Diving Belles

Diving Belles

Author: Lucy Wood

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2012-08-07

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0547595557

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In the tradition of Angela Carter, this luminous, spellbinding debut reinvents the stuff of myth. Straying husbands lured into the sea by mermaids can be fetched back, for a fee. Trees can make wishes come true. Houses creak and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A mother, who seems alone and lonely, may be rubbing sore muscles or holding the hands of her invisible lover as he touches her neck. Phantom hounds roam the moors and, on a windy beach, a boy and his grandmother beat back despair with an old white door. In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Lucy Wood takes us to Cornwall’s ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that bit of magic remaining in all our lives—if only we can let ourselves see it.


Diving Belles

Diving Belles

Author: Lucy Wood

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-01-19

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1408816865

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Along Cornwall's ancient coast, the flotsam and jetsam of the past becomes caught in the cross-currents of the present and, from time to time, a certain kind of magic can float to the surface... Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A teenager's growing pains are sometimes even bigger than him. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door. In these stories, Cornish folklore slips into everyday life. Hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wrecker's lamps, standing stones and baying hounds, and relationships wax and wane in the glow of a moonlit sea. This luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut collection introduces in Lucy Wood a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction.


American Dervish

American Dervish

Author: Ayad Akhtar

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2012-01-09

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0316192821

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From the author of Homeland Elegies and Pulitzer Prize winner Disgraced, a stirring and explosive novel about an American Muslim family in Wisconsin struggling with faith and belonging in the pre-9/11 world. Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes. American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life.


Of Mothers and Little People

Of Mothers and Little People

Author: Lucy Wood

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-06-03

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1408848104

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Each story in this series offers a poignant glimpse of family life – the ties we cling to; the ties we try to sever; and the ties that make us who we are. Told from a myriad of perspectives, from a dazzling array of some of the finest short story writers of our generation (including Jhumpa Lahiri, George Saunders, Jon McGregor and Elizabeth Gilbert), Family Snapshots gives us a fresh, empathetic and moving insight into the meaning of family. Of Mothers and Little People is taken from Lucy Woods luminous collection of short stories, Diving Belles.


Weathering

Weathering

Author: Lucy Wood

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-01-15

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1408840944

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BETTY TRASK PRIZE 2016 From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Diving Belles: a beautifully bewitching novel of memories, mothers, ghosts and daughters 'Deeply poetic; dreamy and thought-provoking' Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat 'A beautifully observed study of mothers and daughters, loss and recovery, that never puts a foot wrong' Sarah Waters, Guardian, Best Reads of the Year Pearl doesn't know how she's ended up in the river – the same messy, cacophonous river in the same rain-soaked valley she'd been stuck in for years. Or why, for that matter, she'd been stupid enough to fall down those rickety stairs. Ada, Pearl's daughter, doesn't know how she's ended up back in the house she left thirteen years ago – with no heating apart from a fire she can't light, no way of getting around apart from an old car she's scared to drive, and no company apart from echoing footsteps on the damp floorboards. With her daughter Pepper, she starts to sort through Pearl's things, clearing the house so she can leave and not look back. Pepper has grown used to following her restless mother from place to place, but this house, with its faded photographs, its boxes of cameras and its stuffed jackdaw, is something new. Fascinated by the scattering of people she meets, by the river that unfurls through the valley, and by the strange old woman who sits on the bank with her feet in the cold, coppery water, Pepper doesn't know why anyone would ever want to leave. As the first frosts of autumn herald the coming of a long winter and Pepper and Ada find themselves irresistibly entangled with the life of the valley, each will discover the ways that places can take root inside us and bind us together.


The Sing of the Shore

The Sing of the Shore

Author: Lucy Wood

Publisher: HarperCollins UK

Published: 2018-04-05

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 0008193428

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An uncanny, startlingly beautiful story collection steeped in the Cornish landscape, from the award-winning author of Diving Belles and Other Stories and Weathering.


SHEMP!

SHEMP!

Author: Burt Kearns

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-10-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1493074229

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The definitive biography of the great Shemp Howard, an original member of the Three Stooges, and one of Hollywood's most influential actors that Library Journal calls "a complete portrait of a talented character actor," Kirkus Reviews calls an "illuminating… reworking of the Stooges mythology" and Patton Oswalt praises as "the only book you will ever need to read about anything. Burn all the other books - there is ONLY SHEMP!" Shemp Howard not only had one of the most distinctive faces of the twentieth century, but was also one of its most accomplished, influential comic actors and showbiz personalities. Along with his brother Moe and comedy violinist Larry Fine, Shemp was an original member of the comedy team that became known as the Three Stooges before he quit and set off on his own in 1932. SHEMP! shows how he made an even greater mark in a successful and until now largely unexplored career in more than a hundred movie shorts and features. He appeared in comedies, dramas, mysteries, Westerns, and musicals alongside the biggest stars of the Golden Age, including W.C. Fields, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, William Powell, Lon Chaney, Jr., Myrna Loy, and the team of Abbott & Costello. Author Burt Kearns challenges the “official” version of Three Stooges history that’s been repeated for decades, shattering myths while uncovering the surprising and often troubling facts behind the man’s unlikely story: how the child of Jewish immigrants, supposedly racked by debilitating phobias, could conquer show business; the behind-the-scenes machinations that pushed him to return to the team; and the circumstances surrounding his untimely death. Through interviews with fans, family members, experts, filmmakers, and celebrities, SHEMP! unearths treasures in Shemp’s solo work, examines the “cult of Shemp” that thrives today, and confirms Shemp Howard’s deserved place in cinematic history.


Vicarious

Vicarious

Author: Paula Stokes

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2016-08-16

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0765380943

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Paula Stokes weaves together a series of mysteries and the story of an unbreakable bond between sisters in this unforgettable high-tech thrill ride. Winter Kim and her sister, Rose, have always been inseparable. Together the two of them survived growing up in a Korean orphanage and being trafficked into the United States. But they've escaped the past and started over in a new place where no one knows who they used to be. Now they work as digital stunt girls for Rose's ex-boyfriend, Gideon, engaging in dangerous and enticing activities while recording their neural impulses for his Vicarious Sensory Experiences, or ViSEs. Whether it's bungee jumping, shark diving, or grinding up against celebrities in the city's hottest dance clubs, Gideon can make it happen for you--for a price. When Rose disappears and a ViSE recording of her murder is delivered to Gideon, Winter is devastated. She won't rest until she finds her sister's killer. But when the clues she uncovers conflict with the digital recordings her sister made, Winter isn't sure what to believe. To find out what happened to Rose, she'll have to untangle what's real from what only seems real, risking her own life in the process.