The Beautiful Visit
The Beautiful Visit

Author: Elizabeth Jane Howard

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2016-06-07

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1504035348

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The author of the bestselling Cazalet Chronicles brilliantly captures the coming-of-age hopes and yearnings of an adolescent English girl during World War I The fourth child born to a struggling musician and a mother who’s an incurable romantic, Lavinia lives an unremarkable existence. But a visit to a sprawling country estate transforms her world and becomes the touchstone for the rest of her life. Lavinia is sixteen when she’s invited to a house party given by distant acquaintances. It’s her first trip away from home, and she’s instantly mesmerized by her beautiful and lush new surroundings. Days are filled with delectable meals and skating and riding lessons; nights with parties and dancing. Lavinia adores her hosts, Lucy and Gerald Lancing, and their boisterous extended family—and the mysterious, conceited Rupert Laing, with whom she shares her first kiss. But the visit can’t last forever. Soon after she returns home, the First World War breaks out. As Lavinia matures, and other people pass through her life—including Ian Graham, the soldier who loves her yet doesn’t expect her love in return—she continues to view things through the prism of that unforgettable Christmas with the Lancings. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s debut novel about a young girl’s spiritual and emotional awakening, the painful pride of youth, and female emancipation, The Beautiful Visit is a moving montage of English life at the beginning of the last century.

All the Beauty in the World
All the Beauty in the World

Author: Patrick Bringley

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1982163321

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A best book of the year from New York Public Library, NPR, the Financial Times, Book Riot, and The Sunday Times (London). An “exquisite” (The Washington Post) “hauntingly beautiful” (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staff who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamourous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought that he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. To his surprise and your delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns. In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All the Beauty in the World is an “empathic” (The New York Times Book Review), “moving” (NPR), “consoling, and beautiful” (The Guardian) portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

Beautiful Oops!
Beautiful Oops!

Author: Barney Saltzberg

Publisher: Workman Publishing

Published: 2010-09-23

Total Pages: 33

ISBN-13: 076115728X

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A life lesson that all parents want their children to learn: It’s OK to make a mistake. In fact, hooray for mistakes! A mistake is an adventure in creativity, a portal of discovery. A spill doesn’t ruin a drawing—not when it becomes the shape of a goofy animal. And an accidental tear in your paper? Don’t be upset about it when you can turn it into the roaring mouth of an alligator. An award winning, best-selling, one-of-a-kind interactive book, Beautiful Oops! shows young readers how every mistake is an opportunity to make something beautiful. A singular work of imagination, creativity, and paper engineering, Beautiful Oops! is filled with pop-ups, lift-the-flaps, tears, holes, overlays, bends, smudges, and even an accordion “telescope”—each demonstrating the magical transformation from blunder to wonder.

Slipstream
Slipstream

Author: Elizabeth Jane Howard

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2011-02-28

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 0330527835

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Slipstream brilliantly illuminates the literary world of the latter half of the 20th century, as well as giving a highly personal insight into the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard, one of our most beloved British writers. 'This is a brave, absorbing and vulnerable book' – Guardian Elizabeth looks back over the course of her eventful life, providing a story of as full of love, passion and betrayal as her novels. Born in London in 1923, she was privately educated at home, moving on to short-lived careers as an actress and model, before writing her first acclaimed novel, The Beautiful Visit, in 1950. She has written many highly regarded novels, including Falling and After Julius. Her Cazalet Chronicles have become established as modern classics and were adapted for a major BBC television series and for BBC Radio 4. She has been married three times – firstly to Peter Scott, the naturalist and son of Captain Scott, and most famously and tempestuously to Kingsley Amis. It was Amis' son by another marriage, Martin, to whom she introduced the works of Jane Austen and ensured that he received the education that would be the grounding of his own literary career. Her closest friends have included some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the day: Laurie Lee, Arthur Koestler and Cecil Day-Lewis, among others. In this memoir, Elizabeth Jane Howard lays bare the slipstream of experience that has comprised her life – in the process, revealing her incredible adventures, wisdom and resilience. 'Her talent seemed so effervescent, so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take her' – Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

A Visit from the Goon Squad
A Visit from the Goon Squad

Author: Jennifer Egan

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2010-06-08

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0307593622

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review

ABC Travel Greenbook
ABC Travel Greenbook

Author: Martinique Lewis

Publisher: Martinique Lewis

Published: 2020-08-23

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13:

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The ABC Travel Greenbook is the #1 resource for Black travelers to connect with the African Diaspora globally! This book was created to honor our roots, and celebrate Black owned businesses on 6 out of 7 continents. With this resource we are encouraging patronage that keeps the black dollar circulating, preserving our businesses worldwide, for generations to come. The ABC Travel Greenbook holds the information that search engines can’t tell you. In it are the communities, restaurants, tours, festivals, and more that have been overlooked by travel publications pertaining to black culture. Want to get your haircut in Budapest? Or take the Black history tour in Cartagena? The ABC Travel Greenbook has got you covered from A-Z.

Beautiful Ruins
Beautiful Ruins

Author: Jess Walter

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2012-06-12

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 006209808X

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“Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.” — Richard Russo The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 . . . and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later. The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, deep in daydreams, looks out over the waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. What unfolds is a dazzling roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow. Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

The Nix
The Nix

Author: Nathan Hill

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2016-08-30

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 1101946628

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Winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction A New York Times 2016 Notable Book Entertainment Weekly's #1 Book of the Year A Washington Post 2016 Notable Book A Slate Top Ten Book NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The Nix is a mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but it’s also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. . . . Nathan Hill is a maestro.” —John Irving From the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago and beyond, The Nix explores—with sharp humor and a fierce tenderness—the resilience of love and home, even in times of radical change. It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson—college professor, stalled writer—has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn’t seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s re-appeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she’s facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel’s help. To save her, Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he thought he knew, secrets that stretch across generations and have their origin all the way back in Norway, home of the mysterious Nix. As he does so, Samuel will confront not only Faye’s losses but also his own lost love, and will relearn everything he thought he knew about his mother, and himself.