When longtime animosities between a Mexican and a white American student at a Texas high school finally flare into violence, one ends up in the hospital with a broken arm and a fractured ego. A few hours later, the other ends up dead. In the reverb, friends and enemies alike are left to grapple with loss, suspicion, and rapidly escalating racial tensions. Narrated with brutal candor by six boys—each with a very different take on the week’s events—The Confessional blends murder mystery, contemporary politics, and high school drama to create a gritty, fast-paced read.
Mirta DeSalvo and her husband, Alberto, refugees of the Dirty War of Argentina, owe their lives to wealthy American, Julia Parks, who rescued them from the horrors of the junta and offered a new life in Two Rock, California. Julia, confronted with a late-in-life pregnancy, asks the DeSalvos to adopt the baby with the added condition that they not return to Argentina until baby Francesca is grown. Though aware of the extraordinary sacrifice the promise will require, the DeSalvos have no honorable choice but to accept. The search for their own granddaughter will have to wait, as will Mirta's burning desire to bring to justice the military officer who destroyed her family. A generational story that skillfully illuminates the resilient lives of characters touched by loss and betrayal, loved ones stolen in the night, and the search for a birth mother hiding in plain sight, The Confessional is a compelling rendering of how war and love thousand of miles apart create trauma that ripples through two generations and emerges as love, understanding and forgiveness.
New York Times Bestseller: A rogue terrorist in Northern Ireland prepares to assassinate the pope in this thriller from the author of Rain on the Dead. Trained by the KGB, the assassin known as Cuchulain has been wreaking havoc throughout Northern Ireland for over two decades, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Now he has set his sights on his most audacious target yet: the pope. Desperate to stop the terrorist, British Intelligence enlists an enemy Irish gunman, Liam Devlin, to accomplish what it never could. He must put an end to Cuchulain’s reign of terror, once and for all.
“Touching.” —The New York Times For fans of Humans of New York and PostSecret, a collection of raw, urgent, and heartfelt stories, shared anonymously. Helena Dea Bala was an exhausted and isolated DC lobbyist, suffocating under the weight of her student loan debt, when she decided to split her lunch with a man who often panhandled near her office. They chatted effortlessly as they ate; there were no half-truths or white lies, and no fear of judgment. Helena felt connected and unburdened in a way she hadn’t in years. Inspired, she posted an ad on Craigslist promising to listen, anonymously and for free, to whatever the speaker felt he or she couldn’t tell anyone else. Emails from people desperate to connect flooded her inbox, and she listened. Within months, Helena quit her job, deferred her loans, and dove into listening full time. The forty first-person confessions in this book are vivid, intimate, and real; they range from devastating traumas, to lost loves, to reflections on hard choices. Some accounts are quotidian, like that of one increasingly estranged husband: “I want to feel that we’re not just roommates—that we’re not just waiting for the kids to grow up so that we can move on.” Others are deeply disconcerting, like that of a sex addict employed by a religious organization and several are heartening, like that of a mother who dares to hope that her daughter, born with life-threatening heart defects, will one day walk down the aisle: “Sometimes you need to have the audacity to believe that it will all be okay, that it is okay to have the same kinds of dreams as everyone else.” In its complex portrayal of the common human experience, Craigslist Confessional challenges us to explore the depths of our vulnerability and expand the borders of our empathy.
Confessional poetry as a genre was first characterized by the critic M. L. Rosenthal in 1959. It has become a potent force, and its practitioners the poetic voices of our time. The poetry is highly subjective, written with frankness and lack of restraint, and focuses on the ugliness of life. Its leading practitioners, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman, have all been recipients of the highest awards in literature, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry. Robert Phillips, a critic and also a poet, here directs our attention to the genre in the first book on the subject. In addition to the poets noted above, he discusses the work of Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg. Especially valuable are the author's definition and historical review of the genre and his use of interviews and personal comments. An appraisal of the genre, his book is also a guide to new avenues open to poets writing today.
"The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed--with, around, and against the text of their lives." --
Former priest reveals a tragic danger of the confessional. What happens when women are commanded, under penalty of eternal damnation, to confess to a man their deepest sexual thoughts and sins? Former priest, Charles Chiniquy, continually dealt with this problem. He personally heard the confessions of over 200 priests. All but 21 admitted falling prey to Satan's devices in this area. This book reverently and tastefully exposes why confession of sins to a man cannot be of God. You'll see how this practice destroys both the priest and the person doing the confessing.
