This award-winning novel about a woman facing her past introduces Terranova to English-speaking audiences. Translated by Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet. Finalist, Premio Strega, 2019 | Winner, Premio Alassio Centolibri | Selected among the 10 Best Italian Books of 2018 by Corriere della Sera Ida is a married woman in her late thirties, who lives in Rome and works at a radio station. Her mother wants to renovate the family apartment in Messina, to put it up for sale and asks her daughter to sort through her things--to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return. The fierce silences between mother and daughter, the unbalanced friendships that leave her emotionally drained, the sense of an identity based on anomaly, even the relationship with her husband, everything revolves around the figure of her absent father. Mirroring herself in that absence, Ida has grown up into a woman dominated by fear, suspicious of any form of desire. However, as her childhood home besieges her with its ghosts, Ida will have to find a way to break the spiral and let go of her father finally. Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein, who also translated Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, Farewell, Ghosts is a poetic and intimate novel about what it means to build one's own identity.
"Charming, melancholy, hip."--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Zapruder's innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. . . . Highly recommended."--Library Journal Matthew Zapruder's third book mixes humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to "a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun." The title poem is an elegy for the heroes and mentors in the poet's life--from David Foster Wallace to the poet's father. Zapruder's poems are direct and surprising, and throughout the book he wrestles with the desire to do well, to make art, and to face the vast events of the day. Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate is 9.4 percent. I have no idea what that means. I tried to think about it harder for a while. Then tried standing in an actual stance of mystery and not knowing towards the world. Which is my job. As is staring at the back yard and for one second believing I am actually rising away from myself. Which is maybe what I have in common right now with you . . . Matthew Zapruder holds degrees from Amherst College, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of two previous books, including The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was honored by Library Journal with a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" listing. He lives in San Francisco and is an editor at Wave Books.
With great narrative, Campbell takes readers with him as he travels 1,200 miles up the Amazon, turns left up the Rio Jurua, and continues for another 28 days to the town of Cruzeiro do Sul where he collects three friends and continues further into the rainforest.
This "graceful, captivating" (New York Times Book Review) story from a singular new talent paints a portrait of grief and the search for meaning as told through the prism of three generations of her Chinese American family—perfect for readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander. Kat Chow has always been unusually fixated on death. She worried constantly about her parents dying---especially her mother. A vivacious and mischievous woman, Kat's mother made a morbid joke that would haunt her for years to come: when she died, she'd like to be stuffed and displayed in Kat's future apartment in order to always watch over her. After her mother dies unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her sisters, and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. With a distinct voice that is wry and heartfelt, Kat weaves together a story of the fallout of grief that follows her extended family as they emigrate from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America. Seeing Ghosts asks what it means to reclaim and tell your family’s story: Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? The result is an extraordinary new contribution to the literature of the American family, and a provocative and transformative meditation on who we become facing loss. AN NPR BOOKS WE LOVE 2021 PICK * A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2021 PICK * A NEW YORK TIMESNOTABLE BOOK OF 2021 * A HARPER'S BAZAAR BOOK YOU NEED TO READ IN 2021 * A TOWN & COUNTRYBEST BOOK OF 2021 PICK * A FORTUNE BEST BOOK OF 2021 PICK
It's 1961, Grady, Oklahoma, population 103. Fifteen-year-old Jacob Leeds lives in a modest house on Hooper Circle. His world includes a wily sister, provincial parents, a grandfather named Woody, and an obsession with superheroes. Peel back one layer, though, and find a very different Hooper Circle--one teeming with lies, a family cover-up, and a secret that will change Jake forever. The summer of 1961 begins with a teenage initiation rite for Jake, delivered by his best friend, Mikey Savage: "Initiation into Manhood--sleep on bare ground in the old baseball diamond. No sleeping bag, no shoes, no blanket." How difficult could it be? Pirate songs and funny stories accompany him in the darkness, until he hears the first of the screams. As he approaches the sound, he sees an apparition of a young woman, brutally beaten. He tries to run away, but finds he's running toward her. When Jake tells Mikey the story, he learns the legend of Mary McCann--a murdered Grady girl who to this day haunts the Oklahoma prairie in search of her killer. For Jake, this sighting marks the end of his childhood and the beginning of his quest to find the truth of her story. "During a beastly-hot Oklahoma summer, on a hard-scrabble farm, Jake Leeds makes the emotional journey from easy boyhood to complicated adolescence when he uncovers a mystery that points to shattered truths and stunning secrets. Lisa Polisar's moving story and elegant prose bring vitality and wonder to an ages-old theme, turning The Ghost of Mary Prairie into a contemporary masterpiece."--Pari Noskin Taichert, two-time Agatha Award finalist
A Choctaw boy tells in his own words the story of his tribe’s removal from the only land its people have ever known, and how their journey to Oklahoma led him to become a ghost — one with the ability to help those he left behind. Isaac leads a remarkable foursome of Choctaw comrades: a tough minded teenage girl, a shape-shifting panther boy, a lovable five-year-old ghost who only wants her mom and dad to be happy, and Isaac’s talking dog, Jumper. The first in a series, How I Became a Ghost thinly disguises an important and oft-overlooked piece of history.