Four Letters of Love
Four Letters of Love

Author: Niall Williams

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-11-03

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1632863197

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Niall Williams's internationally bestselling “delicate and graceful love story . . . a magical work of fiction” (NYTBR), now a major motion picture starring Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter, and Gabriel Byrne. Nicholas Coughlan is twelve years old when his father, an Irish civil servant, announces that God has commanded him to become a painter. He abandons the family and a wife who is driven to despair. Years later, Nicholas's own civil-service career is disrupted by tragic news: his father has burned down the house, with all his paintings and himself in it. Isabel Gore is the daughter of a poet. She's a passionate girl, but her brother is the real prodigy, a musician. And yet this family, too, is struck by tragedy: a seizure leaves the boy mute and unable to play. Years later, Isabel will continue to somehow blame herself, casting off her own chances for happiness. And then, the day after Isabel's wedding to man she doesn't love, Nicholas arrives on her western isle, seeking his father's last surviving painting. Suddenly the winds of fortune begin to shift, sweeping both these souls up with them. Nicholas and Isabel, it seems, were always meant to meet. But it will take a series of chance events-and perhaps, a proper miracle-to convince both to follow their hearts to where they're meant to be.

The Visiting Privilege
The Visiting Privilege

Author: Joy Williams

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-09-08

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 1101874902

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The definitive story collection “by one of the most celebrated American short-story writers…. Powerful, important, compassionate, and full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with admiration and love many times over” (Vanity Fair). Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. At long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and each one of them is available here.

Harrow
Harrow

Author: Joy Williams

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2022-07-05

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1984898809

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In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. "She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.” In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.

William's New Year's Day (Short Reads)
William's New Year's Day (Short Reads)

Author: Richmal Crompton

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2010-12-10

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0230757820

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Everyone's favourite troublemaker is back in Richmal Crompton's William's New Year's Day. Just William makes his mark in this hilarious collection of twelve classic stories. Whether it's trying to arrange a marriage for his sister or taking a job as a boot boy as step one in his grand plan to run away, William manages to cause chaos wherever he goes. Features a charming introduction by one of William's famous fans, the wonderful comic writer Sue Townsend.

A Sitting in St. James
A Sitting in St. James

Author: Rita Williams-Garcia

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0062367323

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Winner of the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award! 7 starred reviews! "Monumental." —Booklist (starred review) * "A marathon masterpiece."—Kirkus (starred review) * "Necessary."—SLJ (starred review) * "Shocking and dramatic."—Shelf Awareness (starred review) * "Mesmerizing, confounding and vividly rendered."—Book Page (starred review) * "Williams-Garcia’s storytelling is magnificent; her voice honest and authentic."—Horn Book (starred review) This astonishing novel from three-time National Book Award finalist Rita Williams-Garcia about the interwoven lives of those bound to a plantation in antebellum America is an epic masterwork—empathetic, brutal, and entirely human—and essential reading for both teens and adults grappling with the long history of American racism. 1860, Louisiana. After serving as mistress of Le Petit Cottage for more than six decades, Madame Sylvie Guilbert has decided, in spite of her family’s objections, to sit for a portrait. While Madame plots her last hurrah, stories that span generations—from the big house to out in the fields—of routine horrors, secrets buried as deep as the family fortune, and the tangled bonds of descendants and enslaved, come to light to reveal a true portrait of the Guilberts.

The Quick and the Dead
The Quick and the Dead

Author: Joy Williams

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 030776382X

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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood."

Stoner
Stoner

Author: John Williams

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1590179285

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"Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--

It Chicks
It Chicks

Author: Tia Williams

Publisher: Paw Prints

Published: 2009-07-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781439598283

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Centering around a prestigious performing arts school in New York City, students Tangie, Skye, Eden, Trey, C.J., Izzy, and Regina learn valuable lessons in love, friendship, fame, and fortune.

Go with the Flow
Go with the Flow

Author: Karen Schneemann

Publisher: First Second

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1250771102

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High school students embark on a crash course of friendship, female empowerment, and women's health issues in Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann's graphic novel Go With the Flow. Good friends help you go with the flow. Best friends help you start a revolution. Sophomores Abby, Brit, Christine, and Sasha are fed up. Hazelton High never has enough tampons. Or pads. Or adults who will listen. Sick of an administration that puts football before female health, the girls confront a world that shrugs—or worse, squirms—at the thought of a menstruation revolution. They band together to make a change. It’s no easy task, especially while grappling with everything from crushes to trig to JV track but they have each other’s backs. That is, until one of the girls goes rogue, testing the limits of their friendship and pushing the friends to question the power of their own voices. Now they must learn to work together to raise each other up. But how to you stand your ground while raising bloody hell?

Attrib. and Other Stories
Attrib. and Other Stories

Author: Eley Williams

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 107

ISBN-13: 0593312368

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"It's just the real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing this book. I love it in a way I usually reserve for people." --Max Porter A dazzling, prizewinning short story collection that showcases a bold new talent Eley Williams has been a literary sensation ever since this collection of experimental short fiction was published in the UK. Lauded as "elegant" (The Guardian) and "exhilarating" (Vanity Fair), Attrib. and Other Stories won the James Tait Black Prize, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was named a best book of the year by The Guardian. Attrib. presents a cast of unforgettable characters standing at the precipice of emotional events (a disastrous breakup, a successful date, an unexpected arrival) and finding it fiendishly impossible to express themselves. With intimate, irreverent, and playful prose, Eley Williams rejoices in both the possibilities and limitations of language, as well as the very human need to be known and understood--despite our own best efforts. Original and inventive in the vein of Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, and Amy Hempel, these stories are "emotionally delicate and tenderly introspective" (New Statesman) and "an absolute must-read" (The London Magazine).