A Hilarious Romp Through Retirement!Why do gay men retire to Palm Springs? Because it's a great place to live and a fabulous place to die. When Brian and Stéphane retired and moved to Palm Springs, California, they never expected their lives to be turned upside down. They expected a quiet, peaceful retirement. But God had other plans. Instead of sunny days lounging by the pool, the aging couple discovered glory holes, nonagenarian cross-dressing neighbors, a lost pussy, an S&M-themed Thai restaurant, owl-collecting lesbians, nuns, a sad-looking anal chrysanthemum, Carol Channing, murder, and annoying mallards ... mostly annoying mallards. Twilight Manors in Palm Springs, God's Waiting Room, is a hysterical, laugh-out-loud romp. It follows the adventures of Brian, Stéphane, their friends and neighbors through a series of bizarre events that could only happen in Palm Springs, God's Waiting Room.
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Told in their separate voices, sixteen-year-old Prince Oliver, who wants to break free of his fairy-tale existence, and fifteen-year-old Delilah, a loner obsessed with Prince Oliver and the book in which he exists, work together to seek his freedom.
"I figure that some of you have been in plays, and so know how a closing night feels. With some shows, it's a relief. With others, you're fighting tears. Robin's theory is that it depends on how you feel about the makeshift family you've created for those weeks." Says Cary Dunkler, chorus boy turned master baker, who forms part of the network of protagonists in Vamp Until Ready. Cary, Isa Vass, Kristy Schroyer, Judy Gabelson, and Mark Shinner have lives that are transformed in surprising ways by working on or backstage at the Hangar Theatre, a summer stock outfit in upstate New York in the 1980's. They make--and remake--their families in this closely observed, ultimately comic valentine to the Socialist-leaning hamlet of Ithaca and to the pleasures of putting on a show at warp speed in hot weather. Praise for Vamp Until Ready "James Magruder's warm-hearted, hair-raising, and hilarious new novel, Vamp Until Ready, is a cross between Winesburg, Ohio and a backstage musical-a panorama of small-town American life over a dozen years, but a dozen particular years, 1980 to 1992, the era of Reagan-Bush, the global AIDS crisis, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. And not just any town: Ithaca, New York, a college town with a hippie hangover and a cast of literally theatrical characters who are always putting on a play. In the novel's ingenious structure, major characters in one chapter appear as minor characters in the next, and vice versa, as if you held up a multi-faceted gem and kept turning it in the light until every surface was illuminated. Magruder's gift is to make you feel like you've gotten to be friends with a bunch of charming, fallible, wounded and wounding, passionate and compassionate people who are yearning for-and sometimes avoiding-connection. Like us." -John Weir, author of Your Nostalgia is Killing Me "This novel is a triumphant romp. We're privileged with intimate portraits of a group of friends as they roam from Ithaca to Uganda, from love to grief, from ambition o reconciliation, James Magruder's Vamp Until Ready is a pure pleasure." -Don Lee, author of Lonesome Lies Before Us "A hilarious, moving novel inhabited by characters who are both outrageous and utterly human, linked not only by a theater in Ithaca but by their desire to be loved. With its seductive, Russian doll structure and gorgeous prose, Vamp Until Ready captivates and delights." -Jane Delury, author of The Balcony
Set in 1960, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's Repetition tells of Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregor. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian - German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him. "Handke's eminence, displayed in a substantial oeuvre of plays, novels and poems, is reaffirmed brilliantly by [Repetition]." - Publishers Weekly
Chicago Whispers illuminates a colorful and vibrant record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who lived and loved in Chicago from the city’s beginnings in the 1670s as a fur-trading post to the end of the 1960s. Journalist St. Sukie de la Croix, drawing on years of archival research and personal interviews, reclaims Chicago’s LGBT past that had been forgotten, suppressed, or overlooked. Included here are Jane Addams, the pioneer of American social work; blues legend Ma Rainey, who recorded “Sissy Blues” in Chicago in 1926; commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker, who used his lover as the model for “The Arrow Collar Man” advertisements; and celebrated playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. Here, too, are accounts of vice dens during the Civil War and classy gentlemen’s clubs; the wild and gaudy First Ward Ball that was held annually from 1896 to 1908; gender-crossing performers in cabarets and at carnival sideshows; rights activists like Henry Gerber in the 1920s; authors of lesbian pulp novels and publishers of “physique magazines”; and evidence of thousands of nameless queer Chicagoans who worked as artists and musicians, in the factories, offices, and shops, at theaters and in hotels. Chicago Whispers offers a diverse collection of alternately hip and heart-wrenching accounts that crackle with vitality.
* A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year * Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, St. Louis Dispatch From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children—“brilliant…gripping…high drama…made tangible and graphic in Tóibín’s lush prose” (Booklist, starred review). “I have been acquainted with the smell of death.” So begins Clytemnestra’s tale of her own life in ancient Mycenae, the legendary Greek city from which her husband King Agamemnon left when he set sail with his army for Troy. Clytemnestra rules Mycenae now, along with her new lover Aegisthus, and together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day of his return after nine years at war. Judged, despised, cursed by gods, Clytemnestra reveals the tragic saga that led to these bloody actions: how her husband deceived her eldest daughter Iphigeneia with a promise of marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifice her; how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus; how Agamemnon came back with a lover himself; and how Clytemnestra finally achieved her vengeance for his stunning betrayal—his quest for victory, greater than his love for his child. House of Names “is a disturbingly contemporary story of a powerful woman caught between the demands of her ambition and the constraints on her gender…Never before has Tóibín demonstrated such range,” (The Washington Post). He brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that we not only believe Clytemnestra’s thirst for revenge, but applaud it. Told in four parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is Orestes’s story, too: his capture by the forces of his mother’s lover Aegisthus, his escape and his exile. And it is the story of the vengeful Electra, who watches over her mother and Aegisthus with cold anger and slow calculation, until, on the return of her brother, she has the fates of both of them in her hands.
From evil vampires to a mysterious pack of wolves, new threats of danger and vengeance test Bella and Edward's romance in the second book of the irresistible Twilight saga. For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is even more dangerous than Bella could ever have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of one evil vampire, but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realize their troubles may be just beginning. Bella and Edward face a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy's reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi. Passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality. It's here! #1 bestselling author Stephenie Meyer makes a triumphant return to the world of Twilight with the highly anticipated companion, Midnight Sun: the iconic love story of Bella and Edward told from the vampire's point of view. "People do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there." -- Time "A literary phenomenon." -- The New York Times
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A bestselling dystopian novel that tackles surveillance, privacy and the frightening intrusions of technology in our lives—a “compulsively readable parable for the 21st century” (Vanity Fair). When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
