In the tales that make up The Elephant Vanishes, the imaginative genius that has made Haruki Murakami an international superstar is on full display. In these stories, a man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard. By turns haunting and hilarious, in The Elephant Vanishes Murakami crosses the border between separate realities—and comes back bearing remarkable treasures. Includes the story "Barn Burning," which is the basis for the major motion picture Burning.
Little Ellie the elephant is the only kid at a grown-up party. No one is paying any attention to poor Ellie, and she can't reach the food! Why must everything be for big people? Then to Ellie's surprise, she discovers a little chef mouse inside a hole in the wall, and he's filming a cooking show! Ellie can see that his sharp senses are key ingredients for a successful tiny pie. Will this be the perfect snack that's just her size? As an added treat, Alice Waters has contributed a delicious tiny apple pie recipe perfect for little hands (and big appetites)!
"At the onset of World War II, [Billy] Williams formed Elephant Company and was instrumental in defeating the Japanese in Burma and saving refugees, including on his own 'Hannibal Trek, ' [becoming] a media sensation during the war, telling reporters that the elephants did more for him than he was ever able to do for them"--
Abandoned by his mother in an Acadia National Park campground, Jack tries to make his way back to Boston before anyone figures out what is going on, with only a small toy elephant for company.
Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins’ ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’ fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. “Memory is about the future, not the past,” she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins’ poetry seeks to challenge the status quo, engaging in a diverse, boundary-defying dialogue with an ever-present reminder of the ways race, sexuality, spirituality, violence, and American culture collide.
A glimpse into a beloved novelist’s inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.” Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again "an absolute master storyteller" (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).
Ever wonder what happens to the zoo and circus elephants after the all the people go home for the day? Ernest knows... Ernest is a captive born elephant with no connection to his wild relatives. He has had no chance to experience the wild, and this is, perhaps, his greatest tragedy. He doesn’t know what he is missing, but he’s about to find out. Ernest is one of thousands of elephants kept in zoos and circuses for the amusement of humans. Throughout the day, humans stare at him and make silly faces. At night, he’s confined to a tiny paddock. He has no idea about life in the wild, where close-knit families of elephants live as long as humans—presuming humans let them. His first elephant friend, wild born Frankie, tells Ernest all about the pleasures of living wild, and the family he misses so much. When humans send Ernest to the circus to perform, he meets other wild-born elephants, including wise old Mary and majestic, motherly Eve. Ernest learns more about what he’s been denied even as he discovers the rigorous, sometimes brutal world of circus training. A somber but ultimately hopeful tale told from an elephant’s point of view, Through the Eyes of Ernest: A Memoir to Honor Elephants asks us to consider why we keep such intelligent, social animals in captivity.
There are many things that make Bruno special. He loves riding his bike and playing soccer, he is a great brother and is passionate about animals. He also has a prosthetic eye and in this book he tells you all about it. You will discover why Bruno got his special eye, how does he take care of it, how to protect eyes from accidents and what is a visit to the ocularist like. Having such a special eye is just one of the many things that make Bruno unique. This positive book will be a great resource for any child with vision in one eye, with or without a prosthetic eye, scleral shell or cosmetic lens. My Special Eye is also available in Spanish (Mi ojo especial: Un libro para niños sobre prótesis oculares) and Italian (Il mio occhio speciale: Un libro per bambini sulle protesi oculari). For more information, visit facebook.com/MySpecialEye/ From the Author: The story behind My Special Eye book My Special Eye was created a few years after my son lost vision in his left eye when he was 2 years old. One year later he had surgery to replace his eye with a prosthetic eye. It is an understatement to say that this affected our family deeply. Apart from the shock and pain for the suffering of our child and the anxiety for his future, we found ourselves dealing with something completely unexpected that we knew nothing about. Ocular prosthesis, scleral shell, hydroxyapatite implant, uveitis, phthisis bulbi, band keratopathy, evisceration, enucleation... suddenly all these terms became part of our day-to-day vocabulary. My Special Eye is the children's book we would have liked to have at that time. It will be a useful resource for any child with vision in one eye, a prosthetic eye or a scleral shell. Explaining a child that he or she needs an ocular prosthesis is not easy. However when the time came we found that our son and his sibling were way ahead of us in terms of acceptance, resilience and positivity. Also we soon realised that losing vision in one eye didn't limit our child in any way. For him his prosthesis meant that now he had a special eye that could be taken in and out. Nothing more and nothing less. I hope My Special Eye book will help monocular children and their families to realise that having a prosthetic eye is just one of the many things that make them so special and unique.
ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 A “warm and funny and honest…genuinely unputdownable” (Curtis Sittenfeld) memoir chronicling what it’s like to live in today’s world as a fat man, from acclaimed journalist Tommy Tomlinson, who, as he neared the age of fifty, weighed 460 pounds and decided he had to change his life. When he was almost fifty years old, Tommy Tomlinson weighed an astonishing—and dangerous—460 pounds, at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, unable to climb a flight of stairs without having to catch his breath, or travel on an airplane without buying two seats. Raised in a family that loved food, he had been aware of the problem for years, seeing doctors and trying diets from the time he was a preteen. But nothing worked, and every time he tried to make a change, it didn’t go the way he planned—in fact, he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to change. In The Elephant in the Room, Tomlinson chronicles his lifelong battle with weight in a voice that combines the urgency of Roxane Gay’s Hunger with the intimacy of Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. He also hits the road to meet other members of the plus-sized tribe in an attempt to understand how, as a nation, we got to this point. From buying a Fitbit and setting exercise goals to contemplating the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, America’s “capital of food porn,” and modifying his own diet, Tomlinson brings us along on a candid and sometimes brutal look at the everyday experience of being constantly aware of your size. Over the course of the book, he confronts these issues head-on and chronicles the practical steps he has to take to lose weight by the end. “What could have been a wallow in memoir self-pity is raised to art by Tomlinson’s wit and prose” (Rolling Stone). Affecting and searingly honest, The Elephant in the Room is an “inspirational” (The New York Times) memoir that will resonate with anyone who has grappled with addiction, shame, or self-consciousness. “Add this to your reading list ASAP” (Charlotte Magazine).
