They had to wait for Elena to take her place, to turn to face the exit, to straighten her body as much as Herself would allow, to align it with the coffin where Rita lay, to take a breath, and then, with her right hand, the one that responded better, to grab that handle, the
What the blurb tells us: When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing forty, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit. Dick proposes a kind of game between them, but when he fails to answer their letters Chris continues
Leo had been avoiding his wife, Victoria, who was barely speaking to him and his sister Beatrice who wouldn't stop speaking to him—rambling on and on about getting together for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. In July. Leo hadn't spent a holiday with his family in twenty years, since the mid-'90s if he was remembering correctly: he wasn't
What the sort-of blurb tells us: "The Book of Other People is just that: a book of other poeple. Open its covers and you'll make a whole host of new acquaintances. Nick Hornby and Posy Simmonds present the constantly diverging writing life of Jamie Johnson; Hari Kunzru twitches open his net curtains to reveal
What the blurb tells us: Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters. Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glanorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. When Elf's latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before
I haven't the courage, or perhaps the hardness, to withstand the tremendous pathos of this life. I love life's casual beauty — fear its awful strength. — Jack Kerouac The Sea is my Brother What the blurb tells us: In the spring of 1943, not long after his first tour as a Merchant Marine, twenty-one-year-old
What the blurb says: "William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet, as years