965 results for "Literary Fiction"

Strangers

Anita Brookner
Booker Prize-winner Anita Brookner captures the magic and depth of real life with this story of an ordinary man whose unexpected longings, doubts, and fears are universal. Paul Sturgis is resigned to his bachelorhood and the quietude of his London flat. He occasionally pays obliging visits to his nearest living relative, Helena, his cousin’s widow. To avoid having to turn down her Christmas invitation, Paul sets off for a holiday in Venice where he meets Mrs. Vicky Gardner, an intriguing woman in the midst of a divorce. Upon his return to England, a former girlfriend, Sarah, reenters Paul’s world and these two women spark a transformation in Paul, culminating in a shocking decision.
National Geographic Books 2010-07-13 256 pages

Lurid & cute

Thirlwell, Adam
'I had this vision very clearly of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, âe" the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute.âe(tm) In this way the hero of Adam Thirlwellâe(tm)s new novel describes the book you hold between your hands: a delirious tale of backchat and low tricks, all of which begin when our hero wakes beside a woman who is bleeding, unconscious and not, unfortunately, his wife... And then, of course, events get very much worse. SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2015 WINNER OF THE E.M. FORSTER AWARD 2015
Vintage Books 2016-01-28 357 pages

The planetarium

Sarraute, Nathalie
"The many narratives of The Planetarium, told from various points of view, revolve around a seemingly simple conceit: a young man has his heart and ambition set on his aunt's large apartment. But, as in Sarraute's other books, this plot forms only the surface of what is really happening. Instead, Sarraute focuses on the emotional lives and internal thoughts of her characters in a way that goes beyond what Virginia Woolf did years before. The spite the young man feels toward his mother-in-law for offering him and his wife cheap chairs for their apartment; the terror inspired during a confrontation between the same young man and his aunt; and the need for approval he feels when he's around his Gertrude Stein-like literary icon are some of the many internal conflicts that move the narrative forward through the minds of the conflicted and clashing characters. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium uses a simple plot to reveal the disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us."--Publisher's website.
Dalkey Archive Press 2022 236 pages

Kapo

Tišma, Aleksandar
"A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia's great literary voices. Lamian is a survivor, but a survivor of a very special kind. He was a Kapo, a prisoner who served as a camp guard in order to save himself. But has Lamian saved himself? The war over, he resumes life in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, works in a land-surveying office, rents a room, eats as many hot potatoes as he likes, not even bothering to salt them--the quantity is what matters. If only he could stop looking over his shoulder, and flinching on the street in the fear that some stranger will step forward, smack his face, and say in a loud voice, "Here's one!" If only he could stop worrying about Helena Lifka, who turned out to be Yugoslav too, and Jewish too, one of the women he made come naked into the toolshed where he hid the gold, and sit on his lap in exchange for bread and butter and a little warm milk. She could turn up any day, an old woman now, and point an accusing finger. In this masterful novel, Aleksandar Tišma shows step by step how fear can turn an ordinary human being into a monster"--
New York Review Books 2021 305 pages

Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound A Novel

Judith Katz
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION Nadine Pagan's dyke sister Jane wants to find her. Her lover Rose wants to marry her. And her mother Fay wants to forget her. All Nadine wants is to stop the buzzing in her head. Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound follows Nadine's (née Morningstar) adventures as she escapes from her incendiary Jewish family into the lesbian town of New Chelm--and far beyond. This is the novel Isaac Bashevis Singer might have written if he'd been a lesbian with a keen eye for contemporary middle-class assimilation. It's Jewish magical lesbian realism, a good story, and a dynamic piece of writing. Includes an all new introduction by the author Judith Katz is the author of two published novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound , which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She teaches cultural studies and literature courses for the University of Minnesota's Center for Jewish Studies.
Firebrand Books 1992 186 pages

And the rat laughed

Semel, Nava
And the Rat Laughed is a unique book. Unlike other Holocaust-related books that focus on the historical horrific events, this novel deals with the act of remembering them. It resembles a relay race in which the characters transfer memory from one another, while travelling on the axis of time. The book begins in the last day of 1999, when a survivor Grandmother in Tel Aviv shares her tragic life story as a hidden child in a pit, with only a rat for company with her granddaughter. The day after – 2000 already – the granddaughter tells the legend of "Girl and Rat" to her teacher and in 2009 those who heard it through her classmates establish an internet website with poems. From now on this memory is spread all over the world and becomes a myth. In 2099 a future anthropologist discovers it and tries to uncover its mysterious roots. In her research, she reveals the first man who created this myth in the past. Father Stanislaw, a Catholic priest, saved that little Jewish girl (who later became the Grandmother in Tel Aviv) and returned her after the war to her Jewish people. In his personal journal he documented everything, to make sure the world will never forget. The chain of remembearers, therefore, moves from the present to the future and back to the past. The novel is written in 5 genres: story, legend, poems, science fiction and diary, creating a cycle of 150 years. And the Rat Laughed got acclaim for its use of unconventional and original literary devices and became a ground breaker for exploring the act of memory itself. How do we tell our painful story? Does it change while we recall it? How will our next recipient recall it in his own individual way? Is Art the only corridor to transfer emotional memory?
Hybrid Publishers 2008 232 pages

Absent Friends

Frederick Busch
For twenty years now, Frederick Busch has been a relentless chronicler of the human heart. Except for an occasional foray abroad, he has tended to set his fiction in a physical territory--the Northeast, upstate New York especially--which he has given literary shape. With the capaciousness of a Dickens and the control of a Hemingway, Busch's novels have come in steady counterpoint, raising and answering by turns insistent questions that worry even the plainest of domestic lives. In this his fifth book of stories, the Absent Friends of the title are the lost characters the author has so compassionately detailed, who long to recover their absent selves. But they are also, as Richard Bausch comments in The Philadelphia Inquirer, "friends we have failed, or who have failed us; it is the emotional cost of that estrangement that interests Frederick Busch."
New Directions Publishing 1991 278 pages

Ziff: a life? : a novel

Lelchuk, Alan
Ziff: A Life? is the latest tour de force by an extraordinary novelist with explosive verbal energy and intelligence, sexual sensibility, and drive, who has been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Wallace Stegner. Who is Arthur Ziff? One of our greatest living writers or an impertinent provocateur? A true literary master or a clever tactician who seduces the reading public? It is narrator Danny Levitan’s job to find out who Ziff really is, in a compelling novel about the writing life that is at once comic and provocative, producing a memorable reading experience. Sensational publishing and serious literature collide when Levitan, a has-been writer, is offered a hefty advance to write a biography of Ziff, the scourge of myriad Jewish-American readers and a titan among the world’s literary giants. For years, Ziff has been sharing secrets, manuscripts, and sexual escapades with his longtime and less successful friend Danny. But, old friendships aside, Ziff hardly welcomes an incendiary study of his life, and is determined to thwart Danny, with legal roadblocks and personal humiliation. Danny must decide whether to accept the advance and risk the rollercoaster of recriminations that will surely follow. He recounts with humor and often wrenching anguish his journey of discovery into the land of Ziff, and the hard-won truths he finds there—original insights into a man who has crafted his novels, often savagely, from the lives of his friends, including Danny’s life. An unabashed look at the ruthless forging of literary careers and a heady brew of books within a book, Ziff: A Life? will enthrall readers of great fiction everywhere and anyone eager for a peek through the keyhole of contemporary literary celebrity.
Carroll & Graf Publishers 2003 408 pages

Revenge A Tale of Old Jamaica

H. G. De Lisser
Revenge: A Tale of Old Jamaica (1919) is a novel by H. G. de Lisser. Born and raised in Jamaica, H. G. de Lisser was one of the leading Caribbean writers of the early twentieth century. Concerned with issues of race, urban life, and modernization, de Lisser dedicated his career to representing the lives and concerns of poor and middle-class Jamaicans. In Revenge: A Tale of Old Jamaica , de Lisser portrays the deadly Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, a protest by poor black laborers unsatisfied with the economic and political establishment and the widespread lack of opportunity for freedmen in Jamaica. In response to a period of scarcity brought on by drought and disease, as well as to acts of police brutality against peaceful protestors, a group of several hundred Jamaicans led by Paul Bogle took to the streets in an effort to fight for their rights. In de Lisser's fictionalized version of events, he explores the experiences of white and black Jamaicans in the days leading up to the violence. As signs of unrest grow impossible to ignore, those in power prove more than willing to reject the pleas of the oppressed, writing their anger off as nothing more than a passing phase. Seated on their veranda overlooking the mountains of the Jamaican countryside, the Carlton family observes a series of fires growing in the nearby hills. While the women see them as a sign of violence to come, the men seem entirely unphased by the threat of an uprising. In response to his mother's fears, Dick Carlton attempts to calm her: "'Our people are just now passing through one of their periodical fits of depression, and you will probably hear them expressing fears of negro uprisings and all that sort of thing [...] and you may be frightened. Don't allow yourself to be. The danger is purely imaginary.'" As night falls with no end to the fires, however, and as the songs and cries of the oppressed grow closer, his sense of security will prove a foolish thing indeed. This edition of H. G. de Lisser's Revenge: A Tale of Old Jamaica is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
West Margin Press 2021-05 200 pages

HebrewPunk

Lavie Tidhar
THE CLASSIC COLLECTION OF JEWISH FANTASY! "Marks a milestone in the literature of the fantastic." - Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy In HebrewPunk , World Fantasy Award winning author Lavie Tidhar had reinvented pulp fantasy fiction in Jewish terms, creating a hidden world where fantasy, horror and history intertwine. Featuring the Rabbi, the Rat and the Tzaddik, their stories take us on a journey from an expedition to an alternate world in Kenya in 1904 to the drug-soaked streets of 1920s London and to Transylvania in the Second World War. "Imagine Hard-Boiled Kabbalah... If you like your otherworld fun noir, have I got a book for you!" - Kage Baker, author of In the Garden of Iden "Wondrous, adventurous, and thought-provoking." - Ellen Datlow, co-editor of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror "Tidhar writes a sort of intensified supernatural action-surrealism that fair rattles along and is full of surprises--not only plot twists and thrills but a level of conceptual surprise, a reinvigoration of some of the more tired conventions of the fantasy-horror genre... not to be missed." - Adam Roberts, author of The Thing Itself
Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Incorporated 2023-04-18 188 pages

The Spy

Maksim Gorky,Thomas Seltzer
"The Spy: The Story of a Superfluous Man" by Maksim Gorky plunges readers into the turbulent heart of Russia during a period of revolution and political upheaval. This gripping historical fiction, set against the backdrop of the 1905-1907 Russian Revolution, explores themes of political intrigue and the shadowy world of espionage. Gorky, a master of Russian literature, crafts a compelling narrative that resonates with timeless relevance. Delve into a society rife with secrets and betrayals, where the lines between loyalty and treachery blur. "The Spy" offers a glimpse into the complex forces that shaped Russia's destiny. This meticulously prepared print edition preserves the integrity of Gorky's original work, making it a valuable addition to any collection of classic literature and historical fiction. Experience the drama and tension of a nation on the brink in this powerful story of a man caught in the crossfire. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Creative Media Partners, LLC 2025-03-28 222 pages

Open City

Richard Foreman,Martha McPhee,Richard Serra
The most important new literary journal to emerge since Granta, Open City has published some of the best work by major writers and artists such as Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, Jeff Koons, David Foster Wallace, Irvine Welsh, Terry Southern, Patrick McCabe, Sam Lipsyte, and David Berman. Edited by the writers Thomas Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck and originally published by the late Robert Bingham, writing from Open City has been included in many prestigious anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Known for launching the careers of today's best new writers, the editors are also committed to printing important unpublished work by writers from past eras, such as Richard Yates, Delmore Schwartz, Jim Thompson, Cyril Connolly, Edvard Munch, and Gregor von Rezzori. With its innovative and daring mix of the old and the new, Open City combines undiscovered writing by classic authors with a fascinating portrait of a literary generation in the making.
Open City Books 2000-10 136 pages

Son of a Smaller Hero

Mordecai Richler
Young Noah Adler, passionate, ruthlessly idealistic, is the prodigal son of Montreal’ s Jewish ghetto. Finding tradition in league with self-delusion, he attempts to shatter the ghetto’s illusory walls by entering the foreign territory of the goyim . But here, freedom and self-determination continue to elude him. Eventually, Noah comes to recognize “justice and safety and a kind of felicity” in a world he cannot—entirely—leave behind. Richler’s superb account of Noah’s struggle to scale the walls of the ghetto overflows with rich comic satire. Son of a Smaller Hero is a compassionate, penetrating account of the nature of belonging, told with the savage realism for which Mordecai Richler’s fiction is celebrated.
McClelland & Stewart 2017-05-02 208 pages