2090 results for "Novel"

The Mao game: a novel

Miller, Joshua
It opens with a card game. Played between Jordan's mother and grandmother, the game is called The Mao, and, like the adult world in which he is prematurely thrust, the rules seem arbitrary and the stakes staggeringly high -- whoever wins the game wins custody of him. So begins this 15-year-old child actor's odyssey through the temptations of Hollywood and the emotional minefield of his family's life. As the story unfolds, we learn that Jordan's father has molested him throughout his childhood and that his mother, a narcissistic woman immersed in her acting career, has little interest in him. The only stable force in his life is his grandmother, a remarkable woman with whom Jordan shares everything from dances to drugs to his innermost confidences; a woman who is slowly dying. Heart-wrenching and highly cinematic, The Mao Game sheds light on both the fragile vulnerability and the remarkable resilience of the human spirit. An unmistakably modern coming-of-age story, it marks the triumphant debut of an important new voice in the next generation of American novelists.
ReganBooks 1997-05-29 215 pages

A sharp intake of breath: a novel

Miller, John
Born with a split lip and cleft palate, Toshy Wolfman's life is an uphill battle. Believing he is dim-witted and ugly, Toshy finds his resentment slowly building as he is ridiculed, used, and misled. Ultimately, he is imprisoned after being caught stealing a valuable and famous diamond, the Orange Sunset. But Toshy's story is not his alone - it is shared with his two sisters: Lil, a radical and a devotee of anarchist Emma Goldman; and Bessie, who goes to work for one of Goldmans enemies, the owners of the Orange Sunset. Toshy's love for his sisters drives him to make some of the bravest decisions of his life. But despite having seemingly overcome his obstacles, an aging Toshy stuns his nephew by asking for his assistance in committing suicide.Toshy wont fully explain his decision. Nor will he fully explain why, at this late stage in life, he is obsessed with making a journey to France.
Simon & Pierre 2006 287 pages

Zoo, or Letters Not about Love

Shklovsky, Viktor
While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.
Dalkey Archive Press 2024 158 pages

Snowball, dragonfly, Jew

Ross, Stuart
"Ben is a performance artist about to enter his forties. His father and mother are both dead, and his brother, Jake, is a lousy source of information. So when he begins to struggle with a particularly nagging memory, he doesn't know where to turn. The memory: the assassination -- by his mother -- of a prominent neo-Nazi. In a non-chronological montage of memories, Ben travels back and forth through the events of his life, some of which seemed trivial at the time but are important now: his childhood summers at a cottage in central Ontario, his teenage years in a Toronto suburb, his disastrous university career, the calamity that precipitated his brother's institutionalization. Stuart Ross's first novel is a blend of suburban realism and out-of-body surrealism"--Product description.
ECW Press 2011 178 pages

Sod the bitches!

Berkoff, Steven
John has crossed the line from performance to reality, from stage to street, from imagination to visceral breath - and he needs to take control before all is lost. Themes that haunt the Berkoff canon are present in this startling novel: his luxurious verbosity; his counterpoint of crude street patter and elegiac proclamation; sex wars; class wars; dislocation and abandonment of love in a thankless and unyielding world. This is a challenging, brutally honest novel that will inspire, enrage and divide - and live on long after the final word. Sod the Bitches! is testament to the power of words. It will shock, amaze, inspire and horrify. This is a book for the brave - a novel to expand your mind and challenge your moral compass and beliefs.
Urbane Publications 2015 247 pages

Strange Genius

Stanley G Weinbaum
Strange Genius is a collection of stories about people whose minds are beyond the ordinary. Included is the hard to find novel The New Adam, a surprising tale of homo superior born among us, the first of a new human race, an evolutionary leap and a man whose mind is so different that he's an alien on his own planet. Also included are the humorous van Manderpootz stories about a scientific genius who wants everyone to know how great he is, and several more of Weinbaum's delightful tales of the human mind at work.
Leonaur 2006 272 pages

They won't let you live

Blumenfeld, Simon
They Won't Let You Live is the story of two small shop-owners - one Christian, one Jewish - in 1930s London. Simon Blumenfeld's 4th and final novel, first published in 1939, critically revisits the themes evoked by Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice. Blumenfeld sets out to confound the reader's prejudices and expectations in a plot that does not shy away from the difficult and the disturbing. In an ever-growing atmosphere of violence in both public and private life, Blumenfeld explores how language that springs from our emotions and misapprehensions shapes our world and, indeed, how it appears to us.
London Books 2022 250 pages

September, September

Foote, Shelby
In September 1957 the South is mesmerized by events in Little Rock, Arkansas, whose governor has called out the National Guard as part of his attempt to halt the integration of Central High School. And in Memphis, two white men and a white woman are planning to capitalize on the confrontation between the races by kidnapping the grandson of a wealthy black entrepreneur and pinning the crime on white supremacists. The problem is that Podjo, Rufus, and Reeny have only an amateur's understanding of what a kidnapping entails -- and a total, terrifying incomprehension of their victims. In September September a magisterial historian of the Civil War charts its distant repercussions in the streets of the contemporary South. By turns wryly comic, ribald, and chilling, Shelby Foote's novel is at once a convincing thriller and a powerful tragicomedy of race. September September has been adapted by Larry McMurtry for the Turner Network Television film Memphis, starring Cybill Shepherd.
Vintage Books 1991-04-09 302 pages