Who would benefit if they really did bring The Rapture on?Marc Estrin follows another of his strange protagonists through a world troubled by what it knows and by how it applies that knowledge.From the first page, we are plunged into a global riot of paranoia, joy, and fear. But something is sadly familiar here, perhaps because we have been taught to anticipate a world in which people suddenly fly off the planet. It might be The Rapture. Or it m ...
By some incalculable force of human attraction, Alan Krieger has two lovers.A man of his girth and compulsion, a man who cannot stop talking and who believes the world to be completely irrational, should not take one companion for granted, much less two. Women who can tolerate his anger, his obsessions, and his antic clowning all at the same time are not easy to come by.But when the thought arises in Alan that he’s been “chose ...
At once a chess master, a linguist, an athlete and an innocent in love, Arnold passes through the racial tensions of Mansfield, Texas (home of the author of Black Like Me) in the 1950s, the anti-war movement at Harvard, and both the Upper East Side and the Bowery, meeting Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, and Leonard Bernstein in the process, and finally learning the meaning of meaning. ...
As she prepares dinner for her husband andtheir extended family, Suzanne hears on the radiothat a jetliner has crashed and her lover is dead.Alex Elling was a renowned orchestra conductor.Suzanne is a concert violist, long unsatisfied withher marriage to a composer whose music turnsemotion into thought. Now, more alone thanshe’s ever been, she must grieve secretly. But ascomplex as that effort is, it pales with the arrival ofAlex&# ...
As recorded in Rick Collignon’s second novel,Perdido, a tall black man with one arm longer thanthe other walked into Guadalupe, New Mexico onemorning about 50 years ago, stayed pretty muchto himself for seven years, and then walked backout of town. No one knew who he was or whatbecame of him.Now, as his last act, an old man named RuffinoTrujillo tells his grown son Cipriano a story aboutwhat became of the black man. After Ruffino&# ...
The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is a sweeping historical novel of Mexico during the short, tragic, at times surreal, reign of Emperor Maximilian and his court. Even as the American Civil War raged north of the border, a clique of Mexican conservative exiles and clergy convinced Louis Napoleon to invade Mexico and install the Archduke of Austria, Maximilian von Habsburg, as Emperor. A year later, the childless Maximilian took custody of the ...
Supplying a quarter of San Francisco’s coal, Nortonville of the 1860s-70s is a flourishing empire in small, seeming to promise unending prosperity and a better future. But beneath the vibrant work ethic of its Welch citizens lies an insidious network of superstitions.A missing boy first brings these dark undercurrents to light. Then young Asher Witherow falls under the spell of an unorthodox apprentice minister, stirring a whirlpool of ...
Beauty and privilege, a charming, handsome husband and two promising young daughters, money, a beach house on the Pacific—Jane has everything that Mattie thinks she wants. But Jane always works to damage what she’s given. Mattie knows that better than anyone.But even she is caught off-guard when Jane leaves her whole life behind one broken morning before dawn. And it will take Mattie awhile to see that, by driving away, Jane h ...
