For her first novel in more than nine years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written a most unusual book in a career of distinctive and unique accomplishments. My Nine Lives is «Chapters of a Possible Past,» as the subtitle declares. It is, as the author has commented, a book filled with «invented memories.» Nine vignettes are linked to portray a rich life filled with searching, from London to Delhi, from Hollywood to New York. Each chapter gathers a d ...
The story begins with the unhappy marriage of junior clerk Earl Summerfield to the much older Bianca. Feeling victimized by his cold wife and mocking superiors at work, Earl decides to keep a diary, a chronicle of his apparently crumbling marital relations, the paranoia and abuses he is seemingly forced to tolerate at work, and the world around him going to pieces in 1960’s San Francisco. What he sees, what he says, what he wants to sa ...
Named a New York Times Best Book of the Year, 2016 For a runaway slave in the 1840s south, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic Massa. That's what fifteen-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation and takes refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. Amidst a revolving door of gamblers and prostitutes, Naomi falls into a love ...
When her long-time agent and friend Robert Lescher died in 2012, the manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher’s unpublished first novel was discovered packed tidily away in one of Lescher’s signature red boxes.Following on the success of Serve It Forth and written when she was in her early 30s, the novel employs Fisher’s characteristic sharp-eyed wit to sketch themes so outré they may have seemed too challenging for a p ...
Acclaimed author Evan S. Connell sends us through the complete experience of a man initially intrigued and then enslaved by art: a curious interest, a rapt fixation, and the becoming of a connoisseur. The Connoisseur trails the evolution of Muhlbach, an insurance executive on a business trip in Taos, New Mexico, who develops an obsession with pre-Columbian figurines after meandering through a curio shop. Entranced yet bewildered by his sudden ...
Capturing the spirit of arcane writing, Evan S. Connell delivers spectacular and esoteric prose as he imagines the journals of seven alchemists. The first is Paracelsus, the famous sixteenth-century alchemist, who is followed by an array of distinct voices: physicians, historians, alchemists, and philosophers. Each employs a unique personality and point of view in a world of pre-scientific thought, of the western world about to step into moderni ...
Our Town is the debut of a striking literary voice, one that captures the disillusion at the fringes of Hollywood as seen through a haze of drugs, alcohol, abuse, and fallen aspirations. An unseen narrator guides us through the dark fairy tale of Dorothy White, an aspiring actress who “never quite figured how to get out of her own way.” Her perfect marriage to an equally golden actor, Dale, quickly turns into one of jealousy a ...
Karl Muhlbach, hero of Evan Connell’s previous novel, The Connoisseur, has a new obsession—a beautiful, nubile girl-about-New York named Lambeth Brent, whose puzzling background and swinging activities lead Muhlbach into dark areas, causing new revelations of himself as a man to emerge.The mysterious bonds between opposites come into sharp relief as we follow the course of Muhlbach and Lambeth’s relationship. An unco ...
Motherland is inspired by stories from the author’s father and his German childhood, and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for fifty years. It is the author’s attempt to reckon with the paradox of her father—a product of her grandparents’ fiercely protective love and their status as Mitläufer, Germans who “went along” with Nazism, first reaping it ...
