About the Book James and Kate are golden children of the late twentieth century, flush with opportunity. But an economic downturn and an unexpected pregnancy send them searching for a way to make do. A winter in the mountains of California’s Siskiyou County introduces a tempting opportunity. A friend grows prime-grade marijuana; if James transports [...]
Archive of posts tagged fiction
Buddha’s Orphans by Samrat Upadhyay
Introduction Raja and Nilu are fated to fall in love. They’ve both been abandoned—he through his mother’s suicide in the public pond, she through her mother’s constant escape into drink. He has grown up on the streets, she in a crumbling mansion. And yet they find each other again and again. First, when they are [...]
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman
Introduction Harrison Opuku is standing in the street watching the police block off a body, the body of one of his classmates—who seems to have been murdered for his dinner. The police have no leads, so Harri and his best friend Dean launch into action. Armed with camouflage binoculars and detective techniques absorbed from television, [...]
The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Poetzsch
Introduction Magdalena, the clever and headstrong daughter of Bavarian hangman Jakob Kuisl, lives with her father outside the village walls and is destined to be married off to another hangman’s son—except that the town physician’s son is hopelessly in love with her. And her father’s wisdom and empathy are as unusual as his despised profession. [...]
My American Unhappiness by Dean Bakopoulos
Introduction “Why are you so unhappy?” That’s the question that Zeke Pappas—a thirty-three-year-old widower and scholar who directs the Great Midwestern Humanities Initiative—asks almost everybody he meets as part of an obsessive project, “The Inventory of American Unhappiness.” Yet he remains delightfully oblivious to the increasingly harsh realities that threaten his own life, opting instead [...]
Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee
Introduction Anjali Bose is “Miss New India.” Born into a traditional lower-middle-class family and living in a backwater town with an arranged marriage on the horizon, Anjali’s prospects don’t look great. But her ambition and fluency in language do not go unnoticed by her expat teacher, Peter Champion. And champion her he does, both to [...]
A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism by Peter Mountford
Introduction On his first assignment for a rapacious hedge fund, Gabriel embarks to Bolivia at the end of 2005 to ferret out insider information about the plans of the controversial president-elect. If Gabriel succeeds, he will get a bonus that would make him secure for life. Standing in his way are his headstrong mother, herself [...]
Becoming George Sand by Rosalind Brackenbury
Introduction Maria Jameson is having an affair—a passionate, life-changing affair. She asks: Is it possible to love two men at once? Must this new romance mean an end to love with her husband? For answers, she reaches across the centuries to George Sand, the maverick French novelist who took many lovers. Immersing herself in the [...]
Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick
Introduction Cynthia Ozick is a literary treasure. In her sixth novel, she retells Henry James’s The Ambassadors and delivers a brilliant, utterly new American classic. At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to travel [...]
Twisted Tree by Kent Meyers
Introduction Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. And the people of small-town Twisted Tree must come to terms with their loss, their place in it, and the secrets they all carry. As one girl’s story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her, Hayley Jo’s absence recasts the lives of others and connects them, her death rooting [...]
