I Called Him Necktie

Author: Milena Michiko Flašar
Publisher: New Vessel Press
ISBN: 1939931169
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
Twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro has spent the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori—a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction—in his parents’ home in Tokyo. As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he spends his days observing life around him from a park bench. Gradually he makes friends with Ohara Tetsu, a middle-aged salaryman who has lost his job but can’t bring himself to tell his wife, and shows up every day in a suit and tie to pass the time on a nearby bench. As Hiro and Tetsu cautiously open up to each other, they discover in their sadness a common bond. Regrets and disappointments, as well as hopes and dreams, come to the surface until both find the strength to somehow give a new start to their lives. This beautiful novel is moving, unforgettable, and full of surprises. The reader turns the last page feeling that a small triumph has occurred.

The Necktie and the Jaguar

Author: Carl Greer
Publisher: Chiron Publications
ISBN: 1630519057
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
Compelling reading for anyone seeking the courage to make more conscious choices and live fully awake, The Necktie and The Jaguar is a memoir with thought-provoking questions that encourage self-exploration. Author Carl Greer—businessman, philanthropist, and retired Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist—offers an illuminating roadmap to individuation and personal transformation. Greer found security in conforming to the cultural expectations of a postwar, midwestern, middle-class upbringing after a childhood tragedy taught him to constrict his emotions. Becoming president of an independent oil and gas company, he drove his team to success and built his wealth only to find in midlife that his spiritual self was crying out for expression. Undergoing Jungian analysis and becoming an analyst himself offered some soul nourishment. So did studying and practicing martial arts, whose principles helped him navigate challenges in the world of work. Still, it wasn’t until Greer took a deep dive into shamanic training and practice that he was able to embody the qualities and emotions he had long denied and turn his attention to philanthropy. Writing about his spiritual practices and reflecting on his vulnerabilities, Greer tells of honoring his longings for purpose and meaning, journeying to transpersonal realms, reinventing his life, and devoting himself to service to others while living with deep respect for Pachamama, Mother Earth. His memoir is an inspirational testament to the power of self-discovery. As Carl Greer learned, you don’t have to feel trapped in a story someone else has written for you.

The Last Weynfeldt

Author: Martin Suter
Publisher: Bedford Square Publishers
ISBN: 0857301012
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
A well-to-do bachelor, who sees no more promise in love. A beautiful young woman with a mysterious past. A picture and its price. An auction, which causes an uproar in the art community - and a few who come up short in their desire for the big money. Adrian Weynfeldt, mid-fifties, bachelor, upper middle class, art expert at an international auction house, lives in an expansive apartment in the city centre. He is done with love. Until one day a younger woman persuades him - against his customary practice - to take her home with him. The next morning, she is holding on to the balcony... and threatening to jump. Adrian is able to dissuade her, but from now on she makes him responsible for her life. Weynfeldt's settled life becomes untracked - until he finally realizes that nothing is the way it appears.

Call Me American

Author: Abdi Nor Iftin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525433023
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop and watching action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. When U.S. marines landed in Mogadishu to take on the warlords, Abdi cheered the arrival of these Americans, who seemed as heroic as those of the movies. Sporting American clothes and dance moves, he became known around Mogadishu as Abdi American, but when the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab rose to power in 2006, it became dangerous to celebrate Western culture. Desperate to make a living, Abdi used his language skills to post secret dispatches, which found an audience of worldwide listeners. Eventually, though, Abdi was forced to flee to Kenya. In an amazing stroke of luck, Abdi won entrance to the U.S. in the annual visa lottery, though his route to America did not come easily. Parts of his story were first heard on the BBC World Service and This American Life. Now a proud resident of Maine, on the path to citizenship, Abdi Nor Iftin's dramatic, deeply stirring memoir is truly a story for our time: a vivid reminder of why America still beckons to those looking to make a better life.

You Can't See the Elephants

Author: Susan Kreller
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
ISBN: 0399172092
Category : Abusive men
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
"When she suspects that her young neighbors are being abused by their father, one brave girl takes a stand to protect them"--

Attachments

Author: Rainbow Rowell
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101476346
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
From the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wayward Son, Fangirl, Carry On, and Landline comes a hilarious and heartfelt novel about an office romance that blossoms one email at a time.... Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder know that somebody is monitoring their work e-mail. (Everybody in the newsroom knows. It's company policy.) But they can't quite bring themselves to take it seriously. They go on sending each other endless and endlessly hilarious e-mails, discussing every aspect of their personal lives. Meanwhile, Lincoln O'Neill can't believe this is his job now—reading other people's e-mail. When he applied to be “internet security officer,” he pictured himself building firewalls and crushing hackers—not writing up a report every time a sports reporter forwards a dirty joke. When Lincoln comes across Beth's and Jennifer's messages, he knows he should turn them in. He can't help being entertained, and captivated, by their stories. But by the time Lincoln realizes he's falling for Beth, it's way too late to introduce himself. What would he even say...?

All Backs Were Turned

Author: Marek Hlasko
Publisher: New Vessel Press
ISBN: 1939931185
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Book Description
“An existential fable” from the uncompromising Polish author of Killing the Second Dog, known as the James Dean of Eastern Europe (The New York Times). In this novel of breathtaking tension and sweltering love, two desperate friends on the edge of the law—one of them tough and gutsy, the other small and scared—travel to the southern Israeli city of Eilat to find work. There, Dov Ben Dov, the handsome native Israeli with a reputation for causing trouble, and Israel, his sidekick, stay with Ben Dov’s recently married younger brother, Little Dov, who has enough trouble of his own. Local toughs are encroaching on Little Dov’s business, and he enlists his older brother to drive them away. It doesn’t help that a beautiful German widow named Ursula is rooming next door. What follows is a story of passion, deception, violence, and betrayal, all conveyed in hardboiled prose reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with a cinematic style that would make Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando green with envy. “[A] blowtorch of a novel . . . Matchless and prescient.” —Publishers Weekly “A story as bleak and unrelenting as its setting, in which no one escapes the past or themselves. Nihilistic but compelling.” —Kirkus Reviews Praise for Marek Hlasko “Hlasko was an original. His novels were fearless, his vision unsparing, and decades later, his darkly brilliant work has lost none of its power to unsettle. He achieved what few other writers ever have: he turned the literary landscape into a much more interesting place than it was when he found it.” ––Emily St. John Mandel, author of National Book Award finalist Station Eleven

When the de La Cruz Family Danced

Author: Donna Miscolta
Publisher: Typhoon Media Ltd
ISBN: 9881989590
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
During his one and only return visit to the Philippines, Johnny de la Cruz-plagued by a sense of isolation-succumbs to a quick sexual encounter with an old flame, the attractive and beguiling Bunny Piña. Years later, nineteen-year-old Winston Piña has barely finished eulogizing his recently deceased mother when he finds a letter she wrote, but never sent, to Johnny. This leads Winston into the lives of the de la Cruz family-a family to which he might or might not belong. When the de la Cruz Family Danced explores the ties within family and how they are affected by circumstances of birth, immigration, and assimilation.

A Very Russian Christmas

Author: Mikhail Zoshchenko
Publisher: New Vessel Press
ISBN: 1939931444
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
A collection of short Christmas stories by some of Russia’s greatest nineteenth and twentieth century authors—several appearing in English for the first time. Running the gamut from sweet and reverent to twisted and uproarious, this collection offers a holiday feast of Russian fiction. Dostoevsky brings stories of poverty and tragedy; Tolstoy inspires with his fable-like tales; Chekhov’s unmatchable skills are on full display in his story of a female factory owner and her wretched workers; Klaudia Lukashevitch delights with a sweet and surprising tale of a childhood in White Russia; and Mikhail Zoshchenko recounts madcap anecdotes of Christmas trees and Christmas thieves in the Soviet Era—a time when it was illegal to celebrate the holiday in Russia. There is no shortage of imagination, wit, or vodka on display in this collection that proves, with its wonderful variety and remarkable human touch, that nobody does Christmas like the Russians.

Moving the Palace

Author: Charif Majdalani
Publisher: New Vessel Press
ISBN: 1939931487
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
“A Middle Eastern heart-of-darkness tale that flows like a dream . . . Crackling with razor-sharp humor” (The New York Times). At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young Lebanese explorer leaves the Levant for the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace in Tripoli and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan. The protagonist soon takes charge of this hoard of architectural fragments, ferrying the dismantled landmark through Sudan, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, attempting to return to his native Beirut with this moveable real estate. Along the way, he will encounter skeptic sheikhs, suspicious tribal leaders, bountiful feasts, pilgrims bound for Mecca, and T. E. Lawrence in a tent—in this “utterly charming” novel that was a recipient of the Académie Française’s François Mauriac Prize (Library Journal). “Renders the complex social landscape of the Middle East and North Africa with subtlety and finesse . . . Yet one doesn’t need to care about the region’s history, or its present-day contexts, to enjoy Moving the Palace.” —The Wall Street Journal