The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet

Author: Reif Larsen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698148231
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 399

Book Description
A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls. T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself. As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery. All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science's inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find. T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut. Now a major motion picture directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Kyle Catlett and Helena Bonham Carter.

Entrances & Exits

Author: Reif Larsen
Publisher: Editions At Play with Visual Editions
ISBN: 0993530508
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 16

Book Description
A book set ‘inside’ Google Street View in which the author imagines a fictional narrative set around a set of real locations which were captured by Google’s cameras, and which the reader navigates.

Life for Sale

Author: Yukio Mishima
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525565159
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
“A propulsive, madcap story” (The New York Times) about a salaryman who decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper after a botched suicide attempt. • "An outstanding writer not only of Japan, but of the world." —The Atlantic After salaryman Hanio Yamada puts his life up for sale, interested parties quickly come calling with increasingly bizarre requests. What follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate. By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.

My Fantoms

Author: Theophile Gautier
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 159017271X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet—not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town—Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature. In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier’s career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through “The Poet,” a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier’s youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. ”What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial…” Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”

Ex Libris

Author: Anne Fadiman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374527228
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
A collection of essays discusses the central and joyful importance of books and reading in the author's life.

Ibid

Author: Mark Dunn
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
ISBN: 9781931561655
Category : Abnormalities, Human
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
Tells the story of Jonathan Blashette, a three-legged circus performer and the CEO of Dandy-de-odor-o Inc., in a novel composed entirely of footnotes.

Binge

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: Random House Canada
ISBN: 1039000525
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER The first new work of fiction since 2013 from one of Canada's most successful, idiosyncratic and world-defining writers, Douglas Coupland. He's called it Binge because it's impossible to read just one. Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every minute of the day! Maybe that's how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there's no sliding scale of life. You're either alive, or you're not. Or you're dead or you're not. Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with Generation X, he is back with Binge, 60 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living: the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny. Here the narrators vary from story to story as Doug catches what he calls "the voice of the people," inspired by the way we write about ourselves and our experiences in online forums. The characters, of course, are Doug's own: crackpots, cranks and sweetie-pies, dad dancers and perpetrators of carbecues. People in the grip of unconscionable urges; lonely people; dying people; silly people. If you love Doug's fiction, this collection is like rain on the desert.

Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

Author: C.J. Box
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 1429989106
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author C.J. Box's novels have been called "red hot" (Booklist) and "edge-of-your-seat read[s]" (Omaha World-Herald). Now he delivers a novel that will steal your sleep as much as it will wrench your heart. Three Weeks to Say Goodbye is a novel about something that could be anyone's worst nightmare. . . Jack and Melissa McGuane have spent years trying to have a baby. Finally their dream has come true with the adoption of their daughter, Angelina. But nine months after bringing her home, they receive a devastating phone call... Angelina's birth father, a teenager, never signed away his parental rights—and he wants her back. Worse, his father, a powerful Denver judge, will use every trick in the book to make sure it happens. The McGuanes attempt to meet face-to-face with the father and son...but soon it becomes clear that there's something sinister about their motivations—and that love for Angelina is not one of them. A horrifying game of intimidation and double crosses begins that quickly becomes a death spiral where everyone is suspect and no one is safe. Now Jack and Melissa will stop at nothing to protect their child—even though time is running out... C.J. Box has once again written a bone-chilling thriller that will keep you guessing until the very last page.

Briar Rose

Author: Jane Yolen
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780765342300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
An American journalist is trapped in Nazi Germany in this variation on the Sleeping Beauty theme.

House of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0375420525
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 738

Book Description
“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.