A Visit from the Goon Squad

Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307593622
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review

Manhattan Beach

Author: Jane Centofante
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615533278
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Living the California Dream

Author: Alison Rose Jefferson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496229061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
2020 Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation’s Jim Crow era.

The Bottom of the Harbor

Author: Joseph Mitchell
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307377636
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
On the centennial of Joseph Mitchell's birth, here is a new edition of the classic collection containing his most celebrated pieces about New York City. Fifty years after its original publication, The Bottom of the Harbor is still considered a fundamental New York book. Every story Mitchell tells, every person he introduces, every scene he describes is illuminated by his passion for the eccentrics and eccentricities of his beloved adopted city. All of the pieces here are connected in one way or another--some directly, some with a kind of mysterious circuitousness--to New York's fabled waterfront, the terrain that Mitchell brilliantly made his own. They tell of a life that has passed--of vacant hotel rooms, deserted communities, once-thriving fishing areas that are now polluted and studded with wrecks. Included are "Up in the Old Hotel," a portrait of Louis Morino, the proprietor of a restaurant called (to his disgust) Sloppy Louie's; "The Rats on the Waterfront," which has inspired countless writers to attempt portraits of these most demonized New Yorkers; and "Mr. Hunter's Grave," widely considered to be the finest single piece of nonfiction to have ever appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. Here is the essential work of a legendary writer.

Lawn Boy

Author: Jonathan Evison
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616209232
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Recipient of the 2019 Alex Award “Mike Muñoz Is a Holden Caulfield for a New Millennium--a '10th-generation peasant with a Mexican last name, raised by a single mom on an Indian reservation' . . . Evison, as in his previous four novels, has a light touch and humorously guides the reader, this time through the minefield that is working-class America.” --The New York Times Book Review For Mike Muñoz, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew--he’s smart enough to know that he’s got to be the one to shake things up if he’s ever going to change his life. But how? He’s not qualified for much of anything. He has no particular talents, although he is stellar at handling a lawn mower and wielding clipping shears. But now that career seems to be behind him. So what’s next for Mike Muñoz? In this funny, biting, touching, and ultimately inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man determined to achieve the American dream of happiness and prosperity--who just so happens to find himself along the way.

The Keep

Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307386619
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "Part horror tale, part mystery, part romance ... utterly fantastic.”—O, The Oprah Magazine • The bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the tower, the last stand—is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive. Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

The Invisible Circus

Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307765180
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
The highly acclaimed debut novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Good Squad follows two sisters in the 1970s—one lost, one seeking—on "a trip that takes the reader through stunning emotional terrain" (The New Yorker). The political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen, in 1978. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith’s lost generation. This spellbinding novel introduced Egan’s remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters and the nuances of emotion.

Look at Me

Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1400033276
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • In this ambitiously multilayered novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.

Feeding the Dragon

Author: Chris Fenton
Publisher: Post Hill Press
ISBN: 1642935875
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
“Paced like a thriller, with comparable doses of international intrigue and conflict, Chris Fenton’s bracingly candid business memoir Feeding the Dragon takes readers deep behind the scenes of Hollywood’s shaky foothold in China. Dealing at the highest levels with Chinese government officials and major American brands like Disney, Marvel, and the NBA, the former Olive Garden waiter-turned-entertainment-industry-power-broker disarmed and defied authorities on both sides of the superpower divide to make billions—and history. Thanks to a brisk, page-turning storytelling style and an evenhanded, insider-level perspective decades in the making, Feeding the Dragon manages to be both timeless and timely. Captivating details on Robert Downey Jr., LeBron James, Kurt Cobain, Michael Phelps, and Marvel Universe creative mastermind Kevin Feige (among others) will enthrall average fans and aspiring moguls alike. But the beating narrative heart remains Fenton’s down-to-earth recounting of a headline-making journey. Ultimately, the intrepid exec builds a compelling case for the power of “cultural diplomacy”: mutually-beneficial, soft power-sharing exchanges as a better way forward than the hardliner battle lines being drawn across Beijing, Washington, and Los Angeles. Teeming with urgent insights about unlikely alliances and dangerous misperceptions, Feeding the Dragon is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of the US-China relationship and the bottom-line realities of show business and professional sports today. Even better, it’s a supremely entertaining ride for anyone who simply loves a great story…. Chris often told me about projects and plans off-the-record that I wouldn’t have reported on anyway, because they all seemed wildly improbable. Every single one came true. And now they’re all down on the page.” —Jamie Bryan, Fast Company contributor

The Leavers (National Book Award Finalist)

Author: Lisa Ko
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 161620804X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Bustle, and Electric Literature “There was a time I would have called Lisa Ko’s novel beautifully written, ambitious, and moving, and all of that is true, but it’s more than that now: if you want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, The Leavers is required reading.” —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth Lisa Ko’s powerful debut, The Leavers, is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice. One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. Told from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish, determined and frightened, Polly is forced to make one heartwrenching choice after another. Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.