The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

Author: William Nicholson
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1569476470
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
"Laura is a happily married mother of two. But when her college boyfriend resurfaces after twenty years, she's forced to compare the passion of that first love with the domesticity of her suburban life in a gentrified English village. What if she'd stayed with him? Would she be happier? And what is happiness, really? Little does she know that many of her neighbors are struggling with their own personal crises. Among the cast of characters are a rector who has lost his faith, a school teacher who longs tobe a screenwriter but receives only rejections, a struggling farmer who resents the influx of young professionals and their privileged offspring to this formerly rural area, and a journalist who can't stop sleeping with her ex, even though it's ruining her life"--Cover, p. 2.

The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

Author: William Nicholson
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1569479569
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Rich and Mad

Author: William Nicholson
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 1606841203
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
Seventeen-year-olds Maddy Fisher and Rich Ross yearn for love, and after their first attempts at relationships go awry, they find one another and form a deep bond that can only be expressed one way.

The Trauma of Everyday Life

Author: Dr. Epstein
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1781804567
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
Trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people; it is the bedrock of our psychology. Death and illness touch us all, but even the everyday sufferings of loneliness and fear are traumatic. In The Trauma of Everyday Life renowned psychiatrist and author of Thoughts Without a Thinker Mark Epstein uncovers the transformational potential of trauma, revealing how it can be used for the mind's own development. Epstein finds throughout that trauma, if it doesn't destroy us, wakes us up to both our minds' own capacity and to the suffering of others. It makes us more human, caring and wise. It can be our greatest teacher, our freedom itself, and it is available to all of us. Western psychology teaches that if we understand the cause of trauma, we might move past it while many drawn to Eastern practices see meditation as a means of rising above, or distancing themselves from, their most difficult emotions. Both, Epstein argues, fail to recognize that trauma is an indivisible part of life and can be used as a tool for growth and an ever deeper understanding of change. When we regard trauma with this perspective, understanding that suffering is universal and without logic, our pain connects us to the world on a more fundamental level. Guided by the Buddha's life as a profound example of the power of trauma, Epstein's also closely examines his own experience and that of his psychiatric patients to help us all understand that the way out of pain is through it.

No Knives in the Kitchens of this City

Author: Khālid Khalīfah
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9774167813
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
WINNER OF THE NAQUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATURE In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, one family descends into ruin in this novel from "one of the rising stars of Arab fiction" (New York Times) Irrepressible Sawsan flirts with militias, the ruling party, and finally religion, seeking but never finding salvation. She and her siblings and mother are slowly choked in violence and decay, as their lives are plundered by a brutal regime. Set between the 1960s and 2000s, No Knives in the Kitchens of this City unravels the systems of fear and control under Assad. With eloquence and startling honesty, it speaks of the persecution of a whole society.

Amherst

Author: William Nicholson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476740429
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
From an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, “a wonderfully smooth, sinuous, enigmatic, and sexy tale of two love affairs” (Providence Journal) set in Amherst and illuminated by the presence of Emily Dickinson. Alice Dickinson, a young advertising executive in London, decides to take time off work to research her idea for a screenplay: the true story of the scandalous, adulterous love affair between Emily Dickinson’s married brother, Austin, and a young, Amherst College faculty wife named Mabel Loomis Todd. Austin, twenty-four years Mabel’s senior and the college treasurer, lived next door to his reclusive sister, who allowed her home to be used for Austin and Mabel’s trysts. Alice travels to Amherst, staying in the house of Nick Crocker, a married English academic in his fifties. As Alice researches Austin and Mabel’s story and Emily’s role in their affair, she embarks on her own affair with Nick, an affair that, of course, they both know echoes the one that she’s writing about. Using the poems of Emily Dickinson throughout, historically accurate and meticulously recreated from their voluminous letters and diaries, “William Nicholson deftly weaves Mabel’s story with Alice’s, shedding light on the timeless longing, lust, and loneliness of love” (People). Amherst is a provocative and remarkable novel: “The poetry and history go down easy, the lovers fall hard, and the tragic, treacherous terrain of romantic entanglement is well explored” (Elle).

Blow Your House Down

Author: Gina Frangello
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640093176
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

All the Hopeful Lovers

Author: William Nicholson
Publisher: Quercus
ISBN: 1623652286
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Book Description
Belinda, just fifty, wistfully reflects how much better she is at sex now than when she was young and gorgeous, and then discovers to her fury that her husband Tom is having an affair. All the Hopeful Lovers tracks the emotional rollercoaster she lives through over the seven days following her discovery. At the same time we learn what's going on inside the mind of Tom and of his lover Meg. Weaving through this web of middle-aged lovers is a tangle of teenage ones, as Belinda's flirty daughter Chloe tries to set up Jack with shy Alice, without realizing that Jack is full of secret longings for her.

Great House: A Novel

Author: Nicole Krauss
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393080366
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the National Book Award • Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • A Best Book of the Year as chosen by the New York Times (Notable), Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Oregonian, and Book Page. "Masterful…Evocative and moving." —NPR For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared. Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change? Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. "This is a novel about the long journey of a magnificent desk as it travels through the twentieth century from one owner to the next. It is also a novel about love, exile, the defilements of war, and the restorative power of language." —National Book Award citation

The Secret History of Las Vegas

Author: Chris Abani
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698140184
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
A gritty, riveting, and wholly original murder mystery from PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author and 2015 Edgar Awards winner Chris Abani Before he can retire, Las Vegas detective Salazar is determined to solve a recent spate of murders. When he encounters a pair of conjoined twins with a container of blood near their car, he’s sure he has apprehended the killers, and enlists the help of Dr. Sunil Singh, a South African transplant who specializes in the study of psychopaths. As Sunil tries to crack the twins, the implications of his research grow darker. Haunted by his betrayal of loved ones back home during apartheid, he seeks solace in the love of Asia, a prostitute with hopes of escaping that life. But Sunil’s own troubled past is fast on his heels in the form of a would-be assassin. Suspenseful through the last page, The Secret History of Las Vegas is Chris Abani’s most accomplished work to date, with his trademark visionary prose and a striking compassion for the inner lives of outsiders.