The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062213849
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
From the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Confessions of Max Tivoli comes The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, a rapturously romantic story of a woman who finds herself transported to the “other lives” she might have lived. After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. Whisked from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room, in these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and well—though fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband…but will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well? Greta Wells is fascinated by her alter egos: in 1941, she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress. In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices?

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 057129541X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
It is 1985, and Greta Wells wishes she lived in any time but this one: she has lost her brother to AIDS, her lover Nathan to another woman, and can not seem to go on alone. To ease her sadness, her doctor suggest an unusual procedure, one that opens doors of insight into the relationships in her life, her conflicting affections, and the limitations put on a woman's life. Throughout, Greta glimpses versions of war, history, herself, and the people she loves, and as the procedures come to an end, she realizes she must make a choice: one which will close every door but one, forever.

The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706301
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
From the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less comes Andrew Sean Greer's extraordinarily haunting love story The Confessions of Max Tivoli, told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwards. A Today Show Book Club Pick We are each the love of someone's life. So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max's father declares him a "nisse," a creature of Danish myth, as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child. The story is told in three acts. First, young Max falls in love with a neighborhood girl, Alice, who ages as normally as any of us. Max, of course, does not; as a young man, he has an older man's body. But his curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him. She takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love. Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max's life and confessions question the very nature of time, of appearance and reality, and of love itself. A beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli reveals the world through the eyes of a "monster," a being who confounds the very certainties by which we live and in doing so embodies in extremis what it means to be human.

How It Was for Me

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466856327
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less, a debut collection of ten short stories featuring characters haunted by their decisions and memories. With a classic storyteller’s gift for nuance and understanding, and a poet’s grace for language, Andrew Sean Greer makes a remarkable debut with How It Was for Me. Focusing on the lives of eleven people—those who have discovered and been uncovered by the truths of life, those who have sacrificed, those who have fallen—Greer fashions a unified, stunning portrait of America, one with the ultimate force and candor of testimonial. Praise for How It Was for Me An LA Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year “Crystal-like clarity . . . outstanding . . . nuanced language . . . Greer is a writer worth watching.” —Martin Wilson, The Austin Chronicle “Impressive . . . Greer’s descriptive talents are immense. . . . While these stories are thick with melancholy, their frankness is refreshing.” —The New York Times Book Review “Greer reveals sensitive, unpredictable characters in direct but subtle prose, saving his most powerful stories for the end. . . . Many of these stories project that same kind of effortlessness—suggesting that more strong writing from Greer will follow.” —Publishers Weekly

Less is Lost

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 9780349144382
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Life is going surprisingly well for Arthur Less: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freedy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis have Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on a zigzagging adventure across the US. [...].

The Path of Minor Planets

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1429901055
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
In 1965, on a small island in the South Pacific, a group of astronomers gather to witness the passing of a comet, but when a young boy dies during a meteor shower, the lives of the scientists and their loved ones change in subtle yet profound ways. Denise struggles for respect in her professional life, married Eli becomes increasingly attracted to Denise and her quixotic mind, and young Lydia attempts to escape the scientists' long-casting shadows. Andrew Sean Greer's remarkable and sweeping first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, is an exploration of chances taken and lost, of love found and broken, and of time's subtle gravitational pull on the lives of everyday and extraordinary people.

The Story of a Marriage

Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429945176
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
A Today Show Summer Reads Pick A Washington Post Book of the Year "We think we know the ones we love." So Pearlie Cook begins her indirect, and devastating exploration of the mystery at the heart of every relationship--how we can ever truly know another person. It is 1953 and Pearlie, a dutiful young housewife, finds herself living in the Sunset District in San Francisco, caring not only for her husband's fragile health, but also for her son, who is afflicted with polio. Then, one Saturday morning, a stranger appears on her doorstep, and everything changes. Lyrical, and surprising, The Story of a Marriage is, in the words of Khaled Housseini, "a book about love, and it is a marvel to watch Greer probe the mysteries of love to such devastating effect."

Less

Author: Perfection Learning Corporation
Publisher: Turtleback
ISBN: 9781663608208
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Timekeepers

Author: Simon Garfield
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782113195
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Not so long ago we timed our lives by the movement of the sun. These days our time arrives atomically and insistently, and our lives are propelled by the notion that we will never have enough of the one thing we crave the most. How have we come to be dominated by something so arbitrary?The compelling stories in this book explore our obsessions with time. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A moment of war is frozen forever. The timetable arrives by steam train. A woman designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar. Roger Bannister becomes stuck in the same four minutes forever. A British watchmaker competes with mighty Switzerland. And a prince attempts to stop time in its tracks.Timekeepers is a vivid exploration of the ways we have perceived, contained and saved time over the last 250 years, narrated in the highly inventive and entertaining style that bestselling author Simon Garfield is fast making his own. As managing time becomes the greatest challenge we face in our lives, this multi-layered history helps us tackle it in a sparkling new light.

On Such a Full Sea

Author: Chang-rae Lee
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101632143
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
“Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more. . . . With On Such a Full Sea, [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart.”—Andrew Sean Greer, The New York Times Book Review “I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with On Such a Full Sea, I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?”—Porochista Khakpour, The Los Angeles Times From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker,The Surrendered, and My Year Abroad, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest in a shocking, future America. On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class—descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China—find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.