Selected eBooks: 2013

Linda Perdido, the story of the antisocial Linda Perdido told by her well-behaved sister Qua, is a memoir like no other. Set in a vast and unknown region in the Midwest, Mac Wellman's Linda Perdido chronicles the lives of two sisters: Linda and Qua Perdido. Linda is bad, acting out every antisocial impulse she has and then some; Qua is good but comes to hate her sister, though she chooses to write a memoir about her, thus Linda Perdido.

Willa Cather's third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg, a character inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea's long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House.

We all have to live together, whether we do it with enthusiasm or grace, reluctance or despair. In this skillfully drawn collection, National Book award-winning Michigan writer Gloria Whelan presents short stories and a novella that look at people living together who have reached a crisis point. Whether her characters are old or young, male or female, in settings that are urban or rural, they wrestle with anger, loneliness, and frustration, but ultimately demonstrate bravery, trust, determination, and, often, the ability to learn something new.

The stories in Allegiance and Betrayal are set in cars, on top of a water tower, in a bar, on a fishing boat, at a family farm, and at a swimming pool. Each story carries an aura of the mystery surrounding family relations, the enigma of love, the gaping rift between generations, the give-and-take between husbands and wives, and the inevitability of loss. Humorous and tender, these stories offer rich portraits of individuals struggling to overcome failed dreams and searching for an answer to the question of what truly matters.

Decades before it saturated the airwaves, Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake actually invented reality TV--and skewered it into a comic novel that was way ahead of its time. Frank Mallory is a big gun at one of the four major networks. Cruising around Manhattan in his ""Silver Goblet, "" a Rolls Royce limo, he finds that life in the fast lane is beginning to unravel. Having to deal with the departure of his wife, his boss ""The Big Guy, "" and crazed Hollywood stars--while at the same time having to maintain a high-stakes job--all tend to make Frank Mallory, well, act out.

What happens when the American dream collides head-on with a nation's dependence on fossil fuels? Oil and Water, a novel by Mei Mei Evans, focuses on precisely this question. Starting with a star-crossed supertanker, a wayward fishing boat, and a well-known hazard in the Gulf of Alaska, the story presents a region plunged into an oil-slicked crisis. As thousands of miles of shoreline and sea are obliterated, the spill threatens the lives and livelihoods of the coastal community of Selby.

Fifteen-year-old Justin Lyle does not see in himself the qualities he admires in heroes. Growing up in the declining manufacturing town of East Liberty, New York--beset by unemployment, rising crime, and an influx of drugs, and encircled by struggling dairy farms--Justin feels isolated and decidedly unheroic. When Justin steps "over the line" one afternoon, attempting to help the drug-addled girlfriend of an unstable bully, he triggers a series of increasingly perilous encounters.

Cruel City tells the story of a young man's attempt to cope with capitalism and the rapid urbanization of his country. Banda, the protagonist, sets off to sell the year's cocoa harvest to earn the bride price for the woman he has chosen to wed. Due to a series of misfortunes, Banda loses both his crop and his bride to be. Making his way to the city, Banda is witness to a changing Africa, and as his journey progresses, the novel mirrors these changes in its style and language.

Uday Prakash's novel of contemporary India is a tender love story--university student Rahul is swept away by a "sweet fever" of love for Anjali, the enchanting girl with the golden parasol. But Prakash's tale is set in a world where the 3,000-year-old Hindu caste system still holds sway and social realities doom the chances of a non-Brahmin boy who loves a Brahmin girl.

This tale of wild adventure reveals the dashed hopes of Africans living between worlds. When Moki returns to his village from France wearing designer clothes and affecting all the manners of a Frenchman, Massala-Massala, who lives the life of a humble peanut farmer after giving up his studies, begins to dream of following in Moki's footsteps.

In The Salmiya Collection, Loomis celebrates the essence of everyday life in a little-known part of the world. With lucid prose and keen detail, these stories offer nuanced portraits--tragicomic, bittersweet, and candid--of ordinary Kuwaitis: expatriates and natives, students and professors, siblings, and lovers. Each of the forty stories in the collection reverberates with the others, illuminating a world the reader will not soon forget. Loomis renders a Kuwaiti society that is complex and distinct, and yet the characters and situations unveil a time and a place that is universal.

Every city has an unspoken side. Cape Town, between the picture postcard mountain and sea, has its own shadow: a place of dislocation and uncertainty, dependence and desperation, destruction and survival, gangsters, pimps, pedophiles, hunger, hope, and moments of happiness. Living in this shadow is Azure, a thirteen-year-old who makes his living on the streets, a black teenager sought out by white men, beholden to gang leaders but determined to create some measure of independence.

"The Emperor Tea Garden" is a vividly engaging fantasy romance told on several different levels that transcend time, place, gender, and even species. In this enchanted space, the boundaries between life and death, dream and reality, and here and there are all blurred. The eponymous tea garden is one whose customers are mostly deceased, mostly in love, and mostly fade away with the dawn.

In these wondrously strange and revealing stories, Tom Kealey chronicles the struggles and triumphs of the young and marginalized as they discover many ways of growing up. They travel with the circus, care for disabled siblings, steal police cars, and retrieve the stolen boots of a priest. They are abandoned yet courageous and plucky children and teenagers living on the edges of society.

The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel. Sacred River deals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty. Sacred River is equally about love and politics, and marks the return to fiction of one of Africa's major writers.

Turning her back on what is considered conventional, Makhosazana Xaba engages with her subject-matter on a revolutionary level in Running and Other Stories. She takes tradition, be that literary, cultural, or gender tradition, and re-imagines it in a way that is liberating and innovative. The ten stories in this collection, while strongly independent, are in conversation with one another, resulting in a collection that can be devoured all at once or savoured slowly, story by story.

When an unidentified "monster" threatens international shipping, French oceanographer Pierre Aronnax and his assistant Conseil join an expedition to hunt down and destroy the menace. The "monster" is actually a futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, commanded by Captain Nemo. Thus begins a journey of 20,000 leagues--nearly 50,000 miles--that will take Captain Nemo, his crew, and these three adventurers on a journey of discovery through undersea forests, coral graveyards, miles-deep trenches, and even the sunken ruins of Atlantis.

In his newest novel, Jeffrey DeShell draws on the musical innovations of Arnold Schoenberg--by turns traditional, serial, and atonal--to inform his grammar and language. Moving progressively through specific Schoenberg compositions, DeShell complicates the surface of his text into lyrical derivatives, all the while drawing us into a murder mystery like no other as Detective Francisca Fruscella pursues both the killer and her own complicated personal history. By turns rapturous, rigorous, and gripping, Expectation is a thriller of another kind--and a bold venture to the limits of the mystery genre and language itself.

The stories in No Longer and Not Yet look at the ways our lives are lived in the split seconds between what is no longer but is still not yet. Most take place on Manhattan's iconic Upper West Side, in the shops, hallways, and parks that reveal this well-known "big city" neighborhood for the tiny, even backwater village it more often resembles. These stories show that, although we may think of ourselves in larger mythic narratives, our days are set in the terrain that is the opposite of the vast.

This is the story of the naïve young Humphrey van Weyden, whose ship is wrecked in a terrible storm. He is rescued by the mysterious Captain Wolf Larsen of the ship Ghost. Humphrey's new life aboard Ghost will test him to the limits of his endurance but also bring him the greatest happiness he has ever known. When there is an attempted mutiny on board he shows no mercy to the would-be mutineers, and when his brother Death Larsen attempts to take over the Ghost by force, there is no love lost between them in their vicious battle.

Light and Dark, Natsume Soseki's longest novel and masterpiece, although unfinished, is a minutely observed study of haute-bourgeois manners on the eve of World War I. It is also a psychological portrait of a new marriage that achieves a depth and exactitude of character revelation that had no precedent in Japan at the time of its publication and has not been equaled since. With Light and Dark, Soseki invented the modern Japanese novel.

The Old Priest is a book of transformations. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they've been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose--and what feels like firsthand experience--Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations.

It is 1970 in a small town in California. "Bean" Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, a woman who "found something wrong with every place she ever lived," takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in Charlotte's family for generations.

The pages of this anthology are filled with personal essays and poems of thoughtful musings, raw memories, and humorous self-examinations by authors and poets who have been labelled by the world-teachers, parents, and peers-as shy. Editors Naomi K. Lewis and Rona Altrows have enlisted writers from across the continent and have created a moving anthology that will appeal to all, either because we are shy or because we know someone who is.