Selected eBooks: 2014

Vignettes of a middle-class American family told through lists, each reflecting their obsessions, their complaints, their desires, and their humanity. A suburban family of four--a man, woman, boy, and girl--struggle through claustrophobic days crowded with home improvement projects, conflicts at work and school, a job loss, illnesses, separation, and the wearying confrontation with aging.

Set shortly after the massacres of hundreds of Jewish communities in the Ukraine in 1648, The Parable and Its Lesson tells the tale of a journey into the Netherworld taken by a rabbi and his young assistant. There is no question that Agnon wrote of the 1648 massacres out of an awareness of the singular catastrophic massacre of his own time--the Holocaust.

Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers, each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists. Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair.

Eleven hundred years after the apocalyptic destruction of the United States of America, peace between the remaining warring tribes has finally been achieved. Despite this peace, the Pelbar stronghold Threerivers retains its secretive and reclusive ways, keeping its distance from the other remaining tribes and guarding against change. Life in Threerivers continues without change until two young twin brothers, Brudoer and Gamwyn, accidentally initiate events that threaten the established order.

Though he lived most of his life in rural South Taiwan, Zhong Lihe spent several years in Manchuria and Peking, moving among an eclectic mix of ethnicities, social classes, and cultures. His fictional portraits unfold on Japanese battlefields and in Peking slums, as well as in the remote, impoverished hill-country villages and farms of his native Hakka districts.

Armed robbery is nothing new in South Africa. But when a pair of clever and squeaky-sounding criminals go on a looting spree that rocks several small towns in the Eastern Cape, Detective Inspector Thabisa Tswane from The Eagles, the Special Violent Crimes Unit is called to work the case. In Now I See You Thabisa's traditional and professional skills will be pushed to the limit. She will have to learn the difference between looking and seeing.

The novel begins with Peregrine as a young country gentleman. His mother rejects him, as do his aloof father and his dissolute, spiteful brother. Commodore Hawser Trunnion takes Peregrine under his care and raises him. Peregrine's upbringing, education at Oxford, and journey to France, his debauchery, bankruptcy, jailing, and succession to his father's fortune, and his final repentance and marriage to his beloved Emilia all provide scope for Smollett's comic and caustic perspectiveon the Europe of his times.

The worlds of three women and the men they love come together in this novel of war and hurricanes, loss and renewal. Christiane, or Nana, reliving the past in her eighties, her granddaughter Angela, working at a Biloxi casino in her twenties, and their teenage friend Cam, the daughter of a Vietnamese shrimper, form a deep connection. As they face heartbreak, their bonds nurture and sustain them. Ordinary people impacted by the shifts of history--Come Landfall is a southern story with a global sensibility.

Come in at the Door tells the story of Chester, a boy who lives with his withholding, widowed father, and Mitty, who keeps house and serves as a surrogate wife to Chester's father and a mother to Chester. One morning before dawn, Mitty takes Chester to the Athlestan courthouse to watch the hanging of a man. Throughout Chester's rambunctious young manhood, the gruesome memory hovers just below the surface of his mind, recalled in detail only at his father's death.

The Looking-Glass is March's story of a small Alabama town in the early days of the twentieth century. Connected by relationships that bind, support, and strangle, the citizens of Reedyville are drawn ineluctably toward a single climactic night. March's skillful blend of humor and pathos evinces his deep insights and empathy into the problems of the mind and heart that are both peculiar to Reedyville yet found in every town and family.

Thirty-three-year-old Shea Rigsby has spent her entire life in Walker, Texas--a small college town that lives and dies by football, a passion she unabashedly shares. She stayed in Walker for college, even taking a job in the university athletic department after graduation, where she has remained for more than a decade. But when an unexpected tragedy strikes the tight-knit Walker community, Shea's comfortable world is upended, and she begins to wonder if the life she's chosen is really enough for her.

In "Hum," a young couple that is paid to live in a house filled with surveillance equipment becomes "quietly lost to each other," as the wife's infatuation with the subject of their surveillance turns to obsession. What does it mean to be heroic? How much should one sacrifice in the name of love? These questions and more are explored with tenderness, wit, and unerring precision in Hum.

If your mentally ill patient dies, are you to blame? For Dr. Françoise Davoine, a Parisian psychoanalyst, this question becomes disturbingly real as one of her patients commits suicide on the eve of All Saints' Day. She herself has a crisis, as she reflects on her thirty-year career and questions whether she should ever return to the hospital. A fictionalized hybrid of personal memoir, case studies, dream sequences, and theoretical reflection, this book uses a fictional form to engage with psychotic experience.

The Last Bizarre Tale consists of works that appeared in journals but that have not appeared together as a collection. The title story, The Last Bizarre Tale, involving a corpse that has hung on a hook in a funeral home garage for decades, is evocative of Poe and, in its dark, grotesque humor, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers. The author of eleven novels and two short story collections, David Madden is known for his innovative style and technique in crafting fiction.

This comprehensive study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual consistencies running through his eclectic and controversial body of work. Within an overview of his career, this volume undertakes a close analysis of fifteen of Winterbottom's films ranging from TV dramas to transnational coproductions featuring Hollywood stars, and from documentaries to costume films.

This welcome volume brings to English-language readers two beautifully crafted works by the internationally acclaimed French author Pierre Michon. Populated by distant and little-known figures--Irish and French monks, saints, and scientists in "Winter Mythologies;" Benedictine monks in the Vendee region of France in" Abbots"--the tales frequently draw on obscure histories and other literary sources.

In this dazzling debut about life after loss, Luke B. Goebel's heart-hurt, ultra-adrenalized alter ego leads us on a raucous RV romp across what's left of postmodern America and beyond. Whether it's gobbling magic cacti at a native ceremony in Northern California, burning bad manuscripts in a backyard bonfire in East Texas, or travelling at top speed to an infamous editor's office in Manhattan, Goebel plunges us into a madly original fictional realm.

Tell the World You're a Wildflower is a collection of loosely interwoven stories in the voices of southern women. Beginning with the youngest characters and ending with the oldest, the stories encompass plastic surgery and white supremacists, family secrets and family trees, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In Tell the World You're a Wildflower, each character must decide what to tell, whether to tell it, and to whom to tell it.

In the eleven kaleidoscopic stories that make up Bright Shards of Someplace Else, Monica McFawn traces the combustive, hilarious, and profound effects that occur when people misread the minds of others. The characters-an array of artists, scientists, songwriters, nannies, horse trainers, and poets-often try to pin down another's point of view, only to find that their own worldview is far from fixed. The characters in McFawn's stories long for and fear the encroachment of others.

Imagine a dark-haired book thief as alluring as she is dangerous. Imagine the mesmerized bookseller secretly tracking the volumes she steals, hoping for insight into her character, her motives, her love life. In Rodrigo Rey Rosa's hands, this tale of obsessive love is told with almost breathless precision and economy. The bookstore owner is soon entangled in Severina's mystery: she steals books to actually read them and to share with her purported grandfather, Señor Blanco.

Too old to leave her veranda, Noubòt reflects on her past, touching on the 1937 Parsley Massacre, in which thousands of Haitians died at the hands of Dominican soldiers, and laments the exodus of so many young people from Haiti, although, ironically, she dreamed of making the trip herself (her name means New Boat in Creole). Her story is juxtaposed with that of her grandson, Jonas, as he suffers the abandonment of friends--including his lover--who emigrated during the Duvalier dictatorships, even feeling an urge to join them.

Set in eastern, upstate New York, Helen Keller Really Lived features a fortyish former barfly and grifter who must make a living in the wake of her wealthy husband's death, and who finds work in a clinic helping women seeking reproductive assistance. The other main character is the grifter's dead ex-husband, a Ukrainian hooker-to-healer success story, who prior to his demise was a gynecologist and after, an amateur folklorist, or ghostlorist, who collected and provided scholarly commentary on the stories of his fellow "revenants."

In Karin Lin-Greenberg's Faulty Predictions, young characters try to find their way in the world and older characters confront regrets. The stories in Faulty Predictions take place in locales as diverse as small-town Ohio, the mountains of western North Carolina, and the plains of Kansas. Lin-Greenberg provides insight into the human condition over a varied cross section of geography, age, and culture. Although the characters are often faced with obstacles and challenges, the stories also capture moments of optimism and hope.

The characters in Now We Will Be Happy are as unpredictable as they are human. A teenage boy leaves home in search of the mother he hasn't seen since childhood; a granddaughter is sent across the ocean to broker peace between her relatives; a widow seeks to die by hurricane; a married woman takes a bathtub voyage with her lover; a proprietress who is the glue that binds her neighborhood cannot hold on to her own son; a displaced wife develops a strange addiction to candles.