Elsewhere

One of the finest writers of his generation tells a story of youthful passion and adult responsibility and of quiet yearnings toward love and art. There are two mysteries in Jonathan Strong’s Elsewhere. In a working-class town near a large city, a baby is taken from her crib. The storyteller knows who took her, but he doesn’t tell us and he doesn’t tell the police, either. Once he was a high school teacher who filled his life with the concerns of his students until a fascination with one of them had him entangled in a situation he has only begun to contemplate. And that’s the second mystery: a story of affection and neglect, of loss and reparation, as the teacher probes for an answer that he’s afraid to learn, but compelled to seek. The setting is a gray landscape of bus lines and chain-link fences, of looming dark churches and once-proud Victorian houses, now covered in asphalt or aluminum. One of these, a round three-decker wedding cake of a house, is his tenuous home and the fleeting refuge of the young people who came to him to learn.

Literature & Fiction

Strong, Jonathan

United States

Ballantine Books

Mr. Stokes, a teacher, becomes involved with a former student, Nell Parshall, whose husband, a writer and also one of Stoke's former students, committed suicide

Fiction. Gay & Lesbian Studies. DRAWN FROM LIFE traces the erotic and aesthetic development of a Midwestern painter--from a childhood fascination with both 1940s cars and the bodies of other boys, through an unhappily extended sojourn on the East Coast, to the inheriting of his grandmother's farm by the Mississippi River where he collects a barnful of Nashes, DeSotos and Kaisers, along with a reclusive ex-convict of a boyfriend in the painter's happily settled middle age.

Drawn from Life

Contemporary

Quale Press

Barbar Orsini, the last one to leave home and live on her own, works as a receptionist at a neighborhood counseling center, and discovers new meaning in her life

Secret Words: A Novel

Zoland Books

Barbar Orsini, the last one to leave home and live on her own, works as a receptionist at a neighborhood counseling center, and discovers new meaning in her life

Secret Words

Two novellas--"Doing and Undoing" and "Game of Spirit"--reveal the stories of two brothers returning to the Illinois farmlands where they spent their Eisenhower-era childhoods, and a lonesome young man whose life starts to mirror that of his neighbor

Companion Pieces: Two Novellas: Doing and Undoing and Game of Sprit.

Sam Lara's family owned a mill, and Otis Gable's father was a handyman, and the two boys were the entire fifth grade in their village school. Sam, wild and rebellious, left home at eighteen to explore the world beyond, while Otis took up hammer and wrench and paintbrush like his father and never left his native valley. Then in 1992, a world-weary Sam showed up in town again, silently accompanied by a handsome young Arab - servant or lover, no one could tell. He'd come back to claim his patrimony the vine-covered ruin of his grandfather's mill, and perhaps to heal a wound he'd inflicted thirty years before on his admiring classmate. Jonathan Strong has created unforgettable antagonists: quiet, bookish, brooding Otis and charismatic Sam, the prodigal who brings home all the tumult of the outside world. Their love/hate relationship fires up a story, by turns poignant and electrifying, that envelopes the reader like a myth in the making.

An Untold Tale

Linc and Izzy, sweethearts since junior high yet still unmarried, find themselves decades later with three sons, a dog, and a bungalow in a suburban backwater of Chicago. Now adolescence is about to strike their eldest, who has been directing his brothers in a mysterious project: the digging of a tunnel under their basement. Are they burrowing to deeper safety or seeking an escape? It seems a time to draw the children close for maybe the last time. With grandparents, uncles and aunts, and a school psychologist watching for any sign of trouble, Linc and Izzy are on an ever-narrowing path. Will their love be enough to protect their boys from the larger world?

Offspring: A Novel

In a Massachusetts mill town in the early 1960s, an elderly teacher of languages runs her car off the road one afternoon, and is killed. A refugee from wartime Germany and Spain, disciplined, exacting Anna Aylmer is a mystery to her neighbors and colleagues. For her prize pupils, four young men on the cusp of gay manhood, the shock waves of her death ripple forward through the remainder of their lives. From Boston in the 1970s to a Caribbean island where the four are reunited in the AIDS-ravaged 1980s, The Old World lays the bones of a troubled past at the doorstep of the present.

The Old World

Drawn From Life

Literary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Strong, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Strong, Jonathan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Strong, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Elsewhere

Elsewhere

Drawn from Life

Secret Words: A Novel

Secret Words

Companion Pieces: Two Novellas: Doing and Undoing and Game of Sprit.

An Untold Tale

Offspring: A Novel

The Old World

Drawn From Life