Free Fall

"I was standing up, pressed back against the wall, trying not to breathe. I got there in the one movement my body made. My body had many hairs on legs and belly and chest and head, and each had its own life; each inherited a hundred thousand years of loathing and fear for things that scuttle or slide or crawl." from Free Fall Sammy Mountjoy, artist, rises from poverty and an obscure birth to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War II, he is taken as a prisoner-of-war, threatened with torture, then locked in a cell of total darkness to wait. He emerges from his cell like Lazarus from the tomb, seeing infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. Transfigured by his ordeal, he begins to realize what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. He determines to find the exact point at which the accumulated weight of those choices has deprived him of free will.

Literature & Fiction

William-Golding

Classics

Mariner

An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, drawn by her husband from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years. Included are entries that refer to her own writing, others that are clearly writing exercises; accounts of people and scenes relevant to the raw material of her work; and comments on books she was reading. Edited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf; Indices.

A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf

Virginia, Woolf

Biographies & Memoirs

One of the most eagerly anticipated graphic memoirs of recent years, "Fun Home" is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis", it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home', as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Bechdel, Alison

Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award * Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize * Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize “I read Stubborn Archivist in a ravenous gulp. It’s stunning: so articulate about what it means to live between two languages and countries, tenderly unraveling the knots of unbelonging.” —Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City and Crudo For fans of Chemistry and Normal People: A mesmerizing and witty debut novel about a young woman growing up between two disparate cultures, and the singular identity she finds along the way But where are you really from? When your mother considers another country home, it’s hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can’t pronounce your name, it’s hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it’s hard to understand your place in the world. In Stubborn Archivist, a young British Brazilian woman from South London navigates growing up between two cultures and into a fuller understanding of her body, relying on signposts such as history, family conversation, and the eyes of the women who have shaped her—her mother, grandmother, and aunt. Our stubborn archivist takes us through first love and loss, losing and finding home, trauma and healing, and various awakenings of sexuality and identity. Shot through the novel are the narrator's trips to Brazil, sometimes alone, often with family, where she accesses a different side of herself—one, she begins to realize, that is as much of who she is as anything else. A hypnotic and bold debut, Stubborn Archivist is as singular as its narrator; a novel you won't soon forget.

Stubborn Archivist

Rodrigues Fowler, Yara

United States

With a new Introduction Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this stunning debut collection unerring charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner.

Interpreter Of Maladies: A Novel

Lahiri, Jhumpa

-- Florida Book Award Gold Medalist-- Longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize-- Medalist (Book of the Year) Military Writers Association of America-- "Symphonic...One of the best works of literature to come from these wars." -- storySouth-- "Powerful." -- Esquire Wintric Ellis joins the army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Kristen, and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of his horizon. Deployed in Afghanistan two years into a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings in a place where allies could at any second turn out to be foes. Two career soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wing. Together, these three men face an impossible choice: risk death or commit a harrowing act of war. The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world. I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is a vital meditation on the weight of war and a humane tale of love, family, and connection at any cost. Jesse Goolsby's fiction and essays have appeared in Narrative, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Richard Bausch Short Story Prize, the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction, and other honors. A U.S. Air Force officer, he lives in Tallahassee.

I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

Goolsby, Jesse

Reference

Winner of the CWA Historical Dagger Award A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Crime/Mystery Novel of 2016 “Historical fiction just doesn’t get any better than this.” — Jeffery Deaver “A rip-roaring ride . . . Wonderfully atmospheric and entertaining.” — Good Housekeeping “Impeccably researched and astonishingly atmospheric . . . Truly spellbinding.” — Guardian London, 1728. Tom Hawkins is headed to the gallows, accused of murder. Gentlemen don’t hang, and Tom’s damned if he’ll be the first—he is innocent, after all. It’s hard to say when Tom’s troubles began. He was happily living in sin with his beloved—though their neighbors weren’t happy about that. He probably shouldn’t have told London’s great criminal mastermind that he was in need of adventure. Nor should he have joined the king’s mistress in her fight against her vindictive husband. And he definitely shouldn’t have trusted the calculating Queen Caroline. She’s promised him a royal pardon if he holds his tongue, but there’s nothing more silent than a hanged man. Now Tom’s scrambling to save his life and protect those he loves. But as the noose tightens, his time is running out. “Hodgson maintains pitch-perfect suspense, craftily constructs a fairly clued whodunit, and convincingly evokes the period . . . [This book] solidifies her position as a major talent in the genre.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins

Hodgson, Antonia

Distinguished by the same charm and playful prose that helped make The Mystery Guest such a cult favorite with readers and reviewers, Report on Myself is the memoir that won Grégoire Bouillier the French Prix de Flore and universal acclaim. Here, Bouillier tells the whole crazy story of his life, from his conception in wartime Algeria to his gritty Parisian boyhood at the mercy of his working-class bohemian parents. With trademark pithy vignettes, he illuminates his life through the stories of his four loves, beginning at age nine with the bourgeois Marie-Blanche, younger sister of his best friend, and ending with the relationship that nearly destroyed him, the aftermath of which he chronicled to such great effect in The Mystery Guest. Shot through with indelible images, bad puns, and Bouillier’s gift for drawing meaning from the seemingly innocuous coincidences of daily life, Report on Myself turns on a literary revelation (in this case, The Odyssey) that helps Grégoire decode the patterns laid out by his life, while teaching us a thing or two about love and literature along the way.

Report On Myself Pa

Grégoire Bouillier

Arts & Literature

A collection of the year’s best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit. “Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship,” contends Rebecca Solnit in her introduction. From lost languages and extinct species to life-affirming cosmologies and literary myths that offer cold comfort, the personal and the public collide in The Best American Essays 2019. This searching, necessary collection grapples with what has preoccupied us in the past year—sexual politics, race, violence, invasive technologies—and yet, in reading for the book, Solnit also found “how discovery can be a deep pleasure.” The Best American Essays 2019 includes Michelle Alexander, Jabari Asim, Alexander Chee, Masha Gessen, Jean Guerrero, Elizabeth Kolbert, Terese Marie Mailhot, Jia Tolentino, and others.

The Best American Essays 2019 (The Best American Series ®)

Atwan,Robert

The latest addition to the acclaimed series showcasing the best sports writing from the past year For over twenty-five years, The Best American Sports Writing has built a solid reputation by showcasing the greatest sports journalism of the previous year, culled from hundreds of national, regional, and specialty print and digital publications. Each year, the series editor and guest editor curates a truly exceptional collection. The only shared traits among all these diverse styles, voices, and stories are the extraordinarily high caliber of writing, and the pure passion they tap into that can only come from sports.

The Best American Sports Writing 2019 (The Best American Series ®)

Stout, Glenn

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