Eternity, My Beloved tells the story of a rebel priest, Jerome Strozzi, who falls between the cracks of both church and state during the German occupation of Paris during World War II. Befriending prostitutes, petty thieves, and con-men, he becomes the unofficial pastor of the notorious Pigalle district. Told by a skeptical narrator who is himself searching for Strozzi's secret, this contemporary lyric masterpiece becomes a sustained meditation on love and freedom.

Eternity, My Beloved (International Series)

Literature & Fiction

Gallimard

Sulivan, Jean

Riordan, Francis Ellen

Riordan, Sister Francis Ellen

Contemporary

River Boat Books

After Thaddeus Jacobs, the adopted so of a traveling preacher, is found naked with a young woman, he is expelled from the only family he has ever known. Guided by visions and a mysterious voice, he makes his way to a coastal South Carolina island, where he struggles to make his peace with God and himself in spite of his own strange cravings and the superstitious hatred of the islanders, who think he is the devil. The price of his inner peace, however, is absolute isolation, and it is only when he meets Kilby, a thirteen-year-old boy, that he rediscovers what it means to be human.

The Conjure Man

Peter Damian Bellis

Gods Among Gazelles focuses on the brutality that is occurring in the Congo as we speak and yet is also anchored in the spirituality of the people living there. The novel is set in the Congo (mythic Congo, historical Congo, and contemporary Congo) and reflects a magical realist perspective embedded in an existential reality. It is also a blend of narrative styles and a commentary on the nature of narrative itself. It is mythic, surreal, abounds in nihilist imagery fused to Christian philosophy, and above all, it is everything African.¿

Gods Among Gazelles

Bellis, Peter Damian

Literary

Brown Man in White Light is an immigrant's story set in the United States after the events of September 11, when a nation previously friendly and welcoming of strangers suddenly turns hostile towards many people, including some within its own borders. Dedicated teacher and long-term U.S. resident Robi Sen faces difficult choices after his wife decides to go back home and the authorities begin to investigate his teaching practices, resulting in suspension from his university. How he comes to terms-moving back and forth between continents-with these various personal and professional losses is the stuff of today's immigrant lives: no longer having to dig a living out of hardscrabble earth, yet faced with many of the same challenges, each man and woman must search for their own answers. Along the way, Robi finds love and loses it, seeks friendship and community, and arrives at an answer to what the words home and belonging might mean in the age of global citizenship. This is a novel that not only tells us how one man lives but shows us how we all may live.

Brown Man in White Light

Roy, Deben

The terrain of Night of the Long Goodbyes is dystopian partially in the manner of 1984 and Brave New World - but there is also an echo of Beckett as well as a strong Nouveau Roman undercurrent that suggests the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet (The Erasers comes to mind), a feeling emphasized by the fact that one of the characters we encounter is named Hermann Gobb-Rillen, a writer known in the reality of the book for writing a famous novel also titled The Erasers. Night of the Long Goodbyes depicts reality as experienced through a kaleidoscope and will challenge every assumption one might possess about what it means to be human.

Night of the Long Goodbyes

Martiny, Erik

Clotel, or the President's Daughter

BROWN, WILLIAM WELLS

The Mad Patagonian is a multi-generational epic spanning three centuries and five continents in which members of the Escoraz family are looking to find true love (and some version of paradise) in a world that has been torn apart by the random even bestial violence of Fascism in all its forms. Part One takes place primarily in Florida and traces the journey of an exiled teacher whop finds refuge among an exiled Spanish couple living in Little Havana.

The Mad Patagonian Part One: An Echo of Paradise (The Mad Patagonian series)

Zabala, Javier Pedro

United States

The Mad Patagonian Part Two: Into the Abyss and Back Again (The Mad Patagonian series)

The Mad Patagonian is a multi-generational epic spanning three centuries and five continents in which members of the Escoraz family are looking to find true love (and some version of paradise) in a world that has been torn apart by the random even bestial violence of Fascism in all its forms. Part Three first examines how the lives of all of the characters are connected, first the connection between Father Anton Kreutner, a priest from Miami, and Isabella Calzada and her brother Emilio; then the connections between Xavier and Soledad Mendoza and their past; and concludes with the existential crisis of the "bearded man," a central character from Part One.

The Mad Patagonian Part Three: An Elegy for a Dream Once Dreamt (The Mad Patagonian series)

Madmen in Revolt contains Roberto Arlt’s complete masterpiece: The Seven Madmen & The Flamethrowers, combined in a single volume for the first time in history. The Seven Madmen is the first half this masterpiece and The Flamethrowers is its second half.\nThe story begins with of a seminal group of madmen in 1920s Buenos Aires intent on blowing up the world. It is in fact about the end of humanity, of what it means to be human, and the central character in this Beckettian tragedy is Remo Erdosain, a man obsessed with technology, a man who is at war with a world controlled by corrupt elite who struggles with the idea of killing a single man. As the novel opens, Erdosain is accused of stealing 600 pesos He is willing to repay the money, but no one will lend him the money to do so. He does receive a check from a stranger named Haffner, but suddenly it seems that Erdosain lives in an alternate reality. In fact he has entered the world of the absurd as defined by Camus. Eventually, Erdosain meets The Astrologer, who instead of giving Erdosain money, convinces Erdosain that what the world needs is a new secret society devoted to revolution, and, what is even more astonishing, this new society needs Erdosain to participate in a plot to kidnap the thug Barust in order to extort money to finance its operations.\nOne by one we are introduced to the seven madmen who will participate in this dream of a new world, but it soon becomes clear that the dream itself is a madness and that each of the madmen suffer from their own peculiar (absurdist) form of insanity. The Astrologer, for instance, is mostly intent on developing a series of bizarre inventions: weaponizing the Asiatic cholera bacillus, adapting steam engines to run by electromagnetics, and copperplating roses, to name three. By the end of the first book, the only thing the reader is certain of is that the story is not yet concluded. The Astrologer says: ““What we call madness is just new thoughts people aren’t used to . . . . Of course, there should only be a few like us...the big thing is for our actions to bring us vitality and energy. Yonder lies salvation.” We realize that the seven madmen have not yet found salvation. And Arlt himself says the novel will continue with a second book titled The Flamethrowers.\nIn The Flamethrowers, the seven madmen try to bring their dream/nightmare vision of revolution to fruition, and the notion of anything resembling salvation disintegrates before our very eyes. Erdosain, caught between the desire for purity and the need to humiliate, murders his fourteen-old bride. The group’s plans to annihilate civilization become more technologically specific and more psychologically deranged. These our men isolated and marginalized by the external world. The inner realities each member of the group has created, realities characterized by games and fantasies, plots and conspiracies, have led to increased isolation from the world. The reader realizes we have entered the abyss, a place of technological terrors where our very sense of morality is abandoned.\nTowards the end of the novel, a jaundiced, fully uniformed (gasmasked!) soldier appears to Erdosain at night and they engage in a rather blasé conversation about gasses that reveals Erdosain’s belief in the efficacy of phosgene as a mass murdering agent. Their conversation, like the rest of the novel, underscores the horrible truth that the abyss we fear is at the very center of the human soul. We are provided a basic understanding of the aberrant behavior (the what but not truly the why), but there is no accompanying political or moral epiphany.\nWhat happens to the revolutionary vision of The Astrologer? What happens to Erdosain and the rest of the seven madmen? Perhaps it is best to say that the answer lies somewhere between fantasy and reality. (In other words, you’ll have to read the book to find out.)

Madmen in Revolt: The Seven Madmen & the Flamethrowers (the Complete Novel)

ARLT, ROBERTO

Genre Fiction

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