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Why the Tree Loves the Ax


Jim Lewis - 1998
    Readers of Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Mary Gaitskill, Susanna Moore, and other contemporary fiction writers will welcome this haunting novel about a 27-year-old woman who flees her failed marriage only to find herself involved in a perplexing spiral of murder, counterfeit, and false identity.

Goodell vs. Obama: The Battle for the Future of the NFL


David Rappoccio - 2014
    Damn, now I sound stupid, too." -Bomani Jones, ESPN "It's great, and I have no idea what just happened, but Jerry Jones dick exploded and that's enough for me." -Spencer Hall, SB Nation "The only parody Twitter account worth following" -Deadspin.com "This is the least influential book of anything I've ever read. I hated it." -Adolf Hitler In what is being hailed by many, probably, as the best, funniest, most gut-shittingly poignant literary work since The New Testament, PFT Commenter takes you on a realistic-fiction journey through the backdoor politics of today's NFL. Set in the 2014 offseason, Roger Goodell and President Barack Obama become locked in a mano a mano battle over the future of the Dallas Cowboys, culminating in a literal fight to the death. Starring NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Barack Obama, Mike Ditka, Joe Biden, Michael Vick, Peter King, Ron Jaworski, Dan Snyder, Robert Griffin III, Danny Woodhead, J.J. Watt, Jerry Jones, Russell Wilson, Pete Carroll, and many more of your favorite NFL stars and media personalities; "Goodell vs. Obama: The Battle for the Future of the NFL" will take you on a journey that any NFL fan is sure to love, or at least not hate. WARNING: Told through the narrative eye and screaming mouth of an uneducated internet commenter, this book is filled with grammatical errors. It was written by a someone who was raised on scorching hot sports takes, light beer, and an undying love for Roger Goodell. He cares about TELLING, not about spelling. If that's going to be a problem,, there's the door.

Joyride


Joan Brady - 2003
    Marriage and motherhood have changed her identity and challenged her previous beliefs about love and romance. The demands of family and career have buried the truths she once knew beneath a mountain of resentment, dirty laundry, and endless bas of groceries. Then, on one of her late-night excursions to the supermarket, Christine runs into Joe again... and everything changes.

A Soldier of the Great War


Mark Helprin - 1991
    Then the Great War intervenes. Half a century later, in August of 1964, Alessandro, a white-haired professor, tall and proud, meets an illiterate young factory worker on the road. As they walk toward Monte Prato, a village seventy kilometers away, the old man—a soldier and a hero who became a prisoner and then a deserter, wandering in the hell that claimed Europe—tells him how he tragically lost one family and gained another. The boy, envying the richness and drama of Alessandro's experiences, realizes that this magnificent tale is not merely a story: it's a recapitulation of his life, his reckoning with mortality, and above all, a love song for his family.

A Vineyard for Two


Laura Bradbury - 2019
    Trouble is, she’s sure she’s already found—and lost—hers. Now the young widow has inherited half the vineyard she considers her own, and she’s got one chance to produce a vintage that could make or break her career. But when the flashy, impetuous Clovis de Valois is revealed as heir to the other half, her dreams of independence are dashed into chaos.Cerise and Clovis seem to be opposites in every way that matters. Can their passion for winemaking—and secretly each other—unite them beyond their differences? Or will their clash ruin the vineyard, and the hearts, they’re both desperate to save?

In a Fishbone Church


Catherine Chidgey - 1998
    But Clifford's words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family's world. This book tells the story of three generations of the Stilton family.

The Impending Sausage Sandwich of Doom


Kirk St Moritz - 2017
    After being fired from his job as the clandestine stooge on hit TV show Ghostbusters UK, Elliott returns home to find his girlfriend missing. To make matters worse, Hapkido Valentine, the legendary 1980s wrestler, has returned from the dead and taken up residency in Elliott’s flat. Despite a voracious appetite for sausage sandwiches, Hapkido is convinced he has finally become the mystical Japanese warrior he once portrayed in the ring.Together they must undertake a dangerous journey to find out why the Universe created this most unlikely of partnerships. All that stands in their way is a medallion wearing TV psychic, a train-spotting assassin and the murderous intentions of the local over 75’s women’s group. If Elliott thought the day started badly, things are about to get a whole lot worse.

She's Come Undone


Wally Lamb - 1992
    She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she really goes under.

The Maytrees


Annie Dillard - 2007
    She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems. Dillard recounts the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. Lou takes up painting. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk. In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.

Bright Lights, Big City


Jay McInerney - 1984
    The novel follows a young man, living in Manhattan as if he owned it, through nightclubs, fashion shows, editorial offices, and loft parties as he attempts to outstrip mortality and the recurring approach of dawn. With nothing but goodwill, controlled substances, and wit to sustain him in this anti-quest, he runs until he reaches his reckoning point, where he is forced to acknowledge loss and, possibly, to rediscover his better instincts. This remarkable novel of youth and New York remains one of the most beloved, imitated, and iconic novels in America.

The Interestings


Meg Wolitzer - 2013
    Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules's now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken. Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.

A Kind of Flying


Ron Carlson - 2003
    In this generous gathering from collections no longer available, longtime fans and new readers alike can savor the development of a master of idiosyncrasy.Properly celebrated for his range, Carlson offers us a rural sheriff who's wary of UFOs ("Phenomena"), a lawyer on a mission in remote Alaska ("Blazo"), a baseball player turned killer-by-accident ("Zanduce at Second"), and a nineteen-year-old who experiences an unsettling sexual awakening during an Arizona summer ("Oxygen"). Here also is a man accusing Bigfoot of stealing his wife, followed by Bigfoot's incomparable response. Not least of the treasures is "The H Street Sledding Record," a story perfect for family holiday reading, in which a young father creates the magic of Santa by throwing manure on his roof on Christmas Eve.This book proves Carlson's axiom that "a short story is not a single thing done a single way," and it offers us—finally—a full view of his remarkable talents.

The Big Green Tent


Lyudmila Ulitskaya - 2011
    A sweeping saga, it tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys—an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets—struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the prospects for integrity in a society defined by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an oppressive regime through art, a love of Russian literature, and activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret police that is highly skilled at fomenting paranoia, division, and self-betrayal. An artist is chased into the woods, where he remains in hiding for four years; a researcher is forced to deem a patient insane, damning him to torture in a psychiatric ward; a man and his wife each become collaborators, without the other knowing. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s big yet intimate novel belongs to the tradition of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: a work of politics, love, and belief that is a revelation of life in dark times.

Angels And Men


Catherine Fox - 1995
    Mara is an angry and intelligent young woman who undertakes a theology degree to explore her unresolved relationship with her vicar father and deceased sister, who died mysteriously in an extreme religious community.

Dusty's Diary Box Set: Apocalypse Series


Bobby Adair - 2015
     I mean, it took more than a year before anybody looked up from their smartphones long enough to wonder why so many of their neighbors were infected. Why so many were dying. The vaccination riots came and went. The grocery store shelves emptied out. The spigots eventually ran dry. That was around the time I moved underground and sealed the hatch on my backyard bunker. That was a couple of years ago. Now, my radio hasn't picked up a signal from the world up top since I can't remember when. My exterior camera died in a storm last spring. And the loneliness has set in, gnawing at me, making me think crazy thoughts, including the one that'll change everything. I have to leave the bunker and see if anyone is left alive.