Book picks similar to
The Last Repatriate by Matthew Salesses


fiction
literary
asian-american-writers
nouvella

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil


George Saunders - 2005
    In a profoundly strange country called Inner Horner, large enough for only one resident at a time, citizens waiting to enter the country fall under the rule of the power-hungry and tyrannical Phil, setting off a chain of injustice and mass hysteria.An Animal Farm for the 21st century, this is an incendiary political satire of unprecedented imagination, spiky humor, and cautionary appreciation for the hysteric in everyone.

Patriotism


Yukio Mishima - 1961
    With Patriotism, Mishima was able to give his heartwrenching patriotic idealism an immortal vessel. A lieutenant in the Japanese army comes home to his wife and informs her that his closest friends have become mutineers. He and his beautiful loyal wife decide to end their lives together. In unwavering detail Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the couple’s seppuku that follows.

The Land of Steady Habits


Ted Thompson - 2014
    Stripped of the comforts of his previous identity, Anders turns up at a holiday party full of his ex-wife's friends and is surprised to find that the very world he rejected may be the one he needs.Thus Anders embarks on a clumsy, hilarious, and heartbreaking journey to reconcile his past with his present. Like the early work of John Updike, Ted Thompson's first novel finely observes a man in deep conflict with his community. With compassion for its characters and fresh insight into the American tradition of the "suburban narrative," The Land of Steady Habits introduces an auspicious talent.

Second Chances


Will Jordan - 2016
    But Ryan Drake has other plans… Olivia Mitchell defied orders and failed to kill her target. Now severely injured, CIA operatives are waiting to intercept her at an Istanbul hospital, and extradite by any means possible.Little do the Agency know that Ryan Drake and his team are also on the scene, and for them she is a valuable asset, with history and connections of immediate interest. If they can escape, the gamble may pay off handily. If not, the consequences will be grave. Is Drake taking one risk too many?Second Chances is a thrilling novella from the bestselling author of Deception Game and Ghost Target, full of his trademark ingenuity and no-holds-barred action.

Scarlet Ribbons


Emma Blair - 1991
    Left with only a pair of scarlet ribbons from her mother, she is given up for adoption. It's 1927, and an operation fixes her hip. She can now walk and run as well as any other child. Sent off to Canada as an orphan, Sadie meets Robbie on the Trikhardt's farm. Although he becomes her good friend, Sadie finds it difficult to overcome her cruel past...

Desayuno con diamantes


Truman Capote - 1958
    And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.This edition also contains three stories: 'House of Flowers', 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory'.

Point Omega


Don DeLillo - 2010
    In his earlier novels, he has written about conspiracy theory, the Cold War and global terrorism. Now, in Point Omega, he looks into the mind and heart of a "defense intellectual", one of the men involved in the management of the country's war machine. Richard Elster was a scholar—an outsider—when he was called to a meeting with government war planners, asked to apply "ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency". We see Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, "somewhere south of nowhere", in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, intent on documenting his experience. Finley wants to persuade Elster to make a one-take film, Elster its single character—"Just a man and a wall."Weeks later, Elster's daughter Jessica visits—an "otherworldly" woman from New York, who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. The three of them talk, train their binoculars on the landscape, and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event throws everything into question. In this compact and powerful novel, it is finally a lingering human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.

The Spinsters Guild: A Sweet Regency Romance Boxset


Rose Pearson - 2020
    That is, until Lady Emily, a widow, returns to society and finds herself in a position to help these ladies find love and happiness.Book 1 – A New BeginningEmily, a widow, returns to society with a new attitude. Admired by some “almost on the shelf” ladies, they ask for her help in finding husbands. Then an old beau is begging her to consider his courtship. Can Emily help others find love, and have a chance at love herself?Book 2 – The Disgraced BrideMiss Emma Bavidge can barely make her way through society without someone whispering about her. Her father’s disgrace has ruined her reputation and left her struggling in society. Her one hope is Lady Emily Smithton, who leads ‘The Spinsters Guild' and has promised to help. Book 3 – A Gentleman’s RevengeMiss Sarah Crosby is considered to be a spinster. Helping her cousin, Sophia, with her debut, she is attracted to Sophia’s suitor, Lord Ruddington. Lord Ruddington has a secret and a desire for revenge. Will he able to enact his revenge? Or will Sarah stop him?Book 4 – A Foolish WagerLady Amelia is forever burdened with an injured leg, a consequence of a fall from a tree. Lord Montague is blackmailed into a wager and is forced to court Lady Amelia to win the bet of making Lady Amelia fall in love with him. He soon realizes his mistake. But what can he do when so much is at stake?Book 5 – A Lord UndoneLady Beatrice's father said her mother played him false, and now she can barely lift her head in society. While hiding from society in a bookshop, she discovers a mysterious note in a book. She takes it home and becomes entwined in a mystery that changes her life!The Spinsters Guild series features Lady Emily Smithton as something of a matchmaker for a group of unusual ladies who are almost “on the shelf.” Can Lady Emily help them find their perfect match? Get your copy today!

A Happy Man


Hansjörg Schertenleib - 2005
    He’s a smart, interesting, quirky jazz musician...albeit with a wife suffering from depression, and a rebellious teenaged daughter. They find his contentedness more and more irritating. And yet This just can’t help it—life makes him happy. And the mounting tension that results is beautifully set off by Schertenleib’s lyrical prose, the smoky setting of Amsterdam, and the dialogue that’ s as edgy as that of a noir movie. And thus a book that seems at first a writerly experiment becomes a gradually intensifying tale of a simple bit of human hope holding on against great odds, to an inspiring and shocking ending.The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertész, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.

Train Dreams


Denis Johnson - 2002
    It is the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century---an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West, this novella captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.

No One


John Hughes - 2019
    He doesn’t stop immediately. By the time he returns to the scene, the road is empty, but there is a dent in the car, high up on the passenger door, and what looks like blood. Only a man could have made such a dent, he thinks. For some reason he looks up, though he knows no one is there. Has he hit someone, and if so, where is the victim?So begins a story that takes us to the heart of contemporary Australia’s festering relationship to its indigenous past. A story about guilt for acts which precede us, crimes we are not sure we have committed, crimes gone on so long they now seem criminal- less.Part crime novel, part road movie, part love story, No One takes its protagonist to the very heart of a nation where non-existence is the true existence, where crimes cannot be resolved and guilt cannot be redeemed, and no one knows what to do with ghosts that are real.

James Joyces the Dubliners


John Wyse Jackson - 2000
    

The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I


Noah Cicero - 2013
    I" contains the early masterpieces by the greatest minimalist writer ever to hail from Youngstown, Ohio. Collecting Noah Cicero's most acclaimed and popular works, this volume includes the short novels "The Human War" (soon to be a major motion picture), "The Doomed," "The Condemned," and "Burning Babies," along with rare novellas and short stories that have not been available to the public in years. Stark in their beauty, raw in their sadness, and driven by a desperate compulsion to save - and be saved by - humanity, "The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I" highlights what it is to be young and poor in America. Buy this book and learn why freedom is good. Buy this book and become beautiful. Buy this book and know that the distance between you and happiness is the distance between you and the nearest Denny's. So get in the car and drive.

Indelicacy


Amina Cain - 2020
    She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor—social and erotic—but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling."Indelicacy isn't merely a book, it's a world; a world I wanted to live in, forever . . . Arch, yet warm; aspiring and impervious; confiding and enigmatic; reposing and intrepid; Cain has conjured a protagonist who purged my mind and filled my heart." —Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond A ghostly feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams.

Claiming the Heart of a Duke


Arietta Richmond - 2016
     Hunter Barrington, Duke of Melton, returned from war a changed man. Grieving his lost love, now the holder of a title that he had never thought to inherit, and expected to marry at the earliest opportunity, what he needed most was someone who could see him, simply as himself. Lady Nerissa Loughbridge, the second daughter, always outshone by her beautiful sister, perpetually reproved for her hoydenish ways. What she needed most was someone who could see her, just for herself, who might allow that her dreams had value, simply because she wished them. Then one day, in the winter woods, they met.... But a few magical weeks of delightful friendship were swept away by the hectic London Season, as Lady Nerissa’s transformation from ordinary, to the Incomparable of the Season, brought a flock of suitors, and the Duke’s new title made him the catch of the year. Can they find their way back to each other, through all their hearts’ confusion? Can Lady Nerissa thaw a heart frozen in grief, and claim it for her own?