Book picks similar to
Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn by Paul Watkins


fiction
literature
naval-fiction
literature-and-fiction

Insidious


Michael McCloskey - 2010
    Some say that it's only the eccentricities of the powerful leaders of capitalistic society. But others speak of dark, twisted rituals, human slavery and illegal experiments in banned technologies.Bren Marcken is a robot handler and strategist on a special team of the United Nations Space Force, formed to occupy the corporate space stations and seize their technological secrets. To accomplish the mission, he's been authorized to field artificial intelligences that he considers just as dangerous as the enemy.Chris Adrastus is an aggressive young executive whose careful machinations have carried him to a high position at the powerful European Union company, Vineaux Genomix. Instead of finding satisfaction, he's become disillusioned with what he discovers at the top of the executive world.Aldriena Niachi is a covert operative of Black Core, a Brazilian software company with a global sphere of influence. She's about to find out what Black Core will do for a technological lead. Do some kinds of knowledge come at inordinate cost, even for a supercorporation?

As a Decade Fades


Joshua Fields Millburn - 2012
    While he stares at the rubble of his one-hit-wonder musical career, his mother is diagnosed with lung cancer, his marriage ends abruptly, and Jody starts drinking heavily to deaden his new reality.When he hasn't a single reason left to live, he attempts suicide and ends up in a psych ward where he's prodded by doctors and social workers with questions he isn't yet prepared to answer. Amid the tailspin, Jody receives a phone call from his recently estranged girlfriend and she has unexpected news: she's pregnant.As a Decade Fades begins with this phone call. As his twenties twilight, Jody Grafton grapples with loneliness, depression, lust, and infatuation, while glancing at the mounting wreckage in his rearview. When he can't fit--or force--the pieces of his life back together, he leaves his native Ohio to search for answers in the most unlikely of places: Brooklyn.Cover design by Spyr Media · Published by Asymmetrical Press

Captain Blood


Rafael Sabatini - 1922
    He escapes and becomes the most feared pirate captain on the Spanish Main, but all the glory of his adventures cannot help him, for the woman he loves cannot love a thief and pirate. Even when he destroys England's enemies, even at his most triumphant...but wait! What's that... Long Description: Peter Blood, an Irish physician and former soldier is happily settled, in the 1680's, as the doctor in an English town, when the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth catches him by accident. He saves a man's life, as a doctor must try to do, but the man is a rebel and the hanging Judge Jeffreys sentences him to ten years as an indentured slave in the Caribbean colonies. Once there, his knowledge as a physician is recognized, and thus he meets and falls in love with the daughter of the man who own his servitude; not likely to be a successful love story! A Spanish ship attacks the town, and while the Spaniards celebrate their victory he boldly steals their ship, and he and his fellow convicts sail off to become the boldest and most fearless of pirates among the islands and on the Spanish Main. But all the glory of his adventures cannot help him, for the woman he loves cannot love a thief and pirate. Even when he destroys England's enemies, even at his most triumphant...but wait! Is that... The classic novel of adventure and romance, and one of Sabatini's best.

Wittgenstein's Nephew


Thomas Bernhard - 1982
    In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality—a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, a strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction, Wittgenstein’s Nephew is both a meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and an eulogy to a real-life friendship.

The Shrine at Altamira


John L'Heureux - 1992
    He loves her more, while she shoves him aside and devotes her attention to their son.

Thinks . . .


David Lodge - 2001
    Thinks . . . , his witty new novel about secret infidelities and the nature of consciousness, unfolds in the alternating voices of Ralph Messenger, director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, and Helen Reed, a novelist and writer in residence at the university. Mutually attracted, the two end up in a moral standoff that is shattered by events that dramatically confirm the truth of Ralph's dictum: we can never know for certain what another person is thinking.

The Constant Heart


Craig Nova - 2012
    Bound up in the laws of Einstein’s theories, these lessons will ultimately influence Jake’s own career as an astronomer. Out on the creek, both father and son conquer their greatest challenges: marital infidelity, professional setbacks, and Jake’s long term, passionate obsession with his childhood crush.The Constant Heart is a potent, and moving book that utilizes the laws of nature and science to illuminate what it means to be a man today. It is an inspiring book that most immediately celebrates the bonds of father and son while exploring the beauty and intensity of love and the profound attachments between human beings, even in the face of great disease and danger.

Faking It


Elisa Lorello - 2008
    So after meeting Devin, a handsome, charming escort, she proposes an unusual arrangement: lessons about writing in exchange for lessons about sex. When Devin accepts Andi's proposal, he draws up a contract in which the two are forbidden to see each other socially. There's just one problem: Andi also wants Devin. Faking It is a witty, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heart-wrenching story about relationships, writing, and getting real.

Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea


Gary Kinder - 1998
    This is the riveting true account of death, danger, and discovery on the high seas in the dramatic search for America's greatest lost treasure, the S.S. Central America.

The Thanksgiving Visitor / A Christmas Memory


Truman Capote - 1967
    Companion tales: The Thanksgiving Visitor and A Christmas Memory in one boxed edition.

The Abyss of Human Illusion


Gilbert Sorrentino - 2010
    He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino’s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light.”—Jeffrey Eugenides“For a compelling, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate rendering of life in mid-20th-century America, forget the conscientious subjectors and take Gilbert Sorrentino at his golden Word.”—Harry Mathews“One of [Brooklyn]’s most intriguing and authentic homegrown talents, Sorrentino’s Bay Ridge deserves to be appreciated alongside Malamud’s Crown Heights, Arthur Miller’s Coney Island, Henry Miller’s and Betty Smith’s Williamsburg, Hamill’s and Auster’s Park Slope, and Lethem’s Boerum Hill.”—BookforumTitled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentino’s final novel consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion—an elegiac paean to the bleak world he so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career. Mirroring the inexplicable coincidences, encounters, and hallmarks of modern life, this novel revisits familiar characters—the aging artists, miserable couples, crackerjack salesmen, and drunken soldiers of previous books, placing them in familiar landscapes lost in time between the Depression era and some fraudulent bohemia of the present.A luminary of American literature, Gilbert Sorrentino was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr., a confidant of William Carlos Williams, a two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, and the recipient of a Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. He taught at Stanford for many years before returning to his native Brooklyn and published over thirty books before his death in 2006.

1914


Griff Hosker - 2014
    After the horrors of a cavalry charge against machine guns he transfers to the R.F.C where he becomes a gunner and observer. Eventually he becomes a pilot and shows a flair for aerial combat. Set against the backdrop of England in 1914 it shows the contrast between life in England and the brutal war in Flanders.

The Brothers Karamazov (Dramatization)


David Fishelson
    

Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories


Italo Calvino - 1993
    For the first time in paperback--a volume of thirty-seven diabolically inventive stories, fables, and "impossible interviews" from one of the great fantasists of the 20th century, displaying the full breadth of his vision and wit.  Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition.

Island in the Sky


Ernest K. Gann - 1944
    Dooley was dean of a close knit group, & everything else took second place as the men came into headquarters, & set out again to find him. An unknown lake--beyond unknown mountains--a time schedule--& faith--such alone they had to go on, hampered by Army red tape, lack of radio contact, navigation rules upset by the frozen north. The story shifts from Dooley's experiences, with the five men who counted on him, to the men who sought him. Starkly told--another segment of understanding of total war.--Kirkus