Book picks similar to
Matador by Barnaby Conrad
spain
fiction
favorites
about-spain
Leaving the Atocha Station
Ben Lerner - 2011
What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.
The Memory of an Elephant
Alex Lasker - 2021
Interwoven with his narrative are the tumultuous lives of the family who raised and then lost him: a famed hunting guide and his wife, who runs an animal orphanage (a conflict that in time upends their marriage); their son and daughter; and the young Kikuyu who finds the orphaned elephant and becomes part of the Hathaway family. This timeless story is alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking, spanning east Africa, Great Britain and New York from 1962 to 2015.
The Silent Stones
Diana Cooper - 2002
Handed a sacred scroll from Atlantis by a dying Tibetan monk, Marcus, Joanna and Helen are propelled into adventure as they race to get it translated and follow its instructions.
The Eternal Wonder
Pearl S. Buck - 2013
Buck at the end of her life in 1973, The Eternal Wonder tells the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax (Rann for short), an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever—and, ultimately, to love.Rann falls for the beautiful and equally brilliant Stephanie Kung, who lives in Paris with her Chinese father and has not seen her American mother since she abandoned the family when Stephanie was six years old. Both Rann and Stephanie yearn for a sense of genuine identity. Rann feels plagued by his voracious intellectual curiosity and strives to integrate his life of the mind with his experience in the world. Stephanie struggles to reconcile the Chinese part of herself with her American and French selves. Separated for long periods of time, their final reunion leads to a conclusion that even Rann, in all his hard-earned wisdom, could never have imagined.A moving and mesmerizing fictional exploration of the themes that meant so much to Pearl S. Buck in her life, this final work is perhaps her most personal and passionate, and will no doubt appeal to the millions of readers who have treasured her novels for generations.
The Blindfold
Siri Hustvedt - 1992
Mr. Morning, an inscrutable urban recluse, employs Iris to tape-record verbal descriptions of objects that belonged to a murder victim. George, a photographer, takes an eerie portrait of Iris, which then acquires a strange life of its own, appearing and disappearing without warning around the city. After a series of blinding migraines, Iris ends up in a hospital room with Mrs. O., a woman who has lost her mind and memory to a stroke, but who nevertheless retains both the strength and energy to torment her fellow patient. And finally, there is Professor Rose, Iris’s teacher and eventually her lover. While working with him on the translation of a German novella called The Brutal Boy, she discovers in its protagonist, Klaus, a vehicle for her own transformation and ventures out into the city again--this time dressed as a man.
The Vanished Series: Books 1-3
B.B. Griffith - 2016
Follow the Crow (Book 1)Ben Dejooli is a Navajo cop who can't escape his past. Six years ago his little sister Ana vanished without a trace. His best friend saw what happened but he refuses to speak of what he knows, and so was banished from the Navajo tribe. That was the day the crows started following Ben. What the crows know will change his life, and the lives of those he loves, forever.Beyond the Veil (Book 2)The bell that holds power over life and death has been lost. The race to find it has begun, and our world hangs in the balance.Caroline and Owen search for the bell across the land of the living. Ben Dejooli, now known as the Walker, searches the land of the dead. Their mission is to protect the bell and keep it secret. Others seek the bell as well, but they have different plans... plans that could disrupt the careful balance between life and death that has stood since the beginning of time.When a young boy finds the bell out in the plains of Texas, he quickly becomes the target of a showdown between the lands of the living and the dead, and those that want to rule over both.The Coyote Way (Book 3)The Walker chases a rogue spirit, something dark and chaotic that broke through into the land of the living and took on the form of a coyote.Caroline and Owen have been on the move for years trying to find a place to call home. Caroline remains torn--her heart split in two. Half of her loves Owen, the other half still loves Ben. Grant travels with them, but he struggles with the weight of his position as Keeper and wants to carve his own path. Everywhere they go they find a strange malice and unease waiting for them. The coyote's handiwork.They don't know it yet, but all of them are travelling in the same direction. Back to Chaco Navajo Reservation . . . which is exactly what the coyote wants.
Wild Freedom: Two Classic Westerns
Max Brand - 1922
The Long, Long Trail (1922)Jess is a gunslinger, an outlaw on the run trying to elude the sheriff. When a woman enters his life, he reconsiders his future.About The AuthorSeattle-born Frederick Schiller Faust (1892 –1944) was a western author who wrote under pen names including Max Brand. He grew up working on a ranch in California's San Joaquin Valley. His books inspired Hollywood films and he created popular characters including Dr. Kildare.
Lovely, Raspberry: Poems
Aaron Belz - 2010
A former resident of St. Louis, where he founded the Observable Poetry reading series, he now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Happy All the Time
Laurie Colwin - 1978
Guido plans to write poetry while Vincent feels confident he will win a Nobel prize for physics. When Guido spots Holly while exiting a museum, he can immediately sense that she will be difficult, quirky, and hard to live with. He loves her on sight. Vincent, open-minded and cheerful, meets Misty at work. Though she is a bored and misanthropic brunette, he finds himself desperate to know her. Through courtship, jealousy, estrangement, and other perils, Happy All the Time follows four sane, intelligent, and good-intentioned people who manage to find love in spite of themselves.
Finn
Jon Clinch - 2007
The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain’s classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own.Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body–flayed and stripped of all identifying marks–drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death.Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn’ s terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn’s mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity–not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright.Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America’s past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.
Poem a Day, Vol. 1
Nicholas Albery - 1994
Poems are meant to be voiced and A Poem a Day includes 366 poems old and new - one for each day of the year - worth learning by heart. Only two criteria were demanded of each poem for inclusion in this collection - it had to be short enough to learn in a day, and good enough to stand among the great poetry of the English language, from Chaucer to Sylvia Plath.A Poem a Day is a book for the bedside. It contains many of the most familiar poems in the language and others that will come as a surprise. Most are complete and most are short, easily contained in a single page. But a few are substantial works, like Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and Rudyard Kipling's "Gunga Din." Some have been read by every high school student (Andrew Marvel, "To His Coy Mistress") while others will be new to most readers (Thomas Hardy, "The Voice"). But all share the compression and charged meaning which are the soul of poetry. In its British version the book went through seven printings in a year and was a bestseller. Now Karen McCosker has added a new foreword and fifty new poems for an American audience willing to make poetry a part of life.
Lie Down in Darkness
William Styron - 1951
William Styron traces the betrayals and infidelities—the heritage of spite and endlessly disappointed love—that afflict the members of a Southern family and that culminate in the suicide of the beautiful Peyton Loftis.
The Haunted Boy
Carson McCullers - 2018
Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Read This and Tell Me What It Says
A. Manette Ansay - 1995
Manette Ansay explores the rural Midwest landscape and the people who inhabit it: ordinary folk with extraordinary inner lives, struggling to make sense of the isolated, sometimes painful, and often intensely religious worlds in which they live. Her are 15 haunting and exquisitely written tales that offer a rare and unforgettable glimpse into the complexities of being human and being alive.
The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft - 1978
Lovecraft from 1917-1935. Excludes collaborations.The eBook’s table of contents is listed below. It includes the year each story was written.The Tomb (1917)Dagon (1917)Polaris (1918)Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)Memory (1919)Old Bugs (1919)The Transition of Juan Romero (1919)The White Ship (1919)The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1919)The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919)The Terrible Old Man (1920)The Tree (1920)The Cats of Ulthar (1920)The Temple (1920)Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1920)The Street (1920)Celephaïs (1920)From Beyond (1920)Nyarlathotep (1920)The Picture in the House (1920)Ex Oblivione (1921)The Nameless City (1921)The Quest of Iranon (1921)The Moon-Bog (1921)The Outsider (1921)The Other Gods (1921)The Music of Erich Zann (1921)Herbert West — Reanimator (1922)Hypnos (1922)What the Moon Brings (1922)Azathoth (1922)The Hound (1922)The Lurking Fear (1922)The Rats in the Walls (1923)The Unnamable (1923)The Festival (1923)The Shunned House (1924)The Horror at Red Hook (1925)He (1925)In the Vault (1925)The Descendant (1926)Cool Air (1926)The Call of Cthulhu (1926)Pickman’s Model (1926)The Silver Key (1926)The Strange High House in the Mist (1926)The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)The Colour Out of Space (1927)The Very Old Folk (1927)The Thing in the Moonlight (1927)The History of the Necronomicon (1927)Ibid (1928)The Dunwich Horror (1928)The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)At the Mountains of Madness (1931)The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)The Evil Clergyman (1933)The Book (1933)The Shadow out of Time (1934)The Haunter of the Dark (1935)