Book picks similar to
The Portable Virgin by Anne Enright


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First Love and Other Stories


Ivan Turgenev - 1881
    These stories all display the elegance and clarity of Turgenev's finest writing.

Sex and the City


Candace Bushnell - 1996
    In essays drawn from her witty and sometimes brutally candid column in the New York Observer, Candace Bushnell introduces us to the young and beautiful who travel in packs from parties to bars to clubs. Meet "Carrie," the quintessential young writer looking for love in all the wrong places..."Mr. Big," the business tycoon who drifts from one relationship to another..."Samantha Jones," the fortyish, successful, "testosterone woman" who uses sex like a man...not to mention "Psycho Moms," "Bicycle Boys," "International Crazy Girls," and the rest of the New Yorkers who have inspired one of the most watched TV series of our time. You've seen them on HBO, now read the book that started it all...

The Sunshine and Biscotti Club


Jenny Oliver - 2016
    But with a dash of sunshine and a sprinkling of old friends, Libby’s kitchen nightmare might just become the best thing that’s ever happened to her.After all, you can’t bake biscotti without breaking a few eggs… For guaranteed sunshine all holiday long, pack your bags and escape to The Sunshine and Biscotti Club – the irresistible new book from Jenny Oliver!

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories


Kevin Wilson - 2009
    "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.

Mrs Whippy


Cecelia Ahern - 2006
    Emelda is 46 years old. Her husband, Charlie, has just left her for a 23-year-old dancer. Her five difficult sons worship their father and blame Emelda for his departure. On top of everything else, she has to struggle with a new job at the local supermarket. For comfort she turns to her only true friend ice-cream. But lately there's a handsome man driving the ice-cream van. Could romance be about to blossom?

The Awakening and Selected Stories


Kate Chopin - 1899
    11 stories: The AwakeningBeyond the BayouMa'ame PelagieDesiree's BabyA Respectable WomanThe KissA Pair of Silk StockingsThe LocketA ReflectionAt the 'Cadian BallThe Storm

Nine Stories


J.D. Salinger - 1953
    D. Salinger published in April 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor". (Nine Stories is the U.S. title; the book is published in many other countries as For Esmé - with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories.)The stories are:"A Perfect Day for Bananafish""Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut""Just Before the War with the Eskimos""The Laughing Man""Down at the Dinghy""For Esmé – with Love and Squalor""Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes""De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period""Teddy"

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios


Yann Martel - 1993
    Yann Martel's title story (described as "unforgettable...a truly stunning piece of fiction"*), won the 1991 Journey Prize to universal acclaim. The intensely human tragedy that lies at its heart is told with a spare, careful elegance that resonates long after it has ended--and is matched through all the stories by an immediacy an dazzling freshness.

Young Skins


Colin Barrett - 2013
    Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars. Amongst them, there’s jilted Jimmy, whose best friend Tug is the terror of the town and Jimmy’s sole company in his search for the missing Clancy kid; Bat, a lovesick soul with a face like “a bowl of mashed up spuds” even before Nubbin Tansey’s boot kicked it in; and Arm, a young and desperate criminal whose destiny is shaped when he and his partner, Dympna, fail to carry out a job. In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of Irish society; unforgettable characters whose psychological complexities and unspoken yearnings are rendered through silence, humor, and violence.With power and originality akin to Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn these six short stories and one explosive novella occupy the ghostly, melancholic spaces between boyhood and old age. Told in Barrett’s vibrant, distinctive prose, Young Skins is an accomplished and irreverent debut from a brilliant new writer.

Embraced by a Rogue: A Trilogy of Second Chance Romances


Collette Cameron - 2016
    Doesn't it?One magical night, Fate orchestrates the reunion of three pairs of lovers at the same Regency ball. Beneath a balmy starlit sky, do the wounded rogues and the resilient women who once adored them, dare open their hearts and gamble on love one final time?A Kiss for a Rogue: A sweet romance of love relinquished and redeemed as once betrothed Allen Wimpleton and Olivia Kingsley meet again after a three year separation only to discover, their love is stronger than ever.A Bride for a Rogue: A tender tale of enduring love, uniting a clumsy noblewoman resigned to spinsterhood with the man she's loved since girlhood; a penniless soldier who returns to England from India, a disfigured and disillusioned man.A Rogue's Scandalous Wish: When an obligatory marriage offers turns into an unexpected second chance for love, Viscount Kingsley seizes it, but Philomena's desperation-borne acceptance forces her to trust the man who betrayed her once already.Caution: This set contains loveable rapscallions whose ears you'll want to box, spinsters determined to take matters into their own hands, the consequences be damned, a meddling aunt with terrible fashion sense, and villians you'll love to loathe.Buy this entertaining Regency historical romance set for emotional romantic reads you won't want to put down.

The World and Other Places: Stories


Jeanette Winterson - 1998
    There are the surprising, fresh little phrases minted expressly to convey the delicate realities of the made-up world. There's the humor, fierce and sly but always kind. There's the imagination that changes gender and historical epoch at whim, and does so convincingly; and the characters themselves, a sundry bunch of men and women not necessarily successful or commendable but always, somehow, likable. Best of all, by their very diversity, these stories reveal glimpses of the smart and enigmatic woman behind the work. In "Atlantic Crossing," Winterson becomes a middle-aged businessman of the mid-20th century, accidentally assigned to share his second-class cabin with a young black woman on a transatlantic crossing. In the realm of event, little happens, but in its depth of perception and what it tells of the nuances of regret, the story is as rich as a novel in another writer's hands. A few scant pages later, Winterson becomes a kind of lost female Homer, telling Orion's story from Artemis's point of view: "When she returned she saw this huge rag of a man eating her goat, raw.... His reputation hung about him like bad breath." In "The Poetics of Sex," she creates a lesbian love story that evokes her characters' personalities as explicitly as their erotic pleasures. "The 24-Hour Dog," the story of a woman writer returning a puppy she had thought to adopt, is remorseless as a psychological thriller in the squirmy depths it plumbs: "I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated: his heart and mine." Read The World and Other Places twice, once for instruction, once for joy. --Joyce Thompson

Flights of Love: Stories


Bernhard Schlink - 2000
    Here his subject is not history but the heart itself, and with the forensic delicacy of a master he lays bare the essence of our feelings.Already an enormous success in the author's native Germany, Flights of Love is certain to be celebrated, discussed, read and re-read.

Anti-requiem: New Orleans Stories


Louis Maistros - 2010
    This collection is also now fully illustrated with unusual and original photographic images of the city taken by the author. The images will appear in black and white for users of "e-ink technology" Kindles, but full color for users of the Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD or any of the Kindle apps (Kindle for PC, iPad, iPhone, etc..) that support color graphics. This edition also includes an interactive table of contents.

The Man


Bram Stoker - 2006
    This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Women With Men


Richard Ford - 1997
    Now, two years later, he reaffirms his mastery of shorter fiction with his first collection since the widely acclaimed Rock Springs, published a decade ago.The landscape of Women with Men ranges from the northern plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago, where Mr. Ford's various characters experience the consolations and complications that prevail in matters of passion, romance and love. A seventeen-year-old boy starting adulthood in the shadow of his parents' estrangement, a survivor of three marriages now struggling with cancer, an ostensibly devoted salesman in early middle age, an aspiring writer, a woman scandalously betrayed by her husband--they each of them contend with the vast distances that exist between those who are closest together. Whether alone, long married or newly met, they confront the obscure difference between privacy and intimacy, the fine distinction of pleasing another as opposed to oneself, and a need for reliance that is tempered by fearful vulnerability.In three long stories, Richard Ford captures men and women at this complex and essential moment of truth--in the course of everyday life, or during a bleak Thanksgiving journey, seismic arguments, Christmas abroad, the sudden disappearance of a child, even a barroom shooting. And with peerless emotional nuance and authority he once again demonstrates, as Elizabeth Hardwick has written, "a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer."