Book picks similar to
Neighboring Lives by Thomas M. Disch


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Yellow Jack


Josh Russell - 1999
    . . shimmers with intensity . . . irresistible."—New Orleans Times-PicayuneHailed by reviewers as "an electrifying debut" (Baltimore Sun) and "perhaps the best evocation of New Orleans ever to appear in print" (Richmond Times-Dispatch), Yellow Jack has given Southern literature its own intoxicating hybrid of Caleb Carr, Flannery O'Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov. Russell's "virtuoso storytelling, evocative prose and original conception mark [his first book] as a significant work that we can only hope will be followed by many more" (Chicago Tribune). Yellow Jack is a ribald, picaresque trip through an 1840s New Orleans saturated with sex, drugs, death, and corruption. In this "luminously haunting" (Entertainment Weekly) portrait of decadence, daguerrotypist Claude Marchand becomes hopelessly entangled with both a voodoo-adept octoroon mistress and the erotically precocious daughter of a prominent New Orleans family. "Russell has distilled the New Orleans of the mid-1800s, the terrible fever of the title, and the savage lives of the characters into a novel of terrible beauty."—Nashville Scene

Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses


Harold Bloom - 2003
    This comprehensive study guide also features "The Story Behind the Story" which details the conditions under which All the Pretty Horses was written. This title also includes a short biography on Cormac McCarthy and a descriptive list of characters.

Hunting with Hemingway


Hilary Hemingway - 2000
    It was an audio-cassette filled with the voice of her father telling outrageous stories about his hunting expeditions with his famous older brother, Ernest Hemingway. In this mesmerizing book, Hilary transcribes these stories, revealing the bond between two larger-than-life brothers -- and tells of her own quest to make peace with the painful parts of the Hemingway legacy.

Becoming Lola


Harriet Steel - 2010
    It brings to vibrant life the true story of Eliza Gilbert, the daughter of an obscure Ensign in the British Army and his cold Irish wife. When she grew up, Eliza changed her name to Lola Montez. She was a dancer, a courtesan, a bigamist, the mistress of a king and the nineteenth-century’s most notorious adventuress. Blazing like a female firecracker across the stages and courts of Europe and beyond, she was, for a while, second only to Queen Victoria in fame.

The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickok


Richard Matheson - 1996
    marshal, legend. Matheson explores the cruelty that turned him violent, the fears that drove him, and the events that caused his name to live on a century later. From the author of Journey of the Gun Years.

The Tailor And Ansty


Eric Cross - 1942
    It has become a modern Irish classic, promising to make immortal the Tailor and his irrepressible wife, Ansty. The Tailor never travelled further than Scotland, yet the breadth of the world could not contain the wealth of his humour and fantasy. All human life is here - marriages, inquests, matchmaking, wakes - and always the Tailor, his wife and their black cow.

The Maid of Buttermere


Melvyn Bragg - 1987
    The story of an imposter and bigamist, who travels to the North where he marries the maid of Buttermere, a young woman whose natural beauty inspired the dreams and confirmed the theories of a=early 19th century writers.

The Jacobite Lass


Janet MacLeod Trotter - 2014
    That child is the passionate and free-spirited Flora, daughter of Marion. Flora’s early years are spent roaming around her father’s cattle farm, running wild and free with her brother and his friends. From early on she adores fair Neil MacEachen. But when her father dies suddenly, Flora and her mother are plunged into poverty and it seems beautiful Flora is destined to skivvy in the kitchen and dairy for her harsh aunt. Until one night dashing soldier, One-eyed Hugh, her mother’s former lover, kidnaps mother and daughter and takes them to Skye where he swiftly marries Marion.Back on the Outer Isles they settle into family life and Flora is taken under the wing of the lively Lady Clan, the chief’s wife, who teaches her the skills of a noblewoman. Flora still dreams of the day she might marry the handsome Neil, who has by now disappeared to France. But when the Clanranalds are invited to the grand wedding of the MacDonald chief of Sleat in Skye, Flora finds herself irresistibly drawn to dark-haired, teasing and passionate Allan of Kingsburgh, one of the mighty Skye MacDonalds, who makes no secret of his desire for her. Her heart is torn; she loves the mysterious and increasingly elusive Neil but struggles to control her attraction to Allan, who is meanwhile being groomed for a prestigious match with the chief of MacLeod’s daughter.Before affairs of the heart can be resolved, the exiled Prince Charles Stuart lands on the Outer Isles in his bid to win back the crown and his arrival ignites the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Scotland is plunged into bloody civil war; families and clans are torn apart in their loyalties and Flora’s fate is changed forever. She faces the biggest decision of her life – whether or not to help the now fugitive Prince to escape the islands and certain execution – knowing that to do so will not only put her own life in danger, but those of the people she loves most in the world.Deeply emotional and uplifting, The Jacobite Lass is set in the turbulent times of 18th century Scotland and is based on the true story of Scottish heroine, Flora MacDonald and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Air & Fire


Rupert Thomson - 1993
    The Indians are indifferent to Western notions of time and industry. The French, on the other hand, are sufficiently meticulous to import 2,348 pieces of cast iron to the desolate mining town of Santa Sofia, there to be assembled into a church under the supervision of a disciple of the renowned Gustave Eiffel.

The Secret Books of Paradys III & IV


Tanith Lee - 1993
    1991 (087951440X)The Book of the Mad, c. 1993 (0879514817)Paradys - the City - was a place of decadence and decay, of luxury and lasciviousness, and, after the revolution, a graveyard peopled by the insane and the dead ... and by those who preyed on both.All who came to Paradys were forever touched by its dread magic - from the bride bespelled into the body of a weasel ... to the poet whose lust for vengeance drove him to a distant isle where voodoo held sway ... to the conjurer with a spell that enabled him to master almost everything ... to the woman whose mere presence seemed to herald death's approach.Yet Paradys held far more treacherous secrets than these. The City was not one place but three, bound together by a labyrinth of ice yet separated, perhaps by time, perhaps by some long-forgotten enchantment, into Paradise, Paradis and Paradys -- each cursed in an entirely different way ...The twins Felion and Smara dwelt in Paradise - brother and sister who prowled the ice labyrinth in an unceasing search for wealth, however ill-gotten.The painter Leocadia was a citizen of Paradis. When her lover was found dead in her studio, she was committed to a mental hospital called the Residence - a welcome descent into madness.In Paradys, 11-year-old Hilde's unrequited love for an actor left her so distraught that her family placed her in an asylum, never expecting a full recovery.Then Felion and Smara met Leocadia and Hilde ...This exclusive SFBC omnibus volume includes The Book of the Dead (eight short stories) and The Book of the Mad

Sean of the South: Volume 2


Sean Dietrich - 2015
    His humor and short fiction appear in various publications throughout the Southeast.

Two Princes and a Queen


Shmuel David - 2017
    In the face of persecution against Jews, Hanne and his parents joins a harrowing voyage down the Danube River, eventually meant to reach pre-State Israel. The passengers aboard the three creaking river-boats are constantly torn between hope and despair in their attempt to reach safety. A dying father implores his son to uncover the truth about his past On his death-bed, Hanne implores his son, Alan, to find out what became of his first love, Inge, whom he was forced to leave under tragic circumstances during the river journey. Alan becomes inexorably drawn to delving into the past. He pores over his father’s journals as well as other survivor diaries and letters, together with recorded interviews with Erica, the one survivor left in NYC, and learns the bitter truth contained in Inge’s death camp diary. A devoted son discover a little-know story that must be shared Bit by bit, Alan uncovers the horrendous story of the young lovers’ harrowing voyage down the Danube River along with Hundreds of other jews attempting to flee the Nazis for Israel in a historic fiasco that came to be called the Kladovo-Sabac Affair. While focusing on a touching love story, this historical novel also tells the ill-fated, real-life stories of other people who shaped the journey. Scroll up now to get your copy of Two Princes and a Queen!

The Best Short Stories of All Time - Volume 1


Jack LondonEdgar Allan Poe - 2011
    Ranging from the 19th to the 20th centuries, writers include James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Richard Edward Connell, Henri Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Jack London, Henri Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe.

The Man with No Borders


Richard C. Morais - 2019
    Nearing the end of a long and tumultuous life, he’s overcome by hallucinatory memories of the past. Among his most cherished memories are those of his boyhood in 1950s Franco-era Spain and the bucolic afternoons he spent salmon fishing on the Sella River with his father, uncle, and much-loved younger brother. But these fond reveries are soon eclipsed by something greater. José’s regrets and dark family secrets are flooding back, as is the devastating tragedy that drove José into exile and makes him bear the burden of a soul-deep guilt.Now, as his three estranged sons return to their father’s side, José hopes to outpace death long enough to finally put his house in order and exorcise its demons. Only in his quest for redemption can José begin to understand the meaning of his life—and what his legacy has meant to others.

Ma Polinski's Pockets


Sara Sheridan - 1999
    Setting off to discover why, she rocks her stable existence and uncovers secrets about her mother's experiences as a 5 year old in a concentration camp in WWII. What made Ma Polinski leave Rachel everything and will what she finds set her and her family free?