Book picks similar to
The Laughing Matter by William Saroyan
drama
fiction
negah-pub
pretentious-literature
The Lion Trees
Owen Thomas - 2016
The Johns family is unraveling. Hollis, a retired Ohio banker, isolates himself in esoteric hobbies and a dangerous flirtation with a colleague's daughter. Susan, his wife of forty years, risks everything for a second chance at who she might have been. David, their eldest, thrashes to stay afloat as his teaching career capsizes in a storm of accusations over a missing student and the legacy of Christopher Columbus. While Tilly, the black sheep, trades her literary promise for an improbable career as a starlet, and then struggles to define herself amidst a humiliating scandal and the judgment of an uncompromising writer. By turns comical, suspenseful and poignant, the Johns family is tumbling toward the discovery that sometimes youhave to let go of your identity to find out who you are.
Mount Verità
Daphne du Maurier - 1952
It is told from the viewpoint of a nameless mountaineer whose best friend's wife disappears on a trip to climb the peak. It is based on the actual colony of Monte Verità in Switzerland which preached a return to nature.
Dances with Wolves
John Barry - 1991
Comes complete with a color photo section of scenes from the movie and a bio of the renowned film score composer John Barry.
The Watershed Years
Russell Rowland - 2007
"The Watershed Years" takes place immediately after World War II following the lives of the Arbuckles, a ranching family on the vast plains of eastern Montana.
Moon Palace
Paul Auster - 1989
As Marco sets out on a journey from the canyons of Manhattan to the deserts of Utah, he encounters a gallery of characters and a series of events as rich and surprising as any in modern fiction.Beginning during the summer that men first walked on the moon, and moving backward and forward in time to span three generations, Moon Palace is propelled by coincidence and memory, and illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit. Here is the most entertaining and moving novel yet from an author well known for his breathtaking imagination.
The Summer Without Men
Siri Hustvedt - 2011
A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment."
Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragicomic poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people’s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,“the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own. From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.
Lucy Gayheart
Willa Cather - 1935
She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Carson McCullers - 1941
A powerful and passionate tale is set on a southern army post --a human hell inhabited by a sexually disturbed officer, his animalistic wife, her lover, and the driven young private who forces the drama to its climax...
Three Minutes More
Edward R. O'Dell - 2010
Severely injured, he does not know if he will survive the night. Reflecting on the evening's dreadful events, wondering if he could have done anything to alter them, his thoughts begin to drift. He begins to contemplate his remarkable life, his dysfunctional family, and the unfortunate prospect that he may have to soon answer for his life to God. While vividly recalling the most amusing, distressing, bizarre, and disturbing events of his life, he soon comes to realize "the monster you know is far easier to deal with than the monster you don't!" Will he get the miracle he needs to make it through the night? If so, will he finally find peace? Author's Note: This book deals with sensitive topics, and is intended for mature audiences only.
My Sister, My Love
Joyce Carol Oates - 2008
A decade ago the Rampikes were destroyed by the murder of Skyler's six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder; part elegy for the lost Bliss and for Skyler's own lost childhood; and part corrosively funny expose of the pretensions of upper-middle-class American suburbia, this captivating novel explores with unexpected sympathy and subtlety the intimate lives of those who dwell in Tabloid Hell.
Lizoanca la 11 ani
Doina Ruști - 2009
People consider her guilty of spreading a disease, and during one single torrid summer, she turns into public enemy no. 1. At first she attracts the attention of the villagers, and afterwards, through mass-media, she becomes a national sensation. As this character develops, hunted, blamed and adored at the same time, various secrets, more or less important, are revealed, gradually turning the story into the chronicle of this small rural community. Hypocrisy, humiliation, cruelty and murder. Each character had contributed one way or another to the change of mentality in society. All these old occurrences actually represent the underground of the contemporary world, and once disclosed, the history of the last 60 years is recomposed in detail, unveiling how the east-European village has been undergoing a sustained downfall. The 13 stories (forming Lizoanca’s story) all lead to a single character, a certain Crone Petrache Notaru (80 years old). He is the one who committed all these landmark acts changing the life of the village, and all the other characters are built around him, weaving, one way or another, Lizoanca’s biography. Notaru ruined Tori’s life (Lizoanca’s grandmother). He is also responsible for Greblă’s fixations, who is a paedophile. Notaru fed Sanitara’s fears, embittering her. And he rewrites the history of an antic ring which he had found when he was a child. Notaru is the unknown architect of a world which can synthetically be named Lizoanca.Based on a true story, the novel represents the radiography of the contemporary society, during its last moments.
The Missing Daughter
Emily Gunnis - 2019
Thirteen-year-old Rebecca lives in fear of her father’s temper. As a storm batters Seaview Cottage one night, she hears a visitor at the door and a violent argument ensues. By the time the police arrive, Rebecca’s parents are dead and the visitor has fled. No one believes Rebecca heard a stranger downstairs...2014. Iris, a journalist, is sent to cover the story of a new mother on the run with her desperately ill baby. But fatefully the trail leads to the childhood home of Iris’s own mother, Rebecca…Seaview Cottage.As Iris races to unravel what happened the night Rebecca’s parents were killed, it’s time for Seaview Cottage to give up its secrets.
To Dream the Blackbane
Richard J. O'Brien
Scientists referred to the event as The Anomaly. A byproduct of The Anomaly was the advent of hybrid beings—people who became mixed with whatever animal or object was closest to them the moment the event occurred. Humans, or pedigrees, soon relegated fairy refugees and hybrids into ghetto zones in large cities.Seventy years later, Wolfgang Rex, a second-generation hybrid—part human, part Rhodesian Ridgeback—is a retired police detective who runs a private investigation business in Chicago’s Southside. It’s a one-hybrid show; though Rex couldn’t survive without his assistant, the faerie Sally Sandweb.One night, two vampires visit Rex and offer him a substantial reward for the recovery of a stolen scroll. Later that same evening, Charlotte Sweeney-Jarhadill, a pedigree woman from Louisiana, visits Rex and hires him to exorcize the headless ghost of a Confederate soldier from her home.To complicate matters, the private detective ends up falling for Charlotte. Meanwhile, the vampires demand results in the search for the missing scroll. When Rex’s assistant Sally goes missing, he must stay alive long enough to find her. Charlotte and the vampires, however, have other plans for Rex.
The Dying Animal
Philip Roth - 2001
The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college - as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous, humblingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling the themes of eros and mortality, licence and repression, freedom and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.
The Neon Bible
John Kennedy Toole - 1989
David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.