Book picks similar to
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by Henry Farrell


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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County


Mark Twain - 1865
    The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is a wild yarn involving a case of mistaken identity, a gambler who’d bet on anything, and a very unusual frog named Daniel Webster.

The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life


Steven Pressfield - 1995
    But the key to the outcome lies not with these golfing titans but with Junah's caddie and mentor, the mysterious, sage and charismatic Bagger Vance - for he is the custodian of the secret of the Authentic Swing...____________________Written in the spirit of Bernard Malamud's The Natural and sharing the magic of the celebrated Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, Steven Pressfield's first novel reveals the true nature of the game. Page-turning, spellbinding and affecting, it is a novel for golfers and non-golfers alike - a story in which the search for the Authentic Swing becomes a metaphor for the search for the Authentic Self.

Freaky Friday


Mary Rodgers - 1972
    If she were a grown-up, she could do whatever she wanted! Then one morning she wakes up to find she’s turned into her mother…and she soon discovers it’s not as easy as it looks!

The Song of Names


Norman Lebrecht - 2002
    Martin already loves Dovidl Rapoport, an eerily gifted Polish violin prodigy whose parents left him in the Simmonds’s care before they perished in the Holocaust. For a time the two boys are closer than brothers. But on the day he is to make his official debut, Dovidl disappears. Only 40 years later does Martin get his first clue about what happened to him. In this ravishing novel of music and suspense, Norman Lebrecht unravels the strands of love, envy and exploitation that knot geniuses to their admirers. In doing so he also evokes the fragile bubble of Jewish life in prewar London; the fearful carnival of the Blitz, and the gray new world that emerged from its ashes. Bristling with ideas, lambent with feeling, The Song of Names is a masterful work of the imagination.

Property


Valerie Martin - 2003
    The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress.Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Just a Couple of Days


Tony Vigorito - 2001
    Read it!"—CHRISTOPHER MOOREJoin cult favorite Tony Vigorito in his award-winning underground hit chronicling the party at the end of time. A mischievous artist kicks off a game of graffiti tag on a local overpass by painting the simple phrase, “Uh-oh.” An anonymous interlocutor writes back: “When?” Someone slyly answers: “Just a couple of days.” But what happens in just a couple of days? Professor Blip Korterly is arrested, his friend Dr. Flake Fountain is drafted into a shadow-government research project to develop the ultimate biological weapon, and an accidental outbreak turns into a merry-hearted, babble-inducing apocalypse that will either destroy humankind or take it to the next step in evolution."Just a Couple of Days. From this seemingly harmless bit of highway graffiti springs Tony Vigorito's inventive debut novel, a madcap adventure of a sinister government plot and an apocalyptic vision worthy of Kurt Vonnegut... After being conscripted as the genetics expert for a secret military project, Dr. Flake Fountain, a molecular geneticist at a major university, is thrust into the (literally) underground development of a biological agent with the power to disable enemies’ symbolic capacity, leaving them unable to communicate. But Just a Couple of Days is no mere sci-fi daydream. Vigorito’s research is impressive, and the narrative pops with linguistic acrobatics reminiscent of Tom Robbins… Vigorito engages in consistently dazzling wordplay, and readers will eagerly follow the narrative as it moves beyond the conventional boundaries of storytelling… An underground cult classic." —Kirkus Reviews

Howl


Allen Ginsberg - 2010
    Now a Major Motion PictureFirst published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is a prophetic masterpiece—an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century.

How the Light Gets In


M.J. Hyland - 2003
    And when she is offered a place as an exchange student at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. welcoming ... until she starts having to live in the suffocating and repressed atmosphere of their suburban mansion and things begin to go terribly wrong. of American Beauty in its dissection of engrained prejudices and middle-class hypocrisy. In Lou Connor, Hyland has created a larger-than-life protagonist who mesmerises the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.

Sonnets from the Portuguese


Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 1850
    . . I love you too", Robert Browning wrote in January 1845, thus initiating the most celebrated literary correspondence of the 19th century. For the next 12 months, he and Elizabeth Barrett exchanged letters and confidences. In this elegant format, the delicate interplay between the poems and the lovers' letters become vividly apparent.Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a prolific writer and reviewer in the Victorian period, and in her lifetime, her reputation as a poet was at least as great as that of her husband, poet Robert Browning. Some of her poetry has been noted in recent years for strong feminist themes, but the poems for which Elizabeth Barrett Browning is undoubtedly best know are Sonnets from the Portuguese.Written for Robert Browning, who had affectionately nicknamed her his "little Portuguese," the sequence is a celebration of marriage, and of one of the most famous romances of the nineteenth century. Recognized for their Victorian tradition and discipline, these are some of the most passionate and memorable love poems in the English language. There are forty-four poems in the collection, including the very beautiful sonnet, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

The Complete Poems


Anne Sexton - 1981
    This book comprises Sexton's ten volumes of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Live or Die, as well as seven poems from her last years.

An American Tragedy


Theodore Dreiser - 1925
    On a deeper, more profound level, it is the masterful portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's ambitions and seal his fate; it is an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American life and of the dark side of the American dream. Extraordinary in scope and power, vivid in its sense of wholesale human waste, unceasing in its rich compassion, 'An American Tragedy' stands as Theodore Dreiser's supreme achievement.Based on an actual criminal case, 'An American Tragedy' was the inspiration for the film 'A Place in the Sun', which won six Academy Awards and starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Cliff.

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters


Elisabeth Robinson - 2004
    Telling the story of two sisters-Olivia, a hotshot Hollywood producer whose life is unraveling, and Maddie, an unflaggingly optimistic, seriously ill midwesterner whose idealism has always driven Olivia crazy-The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters offers a startlingly poignant reminder of how hope can grow in even the darkest places.

A Quiet Storm


Rachel Howzell Hall - 2002
     Rikki Moore was always the star of the family, easily outshining her younger sister, Stacy, at every turn. Smart, kind, and beautiful, it was no surprise when Rikki met and married the perfect man -- pediatrician Matt Dresden. Her students at 59th Street Elementary School adored her, the church matrons solicited her help on every committee, and everyone wanted the golden couple to put in an appearance at their parties. Stacy? She was just the overweight little sister who couldn't get her love life together. But the world didn't know about the storms that rippled just beneath the surface of Rikki's image of perfection. Ever since she was a teenager there were emotional breakdowns and obsessive behaviors -- secrets that Stacy was left to bear alone. Folks whispered, but they didn't know. When Rikki's husband, Matt, mysteriously disappears, however, the Moore family's carefully constructed image comes crashing down.

The Group


Mary McCarthy - 1963
    After the ceremony, the women begin their adult lives: traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City. Through the years, some of the friends grow apart and some become entangled in each other's affairs, but all vow not to become like their mothers and fathers. It is only when one of them dies that they all come back together again to mourn the loss of a friend, a confidante, and most importantly, a member of the group.

The Fortress of Solitude


Jonathan Lethem - 2003
    They live in Brooklyn and are friends and neighbours; but since Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple.This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the simplest decisions - what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money - are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is also the story of 1990s America, when nobody cared anymore.This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: they would screw up their lives.