Search results for ""atlantic monthly press""

The New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Sundog is a powerful novel about the life and loves of a foreman named Robert Corvus Strang, who worked on giant dam projects around the world until he was crippled in a fall down a three-hundred-foot dam. Now as he tries to regain use of his legs, he has a chance to reassess his life, and a blasé journalist who has heard of Strang’s reputation in the field arrives to draw him out about his various incarnations. Strang—who has the violently heightened sensibilities of a man who has gone to the limits and back—recounts his monumental life moving from Michigan to Africa and the Amazon, including his several marriages and children, and dozens of lovers. “A feisty, passionate novel” (Newsday) from a writer whose “storytelling instincts are nearly flawless” (The New York Times), Sundog is a story as true and gripping as real life, and ultimately as victorious.

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Best-selling author Bella Pollen’s imaginative new novel received stellar reviews in hardcover and was chosen as a Richard & Judy Book Club title.In 1980 Germany, Cold War tensions are once again escalating and a mole is suspected in the British Embassy. So when the clever diplomat Nicky Fleming dies suddenly and suspiciously, it’s convenient to brand him the traitor. But was his death an accident, murder, or suicide? As the government investigates Nicky's death, his wife relocates with their three children to a remote Scottish island hoping to save what remains of their family. But the isolated shores of her childhood retreat only intensify their distance between them, and it is the brilliant and peculiar youngest child, Jamie, who alone holds on to the one thing he’s sure of: his father has promised to return and he was a man who never broke a promise.When Jamie sets off to explore the island with his teenage sisters, they discover a tamed grizzly bear has been marooned on shore, hiding somewhere among the seaside caves. Jamie believes the bear may have a strange connection to his father, and as he seeks the truth, Nicky's story begins revealing itself in unexpected ways.

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Critically acclaimed on its hardcover publication, and praised for its playful inventiveness and delightful prose, Deb Olin Unferth’s debut novel, Vacation, features three characters—a man, his wife, and a stranger with ties to them both. With his wife suspiciously absent in the evenings, the man, Myers, follows his unnamed spouse on her evening escapades and soon realizes that she is following the stranger, Gray, a former classmate of Myers whose own marriage has fallen apart. What follows is an unusual, unsettling, and wildly entertaining novel unlike any you’ve read in a long time. With deadpan humor and skewed wordplay, Deb Olin Unferth weaves a mystery of hope and heartbreak.

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"So this is the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war!" Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said when he met the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation. Harriet Beecher Stowe's groundbreaking novel forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet it was just one of many accomplishments of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century. Historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the boomtown of Cincinnati, where Harriet's glimpses of slavery across the Kentucky border moved her to pen Uncle Tom's Cabin. We meet Harriet's loves: her father Lyman, her husband Calvin, and her brother Henry, the most famous preacher of his time. As McFarland leads us through Harriet's ever-changing world, he traces the arc of her literary career from her hard-scrabble beginnings to her ascendancy as the most renowned author of her day. Through the portrait of a defining American family, Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe opens into an unforgettable rendering of mid-nineteenth century America in the midst of unprecedented social and demographic explosions. To this day, Uncle Tom's Cabin reverberates as a crucial document in Western culture.

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An unforgettable tale of love, family secrets, and the hold of the past in a family of New England artists, A Peculiar Grace is the latest triumph from the author of In the Fall, hailed by The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times as one of the best books of the year. Hewitt Pearce lives alone in his family home, producing custom ironwork and safeguarding a small collection of art his late father left behind. When Jessica, a troubled young vagabond, washes up in his backwoods one morning, Hewitt’s hermetic existence is challenged. As he gradually uncovers Jessica’s secrets and reestablishes contact with a woman he thought he had lost twenty years before, Hewitt must confront his own dark history and rediscover how much he craves human connection. A Peculiar Grace is a remarkable achievement by one of our finest authors, an insightful portrait of family secrets, and a rich tapestry filled with characters who have learned to survive by giving shape to their losses.

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The work of the classic philosophers is well known. But what do contemporary thinkers say about what it is to be a human being? In his serious, challenging, and remarkably accessible new book, Nicholas Fearn turns to contemporary philosophers to ask the age old questions: Who am I? What do I know? What should I do? In his search for higher meaning, Fearn consults with thinkers from around the world (including John Searle, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, among many others) to create an impressive survey of recent thought. Variously, they believe that free will, identity, and consciousness are not what they seem; that the difference between virtue and wickedness can be a matter of sheer luck; and that, one day, we will all be vegetarians. Fearn discovers that the topics haven’t changed, though our world has. Or has it? Moving deftly from pop culture to the writings of Plato, Philosophy is a brilliant and entertaining guide to the current state of the philosophical thought.

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David Rabe, the Tony award-winning playwright of Hurlyburly and In the Boom Boom Room, brings his intense vision to the world of fiction, with a short story collection of astonishing range and versatility. Whether he is writing about a marriage shadowed by the unacknowledged discord of a risky pregnancy, a group of men whose attempt to settle an account launches them toward unexpected violence, or a young journalist who believes he’s escaped his Catholic roots only to be forced again to confront them by a priest who once mentored his writing, Rabe’s strong, true voice tenders an inimitable portrait of America and offers benediction to her lost souls. A Primitive Heart confirms the mastery of a writer and establishes David Rabe as an exciting voice in fiction.

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This comprehensive guide to writing creative fiction collects the lectures of the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert Olen Butler, transcribed and edited by Janet Burroway, the author of the classic text on creative writing, "Writing Fiction". "From Where You Dream" reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, and tells writers how to achieve the dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing fiction as the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, Butler reinterprets the traditional tools of the craft using the dynamics of desire. Butler offers invaluable insights into the nature of voice and shows how to experience fiction as a sensual, cinematic series of takes and scenes. Offering a direct view into the mind and craft of a literary master, "From Where You Dream" is an invaluable tool for the novice and experienced writer alike.

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On his wedding day in 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne escorted his new wife, Sophia, to their first home, the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. There, enriched by friendships with Thoreau and Emerson, he enjoyed an idyllic time. But three years later, unable to make enough money from his writing, he returned ingloriously, with his wife and infant daughter, to live in his mother's home in Salem. In 1853 Hawthorne moved back to Concord, now the renowned author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Eager to resume writing fiction at the scene of his earlier happiness, he assembled a biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce, who was running for president. When Pierce won the election, Hawthorne is appointed the lucrative post of consul in Liverpool. Coming home from Europe in 1860, Hawthorne settled down in Concord once more. He tried to take up writing one last time, but deteriorating health finds him withdrawing into private life. In Hawthorne in Concord, acclaimed historian Philip McFarland paints a revealing portrait of this well-loved American author during three distinct periods of his life, spent in the bucolic village of Concord, Massachusetts.

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Describes the devastating 1911 fire that destroyed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village, the deaths of 146 workers in the fire, the Jewish and Italian immigrants, mostly women, who made up the majority of the victims, and the implications of the catastrophe on twentieth-ce

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