Search results for ""Grove Press""

In his critically acclaimed New York Times Notable Book, Michael Ignatieff tells a story of striking contemporary relevance that has drawn comparisons to the novels of Graham Greene and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Charlie Johnson is an American journalist working for a British news agency somewhere in the Balkans. He believes that over the course of a long career he has seen everything, but suddenly he finds himself more than simply a witness. A woman who has been sheltering Charlie and his crew is doused in gasoline and set on fire by a retreating Serbian colonel. As she stumbles, burning, down the road, Charlie dashes from hiding, throws her down rolling her over and over to extinguish the flames, burning his hands in the process. Believing the woman's life to have been saved, Charlie is traumatized by her death. Something snaps. He now realizes he has just one ambition left in life: to find the colonel and kill him.

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An award-winning historian critically examines the role of leadership in the twenty-first century, outlining a program of "Transforming Leadership," through which leaders can become agents of positive social change. Reprint.

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Suzanne Finnamore's universally applauded Otherwise Engaged followed one woman's whirlwind ride from diamond ring to altar. The Zygote Chronicles is her singular take on the next leg of the journey -- a riotous and poignant novel in journal form that takes us from conception to delivery room. Through the voice of a whip-smart, sass-talking everywoman Zygote reveals the unsettling and uproarious truth about pregnancy and the prospect of motherhood. The Zygote Chronicles will resonate for any woman who has even briefly considered motherhood. The strange purgatory of pregnancy has been a fact of life since Eve ate the apple, but never has it been recounted in such brilliant, hilarious detail.

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Literature is full of lyrical odes to the glory of falling in love. But what of its opposite -- the moment when it becomes clear that things are indisputably over? Dumped is a survey of every type of romantic crack-up, a group of stories full of the hilarity, wisdom, insight, and sometimes, yes, fierce revenges of some of the most memorable broken hearts in recent literature. Dumped sheds light on what can be the toughest part of human relations -- whether newly elucidating the misery we've all endured, or merely reminding us that others have had it far worse -- from the mother in Elizabeth Berg's Open House absurdly attempting to tell her son his father has left, to the betrayed wife in Roald Dahl's "Lamb to Slaughter," who beats her husband to death with a leg of lamb, then cooks it for the police. With contributions from such notable authors as Will Self, Saul Bellow, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Dorothy Parker, Andre Dubus, and Tobias Wolff, as well as rising stars like Lucinda Rosenfeld and Steve Almond, Dumped spans every variety of romantic catastrophe and every possible response to it; from the wise to the hilarious, the bitter to the bittersweet. This book is the panacea for problems of the heart.

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Fair Warning is acclaimed novelist Robert Olen Butler's enthralling glimpse into a Manhattan auction house that caters to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. At age forty, the company's charismatic star employee, Amy Dickerson, is capable of selling a Renoir painting of a pudgy nude for twice its value. Her customers are intoxicated by the objects they covet. And sometimes, such as when the dark and mysterious Trevor locks eyes with Amy as she closes an auction with "fair warning," that object is Amy herself. Selected as a Book Sense 76 title and as a New York Times Summer Reading title, "[Fair Warning] is as frank and sassy as its heroine." -- Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe "Engaging ... fascinating ... accompanied by the wealth of evocative detail one might expect from a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize." -- Les Standiford, The Miami Herald "Once again, [Butler's] language is right on the money in this alternately witty and moving meditation on value and values." -- Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor "Butler has created one of the more fascinating female protagonists in recent history." -- Kirkus Reviews "Fair Warning deserves our praise, but its author also deserves our gratitude, for his continued risk-taking and stubbornly singular sensibility." -- Todd Kliman, The Washington Post

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Sarah Lindsay's poems have been hailed as "dark-edged ... with a buoying sense of respect-for the different, the unexpected and the challenging." (Publishers Weekly) Lindsay's new collection, Mount Clutter, is the product of an immensely original and exhilarating poetic sensibility, ranging wide across a highly distinctive imaginary landscape. In a voice that is distinctly her own, Lindsay probes the uncharted territories of history's curious little corners, reanimating obscure accounts of strange discoveries and bizarre scientific findings. A stunning sequence on the discovery of the Bufo Islands imagines what it means to encounter something as yet unnamed, unknown to human history, but bursting with possibilities. Lindsay similarly breathes new life into literary classics and ancient Greek myths, taking, for example, the well-known motif of Orpheus's descent into the underworld and transforming it into a hauntingly resonant portrait of the vicissitudes of loss. Lindsay's poems exude an extraordinary ability of fusing the outlandish and the little-known historical minutiae with the unmistakably familiar markers of the human experience. Mount Clutter is a remarkably sustained and self-assured performance -- stirring new poetry from the acclaimed 1997 national Book Award finalist. "[A] vision that beckons the reader after it into unexpected recognitions." -- W. S. Merwin

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The Guardian (London) has called comic-thriller writer Christopher Brookmyre "the next star of the genre". His American debut, Not the End of the World, is a fast and furious novel set in Los Angeles at the near side of the millennium, at a point when the world is about to spin out of control -- and maybe out of existence. When an oceanic research vessel is discovered with all of its crew vanished, it sets off a chain of events that pulls Lt. Larry Freeman of the LAPD out of the ho-hum assignment of overseeing the security for a B-movie film festival and headlong into a frenzied race to stop a terrorist plot. Along the way he must contend with aging porn stars, rabid evangelical Christians, a mysterious Glaswegian photographer, and an unknown agenda, all in a frenzied -- and ultimately hysterical-race against time. "Imagine Day of the Locust updated and rewritten by Carl Hiaasen. ... Good solid fun." -- Kirkus Reviews "Perpetually in-your-face: sassy, irreverent, and stylish ... [with] a high-octane sense of the absurd." -- The Times (London) "Very violent, very funny ... comedy with a political edge, which you take gleefully in one gulp." -- Literary Review

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Michael Tolkin's acclaimed second novel, Among the Dead, is an arresting examination of public and private grief in the wake of unspeakable disaster, a slow-burning tour de force of psychological fiction. When Frank Gale writes a passionate letter to his wife confessing an affair, he hopes all can be forgiven on the warm beaches of Mexico. But the farewell kiss of his girlfriend causes him to miss the flight carrying his wife and daughter, and when he learns that their plane has crashed in a crowded city, his life changes in the course of seconds. Soon Frank's letter is discovered among the dead, and suddenly one man's struggle to comprehend his loss and grief becomes consumed in a media circus of legal drama, family quarrels, and public scandal.

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Addie Prewitt is a copy editor for the National Association of Libraries. When her boss, the repulsive Coddles, heaps another new project on her department -- with no additional remuneration naturally -- she decides she's had enough. She spends her days battling with her roommate, Val Wayne Newton, about whether Black Sabbath or Neil Diamond will occupy the turntable and her nights beating her overeager suitor, Martin Lemming, away from the door of her boudoir. When she discovers a piece of vile pornography in Coddles's dry cleaning, she has the means to retaliate. Meanwhile, Fat Bald Jeff, the tech-support guy who has to cope with her mechanical self-sabotage, turns out to be even more disaffected than she, and they hatch the ultimate plan to give the pigs some of their own medicine. With a surreal wit and a keen eye that bring to mind Lily Tomlin set loose in Dilbert-world, Fat Bald Jeff is a sharp satire and a paean to the petty humiliations of workers everywhere.

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“So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth this provides!”—Aimee BenderFourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outlander at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong. And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. It seems that her life finally has purpose but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do—and fail to do—for the people they love.Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, Emily Fridlund’s propulsive and gorgeously written History of Wolves introduces a new writer of enormous range and talent.

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In two decades at Field & Stream, the nation's biggest outdoor magazine, Bill Heavey has become America's everyman outdoorsman. Why? Because he believes that enthusiasm trumps skill. When he forgets his hat on a freezing winter hunt, he improvises, cutting open the juice-stained plush golden retriever puppy his daughter left in the car and using it as headgear. Trying to impress a lady, he flips his canoe and loses everything in the boat. Heavey takes you along with him as he nearly freezes to death in the 30-below cold of Alaska, and he also survives a divorce, plans deer hunts around his duties as a single dad, and defies a back doctor who tells him his tree-stand days may be coming to an end. Throughout, he is alive to both the ridiculousness and poignancy of life. Collecting more than sixty of Heavey's best stories from Field & Stream, the Washington Post, and the Washingtonian, this far-ranging and enlightening volume traces a life lived outdoors through the good, the bad, and the downright hilarious.

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Foreign policy in peacetime and command decision in war have always been driven by intelligence, and yet this subject has often been overlooked in standard histories. Honorable Treachery fills in these details, dramatically recounting every important intelligence operation since our nation's birth. These include how in 1795 President Washington mounted a covert operation to ransom American hostages in the Middle East; how in 1897, Kaiser Wilhelm II's plans for an invasion of the United States were scuppered by the director of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence; and how President Woodrow Wilson created a secret agency called the Inquiry to compile intelligence for the peace negotiations at the end of World War I. Honorable Treachery puts America's use of covert intelligence into a broader historical context, and is sure to appeal to anyone interested in American history and the secret workings of our country.

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Edited by Paul Auster, this four–volume set of Beckett's canon has been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, the four hardcover volumes have been specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski. "A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French, which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find the hard words that come with difficulty, and then after all that finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a second language, a new English with the power to change English forever. This is Samuel Beckett. This is his great work. It is the thing that speaks. Surrender." — Salman Rushdie, from his Introduction

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Shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel DaggerAt a dive bar in San Francisco's edgy Tenderloin district, the dishevelled Emily Rosario is drinking whiskey and looking for an escape. When she is approached by a mysterious and wealthy Russian, she thinks she has found an exit from her drifter lifestyle and drug-addict boyfriend. A week later she finds herself drugged, disoriented and wanted for robbery. On the other side of town, cop Leo Elias is broke, alcoholic and desperate. When he hears about an unsolved bank robbery, the stolen money proves too strong a temptation. Elias takes the case into his own hands, hoping to find the criminal and the money before anyone else does.With sharply drawn characters and twists that surprise until the end, The White Van introduces a strong new talent.

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From the bestselling author of Killing Pablo, a haunting and gripping account of the true-life search for the perpetrator of a hideous crime - the abduction and likely murder of two young girls in 1975 - and the skilful work of the cold case team that finally brought their kidnapper to justice.In 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyon, aged ten and twelve, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and mystery endured. Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation.As a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper, Mark Bowden covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending. Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch's sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift fact from deception. How do you get a compulsive liar, desperate to protect himself, to tell the truth?The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind.

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Day by day, tweet by tweet, it often feels like our world is run on hate. Invective. Cruelty and sadism. But is it possible the greatest and most powerful force is love? In the newest issue of this acclaimed series, Freeman's Love asks this question, bringing together literary heavyweights like Richard Russo, Anne Carson, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Tommy Orange and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk alongside emerging writers such as Andres Felipe Solano and Semezdin Mehmedinovic.Together, the pieces comprise a stunning exploration of the complexities of love, tracing it from its earliest stirrings, to the forbidden places where it emerges against reason, to loss so deep it changes the color of perception. In a time of contentiousness and flagrant abuse, this issue promises what only love can bring: a balm of complexity and warmth.

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