Search results for ""Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press""

A riveting mystery that recalls the work of Umberto Eco and Barry Unsworth, A Stolen Tongue is the captivating debut novel that launched critically acclaimed author Sheri Holman’s literary career. In 1483, Father Felix Fabri sails from Germany to Mount Sinai on a pilgrimage to venerate the relics of Saint Katherine of Alexandria. But at each of the shrines he visits throughout Greece and Palestine, he finds that the remains of Katherine’s body are being stolen piece by piece: her hand, her ear, and then her tongue vanish from their holy resting places. Desperate to discover the thief and save his saint from such appalling desecration, Felix is thrust into a strange mystery that takes him across the desert and plumbs the depths of his soul.

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“Kick off your shoes, pour yourself a stiff drink and take your hat off to the elder statesman of southern African words--he’s done it again.” --Alexandra Fuller “Vivid and powerful. Highly recommended.” --Library Journal (starred review) The author of Serenity House and Kruger’s Alp (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction) returns with a lyrical and taut novel about the past fifty years of white presence in South Africa, told through a son’s larger-than-life vision of his mother. In Kathleen Healey, acclaimed novelist Christopher Hope crafts a superbly authentic female character. Aviator, big game hunter, and a knitting devotee who once boxed three rounds with Ernest Hemingway, her multitude of lovers came from all over the world. When she fades with illness, her son must carry out her final wishes, and confront his own ability to love. Bitingly funny and inventive, My Mother’s Lovers is as fierce and radiant as our romance with Africa.

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The spellbinding new novel from the award-winning author of The Caprices and A Carnivore’s Inquiry transports us to a mysterious world of deception, political intrigue, and desire. In the summer of 1963, American Rupert Brigg travels to Greece to collect classical pieces for his Uncle William’s art collection. Rupert’s first discovery, however, is that Athens is a shadowy place that hides a tangle of fork-tongued diplomacy and duplicitous women, a city of replicas and composites that, like a hall of mirrors, calls to question what is real and what is false. Journeying to the secluded island of Aspros, among a circle of artists and aristocrats, each with their own secrets, Rupert finds the very pieces he’s searching for, but can he escape the tragedy that ended his brief marriage? As beautiful as Rupert’s discoveries are, beneath the surface lurk rumors of insurrection, fabrication, and even murder. Seductive, compelling, and sly, Forgery is a sophisticated book about the value and meaning of art, love, and the corrosive power of grief.

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Here They Come is the lyrical, startling and poignant third novel from Yannick Murphy, a National Endowment for the Arts award winner and one of the freshest voices in American fiction today. Splitting time between a ramshackle apartment and a lonely hot dog vendor, the observant thirteen-year-old who stands steadily at the center of Here They Come gives lyrical voice to an unforgettable instant —1970s New York, stifling, violent and full of life. Balanced between her enigmatic siblings, detached parents, and a quiet sense of the surreal, she recounts a year of startling moments with dark humor and deadpan resilience.

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In Cliff Chase’s scathingly funny and surprisingly humane debut novel, the zeitgeist assumes the form of a one-foot-tall ursine Everyman — a mild-mannered teddy bear named Winkie who finds himself on the wrong side of America’s war on terror. After suffering decades of neglect from the children who've forgotten him, Winkie summons the courage to take charge of his fate, and so he hops off the shelf, jumps out the window, and takes to the forest. But just as he is discovering the joys and wonders of mobility, Winkie gets trapped in the jaws of a society gone rabid with fear and paranoia. Having come upon the cabin of the mad professor who stole his beloved, Winkie is suddenly surrounded by the FBI, who instantly conclude that he is the evil mastermind behind dozens of terrorist attacks that have been traced to the forest. Terrified and confused, Winkie is brought to trial, where the prosecution attempts to seal the little bear’s fate by interviewing witnesses from the trials of Galileo, Socrates, John Scopes, and Oscar Wilde. Emotionally gripping and intellectually compelling, Winkie exposes the absurdities of our age and explores what it means to be human in an increasingly barbaric world.

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In the citation accompanying Kay's recent award of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Prize, Christine Wiman wrote: "Kay Ryan can take any subject and make it her own. Her poems-which combine extreme concision and formal expertise with broad subjects and deep feeling-could never be mistaken for anyone else's. Her work has the kind of singularity and sustained integrity that are very, very rare…. It's always a dicey business predicting the literary future…[but] for this reader, these poems feel as if there were built to last, and…they have the passion, precision and sheer weirdness to do so."Salon compared the poems in Ryan's last collection to "Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder." The exquisite poems in The Niagara River provide similarly hidden gems. Bafflingly effective, they seem too brief and blithe to pack so much wallop. Intense and relaxed at once, both buoyant and rueful, their singular music appeals to many people. Her poems, products of an immaculately off-kilter mind, have been featured everywhere from the Sunday funnies to New York subways to plaques at the zoo to the pages of The New Yorker.

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With his latest national best seller, Peace Kills, P.J. O'Rourke casts his ever-shrewd and mordant eye on America's latest adventures in warfare. Imperialism has never been more fun. To unravel the mysteries of war, O'Rourke first visits Kosovo: "Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months later and bomb the country next to where it's happening." He travels to Israel at the outbreak of the intifada. He flies to Egypt in the wake of the 9/11 terrorists' attacks and contemplates bygone lunacies. "Why are the people in the Middle East so crazy? Here, at the pyramids, was an answer from the earliest days of civilization: People have always been crazy." He covers the demonstrations and the denunciations of war. "A moral compass needle needs a butt end. Wherever direction France is pointing-toward collaboration with Nazis, accommodation with communists, existentialism, Jerry Lewis, or a UN resolution veto-we can go the other way with a quiet conscience." Finally he arrives in Baghdad with the U.S. Army and, standing in one of Saddam's palaces, decides, "If a reason for invading Iraq was needed, felony interior decorating would have sufficed."

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The much-anticipated second novel by the Man Booker Prize finalist and national best-selling author of The Hiding Place is a harrowing, elegant, and vivid portrait of a lost life at last reclaimed. Winnie would say she's no trouble, content to let the days go by, bothering no one. Living on the edge of nowhere, she'd rather not recall the past and, at seventy-two, doesn't see much point in thinking too much about the future. But when her closed existence is shattered by a random act of violence, Winnie is catapulted out of her exile. Robbed of everything she owns, she embarks on a journey to track down her stolen belongings-but soon finds her search has become the rediscovery of a stolen life. As Winnie pieces together the fragments of her life, her once-secluded world begins to fill with people: her devoted father; the haunting figure of her mother; her domineering grandfather; and Joseph, her only love. At last Winnie understands that she has not escaped from her life at all; she has simply been circling it. Now she must come to terms with the final revelation, one so profoundly shocking that she had concealed it even from herself.

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When Edward Miller, a London tabloid newspaper editor, finds his career, his marriage, his reputation, and his security in tatters following a night of incredible stupidity and debauchery, he seeks refuge in a Florida town, populated by circus freaks and carnies, where he learns a valuable lesson in

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Witty, bawdy, and highly titillating, Seven Against Georgia skewers prudish legislation of sexuality by allowing seven flamboyant Spanish gay men to counter sodomy laws by sending their sexual histories and fantasies directly to the head of Georgia's police force. Adopting such over-the-top noms de guerre as Herr Betty Honey and Pamela Poodle, the "ladies" of Seven Against Georgia attack sexual repression with hilarious results. Whether it's Miss Balcony's very special relationship with the man who delivers her morning baguette (and who boasts a similar-sized baton himself), or Herr Betty Honey's passion for a man with a great love of first-communion dresses, Colette Miss Coco's comparative study of the sex she's known in her round-the-world business travels, or Miss Madelon's ode to a man (or, better, several men) in uniform, the testimonials in Seven Against Georgia provide a sparkling entertainment that can be opened at any point and read with great enjoyment. Collectively they make for a delightful and erotic praise to the individual right to pleasure in all its forms.

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A delectable novel of a man's lifelong devotion to erotic exploration, The Arch of Desire is based very loosely on the life of the artist Pierre Molinier, admired by the surrealists and creator of a many-layered erotic universe. As the novel opens, Pierre is a boy, raised by a wealthy family of Belgian winemakers. Precociously curious about the opposite sex -- particularly the intimate garments he finds drying in the laundry room -- he is initiated into the erotic by a family servant and soon moves on to the more forbidden charms of his lovely, sophisticated half sister. As he comes of age -- attending art school, becoming an acclaimed painter, and settling in Bordeaux -- Pierre simultaneously pursues ever more complex pleasures, devouring his father's collection of de Sade, Restif de la Bretonne, and other erotic classics, sampling the varieties of women -- from a Senegalese prostitute, to a lesbian who works as a dominatrix to rich men, to a beautiful German who becomes his last, most perfect lover -- and exploring the limits of his fetishes for dressing up and the adoration of beautiful, feminine feet. A delightful recollection of sexual pleasure from the dawn to the twilight of life, The Arch of Desire will satisfy every erotic appetite. "[A] delicious, bold and genuinely immoral book, or perhaps ... a treatise in favor of hedonism and the pleasures of desire." -- A. Castro, El Periodico "A fascinating novel, exquisitely conceived and structured ... De Sade would applaud." -- Antonio Bordon, La Provincia "Munoz Puelles uses an erotic vocabulary that stretches the rules of the genre." -- Maria Jose, El Pais

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From Richard Howard's Foreword: "The burden . . . of this poet's responsibility . . . rests on his eloquence, his way of making us see. For him, . . . the significance of an event or a place is not to be found within it, as within a nutshell, but without, enveloping the language which has generated it, as a light generates a vapor." Writing both narrative and lyric, love poem and elegy, the poems in Marc Woodworth's debut collection, ARCADE, are alternately severe and feverish, contemplative and intimate, novelistic and hauntingly stark. ARCADE opens with a sequence entitled "The City" set in an unnamed and compellingly imagined continental metropolis between the world wars. Early poems in the sequence were featured in The Paris Review's new writers issue and take their place here in what Frank Bidart calls a "fantasia on and hymn to the city," one that evokes the private desires and public scale of urban life where walkers disappear "in a spell of edges" and "two hearts [beat] in every chest,/ one fleshy and inert with familiarity, the other/ a shadow heart unmarred by grieving." This city-with its Weimar decadence, it's Parisian grace-is inhabited by a poet-protagonist equipped with "the accoutrements of the Romantic," who is both guide to the beauty and brutality of this lost world and the center of the poem's haunted, lyrical evocation of it. In other poems, Woodworth enters the grieving mind of Sophia Tolstoy as she mourns at her husband's grave, exposes a self-mortifying erotic episode in the life of Adrian Leverkühn from Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, and depicts the mythical German film-maker Herr Soma's strangely generative breakdown before the making of his best film. In ARCADE, Marc Woodworth creates a rare and intimate world that is as intoxicating as it is intellectually rewarding.

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Over the last decade, ugly allegations of corporate complicity in human-rights violations have exploded into one of the most controversial issues of our time. Companies are being held responsible by human-rights advocates for the injustices that are the unintended side effects of economic globalization: union repression in China, forced labor in Burma, child workers in Pakistan, and sweatshop abuse throughout the developing world. Using the story of Levi Strauss and Company as a guide, Karl Schoenberger offers a highly readable assessment of the challenge that the human-rights scourge poses to international business. Schoenberger is sensitive to the interests of activists, politicians, and multinationals, and as a result his call for active corporate engagement and rigorous accountability in promoting the rights of overseas workers carries enormous resonance. Simultaneously impassioned and evenhanded, Levi's Children is a work of profound importance, one that may help us chart our course in the next century. "Thorough, well-informed and chatty ... Schoenberger's conclusion is intriguing." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

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This tenth collection of Irving Feldman's poems extends what readers and critics have long recognized as a body of work singular in its lyric, visionary, even prophetic intensity; its extravagant wit; its powerful storytelling; and its variety of voices and range of feeling - playful, tender, ardent, biting, enthralled. Here, among the major poems of Beautiful False Things, the stand-up comic Larry Sunrise of "Funny Bones" duels with death in Florida; in "Oedipus Host," Oedipus arrives from his millennia-long trek to host a TV talk show; and the plucky feminist heroine of "Heavenly Muse" visits yet another barely worthy male poet. In the tragicomic title poem, "translation" comes to stand for the dilemmas of expression in a culture that sucks up language and spews it back.

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Highly acclaimed on its publication and selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year, Two Guys from Verona is a rare breed of novel, striking a powerful chord across the nation and making James Kaplan the unexpected voice of a generation. It's the fall of 1999 in the plush New Jersey suburbs, and Will and Joel are fortyish, friends since the second grade. Will is a successful, tired cardboard salesman with a mortgage, a pretty wife, and 2.2 kids. Joel lives with his moth and works at a sub shop. Joel's favorite pastime is cruising the dark streets in his rusted-out '74 Chevy, drinking whiskey from a brown paper bag. Will feels sorry for Joel. And Joel feels sorry for Will. But their twenty-fifth high school reunion will change both their lives in ways neither has dreamed of - one facing death, the other facing life for the first time. "A bittersweet elegy for what, not too long ago, looked like a spanking new American version of the promised land." - The New York Times Book Review

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From a writer who’s been praised for her “intelligence, heart, wit” (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls), The Ice House follows the beleaguered MacKinnons as they weather the possible loss of the family business, a serious medical diagnosis, and the slings and arrows of familial discord. Johnny MacKinnon might be on the verge of losing it all. The ice factory he married into, which he’s run for decades, is facing devastating OSHA fines following a mysterious accident and may have to close. The only hope for Johnny’s livelihood is that someone in the community saw something, but no one seems to be coming forward. He hasn’t spoken to his son Corran back in Scotland since Corran’s heroin addiction finally drove Johnny to the breaking point. And now, after a collapse on the factory floor, it appears Johnny may have a brain tumor. Johnny’s been ordered to take it easy, but in some ways, he thinks, what’s left to lose? This may be his last chance to bridge the gap with Corran—and to have any sort of relationship with the baby granddaughter he’s never met. Witty and heartbreaking by turns, The Ice House is a vibrant portrait of multifaceted, exquisitely human characters that readers will not soon forget. It firmly establishes Laura Lee Smith as a gifted voice in American fiction.

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Hailed as “the slightly more well-adjusted offspring of Hunter S. Thompson and James Ellroy” (Los Angeles Times), Mark Haskell Smith returns with a wildly entertaining satire of corporate greed, sexual desire, and crime in the global financial services industry. Bryan LeBlanc worked his way up into a plum position on Wall Street as the boy genius of the foreign exchange desk. Surrounded by acolytes of the free market, the true believers, the U.S. Marines of capitalism—“the few, the proud, the completely full of themselves”—Bryan soon realizes that being honest at a dishonest job is not the path to success. He decides to give Wall Street a taste of its own medicine and hatches an intricate plan to disappear permanently with just enough misappropriated money—and sailing classes—to spend his golden years cruising the Caribbean. Bryan quickly learns that being a criminal, even a really smart one, is more complicated than he thought. He finds himself on the run in the Cayman Islands, wanted for murder. On his trail is an irresponsible team of investigators sent by his Wall Street firm, hellbent on reclaiming the millions before their clients notice its missing: his boss, Seo-yun Kim, who’s committed to not only clearing her name but escaping her suffocating fiancé and their pending nuptials; the investment bank’s collections agent, Neal Nathanson, depressed over a recent break-up with his boyfriend; and an ex-cop from Curaçao, Piet Room, who has traded in his badge for spouse spying as a private investigator. Their efforts are complicated by an Australian sailor begrudgingly circumnavigating the globe to fundraise for breast cancer awareness. Wickedly funny, ribald, and sharp-eyed, BLOWN starts as a simple case of embezzlement and explodes into a fatal high-stakes gamble for money and the pursuit of happiness.

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