Search results for ""Atlantic Monthly Press""

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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Michael Wolfe's "exemplary" (Library Journal) collection of historical writings on the Hajj, now updated with a new introduction by Reza Aslan.Since its inception in the seventh century, the pilgrimage to Mecca, or the Hajj, has been the central theme in a large body of Islamic travel literature. Beginning with the European Renaissance, it has also been the subject for a handful of adventurous writers from the West who, through conversion or connivance, managed to slip inside the walls of a city forbidden to non-Muslims. One Thousand Roads to Mecca collects significant works by observant travel writers from the East and West over the last ten centuries. The two very different literary traditions form distinct sides of a spirited conversation in which Mecca is the common destination and Islam the common subject of inquiry.Excerpted works include travel narratives by Ibn Jubayr, Ibn Battuta, J. L. Burckhardt, Richard Burton, the Begum of Bhopal, John Keene, Winifred Stegar, Muhammad Asad, Harry St. John Philby, Lady Evelyn Cobbald, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Malcolm X, and Michael Wolfe.

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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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"Flaunt" magazine declares "LAbyrinth" "absolutely impossible to put down." Acclaimed journalist Sullivan follows Russell Poole, an LAPD detective who discovered that a growing cadre of black officers were allied not only with Death Row but with the murderous Bloods street gang. of photos.

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* An Indie Next Pick * A LibraryReads Selection * An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Mysteries & Thrillers) * A Daily Candy Best Book of March * One of More Magazine's "Five Thrillers Not to Read After Dark" When Dr. John Taylor turns up dead in a hotel room, the local police uncover enough incriminating evidence to suspect foul play. Detective Samantha Adams, whose Palo Alto beat usually covers petty crimes, is innocently thrown into a high-profile case that is more complicated than any she has faced before. A renowned reconstructive surgeon and a respected family man, Dr. Taylor was beloved and admired. But beneath his perfect facade was a hidden life--in fact, multiple lives. Dr. Taylor was married to three very different women in three separate cities. As the circumstances surrounding his death emerge, Detective Adams finds herself tracking down a murderer through a tangled web of marital deception and revenge. New York Times bestselling author Alice LaPlante's haunting and complex novel of family secrets dissects--with scalpel-like agility--the intricacies of desire and commitment, trust and jealousy.

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Over the last twenty years, our economy and our society have been completely revolutionized by technology. As Aneesh Chopra shows in Innovative State, once it became clear how much this would change America, a movement arose around the idea that these same technologies could reshape and improve government. But the idea languished, and while the private sector innovated, our government stalled. The election of Barack Obama offered a new opportunity. In 2009, Aneesh Chopra was named the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States. Previously the Secretary of Technology for Virginia and managing director for a health care think tank, Chopra led the administration's initiatives for a more open, tech-savvy government. In Innovative State, he draws on this experience and interviews with policy experts and tech insiders to offer an absorbing look at how government can establish a new paradigm for the internet era and allow us to tackle our most challenging problems, from economic development to veteran affairs.

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