Search results for ""author jesse anderson""

Louis Meyer is an overworked aerospace engineer looking forward to a week-long vacation on the Mediterranean. DeMilo is an astronaut and self-proclaimed ladies’ man whose behavior borders on the obsessive and voyeuristic. When a series of coincidences and disasters-including a devastating earthquake in Marseilles-brings them together on a spacecraft with an aloof woman they are both strongly attracted to, the two men’s flaws and shortcomings emerge as they engage in an underhanded competition to win her over. Brimming with Jean Echenoz’s inimitable humor, We Three is both a satirical take on the adventure novel and subtle experiment with narrative point of view.

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A middle-aged couple takes in a prurient young woman picked up from the side of the road; a single mother struggles against the hostile feelings she harbors towards her precocious son; a man has alternative fantasies of domination and submission involving a fellow commuter; a hotel room is booked by an elderly woman in search of a place to end her life. In the fourteen stories that make up A Perfect Disharmony, Sébastien Brebel explores the experiences of isolated women and sexually obsessed men while weaving together digression, daydreams, and an accumulation of detail to create a wholly unique approach to the short story form.

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The unnamed narrator of Francis Bacon’s Armchair has just been released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital and now has only one objective: to shut himself away in his apartment and contemplate the best way to restart his life. But his obsession with Cathie, a young woman he met during his convalescence, drives him out of his bedroom one night in search of a telephone—which leads him two floors below into the apartment of his morbidly obese neighbor, Sauvage. Sauvage is a translator overwhelmed by his current project, The Dictionary of Rare and Incurable Diseases, and by the inherent difficulties of his profession. The narrator begins paying regular visits to his mysterious neighbor, and the two isolated men develop a bizarre relationship dominated by fear, jealousy, and mutual fascination. A hypnotic and philosophically dense novel, Francis Bacon’s Armchair deftly weaves between explorations of loneliness, language, and obsession.

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