The Throwback Special A Novel

Author : Chris Bachelder
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2016-03-14
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780393249477

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The Throwback Special: A Novel by Chris Bachelder Pdf

Winner of The Paris Review/Terry Southern Prize for Humor. "Chris Bachelder is a witty, compassionate troublemaker, and we need more like him." —George Saunders Here is the absorbing story of twenty-two men who gather every fall to painstakingly reenact what ESPN called “the most shocking play in NFL history” and the Washington Redskins dubbed the “Throwback Special”: the November 1985 play in which the Redskins’ Joe Theismann had his leg horribly broken by Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants live on Monday Night Football. With wit and great empathy, Chris Bachelder introduces us to Charles, a psychologist whose expertise is in high demand; George, a garrulous public librarian; Fat Michael, envied and despised by the others for being exquisitely fit; Jeff, a recently divorced man who has become a theorist of marriage; and many more. Over the course of a weekend, the men reveal their secret hopes, fears, and passions as they choose roles, spend a long night of the soul preparing for the play, and finally enact their bizarre ritual for what may be the last time. Along the way, mishaps, misunderstandings, and grievances pile up, and the comforting traditions holding the group together threaten to give way. The Throwback Special is a moving and comic tale filled with pitch-perfect observations about manhood, marriage, middle age, and the rituals we all enact as part of being alive.

Author : Chris Bachelder
Publisher : W. W. Norton
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Humorous stories
ISBN : 0393353788

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The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder Pdf

Winner of The Paris Review/Terry Southern Prize for Humor. "Chris Bachelder is a witty, compassionate troublemaker, and we need more like him." --George Saunders

Author : Tom Sharpe
Publisher : Random House
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2011-05-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781446474716

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The Throwback by Tom Sharpe Pdf

When Lockhart Flawse is catapulted out of his upper-class and rapunzel-esque life with the curmudgeonly Flawse Senior, he must enter the world of suburbia, and marriage. Rendered an absolute twit in modern society by his medieval upbringing, Lockhart must resort to drastic tactics in his attempt to return to Flawse House. Faced with the horrors of suburbia, he must either terrorise, blackmail and potentially kill an entire street of his tenants, or attempt to find his unknown and elusive father in order to inherit the estate. However, with the belief that he was dropped into his mother's arms by a stork, killing a street of people may be the wiser option for the socially inept young man. He is also under mounting pressure, as it may all be in vain if his gold-digging mother-in-law has her way. Now the wife of Flawse Senior, she has decided that if Lockhart's wealthy grandfather can't have the decency to die on his own, she will take matters into her own hands.

Author : Chris Bachelder
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2011-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780807140208

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Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder Pdf

A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and often heartbreaking challenges that a vulnerable, imaginative young father faces as he lives his everyday American existence.The vexation of Abbott's pensive self-doubt comes to a head one day as he cleans vomited raspberries out of his daughter's car seat and muses: "The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life." Composed of small moments of domestic wonder and terror Bachelder's novel is a charming story of misadventure, anxiety, and the every-day battles.

Author : Leonard Michaels
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2008-07-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781429936958

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The Men's Club by Leonard Michaels Pdf

First published in 1981, Leonard Michaels's The Men's Club is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood in the age of therapy. "The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll" (The New York Times Book Review). Seven men, friends and strangers, gather in a house in Berkeley. They intend to start a men's club, the purpose of which isn't immediately clear to any of them; but very quickly they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk.

Author : Lydia Millet
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2016-05-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780393285550

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Sweet Lamb of Heaven: A Novel by Lydia Millet Pdf

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction: Blending domestic thriller and psychological horror, this compelling page-turner follows a mother fleeing her estranged husband. Lydia Millet’s previous work has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Likewise greeted with rapturous praise, Sweet Lamb of Heaven is a first-person account of a young mother, Anna, fleeing her cold and unfaithful husband, a businessman who’s just launched his first campaign for political office. When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. But the longer they stay, the less the guests in the dingy motel look like typical tourists—and the less Ned resembles a typical candidate. As his pursuit of Anna and their child moves from threatening to criminal, Ned begins to alter his wife’s world in ways she never could have imagined. A double-edged and satisfying story with a strong female protagonist, a thrilling plot, and a creeping sense of the apocalyptic, Sweet Lamb of Heaven builds to a shattering ending with profound implications for its characters—and for all of us.

Author : David Canford
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2018-06-27
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1721937900

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The Throwback by David Canford Pdf

A baby's birth to George Elwood's wife on their South Carolina plantation threatens to cause a scandal, but the funeral of mother and child seems to ensure the truth will never be known. Years later Elwood's son, Thomas, is rescued from disaster by a slave girl, Mosa. Helping her in return, he discovers the secrets of his family which set him on a collision course with his father and the law. Mosa makes it North to freedom but even in New York, she finds her life is threatened. Receiving unexpected news, she risks her life to return South during the height of the Civil War. She hopes to wait it out in relative safety away from any population center, but the war finds her and threatens to destroy those she cares about. A family saga of hatred, revenge, forbidden love, overcoming hardship and helping others from the author of Bound Bayou.

Author : Alex Pickett
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0299331644

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The Restaurant Inspector by Alex Pickett Pdf

Author : Lily Anderson
Publisher : Disney Electronic Content
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2021-10-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781368052023

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The Throwback List by Lily Anderson Pdf

Welcome to Sandy Point, Oregon: a sleepy beach town that's home to a giant anchor statue, a sometimes-karaoke-bar, and Frosty's questionably legendary Sunday Sundae Surprise. A town Jo, Autumn, and Bianca thought they'd left far behind when they graduated high school, finally moving on to greener pastures than the midway point for tourists heading to the Goonies house. But life seldom goes according to plan. Bianca Boria-Birdy, former prom queen and valedictorian, has always been an overachiever. As she juggles managing the family tattoo parlor, caring for her grandmother, and adjusting to a new marriage, Bianca's schedule becomes stricter than ever, with no room for disruption. What she really needs is a vacation, but not even Bianca Boria-Birdy can achieve the impossible. Autumn Kelly used to be an actress. Now she teaches drama at Sandy Point High. She may have had to kiss her movie-star dreams goodbye, but molding the next generation of performers has given her life meaning in a whole new way. Until the sudden reappearance of her ex-best friend throws everything off-balance. Jo Freeman has it all together. With a cool job in Silicon Valley, connections at the trendiest fitness studios, and a down payment on her dream condo, she's well on her way to reaching every one of her goals before thirty. Or she was, before she got fired and landed right back home with her parents and teenage sister. When Jo finds an old bucket list in her childhood bedroom, it sets the three women on a path that brings them closer to one another with each task. And it just might lead to a life none of them could have planned.

Author : Camilla Sten
Publisher : Minotaur Books
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2022-03-29
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781250249289

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The Resting Place by Camilla Sten Pdf

One of Goodreads Most Popular Horror of 2022 "Engrossing, character-rich, powerful. Sten is on a roll."—Publishers Weekly(starred review) Crimson Peak meets The Sanatorium in The Resting Place, a heart-thumping, unforgettable novel of horror and suspense by international sensation Camilla Sten. Deep rooted secrets. A twisted family history. And a house that will never let go. Eleanor lives with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize a familiar person's face. It causes stress. Acute anxiety. It can make you question what you think you know. When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother, Vivianne’s, murder, she came face to face with the killer—a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, the horror of having come so close to a murderer—and not knowing if they’d be back—overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality. Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house—a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died, suddenly. A place that has housed a chilling past for over fifty years. Eleanor. Her steadfast boyfriend, Sebastian. Her reckless aunt, Veronika. The lawyer. All will go to this house of secrets, looking for answers. But as they get closer to uncovering the truth, they’ll wish they had never come to disturb what rests there.

Author : Carol Shields
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2010-10-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307365897

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Unless by Carol Shields Pdf

“Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.” Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year relationship with their father. Her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman. Her modest success with a novel of her own, and the clamour of her American publisher for a sequel. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner, with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck. GOODNESS. With the inconceivable loss of her daughter like a lump in her throat, Reta tackles the mystery of this message. What in this world has broken Norah, and what could bring her back to the provisional safety of home? Reta’s wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Reta’s voice in all its poignancy, outrage and droll humour. Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shields’s fiction.

Author : Jillian Weise
Publisher : Catapult
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2010-02-10
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781593763763

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The Colony by Jillian Weise Pdf

Eugenics, body horror, eros, and medical ethics collide is this “ambitious, provocative, and wildly inventive” dystopian satire (Publishers Weekly). Anne Hatley is a sharp-witted and acerbic young teacher in need of a reprieve from the drudgery of work and a tedious relationship. She accepts an invitation to the nation’s largest research colony, where DNA pioneer James D. Watson hopes to “cure” Anne of a rare gene that affects her bone growth: She is missing a leg, and walks with a prosthesis. Though getting along fine, she’s being pressured to pioneer an experimental procedure, and be the first patient to generate a new limb. As Anne falls into a reluctant romance with a fellow colonist—the rakish possessor of the “suicide gene”—and consults a resurrected Charles Darwin and a dugong-bred mermaid, Anne must first come to terms with who she is, before she ever dares to decide who she can become. “Part Wellsian dystopia, part medical mystery, part Hawthornian allegory, and part reality show, The Colony is a potent exploration of ethics in the Age of the Genome (Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special). It’s also a “hilarious, deeply moving, sexy, scary novel . . . about finding love, finding a home, finding family, and all the other doomed experiments we conduct in the hope in making a better human” (Brock Clarke, author of The Price of the Haircut).

Author : Amor Towles
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 593 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2021-10-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780735222373

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The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles Pdf

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER More than ONE MILLION copies sold A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick A New York Times Notable Book, and Chosen by Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bill Gates and Barack Obama as a Best Book of the Year “Wise and wildly entertaining . . . permeated with light, wit, youth.” —The New York Times Book Review “A classic that we will read for years to come.” —Jenna Bush Hager, Read with Jenna book club “Fantastic. Set in 1954, Towles uses the story of two brothers to show that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as we might hope.” —Bill Gates “A real joyride . . . elegantly constructed and compulsively readable.” —NPR The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes. “Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes. Towles is not a one-trick pony. Like all the best storytellers, he has range. He takes inspiration from famous hero’s journeys, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men. He seems to be saying that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as an interstate highway. But, he suggests, when something (or someone) tries to steer us off course, it is possible to take the wheel.” – Bill Gates

Author : Peter May
Publisher : Quercus
Page : 407 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2015-09-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781623656850

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Entry Island by Peter May Pdf

Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times raved: "Peter May is a writer I'd follow to the ends of the earth." Now Peter May takes us to a small island off the coast of Québec with an emotionally charged new mystery. When a murder rocks the isolated community of Entry Island, insomniac homicide detective Sime Mackenzie boards a light aircraft at St. Hubert airfield bound for the small, scattered chain of Madeline Islands, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, as part of an eight-officer investigation team from Montréal. Only two kilometers wide and three long, Entry Island is home to a population of just more than 100 inhabitants, the wealthiest of whom has just been discovered murdered in his home. Covered in her husband's blood, the dead man's melancholy wife spins a tale for the police about a masked intruder armed with a knife. The investigation appears to be little more than a formality--the evidence points to a crime of passion, implicating the wife. But Sime is electrified by the widow during his interview, convinced that he has met her before, even though this is clearly impossible. Haunted by this strange certainty, Sime's insomnia is punctuated by vivid, hallucinatory dreams of a distant past on a Scottish island 3,000 miles away, dreams in which he and the widow play leading roles. Sime's conviction soon becomes an obsession. And despite mounting evidence of the woman's guilt, he finds himself convinced of her innocence, leading to a conflict between the professional duty he must fulfill and the personal destiny he is increasingly sure awaits him.

Author : Laura Taylor Namey
Publisher : Harlequin
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2019-10-08
Category : Young Adult Fiction
ISBN : 9781488051357

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The Library of Lost Things by Laura Taylor Namey Pdf

Fangirl meets Jane Austen in this deeply heartfelt love story about hiding the worst parts of ourselves, and the people who love us anyway. “How could I open that door and let him see the messiest part of me?” From the moment she first learned to read, literary genius Darcy Wells has spent most of her time living in the worlds of her books. There, she can avoid the crushing reality of her mother’s hoarding and pretend her life is simply ordinary. But then Asher Fleet, a former teen pilot with an unexpectedly shattered future, walks into the bookstore where she works…and straight into her heart. For the first time in her life, Darcy can’t seem to find the right words. Fairy tales are one thing, but real love makes her want to hide behind her carefully constructed ink-and-paper wall. Still, after spending her whole life keeping people out, something about Asher makes Darcy want to open up. But securing her own happily-ever-after will mean she’ll need to stop hiding and start living her own truth—even if it’s messy. “A lovely tale for bookish readers that will give them all the feels.” —Kirkus