A Visit from the Goon Squad
Title | A Visit from the Goon Squad PDF eBook |
Author | Jennifer Egan |
Publisher | Anchor |
Pages | 289 |
Release | 2010-06-08 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0307593622 |
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review
Living the California Dream
Title | Living the California Dream PDF eBook |
Author | Alison Rose Jefferson |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 366 |
Release | 2022 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1496229061 |
2020 Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation’s Jim Crow era.
Manhattan Beach
Title | Manhattan Beach PDF eBook |
Author | Jane Centofante |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 2011-11-01 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9780615533278 |
The Bottom of the Harbor
Title | The Bottom of the Harbor PDF eBook |
Author | Joseph Mitchell |
Publisher | Pantheon |
Pages | 321 |
Release | 2008-07-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0307377636 |
On the centennial of Joseph Mitchell's birth, here is a new edition of the classic collection containing his most celebrated pieces about New York City. Fifty years after its original publication, The Bottom of the Harbor is still considered a fundamental New York book. Every story Mitchell tells, every person he introduces, every scene he describes is illuminated by his passion for the eccentrics and eccentricities of his beloved adopted city. All of the pieces here are connected in one way or another--some directly, some with a kind of mysterious circuitousness--to New York's fabled waterfront, the terrain that Mitchell brilliantly made his own. They tell of a life that has passed--of vacant hotel rooms, deserted communities, once-thriving fishing areas that are now polluted and studded with wrecks. Included are "Up in the Old Hotel," a portrait of Louis Morino, the proprietor of a restaurant called (to his disgust) Sloppy Louie's; "The Rats on the Waterfront," which has inspired countless writers to attempt portraits of these most demonized New Yorkers; and "Mr. Hunter's Grave," widely considered to be the finest single piece of nonfiction to have ever appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. Here is the essential work of a legendary writer.
Lawn Boy
Title | Lawn Boy PDF eBook |
Author | Jonathan Evison |
Publisher | Algonquin Books |
Pages | 337 |
Release | 2019-03-19 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1616209232 |
Recipient of the 2019 Alex Award “Mike Muñoz Is a Holden Caulfield for a New Millennium--a '10th-generation peasant with a Mexican last name, raised by a single mom on an Indian reservation' . . . Evison, as in his previous four novels, has a light touch and humorously guides the reader, this time through the minefield that is working-class America.” --The New York Times Book Review For Mike Muñoz, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew--he’s smart enough to know that he’s got to be the one to shake things up if he’s ever going to change his life. But how? He’s not qualified for much of anything. He has no particular talents, although he is stellar at handling a lawn mower and wielding clipping shears. But now that career seems to be behind him. So what’s next for Mike Muñoz? In this funny, biting, touching, and ultimately inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man determined to achieve the American dream of happiness and prosperity--who just so happens to find himself along the way.
The Keep
Title | The Keep PDF eBook |
Author | Jennifer Egan |
Publisher | Anchor |
Pages | 274 |
Release | 2007-07-10 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1400079748 |
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "Part horror tale, part mystery, part romance ... utterly fantastic.”—O, The Oprah Magazine • The bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the tower, the last stand—is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive. Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.
Look at Me
Title | Look at Me PDF eBook |
Author | Jennifer Egan |
Publisher | Anchor |
Pages | 545 |
Release | 2009-12-23 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1400033276 |
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • In this ambitiously multilayered novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.