Palmares

Sample

Francisco Goldman

"Our narrator, Francisco Goldberg, an American writer, has been living and working in Mexico City as a journalist for over a decade, but has recently returned to New York City in hopes of "going home again." It's been five years since the end of his lastrelationship and he is falling in love again with a new woman. Soon, though, he is beckoned back to Boston by his former high school girlfriend who was witness to his greatest youthful humiliations, and his Guatemalan mother, Yolanda, around whom his story orbits like a dark star. Backdropping this five-day trip to his childhood home is the specter of Frank's recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine who was volcanically tempered, pathologically abusive, yet also at times infuriatingly endearing; as well as the high school bullies who gave him the moniker "monkey boy." Told in an intimate, irresistibly funny, and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of a family and of growing up a "halfie," unearths the hidden cruelties in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb where Francisco came of age and explores the pressures of living betwixt and between worlds all his life. Monkey Boy is a new masterpiece of autobiographical fiction from one of the most important American voices in the last forty years"--

Sample

Salman Rushdie

Work is a celebrated work by Salman Rushdie (Booker of Bookers Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.

Sample

Gabriel García Márquez

Hundred Years of Solitude is a celebrated work by Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel Laureate), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.

Sample

Joseph O'Neill

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck's particular brand of naivete and chutzpah--by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith. Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider's vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man--of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O'Neill's prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.From the Hardcover edition.