![]() ![]() The novel is set against the playful landscape of the summer of 2013 in New York City. Though Isa's mother is no longer in her life for reasons we find out towards the end of the novel (don't worry-I won't spoil anything for you), we do learn that she holds one piece of maternal advice close to her heart: "In life, you must familiarize yourself with what is glamorous." And so she does. "Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry don't walk bare-head in the hot sun cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil soak your little cloths right after you take them off." The mother imparts practical tips, advice on making the most out of life, and several scoldings, all with the hope that it will help her daughter survive in a patriarchal society. It calls to mind "Girl", the short story by Jamaica Kincaid, which is one long sentence packed with instructions from a mother passed down to her daughter. "My mother always told me that to be a girl one must be especially clever." That is how Marlowe Granados opens her debut novel Happy Hour. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() There’s drama, mystery, murders, and a potential cult – and that’s just Season 1. Let me queue up my best Stefon voice as I tell you this series has a little bit of everything. Although we know at least some of the girls get saved, even the survivors are left with the haunting recollections of what happened during their time in the wilderness. The show toggles back and forth between their adult and high school selves, showing their fight for survival as they await rescue. In case you missed it, the series follows the adult version of a group of high school soccer players whose plane crashed in the remote wilderness on the way to a tournament. ![]() After a long wait, the second season of Showtime’s Yellowjackets premiered on March 24, and fans finally get to check back in with Shauna, Taissa, Misty, and Nat (and, well, Lottie). It’s time to head back into the wilderness. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Now the Aryan Steel wants to pulverize Nate’s broken family, and few gangs are as proactive in curbing defiance. Turns out, Nate declined an offer to work for this band of bigots by killing his prospective manager an email wouldn’t suffice. That changes, though, when Nate and Polly are thrust into a violent game of tag with the toughest white boys in California. When you practice the craft and sullen art of armed robbery, as Nate does, danger is an occupational hazard, yet it’s never followed him home. The problem, which drives this outlaw fable to its grisly finale, is that he brings his sins with him and the penance is steep. It’s a tragic irony that a deadbeat dad can destroy a life without ever having nurtured it.īut a recent ex-con does precisely that in Jordan Harper’s debut novel, She Rides Shotgun, when he kidnaps his daughter-a gifted middle-schooler with “gunfighter eyes” named Polly-and not because he misses her. After all, few mysteries are as haunting as the mystery of inheritance. While the former tenders a daily diet of love and mercy, the latter caters a bottomless buffet of wonder and strife. ![]() The only person in a child’s universe who looms larger than a parent is an absent one. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Launched in 1956, the first competition took place in Lugano, Switzerland, and only seven countries participated. It is difficult to conceive of an event less punk than Eurovision. Yes, Johnny Rotten, the Sex Pistol who set out to bring anarchy to the UK 46 years ago, has just volunteered to enter the soporific song in the European competition’s preliminary round. Nevertheless, if rivers of ink have been spilled over this feather-light contemporary ballad, it is because 66-year-old John Lydon has decided to nominate it as an entry to represent Ireland in this spring’s Eurovision Song Contest. ![]() Some give him credit for still being “alive and kicking” after his exhausting 66-year-long personal crusade against the system they say that, beyond its musical virtues (or lack thereof), Hawaii represents a commendable act of resistance. Hawaii, the first song that John Lydon – Johnny Rotten to his friends – has released in eight years is “the definitive nail in the coffin of British punk.” The song –released under the name of Rotten’s band Public Image LTD, of which he has been the only permanent member since 1978– has been called a “horrendous” ballad, “real shit,” “ordinariness” and an “outburst.” Only his fans have attempted to defend Lydon with sanctimonious arguments. On social media, which is almost always merciless, they’ve already reached a verdict. ![]() ![]() Notably, the eponymous heroine is an older woman who is by turns scheming, selfish, unscrupulous and conducting an unsuitable relationship with a married man. This novel was part of The Classics Club and From Page To Screen challenges.Īlthough a juvenile work that ends rather abruptly as if the author tired of writing it, Lady Susan has the trademark wit and ability to skewer social foibles one associates with later Jane Austen novels. It takes the form of letters between Lady Susan and her friend Mrs Johnson, between Lady Susan’s sister-law, Mrs Vernon, and her mother Lady de Courcy and Mrs Vernon’s brother, Reginald. ![]() Lady Susan is a short epistolary novel thought to have been written in 1794 (when Jane Austen would have been 19) but never submitted for publication by the author and only published in 1871, years after her death. ![]() Recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon seeks an advantageous second marriage for herself and her daughter and is not afraid to use all her guile to achieve it. ![]() ![]() Gae Polisner’s Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me is a story about the fragility of female friendship, of falling in love and wondering if you are ready for more, and of the glimmers of hope we find by taking stock in ourselves. But what if devoting herself to Max not only means betraying her parents, but permanently losing the love of her best friend? What becomes of loyalty, when no one is loyal to you? Only, Max is about to graduate, and he’s going to hit the road – with or without JL. Max may be rough on the outside, but he has the soul of a poet (something Aubrey will never understand). With JL’s father gone on long term business, and her mother struggling with her mental illness, JL takes solace in the tropical butterflies she raises, and in her new, older boyfriend, Max Gordon. ![]() But they aren’t the friends they once were. ![]() ![]() She and I are barely friends anymore.”įifteen-year-old JL Markham’s life used to be filled with carnival nights and hot summer days spent giggling with her forever best friend Aubrey about their families and boys. “I lie back on his pillow, my head spinning, and for one split second, I think how crazy it will be when I get home and tell Aubrey everything. ![]() ![]() ![]() Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, is a partially autobiographical account of his youth. Critics, however, note the impassioned cadences of Black churches are still evident in his writing. In the early 1940s, he transferred his faith from religion to literature. At age 14, Baldwin became a preacher at the small Fireside Pentecostal Church in Harlem. He was the eldest of nine children his stepfather was a minister. James Baldwin offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and '60s. James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Bald John Donne: A Life from the 1970s remains the standard scholarly biography: dusty? yes dry? yes but all the detail we need for studying Donne is here and meticulously referenced. Maybe the very complexity of Donne and his various metamorphoses is too much for a biographer to capture because this is the fourth biography I've read and none of them feel complete. Rundell's vast enthusiasm is almost there in his place, a kind of simulacrum for the man. Rundell's writing is the star of this show: it's sparky and textured, original and alive - if she wrote a novel I'd read it like a shot - but, somehow, Donne the man sort of slips between the floorboards of this biography and never really emerges as a fully-fleshed (ha!) person. ![]() ![]() Abu-Jamal questioning the reliability of the proceedings in his case and maintaining that his conviction and death sentence was a miscarriage of justice based on racism. In the past 30 years, the case has garnered a great deal of public attention, with high-profile supporters of Mr. Abu-Jamal will be resentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The officer’s widow, Maureen Faulkner, agreed to stop pushing for execution because the case had gone on for too long. Philadelphia district attorney Seth Williams said he decided not to seek a new death sentence because witnesses are no longer available and to avoid further appeals. Abu-Jamal had been shot in the chest by the officer. ![]() Abu-Jamal’s brother for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. 9, 1981, after the officer pulled over Mr. ![]() Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and journalist, was convicted of fatally shooting Officer Faulkner, who was white, on Dec. ![]() Following the United States Supreme Court’s decision to let stand an April 2011 federal appeal court order vacating Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence for the 1981 killing of a police officer, Philadelphia prosecutors announced this week that they will not seek a new death sentence for Mr. ![]() ![]() ![]() "First printing" stated on copyright page.īook fine, only light edge-wear, faint toning to spine of near-fine dust jacket. Information Agency in the 1950s, he is stationed in Beirut where this time the challenge is to "prove my worthiness as an American by being an Arab." On returning to the U.S., he once again makes Hollywood his battleground, briefly posing as a Saudi Arabian prince about to meet "a casting agent named Destiny." After a successful career as a screenwriter and novelist in the 1960s, in 1971 William Peter Blatty published The Exorcist, which he adapted to the screen and produced in 1973-thereby changing "the course of contemporary horror fiction and film" (Magistrale, Dark Night's Dreaming, 84). In Which Way to Mecca, Jack?, a narrator named "Bill Blatty" recounts life as the child of Lebanese immigrant parents in New York and a brief try at acting in Hollywood, where he is deemed unfit as "The Type" and "Def-initely not Biblical." On enlisting with the U.S. 14)-and here's to that magnificent apartment in Brentwood! Peg & I are grateful for this refreshing breath of the East-All the best, Bill Blatty." $450.įirst edition of the witty semi-autobiographical account published nearly a decade before Blatty wrote The Exorcist, inscribed by him with a reference to the illustration of a camel on the same page, "To Enid & Bob-May your lives never be like this camel's back-(see p. ![]() Octavo, original half red cloth, original dust jacket. Which Way to Mecca, Jack? (New York): Bernard Geis, (1960). ![]() |