Improvement is a wide ranging novel told in stories that connects disparate people through time and place to one tragic accident. Kiki, a free-spirited young adult of the 1970s turned wised woman, is the novel's lodestar. Silber masterfully pulls together the threads of lives in places as remote as rural Turkey and as common as New York City like a finely made Persian rug.
In this deeply emotional and sensual novel, Pritchett reminds us that even in dark moments there are sparks of joy and renewal. Each character gets their own chapter, and together their stories form a tapestry of a community blessed with love and humanity. Pritchett’s book will let you forget the turmoil in the world around us, and luxuriate in what it means to be simply and beautifully human.
This is the perfect novel for the Downton Abbey crowd. A servant from one household has a fling with the heir of the neighboring house. The action of this novel mostly takes place on one day in 1924 England. It’s the day before the heir is to marry and the illicit lovers treat each other with tenderness as they try not to say the words good bye.
These short stories take place in Northern New Mexico and show us communities that are struggling with their traditional religions and the modern world. In one a pregnant girl is the receptionist for the Catholic Church in another tale a town recreates the passion and the man playing Jesus decides that he is willing to suffer as much as Jesus did. Quade writes with great compassion and drama.
Duffy rewrites history, mythology and fairytales with women as the focal point in this remarkably diverse collection of poems. Whether Shakespeare’s wife is using a sonnet to get her story told or Darwin’s wife is skewering him with a rhyming couplet, you can be assured that Duffy’s nimble style will amaze and amuse you.
In these nineteen stories, Morgan explores and destroys the stereotypes of femininity. In one tale, her characters literally take off their skin; in another a woman shops for body parts at a brothel. These stories range from science fiction to fantasy to eroticism forming a kaleidoscopic vision of the struggles of being in a woman’s body in today’s America.
How to be Human is really a beautiful nuanced look at alienation in our crowded world. Mary is not recovering from a break-up and the humans in her life don’t seem to notice. It's a fox that brings her gifts of chewed up shoes and boxer shorts that starts the healing. The problem is, the neighbors want to exterminate the poor devil and the ex is stalking. Can Mary save her beloved fox without dooming herself?
Percival Everett gives us the story of Kevin Pace, an artist working on a giant secret canvas, during three key times in his life: his adventures in El Salvador in 1979, an affair he had in France, and dealing with his pregnant daughter and secret painting in the present time. Everett develops each of these stories and for the most part lets the reader's draw their own conclusions of how they fit together. This is one of the finest novels written by a true American master.