Lunar Park

Lunar Park
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2005-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307264300

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero comes a chilling tale that combines reality, memoir, and fantasy to create a fascinating portrait of this most controversial writer but also a deeply moving novel about love and loss, parents and children, and ultimately forgiveness. “John Cheever writes The Shining.” —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is the bestselling writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed he found himself adrift in a world of wealth, drugs, and fame, as well as dealing with the unexpected death of his abusive father. After a decade of decadence a chance for salvation arrives; the chance to reconnect with an actress he was once involved with, and their son. But almost immediately his new life is threatened by a freak sequence of events and a bizarre series of murders that all seem to connect to Ellis’s past. His attempts to save his new world from his own demons makes Lunar Park Ellis’s most suspenseful novel. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

Imperial Bedrooms

Imperial Bedrooms
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2010-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307593630

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho delivers a riveting, tour-de-force sequel to Less Than Zero, set on the seedy side of Los Angeles. • "A haunting vision of disillusionment, twenty-first-century style" (People). Returning to Los Angeles from New York, Clay, now a successful screenwriter, is casting his new movie. Soon he is running with his old circle of friends through L.A.’s seedy side. His ex-girlfriend, Blair, is married to Trent, a bisexual philanderer and influential manager. Then there's Julian, a recovering addict, and Rip, a former dealer. Then when Clay meets a gorgeous young actress who will stop at nothing to be in his movie, his own dark past begins to shine through, and he has no choice but to dive into the recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

The Accidental

The Accidental
Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2007-04-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307279758

Filled with the bestselling, award-winning author's trademark wordplay and inventive storytelling, here is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family’s summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people. Each of the Smarts—parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid—encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to see their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith’s narrative freedom and exhilarating facility with language propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.

The Polyglot Lovers

The Polyglot Lovers
Author: Lina Wolff
Publisher:
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2019
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781911508441

Ferocious and irreverent, this multiple prize-winning novel burns down the pretensions of a pompous literary establishment and takes no prisoners.

Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2010-06-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307756467

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. • The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." —The New York Times They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

Fool on the Hill

Fool on the Hill
Author: Matt Ruff
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2012-07-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802193625

From the author of Lovecraft Country: Myth and reality collide on a college campus “in a comic fantasy of wonderful energy, invention, and generosity of spirit” (Alison Lurie). Stephen Titus George is a young writer-in-residence at Cornell University in upstate New York. A bestselling author in search of a new story, he sees his life as a modern-day fairy tale starring himself as a would-be knight trying to woo a lovely maiden—or, actually, two: the bewitching Calliope and his guiding light, Aurora Borealis Smith. But he’s not quite in control of the narrative. There’s another writer with even greater influence on campus. The unseen Mr. Sunshine is an eternal, semi-retired deity who’s been fashioning his own story for centuries. He has all his characters in place: dragons, sprites, gnomes, and villains. And now, finally, his hero. As Mr. Sunshine’s world comes to fabulous and violent life, how can Stephen decide his own fate if it’s already being plotted by a god? An epic of life and death, good and evil, love and sorcery, Fool on the Hill lands Matt Ruff happily on the shelf between Tom Robbins and J. R. R. Tolkien for every lover of the “funky and fantastical” (New York magazine). “Inspired . . . rich in flavorful language . . . [a] dazzling tour de force.” —San Francisco Chronicle “The plot comes together like a brilliant clockwork toy.” —Locus

Many People Die Like You

Many People Die Like You
Author: Lina Wolff
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781911508809

Set in Spain and Sweden, twelve dark and funny short stories of characters who range from messy to outright deviant.

The Sins of our Fathers

The Sins of our Fathers
Author: Åsa Larsson
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Total Pages: 551
Release: 2023-03-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0857389998

"Larsson is one of the best current practitioners of Scandinavian crime fiction" Financial Times "A masterful storyteller . . . An astute social commentator" Sunday Express Winner of the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year 2021 (Swedish Crime Writers' Academy) Winner of the Storytel Award for Best Suspense Novel 2021 Winner of the Adlibris Award for Best Suspense Novel 2021 Forensic pathologist Lars Pohjanen has only a few weeks to live when he asks Rebecka Martinsson to investigate a murder that has long since passed the statute of limitations. A body found in a freezer at the home of the deceased alcoholic, Henry Pekkari, has been identified as a man who disappeared without a trace in 1962: the father of Swedish Olympic boxing champion Börje Ström. Rebecka wants nothing to do with a fifty-year-old case - she has enough to worry about. But how can she ignore a dying man's wish? When the post-mortem confirms that Pekkari, too, was murdered, Rebecka has a red-hot investigation on her hands. But what does it have to do with the body kept in his freezer for decades? Meanwhile, the city of Kiruna is being torn down and moved a few kilometres east, to make way for the mine that has been devouring the city from below. With the city in flux, the tentacles of organized crime are slowly taking over . . . Fragile yet fierce Rebecka Martinsson returns in a spellbinding addition to the Arctic Murders series, now a Walter Presents drama for television. Translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry

The Dawn of Language

The Dawn of Language
Author: Sverker Johansson
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2021-09-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1529411424

"A model of popular-science writing" STEVEN POOLE Who was "the first speaker" and what was their first message? An erudite, tightly woven and beautifully written account of one of humanity's greatest mysteries - the origins of language. Drawing on evidence from many fields, including archaeology, anthropology, neurology and linguistics, Sverker Johansson weaves these disparate threads together to show how our human ancestors evolved into language users. The Dawn of Language provides a fascinating survey of how grammar came into being and the differences or similarities between languages spoken around the world, before exploring how language eventually emerged in the very remote human past. Our intellectual and physiological changes through the process of evolution both have a bearing on our ability to acquire language. But to what extent is the evolution of language dependent on genes, or on environment? How has language evolved further, and how is it changing now, in the process of globalisation? And which aspects of language ensure that robots are not yet intelligent enough to reconstruct how language has evolved? Johansson's far-reaching, authoritative and research-based approach to language is brought to life through dozens of astonishing examples, both human and animal, in a fascinatingly erudite and entertaining volume for anyone who has ever contemplated not just why we speak the way we do, but why we speak at all. Translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry