The Immaculate Invasion

The Immaculate Invasion
Author: Bob Shacochis
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 626
Release: 2010-06-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0802196160

“Every war brings forth one perfect book. . . . Now we have The Immaculate Invasion, the masterpiece of the 1994 US assault on and occupation of Haiti.” —Chicago Tribune Widely celebrated upon its original publication in 1999, National Book Award winning writer Bob Shacochis’s The Immaculate Invasion is a gritty, poetic, and revelatory look at the American intervention in Haiti. In 1994, the United States embarked on Operation Uphold Democracy, a response to the overthrow of the democratically elected Haitian government by a brutal military coup. As a reporter for Harper’s, Bob Shacochis traveled to Haiti and was embedded—long before the idea became popular in Iraq—with a team of Special Forces commandos for eighteen months. He came away with tremendous insight into Haiti, the character of American fighters, and what can happen when an intervention turns into a misadventure. In The Immaculate Invasion, Shacochis captures the exploits and frustrations, the inner lives and heroic deeds of young Americans as they struggle to bring democracy to a country ravaged by tyranny. The Immaculate Invasion is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what has happened in Haiti in the past, its current state, and its future path. “An extraordinary book about an extraordinary event . . . I felt transported to Haiti. I could hear it. I could smell it. At moments I felt moved almost to tears, only to find myself, a page or two later, laughing out loud.” —Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
Author: Bob Shacochis
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 773
Release: 2013-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802193099

Pulitzer Prize finalist: “A soaring literary epic about the forces that have driven us to the 9/11 age . . . relentlessly captivating” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post). When humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape riddled with poverty, corruption, and voodoo. It’s the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings. The journalist, whom he knew years before as Jackie Scott, had a bigger investment in Haiti than it seemed. To make sense of her death, Tom must plunge back into his complicated ties to Jackie—and her mysterious past. Shacochis traces Jackie’s shadowy family history from the outlaw terrain of World War II Dubrovnik to 1980s Istanbul. Caught between her first love and her domineering father—an elite Cold War spy pressuring her to follow in his footsteps—seventeen-year-old Jackie hatches a desperate escape plan. But getting out also puts her on the path that turns her into the soulless woman Tom fears as much as desires. Set over fifty years and in four war-torn countries, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is National Book Award winner Bob Shacochis’s masterpiece and a magnum opus. It brings to life an intricate portrait of catastrophic events that led up to the war on terror and the America we are today.

Easy in the Islands

Easy in the Islands
Author: Bob Shacochis
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802199321

Winner of the National Book Award for First Fiction: “Beguiling stories . . . about an uncommonly fascinating part of the hemisphere” (Time). Easy in the Islands is a “stunning” collection of stories by one of contemporary America’s foremost journalists and fiction writers. Infused with the rhythms of the Caribbean, these vivid tales of paradise sought and paradise lost are as lush, steamy, and invigorating as the islands themselves (The Washington Post). A calypso singer named Lord Short Shoe consorts with a vampish black singer to bilk an American out of his only companion—a monkey. An island bureaucracy confounds the attempts of a hotel owner to get his dead mother out of the freezer and into a real grave—until he resorts to a highly unusual form of burial. Two poor islanders stumble into a high-class dance party and find themselves caught in a violent encounter that just might escalate into revolution. And a young woman sails off into the romantic tropics with the man of her dreams, only to learn the hard way—as Eve did—that paradise is just another place to leave behind. From fishing fleets in remote atolls too small to appear on any map to the sprawling barrios and yacht filled marinas of Miami, Bob Shacochis charts a course across a Caribbean that no tourist will recognize.

Domesticity

Domesticity
Author: Bob Shacochis
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2013-11-12
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1595341900

Bob Shacochis, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, and National Book Award winning-author of such books as Swimming in the Volcano, Easy in the Islands, and The Next New World, hones his nonfiction skills in this tour de force romp through the worlds of eating and eroticism. Domesticity is an irreverent exploration of the sweet and sour evolution of the enduring romance between author and lover. In this relationship, Shacochis stays at home and cooks, all the while reflecting on the ups and downs of a romantic partnership, the connection between heart and stomach, and how the crazed lust of youth evolves into inevitably settling down and, well, simply making dinner. Shacochis's delectable musings on monogamy, emotional and physical separations, dogs, career changes, the stress of the holidays, the aesthetics of food, moving, sex and seafood, friendships, writings and the angst over who is going to do the dishes are deftly folded into seventy-five recipes, half of them of the author's own creation. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is Shacochis's celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is a celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point, a "prose stew" of audacious candor, a culinary valentine for lovers of literature.

Swimming in the Volcano

Swimming in the Volcano
Author: Bob Shacochis
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 711
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802199313

A vibrant portrait of love and politics in the tropics from the National Book Award–winning author: “the finest first novel I have read in many years” (William O’Rourke, Chicago Tribune). Winner of the National Book Award for First Fiction for Easy in the Islands, Bob Shacochis returns to the islands with Swimming in the Volcano, a “splendid first novel” that illuminates the beauty and life of the Caribbean (Library Journal). On the fictional island of St. Catherine, an American expatriate becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially explosive scene enters a woman he once loved and lost, but who remains a powerful temptation—one that proves impossible to resist. Both an enchanting love story and a sophisticated political novel about the fruits of imperialism in the twentieth century, Swimming in the Volcano is as brutal and seductive a novel as the world it evokes. “Scores of island people, from conspiring politicians to barbers on the beach, sprawl across the pages like oleander and hibiscus . . . each of [the book’s] scenes is expertly wrought.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Next New World

The Next New World
Author: Bob Shacochis
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802191770

The “chameleon-like” ABA–winning author of Easy in the Islands offers a new collection of eight “surprising [and] memorable” short stories (Publishers Weekly). The haunting stories in Shacochis’s second collection combine comic wit and carnal certainty with an aura of history. Each of the eight tales here feature outrageously original characters who, through Shacochis’s ability to inhabit a spectacular range of voices, become eerily familiar. Two elderly sisters share a phantom lover; a Virginia patriarch, haunted by ghosts of Confederate soldiers, is buried with their bones; a family celebrates the Fourth of July in the shadow of the father’s Alzheimer’s syndrome; and a musician’s thunderous love turns him into a cannibal. From renaissance England to Cape Hatteras to the Caribbean islands, readers will find themselves submerged in exquisitely crafted fictions “charged with wit and style . . . intelligent, engaging, and richly realized.” (The New York Times Book Review). “Shacochis is a master of voices. . . . In The Next New World he roams about through history and across the globe, tethering his wit to a sense of political conscience. . . . Sometimes more is more.” —The Miami Herald “If we are in the golden age of the short story, Bob Shacochis is one of the writers who got us here.” —Providence Journal

Invasions

Invasions
Author: Calvin Gimpelevich
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Gender identity
ISBN: 9781682199107

"A body-swapping personal trainer and her trans girlfriend turn to a life of crime. A man mourning his dead lover becomes trapped in the mind of the leader of a bathhouse raid. A trans man, recovering from top surgery paid for with a stolen credit card, finds strange connection and condemnation among his fellow patients. The fifteen stories in this debut fiction collection from author Calvin Gimpelevich move in the borderlands between realism and surrealism, investigating gender, class, relationships, and the powers we still hold within spaces of powerlessness. They articulate the invasions we commit, the invitations we receive to cross over into another person's world."--

Gates of Fire

Gates of Fire
Author: Steven Pressfield
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2007-01-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0553904051

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life.”—Pat Conroy At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history—one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .

Miracle at Midway

Miracle at Midway
Author: Gordon W. Prange
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2014-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 148048945X

New York Times bestseller: The true story of the WWII naval battle portrayed in the Roland Emmerich film is “something special among war histories” (Chicago Sun-Times). Six months after Pearl Harbor, the seemingly invincible Imperial Japanese Navy prepared a decisive blow against the United States. After sweeping through Asia and the South Pacific, Japan’s military targeted the tiny atoll of Midway, an ideal launching pad for the invasion of Hawaii and beyond. But the US Navy would be waiting for them. Thanks to cutting-edge code-breaking technology, tactical daring, and a significant stroke of luck, the Americans under Adm. Chester W. Nimitz dealt Japan’s navy its first major defeat in the war. Three years of hard fighting remained, but it was at Midway that the tide turned. This “stirring, even suspenseful narrative” is the first book to tell the story of the epic battle from both the American and Japanese sides (Newsday). Miracle at Midway reveals how America won its first and greatest victory of the Pacific war—and how easily it could have been a loss.

Falcon Brigade

Falcon Brigade
Author: Lawrence E. Casper
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2001
Genre: Haiti
ISBN: 9781555879457

Casper's candid account of Operation Continue Hope and the brigade's involvement in Somalia, showcases the leadership skills and courage necessary for troop survival under beleaguered circumstances.".