The Shimmering State

The Shimmering State
Author: Meredith Westgate
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982156724

A “moving, astounding, and totally unsettling” (Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author) literary debut following two patients in recovery after an experimental memory drug warps their lives. Lucien moves to Los Angeles to be with his grandmother as she undergoes an experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s using the new drug, Memoroxin. An emerging photographer, he’s also running from the sudden death of his mother, a well-known artist whose legacy haunts him. Sophie has just landed the lead in the upcoming performance of La Sylphide with the Los Angeles Ballet Company. She still waitresses at the Chateau Marmont during her off hours, witnessing the recreational use of Memoroxin—or Mem—among the Hollywood elite. When Lucien and Sophie meet at The Center, founded by an ambitious yet conflicted doctor to treat patients who’ve abused Mem, they have no memory of how they got there—or why they feel so inexplicably drawn to each other. Is it attraction, or something they cannot remember from “before”? “Contemplative and wonderfully evocative, finishing The Shimmering State is like waking from a dream, where you reenter the world with fresh eyes and wonder at the frailty of your own memories” (Jessica Chiarella, author of The Lost Girls).

Shimmer

Shimmer
Author: Jennifer McBride
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2014-09-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1922089397

Strong protagonists of both genders face friendship, decision-making, and morality Kora, a powerful genie and the heir to the Genesian throne, is suddenly banished to Earth to keep her safe after her homeland is threatened. Meanwhile, everything is going wrong in David's life on Earth. When he accidentally summons Kora from her globe, his whole world is turned upside-down, and her magic powers might just be the solution to the chaos. But commanding a genie is notoriously tricky—especially when she's also an angry teenage girl. Unable to part from each other, and with their loved ones in danger, Kora and David discover that the best way to help themselves is to first help each other. This topical tale deals with contemporary adolescent issues and features an interesting character dynamic.

Radiant Shimmering Light

Radiant Shimmering Light
Author: Sarah Selecky
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1635571812

A nuanced satire--both hilarious and disconcerting--that probes the blurred lines between empowerment, spirituality, and consumerism in our online lives. Lilian Quick is 40, single, and childless, working as a pet portrait artist. She paints the colored light only she can see, but animal aura portraits are a niche market at best. She's working hard to build her brand on social media and struggling to pay the rent. Her estranged cousin has become internet-famous as "Eleven" Novak, the face of a massive feminine lifestyle empowerment brand, and when Eleven comes to town on tour, the two women reconnect. Despite twenty years of unexplained silence, Eleven offers Lilian a place at The Temple, her Manhattan office. Lilian accepts, moves to New York, and quickly enrolls in The Ascendency, Eleven's signature program: an expensive, three-month training seminar on leadership, spiritual awakening, and marketing. Eleven is going to help her cousin become her best self: confident, affluent, and self-actualized. In just three months, Lilian's life changes drastically: She learns how to break her negative thought patterns, achieves financial solvency, grows an active and engaged online following, and builds authentic friendships. She finally feels seen for who she really is. Success! . . . But can Lilian trust everything Eleven says? This compelling, heartfelt satire asks us: How do we recognize authenticity when storytelling and magic have been co-opted by marketing?

Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost
Author: David Hoon Kim
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374722498

In a strangely distorted Paris, a Japanese adoptee is haunted by the woman he once loved When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she’s already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik Blatand, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelgänger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of medical students. Henrik’s inquiry expands beyond Fumiko’s seclusion and death, across the absurd, entropic streets of Paris and the figures that wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom Henrik finds sitting in his place on a train. It drives him into the shadowy corners of his past, where his adoptive Danish parents raised him in a house without mirrors. And it mounts to a charged intimacy shared with his best friend’s precocious daughter, who may be haunted herself. David Hoon Kim’s debut is a transgressive, darkly comic novel of becoming lost and found in translation. With each successive, echoic chapter, Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost plunges us more deeply beneath the surface of things, to the displacement, exile, grief, and desire that hide in plain sight.

The Shimmering Is All There Is

The Shimmering Is All There Is
Author: Heather Catto Kohout
Publisher: Women in Texas History Series
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2021
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781623499501

The Shimmering Is All There Is: On Nature, God, Science, and More is a collection of essays and poems by the late Heather Catto Kohout. A native of San Antonio, Heather was a disciplined and original thinker and writer. Her education, experience, and temperament--as a loving wife, mother, and daughter; a proud Texan; a teacher and scholar with graduate degrees in English literature and religion; and the founder of a residency program for environmental writers and artists at a ranch in the Texas Hill Country--permeate every word she wrote. She had a unique combination of empathetic imagination, profound spirituality, cosmic sensibility, and an ability to laugh--gently--at her fellow creatures and, especially, herself. Heather Kohout's essays and poems are thoughtful, profound, and generous, shifting constantly between the specific and the universal and carrying throughout a message of stewardship. She was an environmentalist at heart, but her writing explores so much more: nature, art, theology, science, food, and family. She wrote about Mexican teenagers who dress as angels in an attempt to halt drug-related violence; the perils of industrial agriculture; the pleasure of letting the chickens out of their coop in the morning; and the battle to save the Georgetown salamander. Always, she wrote about what it means to try to live an ethical life and to be fully human as a part of, not in opposition to, nature. These essays and poems exemplify the best of Texas womanhood: stubborn independence, fierce conviction, good humor, and instinctive generosity and kindness.

Sphinx

Sphinx
Author: Anne Garreta
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2015-04-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1941920098

A landmark literary event: the first novel by a female member of Oulipo in English, a sexy genderless love story.

The Shimmer

The Shimmer
Author: Carsten Stroud
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1489265449

How do you hunt a killer who can go back in time and make sure you're never born? A police pursuit kicks Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol and his trainee, Julie Karras, into a shoot–out that ends with one girl dead and another in cuffs, and the driver of the SUV fleeing into the Intracoastal Waterway. Redding stays on the hunt, driven by the trace memory that he knows that running woman – and he does, because his grandfather, a cop in Jacksonville, was hunting the same woman in 1957. Redding and his partner, Pandora Jansson, chase this seductive serial killer who can ride The Shimmer across decades. The pursuit cuts from modern–day Jacksonville to Mafia–ruled St. Augustine in 1957, then to the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1914. The stakes turn brutal when Jack, whose wife and child died in a crash the previous Christmas Eve, faces a terrible choice: help his grandfather catch the killer, or change time itself and try to save his wife and child. The Shimmer is a unique time–shifting thriller that will stay with you long after its utterly unforeseen and yet perfectly diabolical ending.

Love in the Big City

Love in the Big City
Author: Sang Young Park
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 080215879X

A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest-selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely city of Seoul Love in the Big City is the English-language debut of Sang Young Park, one of Korea’s most exciting young writers. A runaway bestseller, the novel hit the top five lists of all the major bookstores, went into twenty-six printings, and was praised for its unique literary voice and perspective. It is now poised to capture a worldwide readership. Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life. A brilliantly written novel that takes us into the glittering nighttime of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning after with both humor and emotion, Love in the Big City is a wry portrait of millennial loneliness as well as the abundant joys of queer life.

Ariel

Ariel
Author: Gail Herman
Publisher: Chapter Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Chapter book
ISBN: 9781614792116

When her young friend, Laurel, mysteriously goes missing, Ariel reads Laurel's diary entry about a secret new friend and is accompanied by Sebastian, Flounder and Scuttle while following clues.

The Shimmering Road

The Shimmering Road
Author: Hester Young
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2017-02-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0698190785

A pulse-pounding mystery from the author of The Gates of Evangeline featuring Charlotte “Charlie” Cates, an unforgettable heroine whose dark visions bring to light secrets that will save or destroy those around her . . . When soon-to-be mother Charlotte “Charlie” Cates begins to have recurring dreams about harm coming to her unborn daughter, she knows these are not the nightmares of an anxious mom-to-be. They are the result of her mysterious gift. But before she can decipher what these dreams might mean, Charlie learns that the mother who abandoned her when she was a toddler is the victim of a double murder in Arizona. The other victim—Jasmine, a half-sister Charlie never knew she had—has left behind a child, a little girl who speaks to Charlie in her dreams and was present on the night of the murders. Convinced that she must help her orphaned niece, Charlie travels to Tucson, Arizona, where she must confront her painful ties to her mother and delve into her sister’s shadowy past. To untangle the web of secrets that will reveal the truth of her nightmares, Charlie can no longer avoid her family’s checkered history. Who is in the racy photos that turned up in Jasmine’s apartment? Where is her niece’s father, whom Jasmine was rumored to have been seeing again on the sly? Was her mother’s charity work in Mexico really as selfless as it seemed? And most important of all, what did her niece really witness on the night of the murders? The search for answers leads Charlie across the Mexican border, from the resort town of Rocky Point to the border town of Nogales, and elucidates the meaning of her dreams in most unexpected ways. Ultimately, to protect her niece and her unborn child, Charlie must battle not just evil but the forces of nature, in one final terrifying encounter in the Tucson desert. A thrilling mystery that combines literary suspense and romance with a mystical twist that is unputdownable. If you love Kate Atkinson and Alice Sebold, you should not miss Hester Young.