Last Notes from Home

Last Notes from Home
Author: Frederick Exley
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2012-04-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307800733

"Of his generation's metafictioneers, Fred Exley has created the richest and most American body of work .... LAST NOTES tells tales about corruption, confession, and the often terrible beauty of the bonds of love." - VILLAGE VOICE Frederick Exley, the splenetic and prodigiously self-destructive narrator and protagonist of A FAN'S NOTES and PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND, is alive, if not exactly well. In this exhilarating, scalding new novel, Ex recounts his death watch for his older brother, his imprisonment by a nightmarish Irishman, and his sexual enthrallment to a beautiful flight attendant whose lies are even more inventive than his own. Searching compulsively for love and inevitably betraying it, lashing out at the country in which he is perpetually an alien, Exley remains one of the most riveting characters- and mesmerizing writers - in contemporary American fiction. "[Exley] can weave a number of seemingly unrelated incidents into a single, allusive narrative leading to an unexpected, usually prickly epiphany. His books seem like the loquacious meanderings of one of the more literary and entertainingly cynical, if often terrifyingly frank, guys one might meet in a neighborhood bar.... They reveal themselves as structurally complex, thoroughly imagined, consummate works of art." -BOSTON GLOBE

A Fan's Notes

A Fan's Notes
Author: Frederick Exley
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 401
Release: 1988-08-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0679720766

This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.

Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls

Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls
Author: Lynn Weingarten
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2015-07-07
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1481418599

The New York Times bestselling “taut, sophisticated thriller” (BCCB, starred review) packed with twists and turns that will leave you breathless. They say Delia burned herself to death in her stepfather’s shed. They say it was suicide. But June doesn’t believe it. June and Delia used to be closer than anything. Best friends in that way that comes before everyone else—before guys, before family. It was like being in love, but more. They had a billion secrets, binding them together like thin silk cords. But one night a year ago, everything changed. June, Delia, and June’s boyfriend Ryan were just having a little fun. Their good time got out of hand. And in the cold blue light of morning, June knew only this—things would never be the same again. And now, a year later, Delia is dead. June is certain she was murdered. And she owes it to her to find out the truth…which is far more complicated than she ever could have imagined. Sexy, dark, and atmospheric, Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls will keep you guessing until the very last page.

The Whalestoe Letters

The Whalestoe Letters
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2000-10-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0375714413

Between 1982 and 1989, Pelafina H. Lièvre sent her son, Johnny Truant, a series of letters from The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, a psychiatric facility in Ohio where she spent the final years of her life. Beautiful, heartfelt, and tragic, this correspondence reveals the powerful and deeply moving relationship between a brilliant though mentally ill mother and the precocious, gifted young son she never ceases to love. Originally contained within the monumental House of Leaves, this collection stands alone as a stunning portrait of mother and child. It is presented here along with a foreword by Walden D. Wyhrta and eleven previously unavailable letters.

The Bridge Home

The Bridge Home
Author: Padma Venkatraman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1524738131

"Readers will be captivated by this beautifully written novel about young people who must use their instincts and grit to survive. Padma infuses her story with hope and bravery that will inspire readers."--Aisha Saeed, author of the New York Times Bestseller Amal Unbound Four determined homeless children make a life for themselves in Padma Venkatraman's stirring middle-grade debut. Life is harsh on the teeming streets of Chennai, India, so when runaway sisters Viji and Rukku arrive, their prospects look grim. Very quickly, eleven-year-old Viji discovers how vulnerable they are in this uncaring, dangerous world. Fortunately, the girls find shelter--and friendship--on an abandoned bridge that's also the hideout of Muthi and Arul, two homeless boys, and the four of them soon form a family of sorts. And while making their living scavenging the city's trash heaps is the pits, the kids find plenty to take pride in, too. After all, they are now the bosses of themselves and no longer dependent on untrustworthy adults. But when illness strikes, Viji must decide whether to risk seeking help from strangers or to keep holding on to their fragile, hard-fought freedom.

The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
Author: Randy Pausch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Cancer
ISBN: 9780340978504

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

House of Leaves

House of Leaves
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 738
Release: 2000-03-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0375420525

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Leaving Orbit

Leaving Orbit
Author: Margaret Lazarus Dean
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1555973418

Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a breathtaking elegy to the waning days of human spaceflight as we have known it In the 1960s, humans took their first steps away from Earth, and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. But in a time of austerity and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that dream has ended. In early 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era. With Dean as our guide to Florida's Space Coast and to the history of NASA, Leaving Orbit takes the measure of what American spaceflight has achieved while reckoning with its earlier witnesses, such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Oriana Fallaci. Along the way, Dean meets NASA workers, astronauts, and space fans, gathering possible answers to the question: What does it mean that a spacefaring nation won't be going to space anymore?

Dodger

Dodger
Author: Tim Carroll
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0762794208

The Dodger is the story of John Bigelow "Johnny" Dodge, a wartime hero and a pivotal figure in the escapade immortalised in the legendary Hollywood film The Great Escape. The American-born and well-connected Dodge was a cousin by marriage of Winston Churchill and friends with the rich and famous of both countries, including Kermit Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt's son. When the Second World War broke out, he volunteered for the Army but was quickly captured after the debacle of Dunkirk. He became a prisoner of war and an inveterate escapologist and troublemaker - eventually becoming one of the ringleaders of the "Great Escape." Surviving the murderous Gestapo, he was thrown into a VIP compound of Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the orders of Heinrich Himmler - but escaped once more. After recapture, Johnny was spirited away by the SS to a meeting in Berlin with Hitler's interpreter, who sent him on a clandestine mission to his cousin in Downing Street. His odyssey through the dying embers of the Third Reich to Switzerland and freedom in the company of a louche apparatchik is the last curious escapade in the story of Johnny's adventurous life.