Slow Homecoming

Slow Homecoming
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590173074

By Nobel Prize Winner Peter Handke Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self-questioning and self-discovery, Slow Homecoming is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness, a voyage that is fraught and fearful but ultimately restorative, ending on an unexpected note of joy. The book begins in America. Writing with the jarring intensity of his early work, Handke introduces Valentin Sorger, a troubled geologist who has gone to Alaska to lose himself in his work, but now feels drawn back home: on his way to Europe he moves in ominous disorientation through the great cities of America. The second part of the book, “The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire,” identifies Sorger as a projection of the author, who now writes directly about his own struggle to reconstitute himself and his art by undertaking a pilgrimage to the great mountain that Cézanne painted again and again. Finally, “Child Story” is a beautifully observed, deeply moving account of a new father—not so much Sorger or the author as a kind of Everyman—and his love for his growing daughter.

Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming

Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 586
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811226654

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE "Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece" (The Millions); "Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad" (Publishers Weekly); "One of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature" (Paris Review); "Obsessive and visionary" (The New Yorker); "Genius" (The Baffler) At last, the capstone to Krasznahorkai’s four-part masterwork Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor—a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town—offers long rants and disquisitions on his attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged as death and the abyss loom over the unsuspecting townfolk.

The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming

The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming
Author: Sienna Tristen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2018-04-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781775242703

A vivid coming-of-age story that explores the struggles of chronic anxiety and self-doubt within a richly-detailed fantasy setting. Ronoah Genoveffa despairs of fulfilling his spiritual identity, until he begins a cross-continental pilgrimage with an otherworldly mentor. Immersive worldbuilding and mythology meet visceral emotional case study.

Mercy Thompson

Mercy Thompson
Author: Patricia Briggs
Publisher: Del Rey/Dabel Brothers
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2009
Genre: Automobile mechanics
ISBN: 0345509889

Includes art gallery and an interview with the author.

Short Letter, Long Farewell

Short Letter, Long Farewell
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 181
Release: 1974
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374263183

Short Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke's novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America---from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything's spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, Short Letter, Long Farewell is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life---or the corpse of an old one---lying just around the corner.

Homecoming King

Homecoming King
Author: Penny Reid
Publisher: Cipher-Naught
Total Pages: 671
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1942874715

Rex "TW" McMurtry’s perpetual single-hood wouldn't bother him so much if all his ex-girlfriends didn't keep marrying the very next person they dated, especially when so many of those grooms are his closest friends. He may be a pro-football defensive end for the Chicago Squalls, but the press only wants to talk about how he's always a groomsman and never a groom. Rex is sick of being the guy before the husband, and he’s most definitely sick of being the best man at all their weddings. Bartender Abigail McNerny is the gal-pal, the wing-woman, the she-BFF. She's dated. Once. And once was more than enough. Privy to all the sad stories of her customers, ‘contentment over commitment’ is her motto, and Abby is convinced no one on earth could ever entice her into a romantic relationship . . . except that one guy she’s loved since preschool. The guy who just walked into her bar. The guy who doesn’t recognize her. The guy who is drunk and needs a ride home. The guy who has a proposition she should definitely refuse.

Four Treasures of the Sky

Four Treasures of the Sky
Author: Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250811791

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK · A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE · REVIEWED ON THE FRONT COVER · INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “Zhang’s blend of history and magical realism will appeal to fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer as well as Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement.” —Booklist (starred review) "Engrossing...Epic" (The New York Times Book Review) · "Transporting" (Washington Post) · "Propulsive" (Oprah Daily) · "Surreal and sprawling" (NPR) · "An absolute must-read" (BuzzFeed) · "Radiant" (BookPage) A dazzling debut novel set against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, about a Chinese girl fighting to claim her place in the 1880s American West Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school, to a San Francisco brothel, to a shop tucked into the Idaho mountains, we follow Daiyu on a desperate quest to outrun the tragedy that chases her. As anti-Chinese sentiment sweeps across the country in a wave of unimaginable violence, Daiyu must draw on each of the selves she has been—including the ones she most wants to leave behind—in order to finally claim her own name and story. At once a literary tour de force and a groundbreaking work of historical fiction, Four Treasures of the Sky announces Jenny Tinghui Zhang as an indelible new voice. Steeped in untold history and Chinese folklore, this novel is a spellbinding feat.

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2015-12-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 146689539X

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's evocative, moving, often fantastic, short novel about one man's conflict with himself and his journey toward resolution. During one night shift, an unnamed, middle-aged pharmacist in Taxham, an isolated suburb of Salzburg, tells his story to a narrator. The pharmacist is known and well-respected, but lonely and estranged from his wife. He feels most comfortable wandering about in nature, collecting and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. One day he receives a blow to the head that leaves him unable to speak, and the narrative is transformed from ironic description into a collection of sensual impressions, observations and reflections. The pharmacist, who is now called the driver, sets out on a quest, travelling into the Alps with two companions—a former Olympic skiing champion and a formerly famous poet--where he is beaten and later stalked by a woman. He drives through a tunnel and has a premonition of death, then finds himself in a surreal, foreign land. In a final series of bizarre, cathartic events, the driver regains his speech and is taken back to his pharmacy—back to his former life, but forever changed. A powerful, poetic exploration of language, longing and dislocation in the human experience, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House reveals Handke at his magical best.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1782270302

"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better go to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the nerves of her suicide." So begins Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the almost intolerable horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life, as he perceives them. What emerges is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, a woman whose lively spirit has been crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. Yet well into middle age, living in the Austrian village of her birth, she still remains haunted by her dreams.

Homecoming

Homecoming
Author: Lacey Baker
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2013-04-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781250019226

When he returns home to Sweetland after the death of his grandmother, Dr. Quinn Cantrell, who is still haunted by a relationship that ended tragically, is reunited with his siblings and his old acquaintance Nikki Brockington.