Showing results for "But" in Literary Fiction

A national best seller upon its publication, Anywhere but Here is a moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer. As they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions, Ann and Adele bring to life a novel that is a brilliant exploration of the perennial urge to keep moving, even at the risk of profound disorientation. Simpson's first novel is ultimately a heart-rending tale of a mother and daughter's invaluable relationship.

From the bestselling author of Fight Club comes a hilarious horror satire “equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch” (Kirkus Reviews) about a family of professional killers responsible for the most atrocious events in history and the young brothers that are destined to take...

Persephone spends six months of the year under the ground with her husband, king of the dead, and six months on earth with her mother, goddess of the harvest. It has been this way for 9000 years, since the deal was struck. But when she resurfaces this spring, something is different. Rains lash the land, crops grow out of season or not at all, there are people trying to build a road through the woods, and her mother does not seem able to stop them. The natural world is changing rapidly and even the gods have lost control.

Like the small towns J. California Cooper has so deftly portrayed in her previous novels and story collections, Wideland, Oklahoma, is home to ordinary Americans struggling to raise families, eke out a living, and fulfill their dreams. In the early twentieth century, Irene and Val fall in love...

For fans of Dolly Alderton and HBO’s Hacks, a whip-smart, laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about faking it (and “making it”) as a writer in Hollywood. TV writer Caroline Neumann is thirty-four and mired in professional envy and self-hatred. Even Harry, her usually supportive therapist...

Thomas McGuane's high-spirited and fiercely lyrical new novel chronicles the fall and rise of Frank Copenhaver, a man so unhinged by his wife's departure that he finds himself ruining his business, falling in love with the wrong women, and wandering the lawns of his neighborhood, desperate for the merest glimpse of normalcy.

Set in an alternate reality where pregnancy endows women with exceptional powers, one new mother uncovers terrifying truths about herself and life in this philosophical and propulsive tale of a woman and mother in crisis. In a world where drastic measures have averted the global environmental...

A native Texan, Edwin “Bud” Shrake has written more than two dozen works and is best known for "The Borderland", which was named one of the 10 best books of 2000 by the "Los Angeles Times". Fort Worth lawyer Ben Carpenter’s 30th birthday party turns into a bizarre trip across the Mexican border. And things get even stranger when he finds himself in a confrontation with a dangerous legal opponent.

Over six feet tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, Billy looks like an Adonis. But he is not the full shilling; one slice less than a sandwich. When you meet him, you might not notice at first, but after a couple of minutes, it becomes apparent. He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. In Billy’s mind, he’s a superhero: a righter of wrongs, a saver of souls, and that’s where it all goes wrong. At the bus stop, he meets and talks with people as he goes to work, and they all look at Billy a different way.

For most people, going to college is the beginning of their lives away from their parents, when they search for the meaning of their lives. Not so for Bobbie Lamont, who chooses to stay at home with her parents instead of moving away. After graduating from Saint. Augustine Academy for Girls and then falling in love with Malcolm Pryce, Bobbie was ready for the next stage of her life, attending college at Tulane University. Once again, her only friend is Billie Carver, who is also attending Tulane.

A woman flees the hospital even as her infant son is breathing his last breaths. An aging construction worker comes to grips with the end of the only life he's ever known. A deadbeat father meets his son for the first time, only to be blindsided by the boy's birth defect. A man steals a corpse in order to give his father the burial he wanted.

Billy Bradshaw is only 12 when a juvenile court judge sentences him to community service, and throws him to the care of six aging Bohemians in the Liberty Street Home for the Elderly. Billy's summer takes an unexpected turn when a new administrator arrives to Liberty Street, planning to get rid of the troublesome denizens of Hall B. Billy decides to save the home the Bohemians have created, and he doesn't face the challenge alone. Aided by Cassidy, the administrator's eccentric daughter, Billy embarks on a journey through the seedy New Orleans underground.

Joy Bergman is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would prefer. She won't take their advice, and she won't take an antidepressant. Her marriage to their father, Aaron, has lasted through health and dementia, as well as some phenomenally lousy business...

God Sees the Truth, But Waits is a short story by Russian author Leo Tolstoy first published in 1872. The story, about a man sent to prison for a murder he did not commit, takes the form of a parable of forgiveness. English translations were also published under titles "The Confessed Crime", "Exiled to Siberia", and "The Long Exile". The concept of the story of a man wrongfully accused of murder and banished to Siberia also appears in one of Tolstoy's previous works, War and Peace, during a philosophical discussion between two characters who relate the story and argue how the protagonist of their story deals with injustice and fate.

Eight-year-old Leeza hates the boys on twenty-fifth street. Worse than anything, she thinks, after they spit on her and tell her she smells. At home, Leeza's stepmother shows her no sympathy, scrubbing her skin raw and ordering her to chew gum. When the teasing from the "beady-eyed" twins on twenty-fifth takes a dangerous turn, so does the tension between Leeza, her stepmother, and her father.

"Oh, If I Could But Shiver!" is a German folktale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It is tale number 4 in the collection. It was also included by Andrew Lang in The Blue Fairy Book (1889). - The Grimms' first, 1812 edition contained a much shorter version, "Good Bowling and Card Playing". - It is classified as its own Aarne-Thompson index type 326 of a male protagonist's unsuccessful attempts to learn fear, which eventually leads to his awareness of mortality. A father had two sons.

To everyone who knows her, 28-year-old Marcia leads the perfect life. But beneath the shiny surface lurks another reality. Plagued by panic attacks brought on by her family's wartime legacy and exacerbated by the news, Marcia is convinced that "demons" occupy her closet - and her mind. Determined to conceal her secret life, Marcia is pushed closer and closer to a breaking point. Desperate to rid herself of her "demons", she concocts a plan, hoping to be reborn as a new person. Soon, she discovers this creates its own problems. Can she find another path out of her psychic pain?