Fra Keeler

Fra Keeler
Author: Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2012-10-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0984469346

The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.

Call Me Zebra

Call Me Zebra
Author: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2018
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0544944607

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction "Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you."--Wall Street Journal "A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bola o and Borges." --New York Times Book Review Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Bestseller Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29, Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Read It Forward, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature--even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love. Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions--until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past. An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author "on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement" (Bustle).

Savage Tongues

Savage Tongues
Author: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-08-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0358695309

A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi--"if you don't know this name yet, you should" (Entertainment Weekly)--about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection. It's summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood. Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she's long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries. Equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Clarice Lispector, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain, and the life-long search for healing.

Dear Incomprehension

Dear Incomprehension
Author: Stéphane Vanderhaeghe
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2024
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0817361375

"Dear Incomprehension tackles a broad swath of contemporary literature currently labeled "speculative fiction." A blurring of genres that includes science fiction, modern fairy tales, and avant-garde experimental fiction, these works are extremely popular but also derive from highly sophisticated philosophical and aesthetic sensibilities, ones that call into question and uproot the very foundations of stories and storytelling. Because such fictions subvert most conventional narrative devices-plot, recognizable characters, verisimilitude, logic, legibility-they deliberately confound almost any kind of conventional reading and criticism. So, what do you do with a text that cannot be conventionally read or understood? To do such a literature justice, the traditional frameworks of literary criticism fail, and Dear Incomprehension is more of an extended philosophical essay than it is a traditional work of criticism, as oblique and unconventional in its voice, tone, and methods as the texts it illuminates"--

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Author: E.L. Konigsburg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2010-12-21
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1442431261

Now available in a deluxe keepsake edition! A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) Run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with E. L. Konigsburg’s beloved classic and Newbery Medal­–winning novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. When Claudia decided to run away, she planned very carefully. She would be gone just long enough to teach her parents a lesson in Claudia appreciation. And she would go in comfort-she would live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She saved her money, and she invited her brother Jamie to go, mostly because be was a miser and would have money. Claudia was a good organizer and Jamie bad some ideas, too; so the two took up residence at the museum right on schedule. But once the fun of settling in was over, Claudia had two unexpected problems: She felt just the same, and she wanted to feel different; and she found a statue at the Museum so beautiful she could not go home until she bad discovered its maker, a question that baffled the experts, too. The former owner of the statue was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Without her—well, without her, Claudia might never have found a way to go home.

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Author: Patrick Cottrell
Publisher: McSweeney's
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2017-06-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1944211314

Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead. According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive. A bleakly comic tour de force that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett and Bowles—and it announces the singular voice of Patty Yumi Cottrell.

Atmospheric Disturbances

Atmospheric Disturbances
Author: Rivka Galchen
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2008-05-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780374200114

At once a moving love story, a dark comedy, a psychological thriller, and a deeply disturbing portrait of a fracturing mind, this highly inventive debut explores the mysterious nature of human relationships.

Fatherless Daughter

Fatherless Daughter
Author: A Morel Brown
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2016-11-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9780692781685

Fatherless Daughter A Different Perspective is not only a book, but a tool that can aid in forgiveness, healing, and recognition of your Spiritual Father. There are several activities inside that are designed to help you discover things about yourself that will encourage growth and there also perspectives of other women experiences with fatherlessness and how they overcame. Being fatherless is not a disease or a curse, and while the circumstances may not be ideal, it should be faced and embraced. Be prepared to cry, laugh, learn, and apply while engaging in this page turning life changer.

Death Is Hard Work

Death Is Hard Work
Author: Khaled Khalifa
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374717648

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria’s ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination. Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone. With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.