Hard Rain Falling

Author : Don Carpenter
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590173902
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hard Rain Falling written by Don Carpenter and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2010-06-23 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling is a tough-as-nails account of being down and out, but never down for good—a Dostoyevskian tale of crime, punishment, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive redemption. The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary confinement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class—married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But neither Jack nor Billy can escape their troubled pasts, and they will meet again in San Quentin before their strange double drama comes to a violent and revelatory end.

Author : Norman Mailer
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0812986083
Total Pages : 658 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mind of an Outlaw written by Norman Mailer and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE GLOBE AND MAIL Norman Mailer was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American letters and an acknowledged master of the essay. Mind of an Outlaw, the first posthumous publication from this outsize literary icon, collects Mailer’s most important and representative work in the form that many rank as his most electrifying. As America’s foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life—on the airwaves and in print—for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics. Here is Mailer on boxing, Mailer on Hemingway, Mailer on Marilyn Monroe, and, of course, Mailer on Mailer—the one subject that served as the beating heart of all of his nonfiction. From his early essay “A Credo for the Living,” published in 1948, when the author was twenty-five, to his final writings in the year before his death, Mailer wrestled with the big themes of his times. He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. Mind of an Outlaw spans the full arc of Mailer’s evolution as a writer, including such essential pieces as his acclaimed 1957 meditation on hipsters, “The White Negro”; multiple selections from his seminal collection Advertisements for Myself; and a never-before-published essay on Sigmund Freud. Incendiary, erudite, and unrepentantly outrageous, Norman Mailer was a dominating force on the battlefield of ideas. Featuring an incisive Introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Mind of an Outlaw forms a fascinating portrait of Mailer’s intellectual development across the span of his career as well as the preoccupations of a nation in the last half of the American century. Praise for Mind of an Outlaw “[Mailer’s] best and brightest.”—Esquire “The fifty essays collected in this retrospective volume span sixty-four years and show [Norman] Mailer (1923–2007) at his brawny, pugnacious, and egotistical best. . . . This provocative collection brims with insights and reflections that show why Mailer is regarded as a great literary mind of his generation.”—Publishers Weekly “The selections open a window onto the capacious mind and process of one of the most volatile intellects of the twentieth century.”—Library Journal “Vintage Mailer: brilliant, infuriating, witty and never, ever boring.”—Tampa Bay Times “As good an introduction to Mailer’s habits of mind as there’s ever been.”—Kirkus Reviews “There’s no arguing about Mailer the essayist—he was outstanding. . . . These insightful essays educate, argue and persuade on everything from politics and literature to film, philosophy and the human condition.”—Shelf Awareness

Author : Leonard Gardner
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590178939
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fat City written by Leonard Gardner and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring -- the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger - their brief bout sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Ernie into the company of men and luring Tully back into training. In a dispassionate and composed voice, Gardner narrates their swings of fortune, and the plodding optimism of their manager Ruben Luna, as he watches the most promising boys one by one succumb to some undefined weakness; still, "There was always someone who wanted to fight."

Author : John Ketwig
Publisher : Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 1402224737
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book ...and a hard rain fell written by John Ketwig and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A magnetic, bloody, moving, and worm's-eye view of soldiering in Vietnam, an account that is from the first page to last a wound that can never heal. A searing gift to his country."-Kirkus Reviews The classic Vietnam war memoir, ...and a hard rain fell is the unforgettable story of a veteran's rage and the unflinching portrait of a young soldier's odyssey from the roads of upstate New York to the jungles of Vietnam. Updated for its 20th anniversary with a new afterword on the Iraq War and its parallels to Vietnam, John Ketwig's message is as relevant today as it was twenty years ago. "Solidly effective. He describes with ingenuous energy and authentic language that time and place."-Library Journal "Perhaps as evocative of that awful time in Vietnam as the great fictions...a wild surreal account, at its best as powerful as Celine's darkling writing of World War One."-Washington Post

Author : Jon Land
Publisher : Forge Books
ISBN 13 : 9781250248510
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Strong Rain Falling written by Jon Land and published by Forge Books. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jon Land's bestselling series featuring Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong continues in Strong Rain Falling. Mexico, 1919: The birth of the Mexican drug trade begins with opium being smuggled across the U.S. border, igniting an all-out battle with American law enforcement in general and the Texas Rangers in particular. The Present: Fifth Generation Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong and her lover Cort Wesley Masters both survive terrifying gun battles. But this time, it turns out, the actual targets were not them, but Masters' teenage sons. That sets Caitlin and Cort Wesley off on a trail winding through the past and present with nothing less than the future of the United States hanging in the balance. Along the way they will confront terrible truths dating all the way back to the Mexican Revolution and the dogged battle Caitlin's own grandfather and great-grandfather fought against the first generation of Mexican drug dealers. At the heart of the storm soon to sweep away America as we know it, lies a mastermind whose abundant power is equaled only by her thirst for vengeance. Ana Callas Guajardo, the last surviving member of the family that founded the Mexican drug trade, has dedicated all of her vast resources to a plot aimed at the U.S.'s technological heart. This time out, sabotage proves to be as deadly a weapon as bombs in a battle Caitlin must win in cyberspace as well. Her only chance to prevail is to short-circuit a complex plan based as much on microchips as bullets. Because there's a strong rain coming and only Caitlin and Cort Wesley can stop the fall before it's too late.

Author : Charlie LeDuff
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143124463
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Detroit written by Charlie LeDuff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An explosive exposé of America’s lost prosperity by Pulitzer Prize­–winning journalist Charlie LeDuff “One cannot read Mr. LeDuff's amalgam of memoir and reportage and not be shaken by the cold eye he casts on hard truths . . . A little gonzo, a little gumshoe, some gawker, some good-Samaritan—it is hard to ignore reporting like Mr. LeDuff's.” —The Wall Street Journal “Pultizer-Prize-winning journalist LeDuff . . . writes with honesty and compassion about a city that’s destroying itself–and breaking his heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A book full of both literary grace and hard-won world-weariness.” —Kirkus Back in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches the ruins of Detroit for clues to his family’s troubled past. Having led us on the way up, Detroit now seems to be leading us on the way down. Once the richest city in America, Detroit is now the nation’s poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age—mass-production, blue-collar jobs, and automobiles—Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, dropouts, and foreclosures. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark, and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses, LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He beats on the doors of union bosses and homeless squatters, powerful businessmen and struggling homeowners and the ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. Detroit: An American Autopsy is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer.

Author : Darcy O'Brien
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1497658713
Total Pages : 121 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Way of Life, Like Any Other written by Darcy O'Brien and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This PEN/Hemingway Award winner about coming of age in Los Angeles is a “little gem of a novel . . . a masterwork of Hollywood fiction” (Salon). He’s a child of 1940s Hollywood—specifically, Casa Fiesta, a ranch in the Malibu hills that he shares with his mother, a onetime Broadway headliner, and his father, a star of Westerns. But when his parents fall out of favor in Tinseltown, the narrator of this exquisitely crafted dark comedy loses his youthful idyll and accompanies his lovesick mother on a vodka-soaked international quest for romance and redemption. Meanwhile, his father lives in “diminished circumstances” in California, clinging to his silver-screen mementos, trusting that, someday soon, his ex-wife and his career will return. Tired of tending bar at his mother’s parties and listening to his father’s sad tales of former glory, the boy moves in with his best friend’s family in Beverly Hills. But nothing in La-La Land is quite what it seems, and when his new home turns out to be just as dysfunctional as the last, our teenage hero must somehow learn to accept his parents while finding the courage to break free and become his own man. This award-winning novel, “a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the Cheap Trick generation” (GQ), was cited by the Guardian as one of the “ten best neglected literary masterpieces.” Written by a New York Times–bestselling author who was a child of Hollywood movie stars himself, it has been praised for its “spectacularly deadpan humor” by the Atlantic Monthly and called “an insightful coming-of-age tale” by the Austin Chronicle.

Author : Neal Stephenson
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062190415
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Seveneves written by Neal Stephenson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years. What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

Author : Georges Simenon
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590175581
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dirty Snow written by Georges Simenon and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-11-23 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother’s whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go. Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as “one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right.” In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no man’s land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.

Author : William Lindsay Gresham
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590174283
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nightmare Alley written by William Lindsay Gresham and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon to be a major motion picture from Academy Award–winning director Guillermo del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Toni Collette. Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.