Margarets summer isn't what she expected. There was a death of a family member that was really close to her and that was her sister. Her parents give up on raising the kids after her sisters death. When she needs help no one is there for her she lives a hard life. She tried to recover from all th...
Probably most of us have read “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank in our teen years. All of my children also read it in their 7th grade Calvert curriculum some 10-20 years ago. I saw the high school play while a teen (at Central Christian, Julia!) and my children’s home school academy also ...
I liked this book and the Albanian main character who is trying to figure out American life. Lula is the live-in caretaker for a high school student, a precarious job for her, since everyone she meets assumes that she is sleeping with his father, the man she calls Mister Stanley. The book descr...
"... there is, in the ocean of generations, an Aphrodisian current whence every such Venus is born, all daughters of the same salt wave..."Can't say I'll be reading a long list of Balzac titles in my near-future. There is a longstanding tradition of the French bedroom farce out there, and while ...
A Changed Man begins with an ex-white supremacist walking into a human rights organization’s office to offer his services: he wants to “help guys like me from becoming guys like me.” The subject matter allows Prose to flex her satire muscles, which by this point are quite developed. In this case,...
Overflowing in both talent and self-regard, Caravaggio (1571-1610) remains an enigma. He left behind no diaries or letters to convey his thoughts. Instead, contemporaries chose to chronicle his quarrels, profligate drinking and gambling, violent altercations and hurried escapes from vengeful fact...
A conflict of cultures is the backdrop for this early Francine Prose novel. Simone decides to flee Haiti (it's the very unsettled early 1990s). Her lover has cheated; there's no reason to stay, every reason to flee to the U.S. So she finds a way.Simone finds her way to Hudson's Landing, New York,...
What better start to a story than, Joseph Santangelo, the butcher, wins his bride, Catherine Falconetti, in a pinochle game with her father and brother. During a heat wave, Joseph bets a walk into the meat freezer and Lino bets his daughter's hand. A bet is bet in the close knit Italian neighbo...
The Glorious Ones travel the length and breadth of seventeenth-century Italy, playing commedia dell'arte in the streets and palaces with equal vigor. Founded by the ingenious madman Flamino Scala, the small company of players endures kidnappings and passionate affairs, cabals, riots, disgrace—all...
“Blue Angel,” written by Francine Prose (who has the greatest name for a novelist ever), emits the beautiful, multi-colored flames as a large structure falls to ash. It is worth a look, or a read, despite its failure. One, the book is filled with cardboard characters. The supporting characters, i...
A blending of art and cultural criticism, travel writing, and personal narrative, Sicilian Odyssey is Francine Prose's imaginative consideration of the diverse cultural legacies found juxtaposed and entangled on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. She writes of the intensity of Sicily, the "commi...
New edition of a classic adventure novel and one of the most startling, highly praised stories in English literature--a brilliant chronicle of two sensitive children's violent voyage from innocence to experience. After a terrible hurricane levels their Jamaican estate, the Bas-Thorntons decide t...
A really smart, satisfying read. Both of the stories deal with Americans abroad in Europe for reasons of cultural tourism. Both protagonists grapple with darkness and severity, they see whorehouses, catacombs, animal slaughter, the gas chamber of a concentration camp...I'm not sure if there's a c...
Prose has assembled here a collection of her stories which dissect at seemingly functional lives, for what an outsider would take as such. In the tradition of Cheever, she allows us to see into the nagging conscious of a character to see what is probably true of all our lives, nothing is certain,...
This unusual novel follows Vera, a single mother living in New York City and working at a tabloid called This Week. Vera writes stories about outlandish creatures, weird occurrences and the unbelievable. She makes all the stories up. Her brain is constantly thinking up lurid headlines for everyth...
After eighth grader Bart Rangely is granted a mercy scholarship to an elite private school after his father is killed in the North Tower on 9/11, doors should have opened. Instead, he is terrorized and bullied by his own mentor. So begins the worst year of his life.
Penguin Classics is proud to welcome William Trevor—"Ireland’s answer to Chekhov" (The Boston Globe) and "one of the best writers of our era" (The Washington Post)—to our distinguished list of literary masters. In this award-winning novel, an informer’s body is found on the estate of a wealthy Ir...
Just the inner circle this time, they’d come back to the beach to participate in a ritual involving much antiphonal chanting about preparing for the coming dark by embracing the darkness within them. “What season is coming?” Isis intoned. “The season of shadows,” chanted the women. “Where are the...
I loved driving around with Aaron. Our rides never lasted long enough. But as my father and I set out on our Great Disappointment road trip, every mile took forever. The houses were shabby, the barns half collapsed, the countryside depressed me. Dad said, “Did I ever tell you that Miller got most...
Doug’s office is full of primitive masks. I focused on a cone of ropy hair as he told us about the Amazonian tribe which, when too much went wrong, sent someone out to kill a jaguar and bury it under the headman’s house. I said, “We can do in the hamster.” “Hamster?” said Doug. “Murph,” said Beth...
“Your Honor, I object to counsel’s use of the word assault.” “Objection sustained.” “Are the boys who molested you present in the courtroom?” “Objection, Your Honor. Molested is inflammatory.” “Sustained.” “Are the boys who touched you inappropriately on the school bus here today in the courtroom...
But a very strange thing just happened. A huge seagull had been flying alongside the ferry ever since we left the dock. The seagull was escorting us, or really, escorting me, flying as fast as it had to, in order to stay right beside me, just beyond the railing. If I moved down the deck, it moved...
my mother used to say, “ask a woman who loves you to do it.” She was talking about herself, of course—but was she also making a prediction? Is that why I’ve never gotten anything done in my life, mother? Because I’ve never found a woman who loved me? “Don’t kill yourself with self-pity,” I can he...
That is all one needs to write, and already the reader knows who was hiding in the attic and the fate about to befall them. We know it more than sixty years later, at a historical moment when it is often noted how little history we remember. We know the reason why we know, but it bears repeating ...
continued the Rabbi Eliezer, “Judah ben Simon accidentally encountered Jeremiah Vinograd once again. Preoccupied by the conversation he had just had with Rachel Anna, the young man would never have noticed the mountebank, had he not spotted his brilliant scarlet turban gleaming on top of a dry, s...
When Zeke woke at noon, Mister Stanley, apparently having forgotten his plans to ignore the holiday, asked if Zeke wanted to go help pick out a Christmas tree. Zeke said, “What kind of sick trees do you think will be left on Christmas Eve?” Mister S...
He edges away from the new fiction section, turns, faces into the library, then does another slow, shuffling turn, reminding Alvar of how once, at the Franklin Park Zoo, he peeked behind a fence and saw a large caribou, sick or maybe crazy, trembling, painfully stepping forward and back. Sarkisia...
He had been in exile, on the run, for the last four years of his life. He slept fully clothed, with his dagger by his side. He believed that his enemies were closing in on him and that they intended to kill him. He was wanted for murder in Rome, for stabbing a man in a duel that was said to have ...
As he hit their skulls with a mallet, the children began to sing, percussive chimes that turned into the sound of someone banging on Nina’s door. Nina flew out of bed and opened the door before she’d had time to wonder why anyone would be knocking. In another hotel she might have assumed it was t...
Years earlier, I’d seen her throw a javelin at the Vélodrome d’Hiver. After walking away from a promising athletic career, she resurfaced as a “dancer” at the Chameleon Club. There her duties involved clumping around in a sailor suit and lifting Arlette, her tramp of a girlfriend, in their crude ...