text:
Mentioned in:
Most Anticipated: The Great 2014 Book Preview
Last year offered many treats for readers: long-awaited new books by Donna Tartt and Norman Rush; the emergence of Rachel Kushner as a literary superstar; the breakout success of George Saunders. 2014 offers more riches. This year we'll get to crack open new books by E.L. Doctorow, Richard Powers, Sue Monk Kidd, Lorrie Moore, Teju Cole, Mona Simpson, Lydia Davis, and Peter Matthiessen. Our own Edan Lepucki and Bill Morris will have new books on shelves in a few months. Look ahead to the hazy end of summer 2014 and a new novel by Haruki Murakami will be hitting American shores. All of these and many more are the books we're looking forward to this year.
The list that follows isn't exhaustive—no book preview could be—but, at 9,100 words strong and encompassing 89 titles, this is the only 2014 book preview you will ever need. Scroll down and get started.
January or Already Out:
Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart: Say what you will, but Shteyngart is putting the fun back in literary life. If you haven't yet seen the trailer for his fourth book and first memoir, Little Failure, well, start your new year with a giggle or two and be prepared to be delightfully convinced by the romantic (if not quite "erotic") affection between Shteyngart and James Franco in pink bathrobes. But seriously, folks—I'm guessing Adam Gopnik's blurb is just what the Chekhov-Roth-Apatow of Queens (now upstate) was hoping for: "I fully expected Gary Shteyngart's memoir of his search for love and sex in a Russian-Jewish-Queens-Oberlin upbringing to be as hilarious and indecorous and exact as it turns out to be; what I wasn't entirely prepared for was for a book so soulful and pained in its recounting of the feints and false starts and, well, little failures of family love. Portnoy meets Chekhov meets Shteyngart! What could be better?" (Sonya)
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd: Don't expect to find Sue Monk Kidd's third novel at the library anytime soon because Oprah has already selected it as her newest Book Club read. She praised the book as a "conversation changer" regarding how we think about womanhood and history. The novel follows two headstrong women trying to make a change in the Antebellum South. Sarah Grimke, the daughter of a Charleston plantation owner, trades slavery for abolitionism and the suffragist movement. Her slave Handful has equally progressive desires, and the two form an unlikely friendship. (Tess)
Andrew's Brain by E.L. Doctorow: Doctorow's latest novel, his twelfth, is "structured as an extended series of conversations between Andrew, a cognitive neuroscientist by training, and an unnamed man who initially appears to be his psychotherapist," according to Publishers Weekly. Their conversations focus on Andrew's guilt over giving up his daughter after her mother died. Given Doctorow's reputation as king of the American historical novel, it's worrying that early reviews complain of a lack of clarity about exactly when the story takes place, but no one dramatizes complex ideas better than Doctorow. (Michael)
The Scent of Pine by Lara Vapnyar: Lena is on the brink of an early midlife crisis: her career is stalled, she feels disconnected to her adopted country, and her marriage is faltering. She finds romance with a similarly lost academic, Ben, and the two embark on an affair in a cabin in Maine. Yet Lara Vapnyar's sophomore novel is more than just a sexy romp in the woods. Up north, Lena reflects on a romantic and mysterious summer she spent at a Soviet children's camp 20 years before. Early reviewers have called Vapnyar's latest a "Russian Scheherazade." (Tess)
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee: Many of Chang-rae Lee's novels are firmly grounded in reality, examining the worlds of displaced outsiders from the Korean War to the lives of immigrants in the present-day United States. His latest book leaps further afield, into the realm of speculative fiction, in a dystopian American future where declining urban neighborhoods have been transformed into "highwalled, self-contained labor colonies," whose Chinese immigrant residents work catching fish for the surrounding elites. As with any good dystopian work, it promises to highlight and draw parallels with growing inequalities in our own society, which might "change the way readers think about the world they live in." (Elizabeth)
Perfect by Rachel Joyce: When two seconds get added to clock time because "time was out of kilter with the natural movement of the Earth" in the 1970s, two young boys worry if the world will ever be the same. In the present day, a man is so crippled by his OCD that he struggles to maintain a normal life outside the psychiatric hospital. Rachel Joyce weaves these parallel narratives together in her highly anticipated followup to bestseller and Booker longlisted The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Perfect has garnered great reviews in the U.K. with Susanna Rustin at The Guardian lauding it as, "ambitious, darker and more honest." (Tess)
Orfeo by Richard Powers: Richard Powers' novels are often laced with serious science, with narratives that delve into the complexities of genetic engineering, computer coding, and cognitive disorders. In Orfeo Powers returns to the pairing of DNA coding and musicality from his Gold Bug Variations, with a tech-age take on the Orpheus myth. Orfeo follows a retired music professor who's built a DIY genetics lab where he finds musical patterns in DNA sequences. When his dog dies unexpectedly, the FBI seizes the lab, and he goes on the lam. It seems that DNA and music are inextricably paired for Powers, who noted in an essay on having his genome sequenced, "If the genome were a tune played at a nice bright allegro tempo of 120 beats per minute, it would take just short of a century to play." (Anne)
The Radiance of Tomorrow by Ishmael Beah: Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone's civil war, detailed his experiences of the conflict and its aftermath in his 2007 memoir, A Long Way Gone. His debut novel, which Edwidge Danticat has called "formidable and memorable," tells the story of two friends who return to their village after the war and their struggle to restore a sense of order and normalcy in the space between an unspeakable past and an uncertain future. (Emily)
Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus: At Columbia's M.F.A. Program, Ben Marcus teaches a course called "Technologies of Heartbreak"—a nifty coinage that also points to the two poles of Marcus's own aesthetic. In his mind-blowing story collection, The Age of Wire and String, and in the first novel that followed, Marcus gravitated toward the technological: meat masks, air bodies, soft machines… Seldom did one encounter a normal human being. But his most recent novel, The Flame Alphabet, placed wild invention at the service of more straightforward emotion. It'll be worth watching to see where Leaving the Sea comes down; it's likely to be good either way. (Garth)
A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World by Rachel Cantor: Anybody else miss Kurt Vonnegut? Rachel Cantor is here to fill the void with her debut novel, which mixes the comic with the speculative in a voice that one early reviewer described as "Terry Pratchett crossed with Douglas Adams." It's got time travel, medieval kabbalists, and yes, pizza. What more can you ask for? (Hannah)
Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball: In a small Japanese town, eight people disappear from their homes with only a playing card marking their doors and absences; one man, a thread salesman, confesses to the crimes and is put in jail, but refuses to speak. These disappearances form the mystery around which Jesse Ball's fourth novel, Silence Once Begun, is constructed, and which obsess a journalist who shares Ball's name. Interview transcripts make up the central text of a story ultimately concerned with speech, silence, and the control of information. (Anne)
The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani: Abani is both a novelist and a poet, and he brings a poet's instinct for sublime language to his latest work, a crime novel set in Las Vegas. Salazar, a detective, is determined to solve a string of recent murders before he retires. He enlists the help of an expert in psychopathy, Dr. Sunil Singh, who is haunted by a betrayal of his loved ones in apartheid South Africa. "Here in Vegas," Abani writes, "the glamor beguiled and blinded all but those truly intent on seeing, and in this way the tinsel of it mocked the obsessive hope of those who flocked there." (Emily)
A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald: In his seminal novels, the late W.G. Sebald more or less obliterated the line between essay and fiction, if one even existed in the first place. Here, Sebald explores the lives and work of Robert Walser, Gottfried Keller, and other artists. The book is labeled nonfiction, but one imagines that this capstone to the English translation of Sebald's work will offer many of the satisfactions of his novels. (Garth)
Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor: Along with his colleague Matt Bell, Kyle Minor was the subject of a flame war in a recent comment thread here at The Millions. But the imputation of log-rolling struck me as unfair. As someone who's never met, spoken with, or seen Kyle Minor, I can say that the Guernica excerpt of his as-yet-unpublished novel, The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, was one of the more memorable pieces of fiction by a young writer I read in 2012. I guess we'll have to wait a while longer to see the rest, but in the meantime, Minor's latest story collection, Praying Drunk, promises to explore some of the same territory. (Garth)
Bark by Lorrie Moore: New Lorrie Moore! Let us rejoice! Bark is Lorrie Moore's first short story collection since the miraculous and magnificent Birds of America came out fifteen years ago. Some of these eight stories might be familiar; The New Yorker published "Debarking" back in 2003, and "The Juniper Tree" in 2005. All of these stories, new to you or not, should be about as pun-filled, clever, and devastating as we've come to expect from Moore, who is arguably the best American short story writer alive today. (Edan)
MFA vs. NYC: Two Cultures of American Fiction edited by Chad Harbach: Although its title and implied dichotomy will pain any person who writes things and is neither an MFA-holder nor connected with the NYC publishing scene, Chad Harbach's collection of commentaries on the two major drivers of the literary economy promises to deliver valuable collective insight on the current state of writing in America. Harbach first conceived this dichotomy in 2010 in an essay for n+1 (available online at Slate), wherein he made intriguing and provocative statements on, among other things, the rise of the MFA program ("an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market") and argued that the "university now rivals, if it hasn't surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world." The book will feature contributions from writers, editors, and teachers at various stages of their careers, including George Saunders, Elif Batuman, Keith Gessen, Maria Adelmann, Emily Gould, and Alexander Chee. (Lydia)
Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li: Two things intrigue me right off the bat about Yiyun Li's new novel—its title, and this, from the publisher: "Kinder Than Solitude is the story of three people whose lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed." A murder mystery! And from a writer as patient, observant, and precise as Li. Given Li's gifts of insight into human nature, the story will surely evolve less around whodunit? and more around what really happened? and does it matter? The eponymous kindness seems to have been bestowed upon one of the three friends, Moran, by a man who was once her husband, at a time when she fled into—and presumably believed in the kindness of—solitude; all of which is yet more intriguing. (Sonya)
The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol: Molly Antopol's debut is a collection about characters lost in the labyrinth of recent history. Stories are set against various geographical and historical backdrops—the McCarthy witch hunt, Communist-era Prague, Israeli settlements. The book has been accumulating some promising advance praise. Adam Johnson, for instance, has written that "Not since Robert Stone has a writer so examined the nature of disillusionment and the ways in which newfound hope can crack the cement of failed dreams." Antopol was named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" last year. (Mark)
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine: The narrator of Rabih Alameddine's fourth novel is reclusive seventy-two-year-old Aaliya Sobi, who lives alone in an apartment in Beirut who spends her time translating books into Arabic and then stowing them away, never to be read. The book is an exploration of Aaliya's inner life—of her memories of Lebanon's troubled recent history and her own turbulent past, and of her thoughts on literature and art. Colm Tóibín has compared it to Calvino and Borges, describing it as a "fiercely original act of creation". (Mark)
Thirty Girls by Susan Minot: In 1996, The Lord's Resistance Army kidnapped a group of 139 young teenage girls from a convent school in Uganda, holding them captive. The deputy headmistress of their school, Sister Rachele Fassera, pursued the kidnappers and negotiated the release of 109 of the girls; the remaining thirty were kept and subjected to a long ordeal of captivity and brutality. Susan Minot's new novel, Thirty Girls, is a fictionalized account of this mass abduction and its aftermath. Minot tells the stories of these abductees, interweaving them with that of an American journalist named Jane Wood who is interviewing them about their experiences. In 2012, Minot published an extract of the same name in Granta's "Exit Strategies" issue. (Mark)
Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux: The British broadcaster and novelist Marcel Theroux, a son of Paul Theroux, wants to have it all in his fifth novel. Strange Bodies is a high-concept literary thriller that flirts with science fiction while making inquiries into language, identity and what it means to be human. The concept is this: Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months, yet one day he turns up to visit an old girlfriend. He leaves behind a flash drive containing something as unbelievable as he is—a cache of letters supposedly written by Samuel Johnson. This smart novel's central conceit is that we are all, like books, made of words. (Bill)
The News: A User's Manual by Alain de Botton: Known for his wide-ranging curiosity and penchant for philosophical musing, the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, Religion for Atheists, and The Art of Travel has turned his attention to the news. This branch of the media that incorporates everything from war to celebrities getting pizza is almost omnipresent in our lives, and de Botton here examines how that affects us and how much longer the news can get bigger. (Janet)
The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert: Schaffert's fifth novel, which he describes on his website as "a love story (with ghosts)," is set in the 1898 Omaha World's Fair. The fair marks a point of possible transformation, both for Omaha—still in some ways a Wild West town, but yearning for the glamor of Chicago—and for the actors, aerialists, ventriloquists, and assorted hustlers who descend on the city for the fair. Schaffert brings his trademark lyricism, precision, and exquisite character development to a love story between a ventriloquist and a secretive traveling actress. (Emily)
A Life in Men by Gina Frangello: Gina Frangello is a true champion of indie literature—she's an editor at The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown and has appeared repeatedly on the annual "Who Really Books Chicago" list—and yet she somehow finds time to write her own books, too. Frangello's fiction is often sexual, seductive, forward, and frank. Her latest novel, A Life of Men, promises more in the same vein, with a story about two young friends, one recently diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, who travel the world seeking to fill their lives, however brief, with a wealth of experience. (Anne)
Europe in Sepia by Dubravka Ugresic: Ugresic has published several distinguished works of fiction, but her wide-ranging, boundary-blurring essays on politics and culture may be the ideal entry point for English-language readers. Here, in pieces originally published in The Baffler and elsewhere, she ranges from Occupy Wall Street to Ireland's Aran Islands. For a preview, check out Arnon Grunberg's tribute to Ugresic, published here last year. (Garth)
What's Important is Feeling by Adam Wilson: Adam Wilson follows up his debut novel Flatscreen, a dark comedy of suburban listlessness, with a collection of stories taking place across the modern American landscape (the title story, which appeared in the Paris Review and was later included in the Best American Short Stories of 2012, describes a movie set in Texas and opens with the immortal question, "'What is this cockshit?'") Like Flatscreen, What's Important is Feeling promises youthful- to middle-aged angst, ennui, relationship troubles, and weed. (Lydia)
Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole: Teju Cole's peripatetic, meditative Open City drew comparisons to Sebald and Coetzee and firmly placed Cole on the map of young authors endowed with serious smarts and talent, who engage in cultural critique—and this holds true whether he's writing about race, class, and post-colonialism, or Tweeting about drones. Cole's novel Every Day Is for the Thief is an "amalgamation of fiction, memory, art, and travel writing" originally culled from his blog (now removed) about a young Nigerian revisiting Lagos and a version of the book was published in 2007 by Nigeria-based Cassava Republic Press. (Anne)
What Would Lynne Tillman Do by Lynne Tillman: I ask myself this question all the time – WWLTD? – and here, in a thick abecedarium of essays introduced by Colm Tóibín, Tillman offers a variety of answers. A crib sheet: sometimes Lynne Tillman would crack wise; sometimes Lynne Tillman would offer an insight so startling I had to go back and read it twice; always Lynne Tillman would do something smarter and finer and better than I would. And that's why you, too, should be reading Lynne Tillman. (Garth)
The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant: Early reviews have compared Poissant's stories, which ply the literary territory between realism and allegory, to the work of Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver. In one story from this debut collection, a man throws his teenage son out a window when he learns the boy is gay, seeking reconciliation only after helping free an alligator from a golf club pond. In another, two parents confront the unusual complications of having a newborn baby that literally glows. Poissant, whose stories have appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, and The Atlantic, also has a novel in the works. (Michael)
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi: Oyeyemi's newest novel will be her fifth, not bad for a writer who will celebrate her 30th birthday later this year. Oyeyemi's 2009 novel, White is for Witching, won a Somerset Maugham Award (the prize is given to British writers under 35) and she was named to the Granta Best Of Young British Novelists list last year, following the 2011 publication of Mr. Fox, the novel that introduced Oyeyemi to many U.S. readers. Boy, Snow, Bird, Oyeyemi told the Times last year, is "about a woman named Boy who tries to avoid becoming a wicked stepmother and really doesn't know if she's going to manage it." (Max)
The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover: Coover's enormous follow-up to his first novel, Origin of the Brunists, has been delayed several times, but this spring, it should finally see the light of day. Coover's recent short stories in The New Yorker suggest he's still near the top of his game. (Garth)
Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov: A new translation of a Dovlatov novel is like Christmas morning for the English-speaking world; and this one from his daughter, no less. Pushkin Hills, published 30 years ago, is one of his most popular novels in Russia (posthumously, along with all his work). Said The Guardian of the translation that first hit the UK last fall: "Alma Classics have been searching for a suitable translator for years. Now the writer's daughter, Katherine Dovlatov, has captured her father's style. . . [she] only took on the task of translating it after the publishers rejected a previous translation and numerous samples." The story is, of course, autobiographical, featuring "[a]n unsuccessful writer and an inveterate alcoholic, Boris Alikhanov. . . running out of money and . . . recently divorced from his wife Tatyana, who intends to emigrate to the West with their daughter Masha." From The Independent: "Vodka-fuelled mishaps, grotesque comic cameos and—above all—quick-fire dialogue that swings and stings propel this furious twilight romp from the final days of Soviet power." Counterpoint is publishing the book in the U.S. (Sonya)
All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu: A MacArthur genius, a 5 Under 35 awardee, and a 20 Under 40 recipient all walk into a bar and take a single seat, because it's one person and his name is Dinaw Mengestu. The author of the The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air—both concerned with Africans fleeing their countries—returns this year with All Our Names, an elegiac love story about pair of African men separated by a political revolution: one in exile, and another in their war-torn homeland. Split across two narratives—one in the past, one in the present—All Our Names dramatizes the clashes between romantic idealism and disillusioned practicality, as well as between self-preservation and violence, all while blurring the identities of those who can move on, those who stay behind, and those who simply change. (Nick M.)
Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn: Billed as an In Cold Blood for the 21st century, Walter Kirn's non-fiction book Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade tells the story of how this celebrated critic, essayist and novelist (Up In the Air, Thumbsucker) got duped by a man who claimed to be a Rockefeller but turned out to be an impostor, a child kidnapper and a brutal murderer. Part memoir, part true-crime story and part social commentary, Blood Will Out probes the dark psychological links between the artist and the con man. (Bill)
Mount Terminus by David Grand: The titular hilltop in David Grand's third novel roosts high above sunny, sleepy pre-Hollywood Los Angeles. Mount Terminus is a refuge for grieving Jacob Rosenbloom, whose wife died back East. Jacob's invention, the Rosenbloom Loop, has revolutionized the budding art of filmmaking, and he's determined to use his invention's earnings to protect his son, Bloom, from the family's past. But Bloom, a dark, brooding genius, is prodded by his very different half-brother to come down from Mount Terminus and meet the world. This novel, 11 years in the making, becomes that rarest of things: a plausible myth, an intimate epic. (Bill)
Falling Out of Time by David Grossman: An acclaimed Israeli novelist, Grossman found an American audience with 2010's To the End of the Land, an epic novel of love and war hailed as a masterpiece. He returns with a allegorical novel one third its length that tells the story of Walking Man, who walks in circles around his town in an attempt to come to peace with his son's death. Having lost his own son in 2006, Grossman here probes the meaning of loss, memory, and grief. (Janet)
Sleep Donation by Karen Russell: The newly minted MacArthur grantee mines the fertile territory between short story and novel. In Russell's lightly science-fictionalized world (which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like my house) a deadly insomnia epidemic is spreading. The well-rested can help out the afflicted by donating their excess sleep—but scarce supplies force everyone to reevaluate the line between gift and commodity. This is the first title from Atavist Books, so expect some bells and whistles in the digital edition. (Garth)
Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley: Like Alice Munro and Evan Connell, Hadley's devotees exclaim that her sophisticated prose and skill with character transcend their subject—the unfortunately named "domestic fiction." Her fifth novel, Clever Girl follows the life of Stella from her adolescence in the 1960s to the present day. Stella's life, in every description, is ordinary, but illuminates both the woman living it and the times around her. (Janet)
Updike by Adam Begley: What's left to say about John Updike that Updike didn't already say exhaustively, and say better than anyone else could have? Yet Adam Begley has apparently found enough fresh material, or a fresh enough angle on the well-trod, to fill 576 pages. For a primer on Updike, there's no way this book can surpass Nicholson Baker's U&I, but it's always a good sign when a literary biographer is a novelist himself. (Garth)
Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis: "Can't and Won't," the title story from Lydia Davis's new collection of short and short-short stories playfully pokes fun at the brevity of her fictions. In this two-sentence story the author is refused a literary prize, because of the laziness evident in his/her frequent use of linguistic contractions. Quite the contrary is true with Davis's work, where much of the flare is tongue in cheek. Concision and precision invigorate her fictions, and apparently the prize committee agrees, as Davis was just awarded the prestigious Man Booker International Prize. (Anne)
And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass: In her fifth novel, Julia Glass revisits two beloved characters—Malachy Burns and Fenno McLeod—from her first novel, the National Book Award-winning Three Junes. The publisher's description assures us, however, that the novel will range and weave and shift perspectives—as all Glass's novels do—among new characters as well. In an interview with Bloom earlier this year, Glass, who debuted with Three Junes at age 46, said: "I suspect that I simply can't help exploring a story from many angles. . . I have to look through as many windows as I can reach; now and then I resort to a ladder." When interviewer Evelyn Somers described Glass as "fearless" in the way she weaves together complex stories, Glass replied: "I like the idea of being 'fearless,' but sometimes I think the complexity of my novels is more related to another trait I have: I'm an overpacker. . . Call me a maximalist. I won't be insulted." (Sonya)
Love & Treasure by Ayelet Waldman: The plot of this novel revolves around the true history of the Hungarian gold train, a trove of stolen valuables that was seized by American soldiers during World War II but which was never returned to its rightful owners. Seventy years later, the granddaughter of one of the treasure-seizing soldiers must look into the turbulent past—and into her own turbulent life—when her grandfather gives her a jeweled pendant with a murky history. (Hannah)
Lovers at the Chameleon Club: Paris, 1932 by Francine Prose: Francine Prose's 20th novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club: Paris, 1932, is framed as a biography by a French feminist high school teacher. The subject of this fictional biography is Lou Villars, based on an historical figure, a professional athlete, lesbian, cross-dresser and German spy who became a torturer and was executed by the Resistance. One early reader claimed she could smell the nicotine on the fingers of Prose's fictional French biographer. Woven into the text are sections of a fake Peggy Guggenheim memoir and a fake Henry Miller novel. The latter, Prose reports, "was super fun to write." (Bill)
Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken: The novelist, short story writer, and memoirist Elizabeth McCracken, whose novel The Giant's House was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award, has earned a reputation as a writer of rare empathy and descriptive powers. Thunderstruck, her first short story collection in twenty years, charts the territory of family, love, and loss. In their review of the collection, Publisher's Weekly wrote that "McCracken transforms life's dead ends into transformational visions." (Emily)
Frog Music by Emma Donoghue: Best known for the 2010 bestseller Room, Donoghue latest novel sees her returning to historical fiction (four of her eight novels are historical), this one based on a still-unsolved murder in 1870s San Francisco. After her friend is killed by a gunshot through a boardinghouse window, Blanche—a burlesque dancer, prostitute, and the only witness—is forced to seek justice on her own. (Janet)
All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld: This second novel from British thirty-something sensation Evie Wyld (After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, 2009) is about a woman named Jake who, along with a flock of sheep, is the only inhabitant on an unnamed island off the coast of Britain. The novel came out abroad last year and revolves around a mysterious predator stalking Jake's flock, picking off her sheep one at a time in gory fashion. As The Guardian put it in a review last June, the novel is "not a ruminant whodunnit exactly; it is a thoughtful and intense account of a young woman seemingly determined to disappear from the world's radar." (Kevin)
In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen: 86-year-old lion of American letters Peter Matthiessen has written his first novel since Shadow Country and what he told the NY Times may be his "last word." A novel based upon his own experience attending three "Bearing Witness" Zen retreats at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, In Paradise will describe one attendee's experience of meditation in a former concentration camp as a non-Jew of Polish descent. (Lydia)
Family Life by Akhil Sharma: Sharma's first novel, An Obedient Father, won the PEN/Hemingway and the Whiting in 2001. More than a decade later, the Indian-born writer publishes his second novel, which begins in Delhi in 1978 and tracks a family's migration to the United States. "Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes," the publisher writes, "leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land." For a introduction to Sharma's writing, his first short story in twelve years, about cousins living in Delhi, was published in The New Yorker this past spring: "I wrote this story as soon as I had e-mailed the novel to my editor," he told New Yorker fiction editor Deboarah Treisman. "Get thee behind me, devil is what I thought about finishing the novel." (Elizabeth)
With My Dog Eyes by Hilda Hilst: If 2012 was the year of Clarice Lispector, when New Directions issued four new translations of her seminal works, then 2014 may very well be the year of Lispector's friend and fellow Brazilian author, Hilda Hilst. Obscene Madame D was Hilst's first work translated into English, and it made appearances on my best of 2013 reading list as well as Blake Butler's. Two more Hilst translations debut this year, with another from Nightboat (Letters from a Seducer) and Melville House's publication of With My Dog Eyes. This title seems apt, as Hilst produced much of her work after retreating to an estate where a pack of more than one hundred dogs roamed. For a taste, check out the excerpt Bomb published last summer. (Anne)
Talking to Ourselves by Andrés Neuman: Neuman's first novel to be translated into English, Traveler of the Century, was an enormous feat of fabulism, and was critically acclaimed when it appeared here in 2012. Talking to Ourselves demonstrates Neuman's range by running in completely the opposite direction. This comparatively short work is set in the present day, and alternates among the voices of three family members. For those who missed Traveler of the Century, it may be an equally potent introduction to Neuman's work. (Garth)
Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval: Saval, an n+1 editor, has produced what may be an essential volume on a subject that bedevils so many of the over-educated and under-employed among us: the office. It is likely the rare desk jockey who hasn't, in a fugue of 3pm boredom and amid a din of inane small talk, wondered "why does it have to be like this?" Cubed looks for an answer, exploring how the office as we know it came to be, "starting with the smoke one-room offices of the 19th century and culminating in the radical spaces of the dot-com era and beyond." (Max)
Casebook by Mona Simpson: The consistently excellent Simpson returns with what sounds like a riff on Harriet the Spy: the story of a boy investigating his parents' disintegrating marriage. The coming-of-age narrative is complicated here, though, by the disintegration of the possibility of privacy in the age of Facebook, or Snapchat, or whatever we're all on now. Am I the only one hoping that the "stranger from Washington D.C. who weaves in and out of their lives" is Anthony Weiner? (Garth)
Off Course by Michelle Huneven: Michelle Huneven, author of Blame and Jamesland, returns with an engrossing and intimate new novel set in the early 1980s. Cressida Hartley is a young PhD candidate in Economics who moves to her parents' shabby vacation cabin in the Sierras; she ends up getting drawn into the small mountain community there—in particular, its men. According to the jacket copy, Huneven introduces us to "an intelligent young woman who discovers that love is the great distraction, and impossible love the greatest distraction of all." Publishers Weekly says that "Cress makes for an eerily relatable and heartbreaking protagonist." If you haven't yet read a book by Huneven, whom Richard Russo calls "a writer of extraordinary and thrilling talent," then you're in for a treat. (Bonus: Michelle Huneven's beautiful essay, "On Walking and Reading At the Same Time.")
Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers, edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon: There's no such thing as a predictable birth—a fact that maddens parents-to-be but eventually makes for a whopper of an anecdote. If your Aunt Mildred can tell a good story about her scheduled c-section, imagine the tales that writers like Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and The Millions' own Edan Lepucki can spin. (Hannah)
All the Rage by A. L. Kennedy: The Independent once described A. L. Kennedy as "one of nature's Eeyores": "She knows grimness the way some novelists know music or food." So the Scottish writer's sixth collection of short stories—billed as "a dozen ways of looking at love, or the lack of love"—should likely be avoided by the overly sentimental. But it promises to be marked by the dark humor that pervades her work—the "Department 5" ("a shadowy organisation about which it's best you know nothing") page on her website gives you a good taste. (Elizabeth)
Vernon Downs by Jaime Clarke: Clarke, the co-owner of Newtonville Books in Boston, offers a slippery roman-a-clef, or simulacrum thereof. A sad sack writer becomes obsessed with a more famous colleague, the titular Vernon Downs, who despite his lack of a middle name, bears more than a passing resemblance to Bret Easton Ellis. This is the intriguing debut title for a new indie called Roundabout Press. (Garth)
The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry: The Irish poet, playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry's new novel, The Temporary Gentleman, tells the story of Jack McNulty, an Irishman who served in the British army in the Second World and has washed up in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, determined to write down the story of his life. Jack is an ordinary man who has seen extraordinary things—as a world traveler, soldier, engineer, UN observer and ill-starred lover. Once again Barry, a repeat contender for the Man Booker Prize, deftly twines his own family history with the rumbustious history of the Irish in the 20th century. (Bill)
The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham: Michael Cunningham's sixth novel is set in New York City in 2004 and tells the story of two brothers facing loss. One brother, newly bereft, experiences a religious awakening; the other, whose wife is gravely ill, falls into drug use. It sounds like a tearjerker of a story, one likely to be made even more heartrending by Cunningham's graceful prose. (Hannah)
My Struggle, Book III by Karl Ove Knausgaard: It's not really news anymore that Knausgaard's unfolding project (unfolding into English, anyway; in Norwegian, it's already complete) is phenomenal. But now that FSG is handling the paperback editions (replete with Williamsburg-ready jacket design) you'll be hearing even more about My Struggle. And it's true: you should read it! Start Book I now, and you will have caught up by the time Book III comes out. (Garth)
Lost for Words: A Novel by Edward St Aubyn: St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose quintet of novels, based on his own upbringing, center around the nasty dealings of a family in the English aristocracy. (James Wood diminishes regular comparisons to Waugh and Wilde, saying that despite surface similarities, St Aubyn is "he is a colder, more savage writer than either.") His newest novel is somewhat of a departure then, a "a hilariously smart send-up of a certain major British literary award." Readers hesitant to leave the Melrose family behind can rest assured that the new novel promises to be just as cutting as those before it. (Elizabeth)
Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush by Geoff Dyer: Geoff Dyer's latest sees the prolific journalist, essayist, and novelist chronicle a two-week stay aboard a US aircraft carrier. As the tallest (well, second-tallest), oldest, and easily most self-conscious person on the boat, Dyer occupied an odd position on the crew, one which forced him to reconcile his own bookish life with a lifelong interest in the military. (Those readers with Army experience may not be surprised to learn that the text is heavy on acronyms.) (Thom)
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay: If Roxane Gay wrote it, I'll read it. Perhaps best known for her thoughtful and engaging essays about all kinds of topics, from Orange is the New Black to Twitter to Paula Deen's racism, Gay will publish not only a book of essays in 2014, called Bad Feminist, but also this first novel. In An Untamed State, Mireille Duval Jameson, the daughter of one of Haiti's richest men, is kidnapped and held captive for thirteen days by a man who calls himself the Commander. Mat Johnson says, "An Untamed State is the kind of book you have to keep putting down because you can't believe how good it is. Awesome, powerful, impossible to ignore, Roxane Gay is a literary force of nature. An Untamed State arrives like a hurricane." (Edan)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: A blind French girl and a young German boy navigate the perils of occupied France in the latest by the author of Memory Wall. The French girl, Marie Laure, flees Paris with her father, eventually holing up with her agoraphobic uncle in his house on the coast of Brittany. The German boy, Werner, a mechanical whiz, parlays his aptitude into a spot in the Nazi army. The Nazis ship him off to Russia and then from there to northern France. If we can trust Abraham Verghese's endorsement, the story is "put together like a vintage timepiece." (Thom)
The Vacationers by Emma Straub: The highlight of Emma Straub's short story collection, Other People We Married, was the romantically lost but sympathetic Franny. We left the collection wanting to read an entire novel on her, and fortunately, Straub has done just that with her second novel after Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures. Surprisingly, Franny is still married to Jim, and the Post family and friends are off to Mallorca to celebrate their 35th anniversary. Yet not everything is tranquil as the Mediterranean Sea, and the vacation dredges up embarrassments, rivalries, and secrets. (Tess)
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris: To read a Joshua Ferris novel is to stare at the gaping emptiness just below the surface of modern life—and, quite often, laugh. In this third novel from the author of the much-beloved Then We Came to the End, dentist Paul O'Rourke discovers that someone is impersonating him online, with a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account all mysteriously created in Paul's name. As he looks into who has stolen his identity and why, Paul begins to fear that his digital doppelgänger may be better than the real thing. (Michael)
The Painter by Peter Heller: An expressionist painter with a penchant for violence tries to outrun his own crimes in this novel by the author of The Dog Stars. The protagonist, Jim Stegner, thought he'd settled into a peaceful life in his home in rural Colorado. One day, Stegner witnesses a local man beating a horse, and the act so enrages him that he hunts down the man and kills him. He then sets off on a Dostoevskyan quest, one which sees him make sense of his actions while hiding his crime from the cops. All the while, in spite of his turmoil, he keeps painting. (Thom)
Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro: When a group of thirty-something parents gather at a ramshackle beach house called Eden, no serpent is required for the sins, carnal and otherwise, to pile up. Fierro, founder of Brooklyn's Sackett Street Writers' Workshop, argued in The Millions last year that writers need to put the steam—and the human sentiment—back into sex scenes in literary novels. You may want to keep Fierro's debut novel on a high shelf, away from children and prudish literary snobs. (Michael)
The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour: Porochista Khakpour is the author of the blazingly original (pun intended!) novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects. In her new novel, its hero, Zal, is born in a rural Iranian village to a mother who believes he is evil because of his pale skin and hair. For the first ten years of his life he's raised in a cage with the rest of his mother's birds—eating insects, shitting on newspaper—until he is rescued by a behavioral analyst who brings him to New York. The Last Illusion recounts Zal's struggles and adventures in this foreign land, where he befriends a magician, and falls for a supposed clairvoyant. Claire Messud writes, "This ambitious, exciting literary adventure is at once grotesque, amusing, deeply sad—and wonderful, too." (Edan)
The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner: A generational drama set on fictional Loosewood Island, about the King family vying to maintain control of a centuries old lobstering dynasty. Early reports speak of meth dealers, sibling rivalry, and intra-lobster boat love as the main threats to Cordelia King's attempt to preserve the family business. In an interview last April, Zentner (Touch, 2011) also allowed that one of the characters has "a Johnny Cash tape stuck in the cassette player in his truck." (Kevin)
Wonderland by Stacey D'Erasmo: I'm particularly excited about Stacey D'Erasmo's fourth novel Wonderland—not only because its protagonist is a female indie musician, the likes of whom have not made it into novels often, if ever (think about it); but because said musician, Anna Brundage, is on a comeback tour at age 44. Bloomer! From the publisher: "Wonderland is a moving inquiry into the life of a woman on an unconventional path, wondering what happens next and what her passions might have cost her, seeking a version of herself she might recognize." D'Erasmo herself, who spent a decade as a books editor, first for the Village Voice and then Bookforum, did her own later-blooming comeback as a debut novelist at age 39, and now a professor at Columbia. (Sonya)
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman: Rachman follows The Imperfectionists, a pitch perfect novel-in-stories set at a dying English-language newspaper in Rome, with a novel about a bookseller named Tooly Zylberberg, who was kidnapped as a child and then adopted by her kidnappers. In a narrative that hopscotches the globe from Bangkok to Brooklyn to the border towns of Wales, Zylberberg is lured into setting off on a journey that will unravel the mysteries of her past. Never one to worry overmuch about plot credibility, Rachman is a master of wringing pathos from essentially comic tales. (Michael)
The Possibilities by Kaui Hart Hemmings: Seven years after the publication of The Descendents—which you might remember because of a certain movie adaptation starring George Clooney—Kaui Hart Hemmings returns to the themes of familial loss, grief, and unexpected turns of fate all cast against gorgeous scenery. In The Possibilities, a Colorado mother loses her son in an avalanche near their Breckinridge home. Coping with her loss, and trying to piece her life back together, she's suddenly confronted with something she couldn't have seen coming. (Nick M.)
American Innovations by Rivka Galchen: It's been six years since readers were introduced to Galchen via her ambitious debut Atmospheric Disturbances (James Wood called it "a contribution to the Hamsun-Bernhard tradition of tragicomic first-person unreliability.") Since then she has been chosen as one of the New Yorker's 20 writers under 40 and produced an impressive body of unusually lyrical science journalism (on topics like quantum computers and weather control). Galchen's new collection American Innovations reflects an experiment of another sort. Per publisher FSG, "The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, reimagined from the perspective of female characters." "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and Gogol's "The Nose" are among the stories mined. (Max)
Funny Once by Antonya Nelson: Antonya Nelson's new story collection brings together short pieces from the last few years as well as a previously unpublished novella. In the title story, a couple, united by a shared propensity for bad behavior, reckons with the consequences of a lie they tell to their friends. In "The Village," a woman comes to grips with her feelings about her father's mistress. In "Three Wishes," the novella, a group of siblings deals with the fallout of their brother's death. Like much of the native Kansan's work, the collection takes place largely in Heartland and Western settings. (Thom)
The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez: The Book of Unknown Americans, the second novel by Iowa Writers Workshop graduate Cristina Henríquez, begins as a love story between a Panamanian boy and a Mexican girl. After the girl suffers a major injury, the story moves from Mexico to a cinderblock apartment building in Delaware populated with immigrants from Latin America. From there the novel expands outward to become a symphonic love story between these immigrants and an impossible America. Told in a multiplicity of voices, the novel manages that rare balance of being both unflinching and unsentimental. In doing so, it rewrites the definition of what it means to be American. (Bill)
Summer House With Swimming Pool by Hermann Koch: Last year, in a "Books of the Times" review, Janet Maslin took Hermann Koch's novel, The Dinner, out into the town square for a public flogging. A funny thing happened though: the book ended up a bestseller. A bestseller translated from the Dutch, no less! Koch's misanthropic view of contemporary life seemed to resonate with American audiences, and his latest appears to offer more of the same. Here, a murder disturbs the idyll of a group of friends on vacation together, bringing far darker currents to the surface. (Garth)
Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots by Stuart Dybek: Dybek's The Coast of Chicago was, like Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, practically required reading in writing programs in the late '90s and early Aughts. Dybek's voice was lusher than Johnson's, and more openly romantic, but equally poetic. His follow-up, I Sailed With Magellan, sometimes let that lushness grow too wild; the gritty Chicago settings of the earlier book gave way in places to nostalgia. But a new Dybek volume is always welcome, and this year offers a treat: the simultaneous publication of two. Paper Lantern is a group of love stories, while Ecstatic Cahoots gathers together the kinds of short shorts that so memorably punctuated The Coast of Chicago. (Garth)
I'll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin: Kyung-sook Shin is one of Korea's most popular novelists. In I'll Be Right There, set during a period of political turmoil in 1980s South Korea, she uses European literature to bridge experiential differences between East and West. The novel concerns a highly literate woman who receives a phone call from an ex-boyfriend after nearly a decade of separation. The call triggers a flood of memories, and she finds herself reliving her intense and tumultuous youth: memories of tragedy and upheaval and of profound friendships forged in a time of uncertainty. (Emily)
In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds: The third novel from British writer Foulds takes place at the end of World War II and follows two Allied soldiers during the final push to sweep the Germans out of Italy. In an interview last July with the Hindustan Times, Foulds previewed the book, saying, it "would like to give the reader a sense of history as being very complicated and rapid in these high-conflict situations. It is one thing after another. The events are too massive to care for particular individual stories, so there are a number of stories. For a while, one is unsure if they are going to converge but they do." (Kevin)
California by Edan Lepucki: In July, Millions staffer and preferred writing teacher Edan Lepucki will follow up her novella If You're Not Yet Like Me with her first full-length novel, California, a post-apocalyptic number set in, er, California. Lepucki's debut follows a young couple struggling to make it work in a shack in the wilderness and straddles the (complementary) domestic and dystopian spheres, addressing horrors like marital strife, pregnancy, and the end of society as we know it. Dan Chaon called it "a wholly original take on the post-apocalypse genre." (Full disclosure: I have eaten meals with Edan, squeezed her baby, and admired her tiny dog. My feeling of anticipation regarding this novel is thus not impartial.) (Lydia)
Motor City Burning by Bill Morris: Our own Bill Morris, a Motor City native, tells the story of Willie Bledsoe—once an idealistic black activist, now burnt-out and trying to write a memoir about the '60s—who joins his brother to drive a load of illegal guns up to Detroit in 1968. While in Detroit, Bledsoe becomes the top suspect in an unsolved murder from the previous year's bloody race riots. The book will dive deep into some of Morris's great fascinations: cars, Detroit, and the The Indigenous American Berserk that lurks below the surface. (Kevin)
Tigerman by Nick Harkaway: A couple of years back, Charlie Jane Anders—writing on i09—declared that Harkaway had invented a new genre: existential pulp. That might be as good a way as any to describe his wildly inventive ouevre, which involves ninjas, mimes, doomsday machines, schoolgirl spies, shadowy secret societies, and mechanical soldiers. His third novel, Tigerman, concerns a burnt-out sergeant of the British Army, Lester Ferris, who is sent to serve out his time on Mancreu, a shady former British colony slated for destruction, where he encounters a street kid in need of a hero. (Emily)
Friendship by Emily Gould: Emily Gould's debut novel charts the friendship of two women who, at thirty, have been closely entwined in one another's lives for years. Bev lives the kind of aimless life that's easier to put up with at 23 than at 30. Amy has been coasting for some time on charisma, luck, and early success, but unfortunate decisions are catching up with her. A meditation on friendship and maturity in an era of delayed adulthood. (Emily)
Last Stories and Other Stories by William T. Vollmann: Vollmann writes so much that you forget it's been a blue moon since he's published a work of fiction. And that book won the National Book Award! This collection is said to comprise a bunch of ghost stories—perhaps less inherently promising than, say, a Vollmann essay on how the FBI mistook him for the Unabomber, but still liable to fascinate. One of the remarkable things about Vollmann's story collections is the way they add up to more than the sum of their parts; I'm eager to see how these stories connect. (Garth)
The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil: If orbital "space mirrors" reflecting constant sunlight upon Oranzheria, a massive greenhouse in Petroplavilsk, Russia, doesn't pique your interest, then I can't do anything for you. These are the mysterious devices at the heart of Josh Weil's second novel, which follows two twins, Yarik and Dima, who were inseparable as children, but who have grown apart in adulthood. Today, the two work in the collective farms of Oranzheria, the "great glass sea," to harvest crops for the benefit of the place's billionaire owner. What follows is a story of two brothers on oppositional paths, each hoping to reconvene, all set against the backdrop of an "alternative present-day Russia." (Nick M.)
The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai: Doug is an academic interested in the poetry of Edwin Parfitt. As it happens, Doug's mother-in-law owns a former artists' colony where the poet had long ago been an artist in residence. Fancy that. But for whatever reason, she prohibits Doug from entering the estate's attic, where file cabinets of Edwin Parfitt's papers are said to be located. After asking around, however, Doug ultimately gains access to some of the files—only to find that they are much more disturbing than he could have imagined. What ensues is a fragmented narrative, split between 1999, 1955, and 1929, in which readers see glimpses of the present day, the near past, and the final days of the artist colony, all the while affected by the enduring legacy of the estate's original owners. (Nick M.)
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami: When Murakami's new novel—his first since the in-all-ways-gigantic 1Q84—came out in Japan last year, there were apparently 150-deep midnight queues outside Tokyo bookstores. It sold 1 million copies in its first week alone. This is a novel, let's remember, not a new Call of Duty game. And such were its unit-shifting powers in its author's country that it caused a significant spike in sales of a particular recording of Franz Liszt's "Years of Pilgrimage" piano pieces described in the novel, leading to a swift decision by Universal Music to reprint CDs of the recording to meet Murakami-based demand. The novel tells the story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man mysteriously ostracized by his friends. It stands a good chance of selling a few copies in English translation too. (Mark)
The Kills by Richard House: The second section of this four-part novel is called "The Massive"; it's a title that could have stood for the whole. House's sprawling quadruple-decker, longlisted for the Booker Prize, is a literary thriller set against the background of the Iraq War. Intriguingly, House created extensive digital video and audio supplements that unfold alongside the narrative. Not sure how that works, though, if you're going to be reading on boring old paper, as I am. (Garth)
More from The Millions:
The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews
Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
Ask a Book Question: The 63rd in a Series (Chicago Stories)
Rob writes in with this question:I'm a seventeen year old who is going to be spending five weeks this summer in Chicago (to be specific – Evanston, since I'll be part of Northwestern's summer high school music institute). I'm a life-long New Jerseyan, and have never been in the city of broad shoulders for longer than three days.So, since I like reading books about the place I'm visiting, I was wondering if you could recommend anything that captured the essence of Chicago – I'm looking for works that encapsulate Chicago in the same way Kavalier & Clay encapsulates New York.I was thinking about The Lazarus Project and Carl Sandburg's work. Do you have any other ideas?Chicago has inspired some of America's greatest fiction and continues to be a fruitful setting for contemporary writers. I've just completed The Lazarus Project (review hopefully forthcoming), and its twinned stories – set in Chicago 1908 and present day Eastern Europe – mine Chicago's multicultural past and ignominious history. The book, based on the true story of the mysterious death of immigrant Lazarus Averbuch reminded me a lot of The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's non-fiction account of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer who lurked in its shadows (my review here). Both Devil and Lazarus vividly evoke the chaos of Chicago, a turn of the century boomtown of slaughterhouses, nascent industry, and the first "skyscrapers" that was quickly aligning itself as the country's center after only decades earlier being its frontier.An interest in this era in Chicago will inevitably lead one to Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle is a muckraking, contemporary account of the slaughterhouse workers who drove Chicago's economic engine. The novel is a landmark among American social novels.Jumping forward in time, Chicago produced one of America's greatest novelists, Saul Bellow, who haunted the hauls of Northwestern in the 1930s. Garth writes that "the greatest Chicago novel ever is The Adventures of Augie March, which is highly recommended for someone who liked Kavalier & Clay." This contention is hard to dispute.Patrick points us to another, more contemporary literary lodestar for Chicago: "The poet laureate of Chicago is Stuart Dybek (I mean, I don't think he actually is, I just think he should be). The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed With Magellan are both absolute must reads. They both entirely take place in Chicago (mostly the South Side, but not exclusively). He's one of my favorite authors, and somebody who should have a much larger audience."Patrick also throws a more recent selection into the mix: "Also, it's not like a totally Chicago Chicago book, but I think [Joshua Ferris's] Then We Came to the End is about Chicago in a really interesting way, as it encapsulates life in the Loop, full of business people commuting from all the suburbs, folks who live in Lincoln Park, people who drive up from the South Side. Plus it's really fun."To these I would also add Adam Langer's well received duo of books set in West Rogers Park, a neighborhood at the northern edge of the city not far from where I used to live: Crossing California and The Washington Story. Finally, anyone interested in Chicago fiction should consider Chris Ware's landmark graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It's another twinned story, with threads taking place in the near present and during 1893 Chicago World's Fair, for so many the moment of Chicago's emergence. Ware's pathos is haunting and his spare, eccentric drawings are mesmerizing. Along with Devil in the White City, it is a favorite of contemporary Chicagoans.We've undoubtedly skipped over much worthy Chicago literature, so please enlighten us with further suggestions in the comments. Rob, thanks for a great question!
Short Story Week: And May We Also Recommend
Recommended Collections:The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart DybekDybek owns a specific part of the literary universe, a several square-block section of the south side of Chicago. He focuses on that, hones it, and reproduces it beautifully. His stories – sentimental (but not sappy), funny, and moving – describe a world where cultures and generations rub against each other, sometimes producing sparks. If you don't read collections in order, or if you happen upon Dybek's stories in an anthology, start with "Hot Ice," "Pet Milk," or "Orchids."Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. GassBoth of these are challenging collections, or at least they were for me, yet both are also adventurous and mind-altering. Barthelme, who has experienced a renaissance of late, did more with the form of the story than anyone I can think of. His stories – brief, wild, audacious – will cure whatever boredom might have possessed you. Gass' stories, typically quite long, describe the emotionally bleak and unforgiving Midwest, with its brief moments of untold beauty buried within quotidian horrors. At one moment, a Gass character might be counting the peas in his pot pie; in the next, he's contemplating freedom in the backyard. The titular story contains what is, at the moment, my favorite sentence: "It's true there are moments–foolish moments, ecstasy on a tree stump–when I'm all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for I'm the sort now in the fool's position of having love left over which I'd like to lose; what good is it now to me, candy ungiven after Halloween."Recommended Stories:"The Christian Roommates" from Early Stories by John UpdikeAn ode to the classic freshman double. This story pretty much was my first year of college. I played it pretty straight in high school, and had my mind completely blown open by all the nuts I met in school, including my freshman roommate [God bless you, Glen, you beautiful bastard]. Updike captures that so well that the first time I read this, I couldn't believe it had been written before I was born."The Fall of Edward Barnard" from The Collected Stories of W. Somerset MaughamSort of a precursor to The Razor's Edge, this is the story of a man who goes to Tahiti to find his best friend, Edward Barnard, who's fallen off the grid and who also happens to be engaged to his best friend. I spent two years of my life trying to adapt this story for the screen to no avail. If I were pressed, I'd say this is my favorite story.
More on Dybek: From the Archives
News that Stuart Dybek, a great and overlooked short-story writer, had been awarded a MacArthur grant sent me back to the archives of the now-defunct Fabulous World of Hot Face for this review of 2003's I Sailed With Magellan. As you can see below, I recommend that Dybek neophytes may want to skip around in this collection, or start with The Coast of Chicago.I Sailed With MagellanLike the Joyce of Dubliners, Stuart Dybek writes with an exquisite sense of place and an amazing sensitivity to the dreams and dislocations one encounters in the borderland between childhood and adulthood. His last work of fiction, The Coast of Chicago, is one of my favorite books, and I approached I Sailed With Magellan with high expectations. If The Coast of Chicago, with its unified setting, its young-to-old chronology, and its careful patterning (alternating short stories with lyrical "short shorts"), seemed more like a latter-day Winesburg, Ohio than a mere collection of stories, I Sailed With Magellan feels more like a group of very good stories than the "Novel-in-Verse" its title page insists it is. Here, Dybek preserves the setting and tone of his earlier work, but organizes his stories loosely around a central character: Perry Katzek. Like Kerouac's Jack Duluoz, Perry seems pretty clearly to be a stand-in for his author, and the richness of lived experience fills to bursting the strongest stories here – "Song," "Undertow," "Blue Boy," and "Je Reviens." All four offer glimpses of Perry's childhood in the Bronzeville section of Chicago. Another excellent quartet of stories – "Lunch at the Loyola Arms," "Orchids," "We Didn't," and "Que Quieres" – show Perry in various stages of a deferred maturity, and although they seem slightly less finished… well, so does adulthood; I'll call it "evocative disarray" and chalk it up to authorial intent. Throughout, images and characters recur in the background. We see again and again morning glories and the spray of fire hydrants in summer and Perry's uncle Lefty. These devices may justify the inclusion of "Breasts," a novella largely unrelated to Dybek's attempt at bildungsroman, but here, Dybek indulges his weaknesses – stagy dialogue, purple eroticism, and scenes and characters seemingly lifted from TV.Even sans "Breasts," I Sailed With Magellan doesn't succeed as a novel. Broken into discrete chunks, Perry's journey seems stripped of causality. For example, his mother's madness – alluded to in several stories – can remain, in a story collection, undramatized. In a novel, however, such a powerful influence on the protagonist wouldn't remain merely implicit. Other experiences that seem to lie at the heart of Perry's (and perhaps Dybek's) character stay in the background, as well, and while Dybek gestures in a few stories toward focusing this book on the relationship between Perry and his Uncle Lefty, the uncle disappears for long stretches. It is always a pleasure to read Dybek, and some of his best work is here, but I Sailed With Magellan argues less for a reenvisioning of the novel's possibilities than the creation of some genre between collection and novel that might serve Dybek's intentions better than the "Novel in Stories" seems to.
2007's Literary Geniuses
The annual MacArthur "Genius" Fellows have been named. This award gives people from diverse fields $500,000 with "no strings attached," for "exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances." There are typically a handful of literary types among the scientists, artists, and musicians who become Fellows. This year, by my count, there are three.Stuart Dybek, as a highly regarded short story writer and novelist, is the best-known among them. When most people think of Dybek, they think of Chicago, where much of his writing is set. He's also the writer in residence at nearby Northwestern University. I haven't read any Dybek, but when I do, I'll likely start with The Coast of Chicago or I Sailed with Magellan.Peter Cole is co-founder and co-editor of Ibis Editions, "a small press and non-profit organization founded in Jerusalem in 1998 and dedicated to the publication of Levant-related books of poetry and belletristic prose. The press publishes translations from Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, and the other languages of the region. New writing is published, though special attention is paid to overlooked works from the recent and distant past." Among Cole's more recent efforts is The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492Lynn Nottage is a Brooklyn-based playwright. According to the Hartford Courant, "Nottage is developing a workshop production at Chicago's Goodman Theater of 'Ruined,' set in a mining town in the Congo rainforest. She recently workshopped another new play for the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, an adaptation of slave narratives for the stage. She is also working on a children's musical 'Sweet Billy and the Zulus' for the Philadelphia-based touring company, Colored Girl Productions." Her most recently published plays are Intimate Apparel and Fabulation.
A Year in Reading by Patrick Brown
Best Novel: The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen – Hugo Whittier is a 40-year-old misanthrope living in self-imposed exile at Waverly, his ancestral home on the Hudson River. Hugo is rapidly smoking himself to death, but doing it with real style. When his estranged brother separates from his wife and moves in, he drags Hugo kicking and screaming back into the company of other human beings. Will he ruin Hugo's plan to smoke himself out of existence? This book is full of dark humor and wry observations on the loneliness, isolation, and mortality. Also, Hugo is a mean cook and gives one heck of a recipe for Holiday Sauce. I stumbled upon this book through a magazine article about Ms. Christensen, and I'm very happy I did.Runners Up (Fiction): East of Eden, by John Steinbeck (If I'm truly honest with myself, this was probably number one, but Edan already picked it, so that would be no fun. Plus, it's not like Steinbeck needs more heat.)The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret AtwoodThe History of Love by Nicole KraussI Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek (So sentimental, but so, so good. The best story collection I read this year.)Best Non-Fiction: The Power Broker by Robert Caro – Next year will mark the first time in 3 years that I will have a non-Caro title as best non-fiction of the year. Unless, of course, he cranks out that fourth Lyndon Johnson book in record time. The Power Broker is impressive in its scale, its depth, and its incredible sense of drama. It's Caro's second best book (behind The Means of Ascent, Vol 2 of the Lyndon Johnson years), and worth every freakin hour it takes to read it. (As a bonus, if you don't like reading it, you can use it to tone your biceps and triceps…).Runners Up (Non-fiction):A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha PowerGuns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
A Year in Reading: Pete Lit's List
At the end of the year lots of newspapers and media outlets release "best of the year" lists. It's nice to have a record of the year's literary highlights, but the lists do not represent the experience of any real readers. Sure, we may read handful of brand new books each year, but these are likely to be outweighed by older books – books that we are finally getting around to or books that we have just discovered, books two years old and books 200 years old. All these books taken together represent a year in reading, and as a counterpoint to all of those "best of" lists, I've asked authors, bloggers and readers to send along the best of from their year in reading.For today, I asked Pete from Pete Lit to share with us the best books he read this year and he sent back a nice list. Chicagoans may notice that Chicagoans are well-represented here. Says Pete:My top choice is An Unfinished Season by Ward Just. The writing is just beautiful, and Just wonderfully evokes a bygone Chicago era.Runners-Up:William Trevor, A Bit on the SideJoe Sacco, PalestineAlex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children HereHonorable Mention:Stuart Dybek, I Sailed With MagellanKirby Gann, Our Napoleon in RagsIan McEwan, SaturdayDavy Rothbart, The Lone Surfer of Montana, KansasNick Hornby, The Polysyllabic SpreeJohn McNally, The Book of Ralph


text:
Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (2014)
Exiled artist and poet Mustafa embarks on a journey home with his housekeeper and her daughter; together the trio must evade the authorities who fear that the..
Our Kind of Traitor (2016)
A young Oxford academic and his attorney girlfriend holiday on Antigua. They bump into a Russian millionaire who owns a peninsula and a diamond watch. He want..
Trivisa (2016)
The film is set in Hong Kong before its handover to China in 1997, when the city's booming economy inadvertently attracts three infamous criminals from Main..
$9.99 (2008)
Have you ever wondered "What is the meaning of life? Why do we exist?" The answer to this vexing question is now within your reach! You'll find it in a small ..
10 Things We Should Do Before We Break Up
After Abigail, a single mom of two, becomes pregnant following a one-night stand with Ben, the unlikely pair try to make a go of it.
150 Milligrams (2016) a.k.a La fille de Brest
In the hospital where she works in Brest, France, a lung specialist discovers a direct link between suspicious deaths and state-approved medicine. She fights ..
2 Graves in the Desert
A man and woman wake to find themselves tied and gagged in the trunk of a pick-up truck and it soon becomes clear that they have been kidnapped and taken as h..
20,000 Days on Earth (2014)
A semi-fictionalized documentary about a day in the life of Australian musician Nick Cave's persona.
22 minuty (2014)
22 minutes got Russian marine to free a hijacked oil tanker far from shore.
3 Geezers!
Follow actor J Kimball as he researches what it's like to be old for a role in an upcoming movie. When he meets the residents at The Coconuts convalescent hom..
3096 Days (2013)
A young Austrian girl is kidnapped and held in captivity for eight years. Based on the real-life case of Natascha Kampusch.
6 Balloons
A woman (Jacobson) learns her brother (Franco) has relapsed on heroin.
6 Years (2015)
A young couple bound by a seemingly ideal love, begins to unravel as unexpected opportunities spin them down a volatile and violent path and threaten the futu..
96 Minutes (2011)
The story of 4 lives slammed together in a shocking moment. Intercutting between a carjacking and the separate stories of the 4 kids, we watch as they hurtle ..
A Case of You
Young writer Sam has a crush on Birdie, the cute and quirky barista at his local coffee shop. When his conventional attempts to woo her crash and burn, he tak..
A Christmas Treasure
After opening a 100-year-old time capsule and finding her grandfather's old journal, Lou questions whether she should move to New York after Christmas to fu..
A Little Bit of Heaven (2011)
A guarded woman who finds out she's dying of cancer but, when she meets her match, the threat of falling in love is scarier than death.
A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004)
A headstrong young woman returns to New Orleans after the death of her estranged mother.
A Minuscule Adventure (2018)
In the conditioning unit of a small chestnut can factory in a quiet little country village as winter slowly settles, a young ladybug gets trapped by accident ..
A Score to Settle (2019)
A former mob enforcer who is released from prison after serving 22 years for a crime he didn't commit sets out on a path for revenge against the people who wr..
A Second Chance (2014)
Detectives and best friends Andreas and Simon lead vastly different lives; Andreas has settled down with his beautiful wife and son; while Simon, recently div..
A Shot Through the Wall
A young Chinese-American cop unravels after accidentally shooting an innocent African-American man through a wall.
A Silent Voice: The Movie (2016)
Shouya Ishida starts bullying the new girl in class, Shouko Nishimiya, because she is deaf. But as the teasing continues, the rest of the class starts to turn..
A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015)
The story of young Amos Oz, growing up in Jerusalem in the years before Israeli statehood with his parents; his academic father, Arieh, and his dreamy, imagin..
A Tiny Ripple of Hope
A charismatic activist works to build a better Chicago for the teens in his neglected community even if it comes at the cost of his home, his family, and his ..
A Very Charming Christmas Town
City girl and travel and lifestyle blogger, Aubrey Lang (Natalie Hall), goes to the little town of Solvang for her next holiday vlog piece after it's voted ..
A Vigilante (2018)
A once-abused woman devotes herself to ridding victims of their domestic abusers while hunting down the one she must kill to be truly free.
A Wrinkle in Time
After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him.
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016)
Edina and Patsy are still oozing glitz and glamor, living the high life they are accustomed to; shopping, drinking and clubbing their way around London's tren..
Acantilado (2016)
A mass suicide involving members of a cult takes place in the Canary Islands. Gabriel's younger sister, Cordelia, who he hasn't seen for years, was one of the..
Accept the Call
Accept the Call charts a Muslim American family's struggle against Islamic radicalisation. Through a series of calls from federal prison, Yusuf and his son ..
Adolescence (2018)
A teenager from an abusive household falls in love with a free-spirited runaway that leads him into the fast-lane lifestyle of drugs and addiction which threa..
Lil and Roz are two lifelong friends, having grown up together as neighbors in an idyllic beach town. As adults, their sons have developed a friendship as str..
Adult Life Skills
Anna is stuck: she's approaching 30 and has just moved back to her rural home-town, and into a shed in her mother's backyard. She spends her time working ..
After the Wedding (2006)
A manager of an orphanage in India is sent to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he discovers a life-altering family secret.
Afternoon Delight
Rachel is a quick-witted and lovable stay-at-home mom. Frustrated with the realities of preschool auctions, a lacklustre sex life and career that's gone kaput..
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012)
Ai Weiwei is known for many things – great architecture, subversive in-your-face art, and political activism. He has also called for greater transparency on..
Airplane Mode (2019)
En route to the world's largest social media convention in Australia, Logan Paul is scared to death; today is his first time flying. All of his worst nightmar..
Algorithm (2014) a.k.a The Hacker
A freelance computer hacker discovers a mysterious government computer program. He breaks into the program and is thrust into a revolution.
An undercover cop is released from jail after being wrongfully convicted for uncovering a conspiracy that led to the death of hundreds of people living with H..

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Detroit Selected To Host the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships
(DETROIT) – U.S. Figure Skating announced the selection of Detroit, Michigan, as the host city for the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Jan. 19-27, 2019. All junior free skate/dance and championship level events will be held at the newly opened Little Caesars Arena and all junior short programs/dance, novice, intermediate and juvenile events will take place at the Detroit Skating Club.
U.S. champions will be crowned in ladies, men's, pairs and ice dance at the senior, junior, novice, intermediate and juvenile levels of the U.S. Figure Skating competitive structure. The U.S. Championships, which serve as the final qualifying event to make the U.S. World Figure Skating Team every year and the U.S. Olympic Team every four years, annually attract more than 1,700 athletes, coaches, officials and media to the host community and is estimated to generate more than $18 million in local economic impact.
"U.S. Figure Skating is excited for the return of the U.S. Championships to Detroit for the first time since 1994," U.S. Figure Skating President Sam Auxier said. "Detroit and all of Michigan is a skating hotbed that is home to many of our top athletes, both past and present. Detroit, highlighted by the newly opened Little Caesars Arena and downtown redevelopment, will be a great host to our athletes, coaches officials and fans from around the country. It will be a wonderful event in one of the great, new venues in our country."
The U.S. Championships, held since 1914, is the nation's most prestigious figure skating event, with past winners including Meryl Davis & Charlie White, Michelle Kwan, Kristi Yamaguchi and Scott Hamilton. The city of Detroit last hosted the U.S. Championships in 1994 at Joe Louis Arena. Detroit has also been the site of Skate America four times, most recently in 2013.
U.S. Figure Skating will plan the 2019 U.S. Championships with support locally from the Detroit Sports Commission, 313 Presents and the Detroit Skating Club.
"Suburban Detroit is the epicenter for world-class figure skating, so we feel the nation's most prestigious figure skating event is coming home," said Kris Smith, director of the Detroit Sports Commission. "The metro Detroit community is primed and ready to showcase our great destination, while raising the bar like we always do to make this the best championship experience yet. We believe we have the best venue in the country in Little Caesars Arena and partners such as the Mayor's Office, 313 Presents, the Detroit Skating Club and Detroit Metro Skating Council."
"We're thrilled to welcome the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships back to the city of Detroit," said Tom Wilson, Olympia Entertainment president and CEO and interim president of 313 Presents. "The event has a rich history with a passionate fan following, and we're confident that the athletes, coaches and fans will enjoy a first-class experience in our great city."
Recent U.S. Championships were held in Boston (2014), Greensboro, North Carolina (2015), Saint Paul, Minnesota (2016) and Kansas City, Missouri (2017). The 2018 Prudential U.S. Figure Skating Championships are set for Dec. 29, 2017 – Jan. 7, 2018 in San Jose, California.
Tickets to the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships will go on sale in early 2018.
U.S. Figure Skating also announced the host cities for the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating qualifying competition season made up of nine regional championships and three sectional championships that will lead into the 2019 U.S. Championships in Detroit.
for more features.


text:
In February, Fermilab Security responded to 10 vehicle accidents, five of which were a result of improper backing. While there were no injuries reported, the estimated damage amount for these accidents was $21,923. A pedestrian-versus-vehicle backing near miss took place at Wilson Hall in January.
Backing into cars or stationary objects has become the leading traffic violation at Fermilab, resulting in 50 percent of vehicle accidents in the past few months.
Backing collisions are usually caused by inattention, distraction and not looking 360 degrees around the vehicle prior to backing. Driving in reverse requires drivers to continually check at least three mirrors and perhaps even twist and turn to see out of the back window. The biggest hazard for most of us here at Fermilab is getting hurt in a traffic accident.
Immediate traffic safety improvements are needed to prevent vehicle accidents. In the recent past Fermilab has taken the following steps to improve traffic safety:
- Established that personnel may not drive any motor vehicle on the Fermilab site while using an electronic communication device, including hands-free devices.
- Included progressive discipline for parking and moving violations as described in FESHM 10160.
- Set up an online training course titled Traffic Safety Awareness, which is required for all employees and users.
- Affixed stickers to laboratory vehicles to remind drivers to check 360 degrees around vehicles before backing.
As spring approaches and we are out and about more, we have to be aware of our surroundings while operating any vehicle, and especially when backing, to prevent vehicle accidents.


text:
Norwegian Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs - Church Affairs
Councillor of State 2001
Article | Last updated: 20/12/2013
Councillor of state is the traditional title of a Norwegian member of government who is not prime minister or foreign minister. The title is often used synonymously with the title of minister, and was introduced by royal decree of 19 May 1814. The prime minister and the other government members form the Norwegian Council of State when meeting under the King's presidency.
19 October 2001 - 31 December 2001
2001 : Valgerd Svarstad Haugland


text:
Java shutdown hook
Java shutdown hook runs in these two cases.
- The program exits normally, or we call
System.exit()method to terminate the program. Read more about Java System Class.
- User interrupts such as Ctrl+C, system shutdown etc.
Important points about Java Shutdown Hook are;
- We can add multiple shutdown hooks using Runtime
- Shutdown hooks are initialized but not-started threads. They start when JVM shutdown triggers.
- We can't determine the order in which shutdown hooks will execute, just like multiple threads executions.
- All un-invoked finalizers are executed if finalization-on-exit has been enabled.
- There is no guarantee that shutdown hooks will execute, such as system crash, kill command etc. So you should use it only for critical scenarios such as making sure critical resources are released etc.
- You can remove a hook using
- Once shutdown hooks are started, it's not possible to remove them. You will get
- You will get SecurityException if security manager is present and it denies
Java shutdown hook example
So let's see example of shutdown hook in java. Here is a simple program where I am reading a file line by line from some directory and processing it. I am having program state saved in a static variable so that shutdown hook can access it.
package com.journaldev.shutdownhook;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.FilenameFilter;
import java.io.IOException;
public class FilesProcessor {
public static String status = "STOPPED";
public static String fileName = "";
public static void main(String[] args) {
String directory = "/Users/pankaj/temp";
Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook(new ProcessorHook());
File dir = new File(directory);
File[] txtFiles = dir.listFiles(new FilenameFilter() {
public boolean accept(File dir, String name) {
if (name.endsWith(".txt"))
return true;
return false;
for (File file : txtFiles) {
BufferedReader reader = null;
status = "STARTED";
fileName = file.getName();
try {
FileReader fr = new FileReader(file);
reader = new BufferedReader(fr);
String line;
line = reader.readLine();
while (line != null) {
Thread.sleep(1000); // assuming it takes 1 second to process each record
// read next line
line = reader.readLine();
status = "PROCESSED";
} catch (IOException | InterruptedException e) {
status = "ERROR";
try {
} catch (IOException e) {
Most important part of above code is line no 16 where we are adding the shutdown hook, below is the implementation class.
package com.journaldev.shutdownhook;
public class ProcessorHook extends Thread {
public void run(){
System.out.println("Seems some error, sending alert");
It's a very simple use, I am just logging state when the shutdown hook started and if it was not finished already, then send an alert (Not actually, its just logging here).
Let's see some program execution through terminal.
- Program terminated using Ctrl+C command.
- As you can see in the above image, shutdown hook started executing as soon as we tried to kill the JVM using Ctrl+C command.
- Program executed normally.
- Notice that hook is called in case of normal exit too, and it's printing status as finished.
- Kill Command to terminate JVM.
- I used two terminal windows to fire kill command to the java program, so operating system terminated the JVM and in this case shutdown hook was not executed.
That's all for shutdown hook in java, I hope you learned about JVM shutdown hooks and might find a use for it.
Reference: API Doc


text:
I am.
I have not left home. Not yet. Not until tomorrow morning. I hope the coming days in Florida prove restful.
To be stuck in between dreams, for years, leaves me wanting to disappear while I finish off old memories and crave new ideas. To remain in limbo leaves me off kilter.
In Jane Austen's Persuasion, proper manners, community, and romance fills the pages. But also spirit. I could easily fit into Jane's 19th century.
I am. I am trying. Bending. Breaking. Falling. Obsessing over miles. The years span as eagle's wings.
Praying. Mumbling. Beseeching spirits to know more! Craving what I cannot drink today. Reaching for the chalice far away.
This is a great start. I can persuade myself to step out and discover. To be my own heroine and find my future.
I am. Leaving, I disappear.
I am not. Now gone. I sail away on Calypso.


text:
adidas Originals Crew NeckWomen Sweatshirts
Product #: 317983807980
Trendy Essential
Comfort? Check. Style? Check. The adidas Originals Crew Neck combines these and more, bringing you the staple sweatshirt. Its soft fleece construction not only offers superior warmth and coziness in cold weather but also reduces your carbon footprint, courtesy of the brand's sustainable cotton farming. Stock up on everyday eco-friendly styles with the Originals Crew Neck sweatshirt.
adidas Originals Crew Neck Features:
- Relaxed fit
- Ribbed crewneck
- Ribbed cuffs and hem
- Trefoil logo on the chest
- 70% cotton / 30% recycled polyester fleece
- Better Cotton Initiative


text:
Christina lost her 2-year-old son Gunner on April 6, 2016 and has been an advocate for drowning prevention and education ever since. She is married to Chris Martin and they have a daughter, Jada who was only 6 weeks old when Gunner went to heaven. Jada is 1 now and is just a light to the Martin family.
When Sarah was a kid, her 2 year old brother fell into their backyard pool while Sarah and her other siblings swam. No one noticed the young child had fallen in, until minutes later, her mom ran outside and jumped in the water to save him. Her brother was pronounced dead at the scene but miraculously survived and made a complete and full recovery. Praise God! She is committed to sharing our stories to help prevent this from happening again.
Ileana was a Division 1 swimmer at Yale University. She has spent countless hours researching drowning prevention for a program called Yale Swim New Haven which she created in New Haven, Connecticut while she was in college, and as a mother of two children (Anaiah, 2 and Adrien, 9 months) she is familiar with many different methods to teach children to swim.


text:
Okay, this post is really late. Every Valentine's Day, I usually publish a list of my favorite fictional couples from the books that I've read in the past year. Unfortunately, the past week has been insanely busy and I wasn't able to work on my list. During the work week, I was in Kuala Lumpur for a training program and then Saturday is moving day for me. Frankly, I'm exhausted and I've barely started unpacking. However, I wanted to put up this post before the end of the weekend. You can check out posts from years past through these links: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. Isn't it awesome that I've been doing this for five years? 🙂
Image from We Heart It
I'm so happy I discovered Laura Florand's books early last year (I will be eternally grateful to my friend Michelle for the recommendation) because I adore her romances. They're sweet, funny and absolutely delectable. Perfect for any reader who enjoys both love stories AND desserts. It's SO hard for me to choose a favorite couple out of all the books that she's written because I love them all. But I'll narrow it down to two couples, one from each of her series: Jaime and Dominique from The Chocolate Touch (Amour et Chocolat) and Allegra and Raoul from A Rose in Winter (La Vie en Roses)
May and Ben from Truly by Ruthie Knox – I had so much fun reading this serial online. Really enjoyed the tension between May and Ben. I loved that eating good food is something that they both enjoy doing. My favorite scenes in the book were whenever Ben wanted to have May try a restaurant with dishes that she's never had before.
Lily and Rule in the World of the Lupi series by Eileen Wilks – While these two got together fairly early in the series, what I love is how their relationship continued to grow as they learned more about each other. I also enjoyed getting little details about their lives like who prefers cleaning their place vs. doing laundry because of certain personality quirks. I also love that their families are such a huge part of their relationship.
Cassandra and Kaoren in the Touchstone trilogy by Andrea K. Host – Amazing slow burn romance. I'm a sucker for stoic and unreadable characters because you never know what's going on under the surface. I'm excited to reread this trilogy and dive back into this world. Also looking forward to reading more of Andrea's books – and hoping that they will also have love stories that I could root for.
Natividad and Ezekiel from Black Dog by Rachel Neumeier – This is a tentative and understated romance, they haven't gotten together during the course of the book but I'm being hopeful that things will develop in the sequel. I can't wait to read it! It would be interesting to find out more about Ezekiel.
Because I can never stick to just five, here are the runners-up:
Carrie and Brian from The Story Guy by Mary Ann Rivers
Story and Daniel from Officer off Limits by Tessa Bailey
Nyx and Ignifex from Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
Cath and Levi from Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Tiger Lily and Peter Pan from Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson
That's it for the romances that I fell in love with in the past months. Have you read some of the books mentioned here? Who would make it to your list of favorite couples if you had one? Hope you all had a great Valentine's weekend. I'm off to read a few more chapters of The Chocolate Temptation by Laura Florand before going to sleep. Good thing I have some good chocolates on hand.


text:
Personas are characters you create to help define who your typical customer is. Each persona represents a customer group with shared values, behaviors, or goals. In comparison to customer profiles, which are based on demographics, life style traits, and other similar factors, personas have an emotional or behavior element. Each business offering usually serves more than one use or need, and so you will likely have more than one persona.
With personas or characters in mind, targeting a group of customers with similar traits is easier to do. The days of "spray and pray" are gone with today's data driven marketing tools available. Over time, you will learn more specifics about customer attributes, purchasing habits, and product preferences to develop a full customer profile on each persona.
Developing your personas should be done early in the planning process. You'll want to know who will use your product/service and who the buyer will be. Keep in mind: The buyer and user may not be the same person.
Here are the personas we created for those using this website. You'll notice that our characters have similar traits, but different motivations for using our site. We named each character to make them easier to identify and target.
Sally wants to start a consulting business helping people organize and de-clutter their professional or residential spaces; she believes this will help them improve their productivity and create a positive environment. She has experience working for retail stores specializing in helping people purchase items to organize their closets, desks, and other miscellaneous items, but sees a need in the client base for someone to do it for them. Where should Sally start?
- Confirm whether any special education or a professional license is required.
- Research office location; costs for rent and utilities; plus any requirements or incidentals. If a home office is preferred, check local ordinances to ensure residential properties can host home businesses and whether restrictions apply.
- Develop a business plan:
- Setup the legal entity that's preferred – whether corporation, limited liability company or partnership, or as an independent contractor.
- There are tax and legal considerations to take into account for each type of legal entity. Visit www.sba.gov and www.irs.gov to learn more, or consult an attorney or tax specialist to learn the best way to proceed. There are online resources that can help too!
- If required, obtain a local, county, or city business license to start conducting business.
- Extend her reach by implementing her go-to-market plan.
- Contact us if she has questions or needs assistance.
Dan is a product developer for a large company selling parts to worldwide automobile manufacturers and distributors. He's been put in charge of developing a partner website to speed feedback on product enhancements and encourage orders for future products. He will need to outsource building the website, but isn't sure where to begin. What should Dan do?
- Research who his web users are and develop customer profiles (or partner profiles) for each type. He should also understand the business environment and any changes in technology or customer expectations that he should try to incorporate in to building his website. In addition, he'll want to investigate competitor offerings, so that his website is not inferior. If he's not sure which features and benefits to include, Dan may want to conduct a customer survey to see what partners want or need.
- Create a strategy for implementing and maintaining the website by evaluating B2B marketing factors, operation capabilities, budget, and maintenance plan, plus the type of partners using the site.
- Contact us or other professionals he trusts to implement his strategy or web design plan, ensuring basic principles and SEO considerations are taken into account. By being prepared, he can help ensure the website he builds meets user expectations and his business's needs.
Harrison is a marketing consultant who helps companies with their marketing communication projects. He works as an independent contractor for small to large enterprises and helps them with their intermittent projects for program and product launches. As a consultant and communications generalist, he likes to keep up-to-date on the latest trends in the marketing profession and raise awareness for his expertise. How can he sharpen his skill set and raise his visibility among prospects? He can…
- Research what others are doing in the marketing profession. Harrison can start by seeing how others develop a customer profile, prepare a competitive analysis, and assess the business environment to develop their messaging for extending his reach.
- Test his understanding of current trends by suggesting poll questions and submit articles on topics not addressed or covered in depth. If published, he can be recognized for his contributions, which in turn, will demonstrate his expertise and interests to prospective clients. All he has to do is follow our guidelines and contact us with his interests.
- Join the newsletter to learn about recent updates, articles from peers, and encourage others to sign up too! His blog article may be mentioned, helping to extend his reach.
Note: The photos of models are used for illustration purposes only.
Once you understand your customer's motivations or who your customers may be, you will need to understand how to find them, which is where having a customer profile comes in handy. To develop a customer profile, you'll need to know customer attributes, purchasing habits, and product preferences so that you know where, when, and how to reach them with your marketing message…but that's a topic for another article.
With your persona defined, you're on your way to understanding who is using or likely to buy your product/service.