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The beautifully told story of a day in the life of Isabel, a twenty-something from Portland, Oregon, that has all the hallmarks of a cult favourite Isabel lives in Portland, Oregon and works in a library, repairing damaged books. She longs to visit the destinations revealed in their pages. Her daydreams are peopled by memories from her Alaskan childhood, the glaciers that are being lost. Meanwhile, she's just the tiniest bit lonely and lovelorn. The object of her affection, a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan who also works in the basement of the library, seems equally quiet and so perhaps it's no surprise that their contact has been limited to only snatched moments. But today is the day that will all change. Isabel is determined to finally open up to him, to find the perfect vintage dress for this evening's party, and to invite him along. But, of course, life rarely happens as we plan it.
A new novel from the author of the acclaimed Glaciers tracks a young woman's return home to investigate a secretive community that has mysteriously rescued an island devastated by natural and chemical disaster--as well as taken hold of one of her oldest friends.
"Working from inside American popular culture, Alexis Smith makes direct use of our shared values, fears, and aspirations to create an art that is both extremely private and remarkably plain-speaking. This is no simple matter, for Smith's art is deeply rooted in the narrative forms of Conceptualism... Smith produces a profoundly moral art confronting social issues from a psychologically charged perspective. ...the artist is best understood in the Symbolist tradition, and it is that quality, served well by her dry wit, that elevates her unique constructions above most common narrative work. That she often draw her themes from Hollywood film culture and the pulp fiction universe only adds to the lure of legibility which underscores Smith's desire to include her reader-viewer in her compelling vision."--from foreword.
This fully illustrated catalogue provides an overview of Los Angeles-based artist Alexis Smith's (born 1949) work from 1994 to 2015. It features 28 of her meticulously crafted mixed-media collages, featuring images, objects and texts rescued from pop novels, postcards, roadmaps, movie stills and advertisements.
'Hypnotic, delivering acute social commentary on everything from class and race to familial bonds and community . . . I devoured Saint X in a day.' —New York Times, Oyinkan Braithwaite (author of My Sister, The Serial Killer) Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister Alison vanishes from the luxury resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X on the last night of her family’s vacation. Several days later Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men, employees at the resort, are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. It’s national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved, but fo...
Alexis Wright’s award-winning classic Carpentaria: “a swelling, heaving tsunami of a novel—stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humor, sweetened by spiraling lyricism” (The Australian) Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland, Australia. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centers on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob, on the one hand, and with the white officials of Uptown and the nearby rapacious, ecologically disastrous Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s masterful novel teems with extraordinary characte...
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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN NPR CONCIERGE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “In her form-shattering and myth-crushing book….Coe examines myths with mirth, and writes history with humor… [You Never Forget Your First] is an accessible look at a president who always finishes in the first ranks of our leaders.” —Boston Globe Alexis Coe takes a closer look at our first--and finds he is not quite the man we remember Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down--even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything cha...
Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska. Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories—the remnants—of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.
Poetry. The speaker of Brigitte Byrd's debut volume pivots in the roles of mourning daughter, affectionate mother, and poet whose attention to the sensory and sensual world never falters. In language both musical and linguistically playful, Byrd revivifies the form of unlineated lyric that in her hands reminds us of its French forebears and could never be termed "prosaic." These poems haunt, ache, and celebrate by turns; always they sing. "She is a wise, ebullient poet whose prose poems are mosaics of humor and loss, a playful requiem for life as it is in this dangerous new century"--Maxine Chernoff