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THE STORY: Ed, a physician, and Sheila, a well-known anthropologist, are celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary at their summer cottage. Their son, Tom, joins them, bringing with him his new girlfriend, Annie, who is apparently thrilled to discover that her boyfriend's stepmother is one of her academic heroines. As the weekend unfolds, it becomes increasingly unclear whether Annie's presence at the house is a matter of fate, coincidence or deliberate manipulation—and the peculiar tension between the women leads to other deeper, long-avoided questions about Ed and Sheila's marriage and the intertwined acts of love and deceit that brought and have kept them together.
Kathryn Chetkovich's stories detail the lives of women finding their way in a contemporary world where the traditional maps of love, family, and community are no longer particularly reliable. These are women who find themselves in that mysterious zone of existence that separates our expectations from what eventually befalls us. It's a gap between what we want and what's offered, between what we think we're capable of and the gesture that must suffice. Consequently, Chetkovich's characters in Friendly Fire, often to their own consternation, find themselves chasing a dream while simultaneously searching for its opposite. As the title suggests, Friendly Fire is a collection that describes how w...
The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The Corrections
A young poet, Who May, pens one disturbing poem after another until he creates a poem that can kill, which sparks a "magic poem plague" when copies are mailed to all of his friends.
From the National Book Award–winning author of Interior Chinatown, comes a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories. A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date . . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero? . . . A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: “Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you.” Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and in this new collection we have resounding proof that he has arrived (via a wormhole in space-time) as a major new voice in American fiction.
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In this highly original and much-anticipated ethnography, Anna Tsing challenges not only anthropologists and feminists but all those who study culture to reconsider some of their dearest assumptions. By choosing to locate her study among Meratus Dayaks, a marginal and marginalized group in the deep rainforest of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, Tsing deliberately sets into motion the familiar and stubborn urban fantasies of self and other. Unusual encounters with her remarkably creative and unconventional Meratus friends and teachers, however, provide the opportunity to rethink notions of tradition, community, culture, power, and gender--and the doing of anthropology. Tsing's masterful weaving o...
An anthology by various authors on a variety of subjects. Akhil Sharma's Cosmopolitan is a love affair between an American woman and an Indian immigrant, while Tim Gautreaux's Welding with Children is on a man caring for his grandchildren.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 and winner of the 2006 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, The History of Love by bestselling author Nicole Krauss explores the lasting power of the written word and the lasting power of love. 'When I was born my mother named me after every girl in a book my father gave her called The History of Love. . . ' Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the love lost that s...
What the struggle over the Indonesian rainforests can teach us about the social frictions that shape the world around us Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light while one stick alone is just a stick. It is the friction that produces movement, action, and effect. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. Tsing focuses on the rainforests of Indonesia, where in the 1980s and 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as ...