A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY24 start with L start with L
The linked stories of Lake Song, set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward. Against a backdrop of historical events—bootlegging, Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout—a generations-long mystery unwinds. In 1906 Mavis Staunch drowns in Okisee Lake days after she refuses to sell her land to a trio of brothers. The same night, one of the brothers, Angus Epps, doesn’t come home. Few suspect the two events are connected, and no one imagines the role that a ten-year-old boy, a canoe, and a pack of coyotes play in the tragedies. Spiritualists, grifters, sugar makers, arsonists, seekers, and saleswomen wind through each other’s lives and across decades to add layers of resonance to each captivating story. The mercurial lake that unites the people of Kinder Falls sustains as much as it haunts, both witness and diary.
Koppes, who came of age in the sixties, is an editor slowly running off the rails. In the six episodes of The Last Days of Publishing, he refights the Vietnam War in a Chinese restaurant, discovers that the paleontological is political in a natural history museum, mixes it up with a flamboyant literary agent who went underground decades earlier, and encounters a hippie cultural oligarch on the forty-fifth floor of Multimedia's transnational entertainment headquarters.
Tom Engelhardt, himself a publishing veteran, has produced a tumultuous vision of the new world in which the word finds itself hustling for a living. By turns hilarious, sardonic, and poignant, his novel deftly captures the ways in which publishing, which has long put our world between covers but has seldom been memorialized in fiction, is being transformed.
Not quite a roman á clef of notorious Boston mayor James Michael Curley, The Last Hurrah tells the story of Skeffington’s final campaign as witnessed through the eyes of his nephew, who learns a great deal about politics as he follows his uncle to fundraisers, wakes, and into smoke-filled rooms, ultimately coming—almost against his will—to admire the man. Adapted into a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy and directed by John Ford (and which Curley tried to keep from being made), Edwin O’Connor’s opus reveals politics as it really is, and big cities as they really were. An expansive, humorous novel offering deep insight into the Irish-American experience and the ever-changing nature of the political machine, The Last Hurrah reveals political truths still true today: what the cameras capture is just the smiling face of the sometimes sordid business of giving the people what they want.
Exuberant and colorful, Latin Moon in Manhattan paints a vivid portrait of New York City as the land of El Dorado for today’s Latino immigrants. From Little Colombia in Queens to the street life of Times Square, this brilliant novel is crowded with an extraordinary cast of characters: Hot Sauce, a midget hooker; Simon Bolivar, a parrot who croons Julio Iglesias songs; the Urrutias, a family rich from cocaine smuggling; Santiago Martinez, a loner and would-be poet whose ancient cat, Mr. O’Donnell, is slowly dying of an enlarged heart. Exploding with a profusion of plots and subplots involving drug smuggling, romance, and the literary politics of Queens, Latin Moon in Manhattan is a rich and utterly charming work.
In the insular Portuguese fishing community of Provincetown, Josie Carvalho’s life has been shaped by the annual influx of summer tourists and his great aunt’s fervent, if idiosyncratic, Catholicism. The counterweight to these forces has always been Josie’s relationship with his grandfather John Joseph, a drunk, clam-poaching old man who is nevertheless a sly and masterful storyteller.
After a stranger starts dating Josie’s mother and upsets the family’s equilibrium, John Joseph heals the rift with the colorful and adventurous stories of their ancestor, Francisco Carvalho, a Portuguese explorer who just may have beaten Columbus to the New World. With the guidance of these obscure but inspired tales, Josie begins to find new ways of understanding his family and the outside world. This new edition of Leaving Pico makes Frank X. Gaspar’s award-winning coming-of-age novel accessible to a new generation of readers.
In Legacy of the Blue Mountains, author Lynn Galvin asks: What might happen to a group of Apache children, born in present times, yet living as if in the past and marooned in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico when their last renegade adult dies? As they attempt to reach their nearest, last known family members, they embark on a journey to a place none of them has ever seen or visited before. Will they be able to remain undetected while following a memorized path laid out in previous centuries that will lead them into the modern world? As the last remaining Apache children confront the challenges of survival in unfamiliar lands, will they endure long enough to reunite with their remaining relatives?
The Leonard Cohen at the center of Leonard Cohen: A Novel is an everyman, a would-be artist, a would-be lover, a would-be tragic figure, yet a man haunted by the greatness of his namesake. He struggles to compete. He struggles to be more than a punchline in his own mind. He struggles, in particular, to write one song as great as the least of the great Leonard Cohen's songs.
At the center of Leonard's life is Daphne. In their meeting on a Greek island, a contemporary fable of Daphne and Apollo plays out. But even with Daphne, Leonard is shadowed by the other Leonard Cohen, whom he fears is the real Apollo. The ancient myth haunts the fated lovers, and the nobody Leonard Cohen’s life becomes at once a mystery, a miracle, and a myth on its own terms.
Once upon a time, Apollo fell hard for Daphne, who turned herself into a laurel tree. No less a fate awaits the protagonists of this slender yet universal novel, where art, love, and fame all fatefully intertwine.
One character sands in the Prince’s way—Princess Sophia from Grimm’s lesser known “12 Dancing Princesses.” She’s stable—mostly—but Prince Charming is most definitely not. The good Storyteller and the First Character have tasked Sophia with stopping the Prince from destroying their world, and, by extension, ours.
On the rocky shores of Lake Superior, a piercing story of selfhood and determinism develops: is the future what we’re handed or what we make of it?
It’s 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it’s clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage before she can comprehend her fate.
As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile, with little mutual understanding or tenderness. Willa takes solace in her learned fascination with the cosmos, especially (despite her husband’s suspicion of the event) in viewing the imminent Halley’s Comet. Under ominous night skies, Theodulf stands sentry over the lake, clinging to long-ago and faraway memories of happiness that fill him with longing and shame.
Into this impasse, a clairvoyant girl and her resolute uncle emerge from across the cove. They see through the Sauers’ thin façade and, by turns and in different ways, convey promise, sympathy, and insight that counter Willa’s despair. Armed with renewed self-determination, Willa forges a path to happiness. But before she can grasp it, tragedy comes to their remote beacon, and her future plunges toward a dark unknown.
Set against a brooding and beautiful landscape, A Lesser Light is a story about industry and calamity, science versus superstition, inner desire countered with societal expectations—and the consequences when these forces collide in the wilderness of rapid social change.
The Light People is a multi-genre novel that includes a series of nested stories about a tribal community in Northern Minnesota. Major themes include Oskinaway’s search for his parents and the legal wrangling over the possession of a leg that has been removed from a tribal elder. Each story is linked to previous and successive stories to form a discourse on identity and cultural appropriation, all told with humor and wisdom.
Taking inspiration from traditional Anishinabe stories and drawing from his own family's storytelling tradition, Gordon Henry, Jr., has woven a tapestry of interlocking narratives in The Light People, a novel of surpassing emotional strength. His characters tell of their experiences, dreams, and visions in a multitude of literary styles and genres. Poetry, drama, legal testimony, letters, and essays combine with more conventional narrative techniques to create a multifaceted, deeply rooted, and vibrant portrait of the author's own tribal culture. Keenly aware of Eurocentric views of that culture, Henry offers a "corrective history" where humor and wisdom transcend the political.
In the contemporary Minnesota village of Four Bears, on the mythical Fineday Reservation, a young Chippewa boy named Oskinaway is trying to learn the whereabouts of his parents. His grandparents turn for help to a tribal elder, one of the light people, Jake Seed. Seed's assistant, a magician who performs at children's birthday parties, tells Oskinaway's family his story, which gives way to the stories of those he encounters. Narratives unfold into earlier narratives, spinning back in time and encompassing the intertwined lives of the Fineday Chippewas, eventually revealing the place of Oskinaway and his parents in a complex web of human relationships.
“Emotionally wrenching. . . . Haunting (and haunted) in the best possible way.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Darkly compelling.” —Tom Perrotta
In the fall of 2018, a bomb goes off at a water-bottling plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia, an incident the FBI declares an act of ecoterrorism. Arrested at the scene is Chris Bright, a mountain hermit with a long history of activism. Unaccounted for—and presumed dead—is Mara Wood, an installation artist who in the last two years has lost her son and left her husband.
But Mara’s estranged husband David cannot quite believe she is dead, and as he goes about reconstructing the story of what happened, he begins to imagine an alternate narrative—one in which their son doesn’t die and his wife doesn’t leave him, one in which his wife doesn’t carry on a secret relationship with Chris Bright, a man bent on fighting back against the environmental despoliation of his Appalachian home. Lioness is a page-turning, heart-wrenching examination of extremism: What pushes people to act violently, and is that violence ever justified?
A suburban family of four—a man, woman, boy, and girl—struggle through claustrophobic days crowded with home improvement projects, conflicts at work and school, a job loss, illnesses, separation, and the wearying confrontation with aging. The accoutrements of modern life—electronic devices and vehicles—have ceased to be tools that support them and have become instead the central fulcrums around which their lives wheel as they chase “cleanliness” and other high virtues of middle American life.
In Matthew Roberson’s hands, the family’s list-making transcends the simple goal of planning. Their lists reveal the aspirations and anxieties that lie beneath the superficial clatter of everyday activities. Fearing the aimless chaos of unplanned days, the family compulsively compiles lists as maps to steer them away from uncertainty and failure, and yet at what point does a list stop being a map and become the final destination? The family creates an illusory cloud of meaningful activity but cannot stave off the mortal entropies that mark the suburban middle class.
Literature as History offers a critical new path for Chicano and Latino history. Historian Mario T. García analyzes prominent works of Chicano fiction, nonfiction, and autobiographical literature to explore how they can sometimes reveal even more about ordinary people’s lives. García argues that this approach can yield personal insights into historical events that more formal documents omit, lending insights into such diverse issues as gender identity, multiculturalism, sexuality, and the concerns of the working class.
In a stimulating and imaginative look at the intersection of history and literature, García discusses the meaning and intent of narratives. Literature as History represents a unique way to rethink history. García, a leader in the field of Chicano history and one of the foremost historians of his generation, explores how Chicano historians can use Chicano and Latino literature as important historical sources. Autobiography, testimonio, and fiction are the genres the author researches to obtain new and insightful perspectives on Chicano history at the personal and grassroots levels. Breaking the boundaries between history and literature, García provides a thought-provoking discussion of what constitutes a historical source.
José Donoso was the leading Chilean representative of the Latin American “Boom” of the sixties and seventies that included Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Manuel Puig, among others. Written as a draft in 1973, set aside, and forgotten, The Lizard’s Tale was discovered among Donoso’s papers at Princeton University by his daughter after his death. Edited for publication by critic and poet Julio Ortega, it was published posthumously in Spanish under the title Lagartija sin cola in 2007. Suzanne Jill Levine, who knew Donoso and translated two of his earlier works, brings the book to an English-language audience for the first time.
Defeated and hiding in his Barcelona apartment, painter Antonio Muñoz-Roa—Donoso’s alter ego—relates the story of his flight with Luisa, his cousin, lover, and benefactor, after his scandalous desertion from the “Informalist” movement (a witty reference to a contemporary Spanish art movement and possibly an allusion to the Boom as well), in which he had been a member of a certain standing. Frustrated, old, and alone, the artist looks back on his years in the small town of Dors, a place he unsuccessfully tried to rescue from the crushing advance of modernity, and on the decline of his own family, also threatened by the changing times. In Levine’s able hands, Donoso’s clear prose shines through, forming a compact, powerful, and still-relevant meditation on the commercialization of art and the very places we inhabit.
Summoned with cold hard cash and a pinch of flattery, a professor and novelist named Lee Siegel finds himself in Eagle Springs, Florida, attempting to give form to the life of the man who, contrary to popular and historical opinion, did indeed find the Fountain of Youth. Spending humid days listening to the romantic ramblings of the old man and sleepless nights doubting yet trying to craft these reminiscences into a narrative that will satisfy the literary aspirations of his subject, Siegel the ghostwriter spins an improbable tale filled with Native Americans, insatiable monarchs, philandering cantors, deliriously passionate nuns, delicate actresses, androgynous artists, and deceptions small and large. For de León, and for Siegel too, centuries of conquest and colonialism, fortune and identity, are all refracted through the memories of the conquistador’s lovers, each and every one of them adored “more than any other woman ever.”
Comic, melancholic, lusty, and fully engaged with the act of invention, whether in love or on the page, Love and the Incredibly Old Man continues the real Lee Siegel’s exuberant exploration of that sentiment which Ponce de León confesses has “transported me to the most joyous heights, plunged me to the most dismal depths, and dropped me willy-nilly and dumbfounded at all places in between.”
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