A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
764 books about Literary and 32
start with R
764 books about Literary and 32
764 books about Literary
32 start with R start with R
32 start with R start with R
Radical Empathy
Robin Romm
Four Way Books, 2024
In this new collection of short stories that Ben Fountain declares “all marvels,” Robin Romm (author of The Mercy Papers) revels in the mess behind the slick veneer of modern life. A financially-strapped college student sells her sought after “Ivy League eggs” to a movie star, then wrestles with her feelings as the child grows up in the public eye. A long-married wife in the midst of a bungled kitchen remodel imagines the excitement of her neighbor’s unstable erotic life. Isolated by quarantine, a young widow contends with a talking daffodil that panders to her in therapy-speak. Disquieting, original and strangely reassuring, these ten new stories make quick work of the easy truths and thoughtless salvos that keep us from seeing the wildness of our irreducible lives.
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Range of Motion
A Novel
Brian Trapp
Acre Books, 2025
A tender, wrenching, and comic novel that follows two twin boys from infancy to the cusp of adulthood.
Twin A and Twin B. That’s what Michael and Sal’s neuroscientist father irreverently calls them. The boys are born moments apart, but baby Sal’s brain scan shows a bleed. He has severe cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities.
Told through multiple perspectives—Gabe, the boys’ father; Hannah, their mother; and Michael—this debut novel follows the Mitchell family from the boys’ infancy to the cusp of adulthood as they all try to interpret what Sal, who speaks only eight words, is thinking and feeling. The twins’ upbringing in suburban Ohio is familiar and unfamiliar, ordinary and extraordinary, as this middle-class family navigates the challenges and rewards of nurturing a special-needs human with a killer dimple who is utterly and winningly himself: sweet, stubborn, mischievous, impenetrable, and above all, very funny.
Michael feels that he alone understands Sal and devotes himself to giving his brother a voice in the “normal” world until he grows up and can’t “hear” his twin anymore—his worst fear. Their mother, a teacher who has given up her career for caregiving, and their father, who is determined to succeed in his research, also struggle with the balance of sacrifice and duty and love, especially as Sal’s health deteriorates. Before Michael leaves for college, the twins spend a final week together at a summer camp for people with disabilities, and Sal does something that changes their lives forever.
Transforming perceptions of disability and interdependence through tender attention to detail, Range of Motion is wrenching, beautiful, and sharply comic.
Twin A and Twin B. That’s what Michael and Sal’s neuroscientist father irreverently calls them. The boys are born moments apart, but baby Sal’s brain scan shows a bleed. He has severe cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities.
Told through multiple perspectives—Gabe, the boys’ father; Hannah, their mother; and Michael—this debut novel follows the Mitchell family from the boys’ infancy to the cusp of adulthood as they all try to interpret what Sal, who speaks only eight words, is thinking and feeling. The twins’ upbringing in suburban Ohio is familiar and unfamiliar, ordinary and extraordinary, as this middle-class family navigates the challenges and rewards of nurturing a special-needs human with a killer dimple who is utterly and winningly himself: sweet, stubborn, mischievous, impenetrable, and above all, very funny.
Michael feels that he alone understands Sal and devotes himself to giving his brother a voice in the “normal” world until he grows up and can’t “hear” his twin anymore—his worst fear. Their mother, a teacher who has given up her career for caregiving, and their father, who is determined to succeed in his research, also struggle with the balance of sacrifice and duty and love, especially as Sal’s health deteriorates. Before Michael leaves for college, the twins spend a final week together at a summer camp for people with disabilities, and Sal does something that changes their lives forever.
Transforming perceptions of disability and interdependence through tender attention to detail, Range of Motion is wrenching, beautiful, and sharply comic.
[more]
Rebel Footprints
A Guide to Uncovering London's Radical History
David Rosenberg
Pluto Press, 2019
"There is so much that is inspirational in this book, whether the struggles of Jewish tailors in Spitalfields, bakers across the city (who were obliged to work 16-hour shifts in poorly ventilated basements), or the battles against fascism in Cable Street." ― Guardian
If you visit London, and you’ve only experienced Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London, and The Millennium Wheel, you’ve missed the true essence of London, and its politically-charged, rebellious history. A truly radical response to conservative heritage tours and banal day trips, Rebel Footprints brings to life the history of social movements in England's capital by providing lively commentary, maps, and walking tours you will not find anywhere else.
David Rosenberg transports readers from well-known landmarks to history-making hidden corners, while telling the story of protest and struggle in London from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
From the suffragettes to the socialists, from the chartists to the trade unionists: Rosenberg invites us to step into the footprints of a diverse cast of dedicated fighters for social justice. Individual chapters highlight particular struggles and their participants, from famous faces to lesser-known luminaries. Chapters include:
*Writers and Rioters in the Fleet Street Precinct
*Trailblazers for Democracy in Clerkenwell Green
*The Spark of Rebellion in Bow
*Coming in from the Cold: Immigrant Agitators and Radicals in Spitalfields
*No Gods, No Masters: Radical Bloomsbury
*Life on the Boundary: Fighting for Housing in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch
*Stirrings from the South: The Battersea Four
*peaking Truth to Power: Suffragettes and Westminster
*Not Afraid of the Prison Walls: Rebel Women and Men of Poplar
*People's Power in Bermondsey
Rebel Footprints sets London's radical campaigners against the backdrop of the city's multi-faceted development. Self-directed walks pair with narratives that seamlessly blend history, politics, and geography, while specially commissioned maps and illustrations immerse the reader in the story of the city.
Whether you're visiting London for the first time, or born and raised there, Rosenberg invites you to see London as you never have before—the radical center of the English-speaking world.
If you visit London, and you’ve only experienced Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London, and The Millennium Wheel, you’ve missed the true essence of London, and its politically-charged, rebellious history. A truly radical response to conservative heritage tours and banal day trips, Rebel Footprints brings to life the history of social movements in England's capital by providing lively commentary, maps, and walking tours you will not find anywhere else.
David Rosenberg transports readers from well-known landmarks to history-making hidden corners, while telling the story of protest and struggle in London from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
From the suffragettes to the socialists, from the chartists to the trade unionists: Rosenberg invites us to step into the footprints of a diverse cast of dedicated fighters for social justice. Individual chapters highlight particular struggles and their participants, from famous faces to lesser-known luminaries. Chapters include:
*Writers and Rioters in the Fleet Street Precinct
*Trailblazers for Democracy in Clerkenwell Green
*The Spark of Rebellion in Bow
*Coming in from the Cold: Immigrant Agitators and Radicals in Spitalfields
*No Gods, No Masters: Radical Bloomsbury
*Life on the Boundary: Fighting for Housing in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch
*Stirrings from the South: The Battersea Four
*peaking Truth to Power: Suffragettes and Westminster
*Not Afraid of the Prison Walls: Rebel Women and Men of Poplar
*People's Power in Bermondsey
Rebel Footprints sets London's radical campaigners against the backdrop of the city's multi-faceted development. Self-directed walks pair with narratives that seamlessly blend history, politics, and geography, while specially commissioned maps and illustrations immerse the reader in the story of the city.
Whether you're visiting London for the first time, or born and raised there, Rosenberg invites you to see London as you never have before—the radical center of the English-speaking world.
[more]
The Red Scarf
Followed by "Two Stages" and Additional Notes
Yves Bonnefoy
Seagull Books, 2021
An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy’s childhood memories.
In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L’écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"—a formal act of commemoration—Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: “My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence.” Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father’s silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet’s mother.
At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet’s parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son—the solitary boy’s intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.
In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L’écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"—a formal act of commemoration—Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: “My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence.” Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father’s silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet’s mother.
At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet’s parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son—the solitary boy’s intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.
[more]
The Red Sofa
Michèle Lesbre
Seagull Books, 2017
Now in paperback, The Red Sofa is a quiet French novella exploring love, memory, and the perspective that travel gives us on both.
In The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects on her past with Gyl and their patriotic struggles, as well as on the neighbor she has just left behind, Clémence Barrot.
Rocked by the train’s movements Anne is moved by her memory of Clémence, who is old and whose memory is failing, but who has not lost her taste for life and adventure. Ensconced on her red sofa at home, Clémence loves to tell Anne her life story, mourning lost loved ones and celebrating the lives of brave, rebellious women who went before her. Eventually, Anne’s train trip returns her home having not found Gyl, but having found something much more meaningful—herself.
In The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects on her past with Gyl and their patriotic struggles, as well as on the neighbor she has just left behind, Clémence Barrot.
Rocked by the train’s movements Anne is moved by her memory of Clémence, who is old and whose memory is failing, but who has not lost her taste for life and adventure. Ensconced on her red sofa at home, Clémence loves to tell Anne her life story, mourning lost loved ones and celebrating the lives of brave, rebellious women who went before her. Eventually, Anne’s train trip returns her home having not found Gyl, but having found something much more meaningful—herself.
[more]
Red Weather
Janet McAdams
University of Arizona Press, 2012
This trip wasn’t about her, her need to escape. She had been too young when it happened. Too young to understand what could be worth risking everything for. Even now they seemed naïve, foolish in their belief that anything could change. They had tried to save a generation. If she couldn’t save them, she might find a way to finish their story.
Neva Greene is seeking answers.
The daughter of American Indian activists, Neva hasn’t seen or heard from her parents since they vanished a decade earlier, after planning an act of resistance that went terribly wrong. Discovering a long-overlooked clue to their disappearance, Neva follows their trail to Central America, leaving behind an uncaring husband, an estranged brother, and a life of lukewarm commitments.
Determined to solve the mystery of her parents’ disappearance, Neva finds work teaching English in the capital city of tiny Coatepeque, a country torn by its government’s escalating war on its Indigenous population. As the violence and political unrest grow around her, Neva meets a man whose tenderness toward her seems to contradict his shadowy political connections.
Against the backdrop of Central American politics, this suspenseful first novel from award-winning poet Janet McAdams explores an important chapter in American Indian history. Through finely drawn, compelling characters and lucidly beautiful prose, Red Weather explores the journey from loss to possibility, from the secrets of the past to the longings of the present.
[more]
Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman
Stories
Aimee Parkison, Foreword by Stephen Graham Jones
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
A darkly comical horror lurks beneath the surface of everyday events in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, a seductively poetic story collection of unusual brilliance and rare humor.
In Aimee Parkison’s Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children’s eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive.
Open the refrigerator door. Inside are antique jars. Open them to hear the music: Beethoven playing piano; slaves singing for freedom in plantation fields; mothers humming lullabies through the night to smallpox babies, knowing this song is the last sound their children will ever hear.
As Stephen Graham Jones notes in his foreword to this prize-winning collection, “The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it’ll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they’re loops. They never stop. This one still hasn’t, for me.”
A darkly comical horror lurks beneath the surface of everyday events in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, a seductively poetic story collection of unusual brilliance and rare humor.
In Aimee Parkison’s Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children’s eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive.
Open the refrigerator door. Inside are antique jars. Open them to hear the music: Beethoven playing piano; slaves singing for freedom in plantation fields; mothers humming lullabies through the night to smallpox babies, knowing this song is the last sound their children will ever hear.
As Stephen Graham Jones notes in his foreword to this prize-winning collection, “The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it’ll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they’re loops. They never stop. This one still hasn’t, for me.”
[more]
The Registry of Forgotten Objects
Stories
Miles Harvey
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.” Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called “ludicrously unputdownable”—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.
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The Relic
Jose Maria Eca de Queiros
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
The Relic tells the story of an orphaned young man, Teodorico Raposo, who is brought to Lisbon from a provincial town in Portugal to live with his aunt, a rigid, stern—and oftentimes—forbidding Catholic. Her devout circle of acquaintances is made up almost entirely of priests, many of whom are more concerned with appearances than spirituality, and seeking her and their approval, Teodorico is driven to attend Mass, say rosaries, and frequent churches, all the while awakening to sensuality, women, and the material life in conflict with “Auntie’s” devotions, which are—inwardly—devoid of the charity preached by Christ.
When Teodorico obtains a degree from the University of Coimbra, Auntie sends him to the Holy Land to search for a relic to cure her ills. He meets up with a learned German author and, after a sojourn to Egypt, the two make their way to the land trod by Jesus. It is there that Teodorico has the dream that takes up nearly one third of the novel: he witnesses the travails that lead to the Passion and Crucifixion, as well as the aftermath of Christ’s death.
Faced now with his mission, Teodorico embarks on a search. He soon comes upon an item, a “true” relic authenticated by his German friend, the sanctity of which will send Auntie to the heights of spiritual bliss, so much so that she will make him her heir. But when Teodorico returns to Lisbon with it, deception awaits her as the result of a simple mistake that had been made, and disinheritance awaits him as a result of Auntie’s anger and vindictiveness.
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Remember This
Steve Adams
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
John Martin, a talented graphic designer employed as a word processor for a prestigious New York investment bank, has happily left behind Texas and his alcoholic, emotionally absent mother. It is the height of the personal computer revolution and the AIDS epidemic, and gentrification is sweeping the city. Alena Marino, John’s supervisor, is an Italian immigrant who shares his hustle and grit, aggressively building a new life for herself. As their affair begins, John imagines himself the perfect lover for Alena, fulfilling her desires without expectation that she leave her husband. But when his oldest sister arrives in town unannounced, he is forced to confront his damaged past and serial history of relationships with stunningly gorgeous, emotionally complex women.
John’s journey to understand the roots of his compulsion to “save” those around him is both aided and thwarted by his relationship with his colleague Jeremy Crawford. Alena’s closest confidant, Jeremy shares an intimacy with her that fuels John's jealousy. Meanwhile, Jeremy finds himself drawn to John and, as his confidant too, participates in the drama of John and Alena’s relationship. As John slowly begins to understand the flawed and wounded experience of love that has followed him through life, he learns how to open himself to true friendship—and to true loss. Set in the midst of cultural upheaval, this powerful novel reverberates across the decades.
John’s journey to understand the roots of his compulsion to “save” those around him is both aided and thwarted by his relationship with his colleague Jeremy Crawford. Alena’s closest confidant, Jeremy shares an intimacy with her that fuels John's jealousy. Meanwhile, Jeremy finds himself drawn to John and, as his confidant too, participates in the drama of John and Alena’s relationship. As John slowly begins to understand the flawed and wounded experience of love that has followed him through life, he learns how to open himself to true friendship—and to true loss. Set in the midst of cultural upheaval, this powerful novel reverberates across the decades.
[more]
The Reprisal
A Novel
Laudomia Bonanni
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the bitterly cold winter of 1943, the Italian countryside is torn apart by violence as partisans wage a guerilla war against the occupying German army and their local fascist allies. In the midst of this conflict, a ragtag group of fascist supporters captures a woman in the late stages of pregnancy. Suspecting her of being in league with the partisans, they hastily put her on “trial” by improvising a war tribunal one night in the choir stalls of the abandoned monastery that serves as their hide-out. This sham court convicts the woman and sentences her to die—but not until her child has been born. When a young seminarian visits the monastery and tries to dissuade the fascist band from executing their sentence, the absurd tragedy of the woman’s fate is cast in stark relief. The child’s birth approaches, an unnerving anticipation unfolds, and tension mounts ominously among the characters and within their individual psyches.
Based on a number of incidents that took place in Abruzzo during the war, Laudomia Bonanni’s compact and tragic novel explores the overwhelming conflicts between ideology and community, justice and vengeance. The story is embedded in the cruel reality of Italian fascism, but its themes of revenge, sacrifice, and violence emerge as universal, delivered in prose that is at once lyrical and brutal.
In her native Italy, Bonanni, a writer of journalism and critical prose as well as fiction, is hailed as one of the strongest proponents of post-war realism, and this is the first of her novels to be made available to Anglophone readers. Translators Susan Stewart and Sara Teardo render Bonanni’s singular style—both sparse and emotive, frank and poetic—into readable, evocative English.
[more]
Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds
A Novel
Patrick Lawler
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Winner of the 2013 CNY Book Award for Fiction.
When you step inside Patrick Lawler’s Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, you will find yourself hovering in the clouds, among a family and a town, and in the world of one of fiction’s most inventive writers.
When you step inside Patrick Lawler’s Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, you will find yourself hovering in the clouds, among a family and a town, and in the world of one of fiction’s most inventive writers.
Patrick Lawler’s novel is about resonance, echoes, and naming; about hiding inside of names; about standing completely still; and about the fractalization of family. Connect the dots. Connect the secrets. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Every character wears a variety of masks, and every place is also someplace else.
Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds is a reconfiguring of narrative—how stories exist inside stories, how place exists inside self, how self exists inside others, and how parachutists exist inside clouds.
[more]
The Restaurant Inspector
Alex Pickett
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
A mysterious illness is afflicting the residents of Millsville, Wisconsin—but that might be the least of their problems. Investigating the situation is Arthur Reilly, the county restaurant inspector who recently relocated from New York City following an unseemly scandal. When he gets sidetracked and falsely suggests a link between the outbreak and a local Albanian-run diner, the town descends into panic, chaos, and finger pointing. As the situation spirals out of control, county commissioner Janet Vosberg seizes the moment to position herself for higher office and newspaper editor Adam Bender aims to settle a long-simmering score. And what’s with the hot dog pushcart that recently appeared by the side of Highway 9?
This antic, raunchy send-up of small-town life gets deep into the minds and hearts of its characters and their entanglements. Alex Pickett exposes the fault lines in Midwestern Nice and reveals how corruption can take hold in even the most unlikely of places.
This antic, raunchy send-up of small-town life gets deep into the minds and hearts of its characters and their entanglements. Alex Pickett exposes the fault lines in Midwestern Nice and reveals how corruption can take hold in even the most unlikely of places.
[more]
Return
Raharimanana
Seagull Books, 2025
A powerful testament to writing as an act of beauty and rebellion that speaks truth and condemns violent legacies and a feverish ode that weaves together personal and national history to finally find healing.
This evocative novel from a great figure of Malagasy literature tells the story of Hira, a writer born on the seventh anniversary of Madagascar’s independence. He wanders through different cities on a book tour, but the experience is amnesiac and confusing. There is a past he is trying to reckon with, filled with violence against both his family and country. He runs from his wife and represses his memories until it all explodes in fever dreams and a vomit of words. But to write the rebirth that he yearns for, Hira must write of his father’s torture, his tortured island, and how both were juxtaposed to his own happy childhood. In combing through these various pasts, he might make the same mistake his father did: trying to change the world but leaving his own family broken.
Drawing from the lived experience of both the author and his parents, the violence of both life and language, and the stories of both myth and history, Return is a search for an individual’s place within larger collective trauma. Infused with Raharimanana’s signature poeticism and intensity, this is a masterwork by an as-yet-overlooked but essential voice in the postcolonial tradition.
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The Return of Philip Latinowicz
Miroslav Krleza
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Philip Latinowicz is a successful but disillusioned painter who returns to his hometown after an absence of twenty-three years. He hopes that revisiting his roots will inspire him to create the perfect work of art and thereby restore his faith in both art and life. Haunted by his troubled childhood, however, he falls in with shady characters and discovers the emotional, intellectual, and imaginative poverty of his own background.
The first and most enduring work by preeminent Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza, The Return of Philip Latinowicz was highly praised by Jean-Paul Sartre.
The first and most enduring work by preeminent Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza, The Return of Philip Latinowicz was highly praised by Jean-Paul Sartre.
[more]
Returning from Silence
Jenny’s Story
Michèle Sarde
Swan Isle Press, 2022
A novel that tells the story of a Jewish family in World War II and reaches deep into Jewish history.
Born in Brittany on the threshold of World War II, novelist Michèle Sarde had long been silent about her origins. After her mother, Jenny, finally shared their family history, Sarde decided to reconstruct Jenny’s journey, including her exile from Salonica, move to Paris in 1921, and assimilation in France. The Nazi occupation then forced her and her family to hide and conceal their Jewish identity, and in this retelling, Sarde shows how Jenny fights with everything she has to survive the Holocaust and protect her daughter.
Returning from Silence is a powerful saga that reaches deep into Jewish history, opening with the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and their settlement in a more tolerant Ottoman Empire. Sephardi culture and language flourished in Salonica for four centuries, but with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, and the sense of troubling times to come, Jenny’s family felt impelled to leave their much-loved city and rebuild their lives in France. Their years in France led to change that none could have fully expected, and then, the Holocaust. The trauma lasts well into the post-war period, silencing both mother and daughter in unanticipated ways.
Through this family history, Sarde sensitively raises questions about identity, migration, and assimilation while weaving fiction together with history, research, and testimony to bring the characters’ stories to life.
Born in Brittany on the threshold of World War II, novelist Michèle Sarde had long been silent about her origins. After her mother, Jenny, finally shared their family history, Sarde decided to reconstruct Jenny’s journey, including her exile from Salonica, move to Paris in 1921, and assimilation in France. The Nazi occupation then forced her and her family to hide and conceal their Jewish identity, and in this retelling, Sarde shows how Jenny fights with everything she has to survive the Holocaust and protect her daughter.
Returning from Silence is a powerful saga that reaches deep into Jewish history, opening with the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and their settlement in a more tolerant Ottoman Empire. Sephardi culture and language flourished in Salonica for four centuries, but with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, and the sense of troubling times to come, Jenny’s family felt impelled to leave their much-loved city and rebuild their lives in France. Their years in France led to change that none could have fully expected, and then, the Holocaust. The trauma lasts well into the post-war period, silencing both mother and daughter in unanticipated ways.
Through this family history, Sarde sensitively raises questions about identity, migration, and assimilation while weaving fiction together with history, research, and testimony to bring the characters’ stories to life.
[more]
Reuben, Reuben
A Novel
Peter De Vries
University of Chicago Press, 1964
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries’s well-read suburbanites. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece.
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Revelation Countdown
Cris Mazza
University of Alabama Press, 1993
A collection of stories by award-winning California writer Cris Mazza that reveal the open road to be not romanticized freedom but an unsettling loss of control
While in many ways reaffirming the mythic dimension of being on the road romanticized in American pop and fold culture, Revelation Countdown also subtly undermines that view. These stories project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom, but rather a type of freedom more closely resembling loss of control. Being in constant motion and passing through new environments destabilizes life, casts it out of phase, heightens perception, and skews reactions. Every little problem is magnified to overwhelming dimension. Events segue from slow motion to fast forward. Background noises intrude, causing perpetual wee hour insomnia. Imagination flourishes, often as an enemy. People suddenly discover that they never really understood their travel companions. The formerly stable line of their lives veers off course. In such an atmosphere, the title Revelation Countdown, borrowed from a roadside sign in Tennessee, proves prophetic. It may not arrive at 7:30, but revelation will inevitably find the traveler.
While in many ways reaffirming the mythic dimension of being on the road romanticized in American pop and fold culture, Revelation Countdown also subtly undermines that view. These stories project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom, but rather a type of freedom more closely resembling loss of control. Being in constant motion and passing through new environments destabilizes life, casts it out of phase, heightens perception, and skews reactions. Every little problem is magnified to overwhelming dimension. Events segue from slow motion to fast forward. Background noises intrude, causing perpetual wee hour insomnia. Imagination flourishes, often as an enemy. People suddenly discover that they never really understood their travel companions. The formerly stable line of their lives veers off course. In such an atmosphere, the title Revelation Countdown, borrowed from a roadside sign in Tennessee, proves prophetic. It may not arrive at 7:30, but revelation will inevitably find the traveler.
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A River Runs through It and Other Stories
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press, 2017
When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Forty years later, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs through It has established itself as a classic of the American West. This new edition will introduce a fresh audience to Maclean’s beautiful prose and understated emotional insights.
Elegantly redesigned, A River Runs through It includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film adaptation of River. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.”
Elegantly redesigned, A River Runs through It includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film adaptation of River. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.”
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A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.
Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.
By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."
Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.
By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."
[more]
The Road to the Open
Arthur Schnitzler
Northwestern University Press, 1991
Turn-of-the-century Vienna was the scene of tremendous social and artistic upheaval. Arthur Schnitzler's novel The Road to the Open brilliantly captures the complex world of Freud, Mahler, Strauss, and Klimt, dealing masterfully with the basic issues of Austrian anti-Semitism, the Viennese intellectual community, post-Wagnerian music, and the psychology of Vienna's middle class.
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Roads, Where There Are No Roads
A Novel
Angela Jackson
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Winner, 2018 John Gardner Fiction prize
In this highly anticipated sequel to her acclaimed first novel, Where I Must Go, Angela Jackson continues the remarkable story of Magdalena Grace. As a black student at the predominantly white Eden University, Maggie found herself deeply involved in conflict. Now, out in the wider world, she and her beloved Treemont Stone evolve into agents of change as they become immersed in the historical events unfolding around them—the movements advocating for civil rights, black consciousness, black feminism, the rights of the poor, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Rendered in prose so lyrical and luminous as to suggest a dream, Roads, Where There Are No Roads is a love story in the greatest sense, celebrating love between a man and a woman, between family members, and among the members of a community whose pride pushes them to rise up and resist. This gorgeously written novel will resonate with readers today as incredibly relevant, uplifting hearts and causing eyes to water with sorrow and delight.
In this highly anticipated sequel to her acclaimed first novel, Where I Must Go, Angela Jackson continues the remarkable story of Magdalena Grace. As a black student at the predominantly white Eden University, Maggie found herself deeply involved in conflict. Now, out in the wider world, she and her beloved Treemont Stone evolve into agents of change as they become immersed in the historical events unfolding around them—the movements advocating for civil rights, black consciousness, black feminism, the rights of the poor, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Rendered in prose so lyrical and luminous as to suggest a dream, Roads, Where There Are No Roads is a love story in the greatest sense, celebrating love between a man and a woman, between family members, and among the members of a community whose pride pushes them to rise up and resist. This gorgeously written novel will resonate with readers today as incredibly relevant, uplifting hearts and causing eyes to water with sorrow and delight.
[more]
Roast Beef, Medium
The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney
Edna Ferber
University of Illinois Press, 1913
Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories she published in American Magazine between 1911 and 1913. The stories featured Emma McChesney: smart, savvy, stylish, divorced mother, and Midwest traveling sales representative for T. A. Buck's Featherloom skirts and petticoats. With one hand on her sample case and the other fending off advances from salesmen, hotel clerks, and other predators, Emma holds on tightly to her reputation: honest, hardworking, and able to outsell the slickest salesman.
Like her compact bag of traveling necessities, Emma has her life boiled down to essentials: her work and her seventeen-year-old son, Jock. Her experience has taught her that it's best to stick to roast beef, medium--avoiding both physical and moral indigestion--rather than experiment with fancy sauces and exotic dishes. Yet she never shies away from a challenge, and her sharp instincts and common sense serve her well in dealing with the likes of Ed Meyer, a smooth-talking, piano-playing salesman; Blanche LeHay, prima donna of the Sam Levin Crackerjack Belles; and T. A. Buck Jr., the wet-behind-the-ears son of the founder of Featherloom.
Roast Beef, Medium is the first of three volumes chronicling the travels and trials of Emma McChesney. The illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg, one of the most highly regarded book illustrators of the period, enhance both the humor and the vivid characterization in this wise and high-spirited tale.
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Roman Elegy
Sabine Gruber
Haus Publishing, 2013
It is 2009: writer Clara Burger arrives in Rome to sort out the affairs and clear the flat of her school friend Ines, prematurely dead from cancer. Sorting through Ines's belongings, Clara finds a manuscript containing not only an autobiographical account of Ines's strange experiences while working as a chambermaid in Rome in the summer of 1978, but also the life story of her former employer, the hotelier Emma Manente. Originally from Italy's German-speaking enclave South Tyrol (like Clara and Ines), Emma first comes to Rome in the late 1930s and becomes an eyewitness to the capital's turbulent past and present: Mussolini's fascist regime, the Nazi occupation and an uneasy postwar democracy threatened by corruption and extremism. In a sweeping tale of remembrance and reconciliation, of lives unfulfilled and loves unrequited, Roman Elegy interweaves the personal stories of three resilient women with a fascinating historical narrative of the Eternal City, in all its contrasting squalor and beauty, compassion and savagery.
[more]
The Round Dance
A Novel
Carmine Abate
Rutgers University Press, 2024
The village of Hora is a magical place that blurs the boundaries between a mythical past and the present. It is here that Costantino Avati grows alongside his impetuous and melancholic father, Francesco; his mother, Elena, who hides a secret torment; his two sisters, Orlandina and Lucrezia; and his grandfather Lissandro, the last custodian of an era and a world that are disappearing. As Costantino feels the pangs of first love with the intriguing Roman Isabella, he also discovers the romantic allure of his own village and its rich cultural heritage. In his first novel, acclaimed author Carmine Abate transforms his Italo-Albanian (Arbëresh) hometown of Carfizzi, Calabria, into a magical realist wonderland that rivals Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo. Inspired by the oral traditions of the old Albanian bards and incorporating the poetic local dialect, The Round Dance is a unique piece of multicultural literature that was named by the publishing house Mondadori as one of the one hundred greatest Italian novels of the twentieth century.
[more]
Roundabout
An Improvisational Fiction
Phong Nguyen
Moon City Press, 2019
Ovid Dullann works as an assistant accountant for a multinational corporation and is supporting a family of four; but abruptly, on his forty-ninth birthday, Ovid runs away from his daily work and his loving family to go on a road trip. Struck by inspiration, Ovid knows that an Author is writing about him, and will do anything to avoid acting as a protagonist of a book. But this Author will not abandon his pursuit, and vows to punish Ovid, his wayward protagonist.
[more]
Roxy and Coco
A Novel
Terese Svoboda
West Virginia University Press, 2024
Roxy and Coco, sisters and glamorous harpies (mythical bird women), work to save the world by stopping child abuse, while also trying to evade capture. For readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell.
“[A] wry and rambunctious fable….The book offers brief and staggered visions of family, in all its complex permutations. Here, flocks settle into wonderfully unlikely formations. It’s possible that the most dangerous thing for anyone, harpy or human, is the decision to fly alone.”
— Hilary Leichter, New York Times Book Review
Sisters Roxy and Coco are two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time.
When Roxy is suddenly attracted to her human supervisor at a social work agency a hundred years too early, Coco is very suspicious. Luring Roxy with his scent, Tim is also on the payroll of a fake conservationist intent on her less-than-legal collection. Coco swoops in to vet Tim, but Interpol is hot on her trail for a series of curious homicides. (Surveillance has a very hard time convincing his boss of what he’s monitoring.) When the sisters find themselves trapped, Chris, a bipolar skateboarding truant, tries his best to rescue them but it’s Stewie, Coco’s colleague, who turns the story inside out. Roxy and Coco climaxes at a gala of egg fanciers who scramble to escape the harpies’ talons.
Action figure–worthy, for readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell, this modern take on these fabled women touches on mental illness, racism, animal rights, and the rights of children.
“[A] wry and rambunctious fable….The book offers brief and staggered visions of family, in all its complex permutations. Here, flocks settle into wonderfully unlikely formations. It’s possible that the most dangerous thing for anyone, harpy or human, is the decision to fly alone.”
— Hilary Leichter, New York Times Book Review
Sisters Roxy and Coco are two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time.
When Roxy is suddenly attracted to her human supervisor at a social work agency a hundred years too early, Coco is very suspicious. Luring Roxy with his scent, Tim is also on the payroll of a fake conservationist intent on her less-than-legal collection. Coco swoops in to vet Tim, but Interpol is hot on her trail for a series of curious homicides. (Surveillance has a very hard time convincing his boss of what he’s monitoring.) When the sisters find themselves trapped, Chris, a bipolar skateboarding truant, tries his best to rescue them but it’s Stewie, Coco’s colleague, who turns the story inside out. Roxy and Coco climaxes at a gala of egg fanciers who scramble to escape the harpies’ talons.
Action figure–worthy, for readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell, this modern take on these fabled women touches on mental illness, racism, animal rights, and the rights of children.
[more]
Rudolf
Marian Pankowski
Northwestern University Press, 1996
This novel, set in the 1970s, tells the story of the "author," a middle-aged Polish professor who lives abroad but who earlier survived the Nazi concentration camps, and Rudolf, an old man. Told in stream of consciousness as well as through a triangular correspondence among Rudolf, the author, and the author's mother, the story emerges as a tale of subversion and liberation that echoes Gombrowicz in its exploration of transgressive desire. It will be of great interest to those interested in Polish literature and to readers of gay and lesbian literature.
[more]
Ruin
Beppe Fenoglio
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Ruin is an acclaimed 1954 novel by Italian Beppe Fenoglio. It's the story of Augustine Braida, a boy who serves the Rabino family, whose first-person account of life in Langhe paints a vivid portrait of early twentieth-century Italian peasant life. Told with terrible humility and great force, it is a compassionate and harrowing narrative of peasant endurance in the face of overwhelming hardship.
Born into a working-class family in the town of Alba lying in that part of the Piedmont called LeLanghe, Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) belonged to the generation of young Italian writers whose works were molded by their World War II experience and the anti-Fascist Resistance many took part in. Fenoglio fought as a partisan against the German troops occupying Italy, and the major part of his literature is connected with the events of the time.
Born into a working-class family in the town of Alba lying in that part of the Piedmont called LeLanghe, Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) belonged to the generation of young Italian writers whose works were molded by their World War II experience and the anti-Fascist Resistance many took part in. Fenoglio fought as a partisan against the German troops occupying Italy, and the major part of his literature is connected with the events of the time.
[more]
The Rumphulus
Joseph G. Peterson
University of Iowa Press, 2020
Romulus was the founder of Rome; and those tossed outside the city-gate are not Romulus’s children but the cast-offs living in hovels, the Rumphulus. However, this isn’t ancient Rome, but rather the nature preserve of a contemporary American suburb. The outcasts don’t understand why they’ve been relegated to the
woods. Nor do they know if they will ever summon the courage to cross the roads that act as a physical and psychological barrier to their reentry into conventional society. Daily they negotiate the harsh conditions of the wild and the dangerous presence of one another while they contemplate their exiles. That is until society
comes for one of them.
The Rumphulus have grown their beards long, and when they can no longer stand life they howl like wolves; only they are not wolves but the stranded city outcasts who howl in pain.
[more]
Russian Absurd
Selected Writings
Daniil Kharms, Translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale
Northwestern University Press, 2017
A writer who defies categorization, Daniil Kharms has come to be regarded as an essential artist of the modernist avant-garde. His writing, which partakes of performance, narrative, poetry, and visual elements, was largely suppressed during his lifetime, which ended in a psychiatric ward where he starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. His work, which survived mostly in notebooks, can now be seen as one of the pillars of absurdist literature, most explicitly manifested in the 1920s and ’30s Soviet Union by the OBERIU group, which inherited the mantle of Russian futurism from such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. This selection of prose and poetry provides the most comprehensive portrait of the writer in English translation to date, revealing the arc of his career and including a particularly generous selection of his later work.
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Russian Nights
Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky
Northwestern University Press, 1997
This captivating novel is the summation of Odoevsky's views and interests in many fields: Gothic literature, romanticism, mysticism, the occult, social responsibility, Westernization, utopia and anti-utopia. Compared to The Decameron, to Hoffman's Serapion Brethren, and to the Platonic dialogues, Russian Nights is a unique mixture of romantic and society tales framed by Odoevsky's musings on strands of Russian thought and his own obsessions.
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