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3388 books match the query 'Fiction' and 20 start with y
Yankinton
Rachel Shihor
Seagull Books, 2020
Set in the early days of the Jewish state, Yankinton tells the stories of refugees from the Holocaust and antisemitism who struggled to build new lives in Israel. Through the eyes of a young Orthodox Jewish girl growing up in Tel Aviv, we watch a colorful mosaic of characters from Soviet revolutionaries to weapons runners during the War of Independence. Faced with the difficulties of the traumatized adults around her, from panic attacks to suicide attempts, the girl seeks moments of wonder among the struggle and tragedy.
We join her as she moves through the Tel Aviv streets, avoiding the spots exposed to Arab sniper fire; seeks literature of the wider world in a city awash in translations of Soviet propaganda novels; and navigates the idiosyncrasies of the adults around her. With her, we listen in on political discussions, reminiscences of Russia and wartime Eastern Europe, and Soviet revolutionary songs accompanied by balalaikas. We track the lives of the couple for which the novel is named. Mrs. Yankinton smuggled grenades in her baby’s carriage during Israel’s War of Independence; for years after, she would end every day standing at attention, alone in her living room, when the national anthem came over the radio. Mr. Yankinton, whose arrest as a revolutionary in Soviet Russia foiled his plans to study medicine, became the proud curator of the Zionist visionary Jabotinsky’s complete works.
In this rich mosaic of scenes and characters from postwar Tel Aviv, Shihor muses on the vital significance of the act of remembering and of the search for flashes of magic in the darkness.
We join her as she moves through the Tel Aviv streets, avoiding the spots exposed to Arab sniper fire; seeks literature of the wider world in a city awash in translations of Soviet propaganda novels; and navigates the idiosyncrasies of the adults around her. With her, we listen in on political discussions, reminiscences of Russia and wartime Eastern Europe, and Soviet revolutionary songs accompanied by balalaikas. We track the lives of the couple for which the novel is named. Mrs. Yankinton smuggled grenades in her baby’s carriage during Israel’s War of Independence; for years after, she would end every day standing at attention, alone in her living room, when the national anthem came over the radio. Mr. Yankinton, whose arrest as a revolutionary in Soviet Russia foiled his plans to study medicine, became the proud curator of the Zionist visionary Jabotinsky’s complete works.
In this rich mosaic of scenes and characters from postwar Tel Aviv, Shihor muses on the vital significance of the act of remembering and of the search for flashes of magic in the darkness.
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Year of the Dog
A NovelBy Shelby Hearon
University of Texas Press, 2007
When her husband dumps her for an old girlfriend and sets all of Peachland, South Carolina, gossiping, Janey Daniels has to get away—far away—for a "sabbatical" year. She flees to Burlington, Vermont, home of Aunt May, her mother's only living relative. There she adopts Beulah, a Labrador puppy in training to become a companion dog for the blind. Not for a moment does Janey suspect that this "year of the dog" will change her life forever.
Shelby Hearon is an acknowledged master at illuminating the nuances of relationships. In Year of the Dog, she explores the surprising ways that the heart heals after a betrayal. While Janey is training Beulah, Beulah leads Janey to a new love, James Maarten, a smart, "fidgety" teacher they meet at the dog park. As Janey soon discovers, James has suffered a betrayal of his own that makes it hard for him to open up and trust her with even the smallest details of his past. While Janey tries to help James, she also reaches out to her enigmatic Aunt May, a retired librarian reputed to be the friend, perhaps even the lover, of popular mystery writer Bert Greenwood. When Janey attempts to solve the twin mysteries of why her great aunt has distanced herself from the family—and what her true relationship is with Bert Greenwood—Beulah provides the clues that lead Janey to uncover the secrets of her aunt's life. By the time Beulah's stay with Janey comes to an end, the people whose lives she's linked will discover that healing and reconciliation can come in the most unexpected ways.
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Year of the Rat
Marc Anthony Richardson
University of Alabama Press, 2016
2017 American Book Award Winner
Winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
Marc Anthony Richardson's Year of the Rat is a poignant and riveting literary debut narrated in an unabashedly exuberant voice.
In Year of the Rat, an artist returns to the dystopian city of his birth to tend to his invalid mother only to find himself torn apart by memories and longings. Narrated by this nameless figure whose rants, reveries, and Rabelaisian escapades take him on a Dantesque descent into himself, the story follows him and his mother as they share a one-bedroom apartment over the course of a year.
Despite his mother’s precarious health, the lingering memories of a lost love, an incarcerated sibling, a repressed sexuality, and an anarchic inability to support himself, he pursues his dream of becoming an avant-garde artist. His prospects grow dim until a devastating death provides a painful and unforeseeable opportunity. With a voice that is poetic and profane, ethereal and irreverent, cyclical and succinct, he roams from vignette to vignette, creating a polyphonic patchwork quilt of a family portrait.
Winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
Marc Anthony Richardson's Year of the Rat is a poignant and riveting literary debut narrated in an unabashedly exuberant voice.
In Year of the Rat, an artist returns to the dystopian city of his birth to tend to his invalid mother only to find himself torn apart by memories and longings. Narrated by this nameless figure whose rants, reveries, and Rabelaisian escapades take him on a Dantesque descent into himself, the story follows him and his mother as they share a one-bedroom apartment over the course of a year.
Despite his mother’s precarious health, the lingering memories of a lost love, an incarcerated sibling, a repressed sexuality, and an anarchic inability to support himself, he pursues his dream of becoming an avant-garde artist. His prospects grow dim until a devastating death provides a painful and unforeseeable opportunity. With a voice that is poetic and profane, ethereal and irreverent, cyclical and succinct, he roams from vignette to vignette, creating a polyphonic patchwork quilt of a family portrait.
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Yellow Stonefly
A NovelTim Poland
Ohio University Press, 2024
In her day job as a nurse, Sandy Holston cares for the elderly and the sick, even as she is haunted by her own questionable past and the deaths that marked it. Her true self resides among the mountain trout streams of her Appalachian home, where she wields her fly rod with uncanny accuracy as her life plays out along a tight line between herself and a fish on the other end. But then the Ripshin River threatens to flood. Sandy can no longer deny that dementia has taken hold in James Keefe, her older sometimes-lover. An elusive eastern mountain lion appears. And when a predatory survivalist keeping a solitary camp by the headwaters arrives, he poses the biggest threat of all. His merciless pursuit of the lion brings him ever closer to Sandy, triggering her final, tragic attempt to preserve her connections with Keefe, the headwaters, and all that she has, at last, come to love. In Yellow Stonefly—a rare fly fishing novel with a female protagonist—Tim Poland weaves suspense and introspection into an unforgettable read, at once mournful and bracing.
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Yes
Thomas Bernhard
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scientist, his endless talks with the strange Asian woman mean release from his condition, but for the Persian woman, as her own circumstances deteriorate, there is only one answer.
"Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century."—Gabriel Josipovici, Independent
"With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war."—Spectator
Widely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix Séguier.
"Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century."—Gabriel Josipovici, Independent
"With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war."—Spectator
Widely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix Séguier.
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Yiza
Michael Köhlmeier
Haus Publishing, 2017
Part dark fairy tale, part mystery, Yiza is the story of three homeless street children on the run. One evening, not long after her arrival in Germany, six-year-old Yiza is abandoned at the market where she spends her days. At a shelter for migrant children she meets two boys, Schamhan and Arian, and together they run away. Trekking through snowy forests and housing settlements, they evade police custody, subsisting on the margins of society and doing whatever it takes to survive.
Both boys are protective of Yiza but are blind to the moral and emotional complexities of their actions. When Yiza falls ill they take shelter in a greenhouse and Arian spends his days begging for food and medicine, but before long they are discovered. When Yiza is illicitly taken into foster care and confined the novel reaches its brutal denouement as we see that Schamhan and Arian will do anything to be reunited with her.
Narrated in simple language and with an innocent charm that belies its social reality, Yiza is a pertinent and timely tale of displacement and suffering.
Both boys are protective of Yiza but are blind to the moral and emotional complexities of their actions. When Yiza falls ill they take shelter in a greenhouse and Arian spends his days begging for food and medicine, but before long they are discovered. When Yiza is illicitly taken into foster care and confined the novel reaches its brutal denouement as we see that Schamhan and Arian will do anything to be reunited with her.
Narrated in simple language and with an innocent charm that belies its social reality, Yiza is a pertinent and timely tale of displacement and suffering.
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Yonder Mountain
An Ozarks AnthologyAnthony Priest
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
Yonder Mountain, inspired by poet Miller Williams's Ozark, Ozark: A Hillside Reader, is rooted in the literary legacy of the Ozarks while reflecting the diversity and change of the region. Readers will find fresh, creative, honest voices profoundly influenced by the landscape and culture of the Ozark Mountains. Poets, novelists, columnists, and historians are represented--Donald Harington, Sara Burge, Marcus Cafagna, Art Homer, Pattiann Rogers, Miller Williams, Roy Reed, Dan Woodrell, and more.
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York's Ride
A Novel of Old CaliforniaMichael Dennis Cassity
University of Nevada Press, 2025
In 1914, most of the world is focused on The Great War, but a much quieter story is taking place in a remote mountain region in northern California and western Nevada with the tale of two twelve-year-old boys and a legendary, wild horse from the desert. The stallion, Meshuga—part mustang and part giant Percheron draft —is a stallion so strong that he becomes a mythical, inspirational fable. Meshuga is destined to compete in a long-distance race through the mountains and valleys against the nation’s best Arabian horses.
Jim, an orphan, has moved to the West to live on his Uncle Martin and Aunt Hanna’s ranch in the small, post-Gold Rush town of Taylorsville where the Sierra Nevada meets the Cascades. Mostly, Jim doesn’t miss his family farm in Missouri, and when he’s not doing ranch chores, he spends his time fly-fishing on nearby Indian Creek. This is where he first encounters York, a local boy from the Maidu tribe, and the two become fast friends. Jim and York soon meet up with Blind Charlie, a famous Maidu elder storyteller, who fills their heads with ancestral myths and legends.
After the untimely death of York, Meshuga’s caretaker, Jim is suddenly moved to take responsibility for the great black mustang and become part of Blind Charlie’s prophecies. With York gone, Jim must fulfill what his friend knew all along—that he and Meshuga would learn to conquer the challenge of the race of the century. A romantic novel of the Old West imbued with rich historical details, York’s Ride is a complex and beautiful tale about family relationships and coming-of-age in early twentieth-century California.
Jim, an orphan, has moved to the West to live on his Uncle Martin and Aunt Hanna’s ranch in the small, post-Gold Rush town of Taylorsville where the Sierra Nevada meets the Cascades. Mostly, Jim doesn’t miss his family farm in Missouri, and when he’s not doing ranch chores, he spends his time fly-fishing on nearby Indian Creek. This is where he first encounters York, a local boy from the Maidu tribe, and the two become fast friends. Jim and York soon meet up with Blind Charlie, a famous Maidu elder storyteller, who fills their heads with ancestral myths and legends.
After the untimely death of York, Meshuga’s caretaker, Jim is suddenly moved to take responsibility for the great black mustang and become part of Blind Charlie’s prophecies. With York gone, Jim must fulfill what his friend knew all along—that he and Meshuga would learn to conquer the challenge of the race of the century. A romantic novel of the Old West imbued with rich historical details, York’s Ride is a complex and beautiful tale about family relationships and coming-of-age in early twentieth-century California.
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You Alone Are Dancing
Brenda Flanagan
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Rape, the devastation of hurricane Flora, a child's tragic death, and an indifferent and corrupt government are some of the numerous problems challenging the people of Rosehill. Set on the fictional island of Santabella and spanning three years, You Alone Are Dancing follows the life of young Beatrice Salandy, balancing her ambitions, obligations, and love for Sonny Allen. Determined to create his own opportunities, Sonny leaves Rosehill for the United States in a swirl of promises and expectations. Beatrice remains on Rosehill, sharing her neighbors' struggle, adding their pain to her own, but sharing as well their music and their laughter, their history and their allegiance to it. Like Santabella, set in an indifferent blue sea, Rosehill is part of a larger neglected Caribbean society, and Beatrice must learn to negotiate its tides and ebbs, overcome its storm and ensure its lulls, as she peruses what has to be done. She succeeds--but at a price that changes her life forever, as it does that of Sonny and all of Rosehill. "In Brenda Flanagan's novel, You Alone Are Dancing, there's talk and talk, the life-long dance of talk--it's lyrical, raucous, sorrowful, vibrant, inventive. And there you are, on the island, in the midst and mix of it all. What the best musicians do with wood and brass and air, Brenda Flanagan does with words--she gives them voice and life." --Janet Kauffman, author of Places in the World a Woman Could Walk Brenda Flanagan, a native of Trinidad, is Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing and African-American and Caribbean literature. Flanagan is a three-time Hopwood award winner, including one for this novel. She is also the author of a play, When the Jumbie Bird Calls, and a forthcoming short story collection, In Praise of Older Women and Other Crimes. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Caliban, Calalloo, the Caribbean Review, and the Indiana Review, among others.
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You Are the Phenomenology
Timothy O'Keefe
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
You Are the Phenomenology is a cross-genre book—a blend of poetry, songs, lyric prose, and invented forms—that explores the everyday junctures of perception, compassion, and multiplicity. How might our powers of association create shared experiences without distorting the contexts from which those experiences emerge?
One of the volume's innovative forms is a poetic series called “Quadrilaterals”—four-line poems that present the reader with various ways to leap associative gaps:
Quadrilateral : Pinch in Your Heel
Soars the mackled sound, kites ago :
A Polish boy thinks with accordions, adopts a stammer :
When were we first older than we wanted to be :
That was our city, our chisel, the corbeil from which we ate.
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You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot
Freddy Prestol Castillo
Duke University Press, 2019
In 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican writer and lawyer Freddy Prestol Castillo worked on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border during the massacre, known as “The Cutting,” and documented the atrocities in real time in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot. Written in 1937, published in Spanish in 1973, and appearing here in English for the first time, Prestol Castillo's novel is one of the few works that details the massacre's scale and scope. Conveying the horror of witnessing such inhumane violence firsthand, it is both an attempt to come to terms with personal and collective guilt and a search to understand how people can be driven to indiscriminately kill their neighbors.
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You Know Nothing
StoriesYasmina Din Madden
Northwestern University Press, 2026
Questioning the roles of women’s bodies and the emotions that drive them in Madden’s debut story collection
Following women and girls as they navigate everyday life in contemporary America, You Know Nothing explores the experiences of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and lovers whose inner worlds are animated by a tangle of emotion—from desire to rage and everything in between. Yasmina Din Madden’s characters inhabit the margins of their cultures, their diverse backgrounds united by their profound unease and the female bodies in which each resides. Madden takes us into the lives of a ravenous mother who devours her own son, a woman who sands away parts of her body, a Vietnamese mother facing her too-American children, and a fiercely protective dog owner who wanders a dog park with Satan’s master. In this debut collection, Madden brings these characters to life in bite-size stories of surreal revelation and inquisitive long-form explorations alike, leaving newfound clarity and hypnotizing carnage in her wake.
Following women and girls as they navigate everyday life in contemporary America, You Know Nothing explores the experiences of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and lovers whose inner worlds are animated by a tangle of emotion—from desire to rage and everything in between. Yasmina Din Madden’s characters inhabit the margins of their cultures, their diverse backgrounds united by their profound unease and the female bodies in which each resides. Madden takes us into the lives of a ravenous mother who devours her own son, a woman who sands away parts of her body, a Vietnamese mother facing her too-American children, and a fiercely protective dog owner who wanders a dog park with Satan’s master. In this debut collection, Madden brings these characters to life in bite-size stories of surreal revelation and inquisitive long-form explorations alike, leaving newfound clarity and hypnotizing carnage in her wake.
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You May See a Stranger
StoriesPaula Whyman
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Miranda Weber is a hot mess. In Paula Whyman’s debut collection of stories, we find her hoarding duct tape to ward off terrorists, stumbling into a drug run with a crackhead, and—frequently—enduring the bad behavior of men. A drivers’ education class pulsing with racial tension is the unexpected context of her sexual awakening. As she comes of age, and in the three decades that follow, the potential for violence always hovers nearby. She’s haunted by the fate of her disabled sister and—thanks to the crack cocaine epidemic of the ’80s, the wars in the Middle East, and sniper attacks—the threat of crime and terror in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Miranda can be lascivious, sardonic, and maddeningly self-destructive, but, no matter what befalls her, she never loses her sharp wit or powers of observation, which illuminate both her own life and her strange, unsettling times.
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You Never Get It Back
Cara Blue Adams
University of Iowa Press, 2021
The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams’s precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation, first as a research scientist and later as a writer. Place is a palpable presence: Boston in winter, Maine in summer, Virginia’s lush hillsides, the open New Mexico sky. Along the way, we meet Kate’s difficult bohemian mother and younger sister, her privileged college roommate, and the various men Kate dates as she struggles to define what she wants from the world on her own terms.
Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.
Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.
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You Shall See the Beautiful Things
A Novel & A NocturneSteve Amick
Acre Books, 2023
Envisioned as a “nocturne,” Steve Amick’s playful, multilayered novel expansively retells Eugene Field’s famed verse “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”
In the fishing village of Scheveningen in 1889, three men build and secretly launch an unorthodox fishing vessel, departing from the long tradition of netting herring using massive boats and large crews. Collaborating in this venture are Wyn van Winkel, a cavalier joker and opium addict currently AWOL from the Aceh War in Sumatra; Ned Nodder, a seasoned fisherman trying to support his family while plagued by narcolepsy and prophetic dreams; and Luuk Blenkin, a scattered young troubadour failing at love and searching for his place in the world.
As formally innovative as the “picarooner” this mismatched trio construct, the narrative lifts off into the fantastical, flitting between reality and irreality. Sparked by lines of the “Dutch lullaby,” the inexplicable adventure unfolds—and along the way, we learn of Wyn’s romantic recklessness, his broken relationship with his father, and the tragedies of war that scarred and changed him. We witness Ned’s unconventional path toward matrimony, as well as the painful loss that made his marriage a true union. We follow Luuk’s fumblings for purpose and fulfillment beyond the disgrace that befell his family and marred both his outlook and his prospects.
In the spirit of a nocturne, Steve Amick envelops his characters in the world of night and dreams. Lyrical, historical, surprising, magical, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, You Shall See the Beautiful Things will make readers look at the stars—and herring—in a new light.
In the fishing village of Scheveningen in 1889, three men build and secretly launch an unorthodox fishing vessel, departing from the long tradition of netting herring using massive boats and large crews. Collaborating in this venture are Wyn van Winkel, a cavalier joker and opium addict currently AWOL from the Aceh War in Sumatra; Ned Nodder, a seasoned fisherman trying to support his family while plagued by narcolepsy and prophetic dreams; and Luuk Blenkin, a scattered young troubadour failing at love and searching for his place in the world.
As formally innovative as the “picarooner” this mismatched trio construct, the narrative lifts off into the fantastical, flitting between reality and irreality. Sparked by lines of the “Dutch lullaby,” the inexplicable adventure unfolds—and along the way, we learn of Wyn’s romantic recklessness, his broken relationship with his father, and the tragedies of war that scarred and changed him. We witness Ned’s unconventional path toward matrimony, as well as the painful loss that made his marriage a true union. We follow Luuk’s fumblings for purpose and fulfillment beyond the disgrace that befell his family and marred both his outlook and his prospects.
In the spirit of a nocturne, Steve Amick envelops his characters in the world of night and dreams. Lyrical, historical, surprising, magical, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, You Shall See the Beautiful Things will make readers look at the stars—and herring—in a new light.
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You as of Today My Homeland
Stories of War, Self, and LoveTayseer Al-Sboul
Michigan State University Press, 2016
This volume comprises a translation of the first post-modernist historical Arabic novella, You as of Today, by the renowned Jordanian writer Tayseer al-Sboul, and his two short stories “Red Indian” and “The Rooster’s Cry.” “Red Indian” and “The Rooster’s Cry” complement You as of Today by providing, with striking transparency and precision, narratives that examine man’s journey to self-discovery through events that are culturally unique, transparent, and at times shocking. This volume is rich with tales of war, love, politics, censorship, and the search for self in a complex and conflicting Arab world at a critical time in its history. In a captivating style consistent with the nature of events narrated in the text, al-Sboul unveils the inner nature of social, political, and religious patterns of life in Arab society with an honesty and skill that renders You as of Today My Homeland a testimony of human experiences that transcend the boundaries of time and place.
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You've Told Me Before
Jennifer Anne Moses
University of Wisconsin Press, 2025
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, always compelling, the stories in this collection explore the many manifestations of being Jewish in a modern and largely secular world. Jennifer Anne Moses creates characters, mostly American, who are struggling with love, relationships, faith, tradition, family, and the ties that bind.
A professor of Jewish literature buys a lake house in the countryside with the aim of enjoying it with her husband, dogs, and grown sons, only to discover that her new neighbor is a sexist, dog-hating, and deeply antisemitic bully. The editor of a magazine devoted to lost languages resents the popularity of a younger, less sophisticated novelist, who happens to have been her student. A young woman tries to find her way after her fiancé calls off their wedding. With the contradictions, yearnings, imperfections, and longing for grace that beset all of us, these characters reach their own epiphanies—with results that are by turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.
A professor of Jewish literature buys a lake house in the countryside with the aim of enjoying it with her husband, dogs, and grown sons, only to discover that her new neighbor is a sexist, dog-hating, and deeply antisemitic bully. The editor of a magazine devoted to lost languages resents the popularity of a younger, less sophisticated novelist, who happens to have been her student. A young woman tries to find her way after her fiancé calls off their wedding. With the contradictions, yearnings, imperfections, and longing for grace that beset all of us, these characters reach their own epiphanies—with results that are by turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.
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Your Madness, Not Mine
Stories of CameroonMakuchi
Ohio University Press, 1999
Women’s writing in Cameroon has so far been dominated by Francophone writers. The short stories in this collection represent the yearnings and vision of an Anglophone woman, who writes both as a Cameroonian and as a woman whose life has been shaped by the minority status her people occupy within the nation-state. The stories in Your Madness, Not Mine are about postcolonial Cameroon, but especially about Cameroonian women, who probe their day-to-day experiences of survival and empowerment as they deal with gender oppression: from patriarchal expectations to the malaise of maldevelopment, unemployment, and the attraction of the West for young Cameroonians. Makuchi has given us powerful portraits of the people of postcolonial Africa in the so-called global village who too often go unseen and unheard.
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Yours
The Civil War, a Love Triangle, and the Steamboat SultanaLila Jeanne Elliott Sybesma
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2019
Sarah Sutton and the Elliott brothers, Gabe and Joseph, grew up together, and, as teenagers, the brothers vie for Sarah's attention. When the Civil War starts, Gabe and Joseph enlist in the Union army. Sarah accompanies her father, a surgeon, and serves as a nurse in battlefield hospitals.
They reunite on the Sultana, a steamboat returning thousands of soldiers, many former prisoners of war, home. Tragedy strikes when the boilers explode and the ship sinks in the Mississippi River. What will happen next?
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Youth Without Youth
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 2007
A fascinatingly unclassifiable novel of survival, the surreal, and the supernatural in the shadow of World War II
Bucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard. Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history—a man who thought his life was over—lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity.
At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade’s novella. The psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India. Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and terror of the supernatural. In this surreal, philosophy-driven fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of literary genre as well as the reader’s imagination.
Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, Youth Without Youth illuminates Eliade’s longing for past loves and new texts, his erotic imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery. It was adapted for the screen in 2007 by Francis Ford Coppola
Bucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard. Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history—a man who thought his life was over—lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity.
At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade’s novella. The psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India. Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and terror of the supernatural. In this surreal, philosophy-driven fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of literary genre as well as the reader’s imagination.
Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, Youth Without Youth illuminates Eliade’s longing for past loves and new texts, his erotic imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery. It was adapted for the screen in 2007 by Francis Ford Coppola
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