I read this book decades ago and although I never forgot how it startled me, I had forgotten the basic plot and premise. It made me recognize that the power of a compelling book is the feelings you remember, not necessarily the plot.
One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation
Experiment.
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.
Solution.
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to…
The struggle of an introvert in search of her voice was new territory for me. It takes courage to open your mouth and make music with your voice, something I have no ability to do (but wish I had).
Voice Lessons is a collection of personal essays about a shy introvert's struggle to find her voice―as a singer, a writer, a mother, and a human being. Using traditional narrative and hybrid forms, debut author Eve Krakow explores the early loss of her mother, her innermost anxieties as a young adult, the building of family, the push and pull of heritage and tradition, and more. Juxtaposing shyness in life with boldness on stage, these stories expose the deep-seated need for human connection and belonging.
Stream of consciousness with a Russian accent, laced with biting Soviet-Jewish humor makes this an extraordinary read that you can't put down. If you do, some chapters are pages long but only one sentence. If you stop in the middle, you'll have to start all over again to stay in the flow. A dazzling feat, at times.
In Sentence, Mikhail Iossel performs a remarkable juggling act between genres and countries. Can you write a "Russian" sentence in English? The author has found a perfect syntactical solution to the opposition of past and present in this groundbreaking collection of one-sentence stories: everything is simultaneous, breathless, in a dizzying spin of memory and imagination. The past and the present are inseparable-but the sentence is here, as a celebration of linguistic freedom and virtuosity.
Hannah, a successful real-estate broker, never pressed her mother Rokhl about the past—even as her late father often referenced the war she refused to mention. But when Hannah plans a business trip to Germany, Rokhl snaps, “Over my dead body!”—then vanishes. The next morning, a cryptic note remains: I am not her. Days later, Hannah identifies Rokhl’s body in the morgue.
In Germany, Hannah’s attraction to a local complicates her trip as a WWII-era family saga unravels. Parallel to her journey, a letter from Rokhl surfaces, exposing buried truths: her mother’s stolen identity, wartime survival, and the haunting legacy Hannah unknowingly carries. As past and present collide, Hannah confronts the questions she never asked and the secrets her mother refused to speak—until death demanded it.
