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Readers follow in the search for a beautiful but amoral woman by a husband who is determined to redeem her. In a series of dazzling flashes from the Southern California underworld, an extraordinary carnival of characters appears.
In the tradition of Joseph Conrad, Ethan, haunted by guilt in the wake of his wife's tortured descent into madness, loses himself in a lawless and sensual world beyond the US's southern border.A stunning debut by an impressive new talent. Ethan, haunted by guilt in the wake of his wife's tortured descent into madness, loses himself in a lawless and sensual world when he crosses the US's southern border.Wandering without hope in a place that obeys only raw power, he meets a woman who saves his life and, in return, extracts his promise to rescue her sister, Mirabelle, from a Central American country on the brink of revolution before Mirabelle can be lured into deeper danger by the false coyote Soto. Pursued through crumbling cities and down a jungle river, Ethan finds himself in a country where personal and political traumas converge in a guerrilla war in which the sides are unclear and the stakes beyond reckoning. Ethan sought absolution and relief when he abandoned everything he knew, but to save Mirabelle, he must make a choice that will place him far beyond the borders of redemption.Horse Latitudes is a lushly-written modern gothic ? part thriller, part nightmarish journey into the moral uncertainty at the heart of the American experience in Central America.
The title of Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to be becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day. From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. Horse Latitudes is a triumphant new collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.
Winner, ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2018 In Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves, James Krohe Jr. presents an engaging history of an often overlooked region, filled with fascinating stories and surprising facts about Illinois’s midsection. Krohe describes in lively prose the history of mid-Illinois from the Woodland period of prehistory until roughly 1960, covering the settlement of the region by peoples of disparate races and religions; the exploitation by Euro-Americans of forest, fish, and waterfowl; the transformation of farming into a high-tech industry; and the founding and deaths of towns. The economic, cultural, and racial factors that led to antagonism and accommodation between various people of different backgrounds are explored, as are the roles of education and religion in this part of the state. The book examines remarkable utopian experiments, social and moral reform movements, and innovations in transportation and food processing. It also offers fresh accounts of labor union warfare and social violence directed against Native Americans, immigrants, and African Americans and profiles three generations of political and government leaders, sometimes extraordinary and sometimes corrupt (the “one-horse thieves” of the title). A concluding chapter examines history’s roles as product, recreation, and civic bond in today’s mid-Illinois. Accessible and entertaining yet well-researched and informative, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves draws on a wide range of sources to explore a surprisingly diverse section of Illinois whose history is America in microcosm.
The Horse Latitudes follows one Cavalry platoon's time in Baghdad, Iraq. The missions are long stretches of boredom broken by flashes of violence. A single sniper shot fired. An IED loosely buried in the roadside, waiting. A schoolyard of kids throwing fist-sized rocks at gun trucks. The downtime is a combination of homesickness, RPGs, and mortar fire. The Horse Latitudes observes not only firefights and their aftermath, but also the soldiers' struggles within themselves: how to fight a faceless enemy, what it means to serve, how one soldiers, what makes a man, what makes a good man, what it might mean to die for this, and what it might mean not to.
Stephen Atkins Swails is a forgotten American hero. A free Black in the North before the Civil War began, Swails exhibited such exemplary service in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry that he became the first African American commissioned as a combat officer in the United States military. After the war, Swails remained in South Carolina, where he held important positions in the Freedmen’s Bureau, helped draft a progressive state constitution, served in the state senate, and secured legislation benefiting newly liberated Black citizens. Swails remained active in South Carolina politics after Reconstruction until violent Redeemers drove him from the state. After Swails died in 1900, state and local leaders erased him from the historical narrative. Gordon C. Rhea’s biography, one of only a handful for any of the nearly 200,000 African Americans who fought in the Civil War or figured prominently in Reconstruction, restores Swails’s remarkable legacy. Swails’s life story is a saga of an indomitable human being who confronted deep-seated racial prejudice in various institutions but nevertheless reached significant milestones in the fight for racial equality, especially within the military. His is an inspiring story that is especially timely today.
"Scapellato's blend of existential noir, absurdist humor, literary fiction, and surreal exploration of performance art merges into something special. . . . The Made-Up Man is a rare novel that is simultaneously smart and entertaining." —Gabino Iglesias, NPR Stanley had known it was a mistake to accept his uncle Lech’s offer to apartment-sit in Prague—he’d known it was one of Lech’s proposals, a thinly veiled setup for some invasive, potentially dangerous performance art project. But whatever Lech had planned for Stanley, it would get him to Prague and maybe offer a chance to make things right with T after his failed attempt to propose. Stanley can take it. He can ignore their hijinks, resist being drafted into their evolving, darkening script. As the operation unfolds it becomes clear there’s more to this performance than he expected; they know more about Stanley’s state of mind than he knows himself. He may be able to step over chalk outlines in the hallway, may be able to turn away from the women acting as his mother or the men performing as his father, but when a man made up to look like Stanley begins to play out his most devastating memory, he won’t be able to stand outside this imitation of his life any longer. Immediately and wholly immersive, Joseph Scapellato’s debut novel, The Made-Up Man, is a hilarious examination of art’s role in self-knowledge, a sinister send-up of self-deception, and a big-hearted investigation into the cast of characters necessary to help us finally meet ourselves.
Today's greater public awareness of how climate affects our quality of life and environment has created an increasing demand for climatological information. Now this information is available in one convenient, accessible source, The Encyclopedia of Climatology. This comprehensive volume covers all the main subfields of climatology, supplies data on climates in major continental areas and explains what is known about the causes of climatic processes and changes. Contents include articles on bioclimatology, El Niño, climatic models, world regional climates, civilization and climate, climatic variations and the greenhouse effect.
Goodfellas meets Thelma and Louise when an unlikely trio of women in New York find themselves banding together to escape the clutches of violent figures from their pasts. After Brooklyn mob widow Rena Ruggiero hits her eighty-year-old neighbor Enzio in the head with an ashtray when he makes an unwanted move on her, she embarks on a bizarre adventure. Taking off in Enzio’s ’62 Impala, she retreats to the Bronx home of her estranged daughter, Adrienne, and her granddaughter, Lucia, only to be turned away by Adrienne at the door. Their neighbor, Lacey “Wolfie” Wolfstein, a one-time Golden Age porn star and retired Florida Suncoast grifter, takes Rena in and befriends her. When Lucia discovers that Adrienne is planning to hit the road with her ex-boyfriend Richie, she figures Rena’s her only way out of a life on the run with a mother she can’t stand. But Richie has massacred a few members of the Brancaccio crime family for a big payday, and he drags even more trouble into the mix in the form of an unhinged enforcer named Crea. The stage is set for an explosion that will propel Rena, Wolfie, and Lucia down a strange path, each woman running from something and unsure what comes next. A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself is a screwball noir about finding friendship and family where you least expect it, in which William Boyle again draws readers into the familiar—and sometimes frightening—world in the shadows at the edges of New York’s neighborhoods.
H Allen Smith has sometimes been referred to as "the best-selling humorist since Mark Twain". Considering that he wrote against the likes of James Thurber, Robert Benchley, and S. J. Perelman, that's quite a statement. And probably true. He sold a million copies of each of his first several books, starting with Low Man on a Totem Pole. In this book, which might be called a fraction of his memoirs (Mr. Smith claimed he could have filled twenty), he recounts the high points of his life amid the human race -- a race he appreciated and observed with a keen nose for the humor hiding in the most unexpected places. Here is a panorama of unlikely people who really existed, of inconceivable things that actually happened, of the commonplace rarities of our frenzied epoch. Among others, there is the newspaperman who suffered under the delusion that Herbert Hoover had bladders on his feet: the man who thoughtfully and perpetually bounced turtle eggs on a bar: a deaf dentist who trained his dog to act as his receptionist; a child prodigy who couldn't talk any too well, but appeared to know more about swing music than the head usher at the Paramount Theater -- all these are part of Mr. Smith's life and times.
