Books That Inspired Me BIG TIME!
Discover the most inspiring books that changed my life! Explore this curated list of transformative reads that motivated, educated, and empowered me BIG TIME.
Book
The Losers' Club
by Richard Perez
WHAT IS LOVE? In the game of love, there are winners and losers. In THE LOSERS' CLUB, Richard Perez tries to answer the eternal question. Set in downtown New York City, THE LOSERS' CLUB tells the story of Martin Sierra, an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. His journey brings us into the East Village, pre-9/11-and in contact with Nikki, his dream woman, who remains unattainable romantically yet becomes his friend and confidant during his illuminating misadventures. Populated with characters and surprises few will ever forget, this energetic, comic novel is as much about a generation (we won't say "X") as it is about a specific time and place.
Book
The Dog of the Marriage
by Amy Hempel
From one of the most highly acclaimed short story writers of the last two decades comes a glittering collection about relationships gone awry, sexual obsession, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life.
Book
Reasons to Live
by Amy Hempel
Hempel's now-classic collection of short fiction is peopled by complex characters who have discovered that their safety nets are not dependable and who must now learn to balance on the threads of wit, irony, and spirit.
Book
Tumble Home
by Amy Hempel
Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter.
Book
The Ice at the Bottom of the World
by Mark Richard
With a distinctive and original voice, Mark Richard's stories capture characters on the fringe of society, and illuminate the goodness at the heart of their Southern, down-and-out lies. Full of startling images and harrowing epiphanies, The Ice at the Bottom of the World is a collection by a true master of his craft. In these ten stories, Mark Richard, winner of the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, emerges as the heir apparent to Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner.
Item Not Found
ID: 0802135986
(Type: books)
Book
Suicide Blonde
by Darcey Steinke
S. alone, "Suicide Blonde" is a beautiful, brutal cult classic that "Details" calls "a shocking and electrifying journey into the inferno of sexual obsession."
Item Not Found
ID: 0802137342
(Type: books)
Book
Milk
by Darcey Steinke
From a writer of remarkable depth and courage, a brilliant and haunting novel that explores the intersection of spirituality and sexuality. Mary is a new mother transformed by the birth of her baby. She is infatuated with the tiny creature, yet feels abandoned by her husband. As her baby sleeps in his crib, she doesn't know whether to kneel in her coat closet and pray or fantasize about sex. She seeks refuge in her old friend Walter, a lonely gay Episcopal priest, who privately struggles with his own contradictory desires. Still grieving over the death of his boyfriend, he finds himself dangerously attracted to a teenage boy. How can he lead his church when he is overwhelmed by nascent desires? Meanwhile Mary meets John, a monk who has just left his monastery after fifteen years because he feels abandoned by God and craves intimacy with a woman. These three characters' lives come together in ways that reveal how even our rawest, most confused impulses may contain elements of the divine.
Book
Music for Torching
by A. M. Homes
As A.M. Homes's incendiary novel unfolds, the Kodacolor hues of the good life become nearly hallucinogenic.Laying bare th foundations of a marriage, flash frozen in the anxious entropy of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine spin the quit terors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens out of control. From a strange and hilarious encounter with a Stepford Wife neighbor to an ill-conceived plan for a tattoo, to a sexy cop who shows up at all the wrong moments, to a housecleaning team in space suits, a mistress calling on a cell phone, and a hostage situationat a school, A.M. Homes creates characters so outrageously flawed and deeply human that thery are entriely believable.
Book
Safety of Objects
by A. M. Homes
Published to overwhelming critical acclaim, this extraordinary collection of short stories established A. M. Homes as one of the most provocative and daring writers of her generation. Here you'll find the cult classic A Real Doll, the tale of a teenage boy's erotic obsession with his sister's favorite doll; Adults Alone, which first introduced Paul and Elaine, the crack-smoking yuppie couple whose marriage careens out of control in Homes's novel Music for Torching; and Looking for Johnny, in which a kidnapped boy, having failed his abductor's expectations, is returned home. Brilliantly conceived, sharply etched, and exceptionally satisfying, these stories explore the American dream in ways you're not likely soon to forget. Working in Kodacolor hues, Homes offers an uncanny picture of a surreal suburbia-outrageous and utterly believable.
Item Not Found
ID: 0060520132
(Type: books)
Book
The End Of Alice
by A.M. Homes
From the 2013 Orange Prize–winning author of May We Be Forgiven. Only a work of such searing, meticulously controlled brilliance could provoke such a wide range of visceral responses. Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal—and revel in—their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.
Book
In a Country of Mothers
by A.M. Homes
No relationship is more charged than that between a psychotherapist and her patient—unless it is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This disturbing literary thriller explores what happens when the line between those relationships blurs. Jody Goodman enters psychotherapy with questions of career and love on her mind. But Claire Roth, her therapist, keeps changing the focus of their sessions to Jody's parentage—Jody was adopted; Claire gave up a baby for adoption who would now be exactly Jody's age. As the two women become increasingly involved, speculation turns into certainty, fantasy into fixation. Until suddenly it is no longer clear just which of them needs the other more—or with more terrifying consequences.
Item Not Found
ID: 0316592102
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0316739014
(Type: books)
Book
Purple America
by Rick Moody
On the occasion of the paperback release of Demonology, Back Bay Books takes pleasure in making all four of Rick Moody's acclaimed earlier works of fiction available in handsome new paperback editions.
Book
The Ice Storm
by Rick Moody
The year is 1973. As a freak winter storm bears down on an exclusive, affluent suburb in Connecticut, cark skid out of control, men and women swap partners, and their children experiment with sex, drugs, and even suicide. Here two families, the Hoods and the Williamses, com face-to-face with the seething emotions behind the well-clipped lawns of their lives-in a novel widely hailed as a funny, acerbic, and moving hymn to a dazed and confused era of American life.
Item Not Found
ID: 0316557633
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0316578991
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0679732217
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0446671924
(Type: books)
Book
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Editors' Choice A Pulishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Birds of America is a stunning collection of twelve stories by Lorrie Moore, one of our finest authors at work today. With her characteristic wit and piercing intelligence she unfolds a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America, and with a trademark humor that fuels each story with pathos and understanding.
Item Not Found
ID: 1400033829
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0446672726
(Type: books)