Description
“The Poser is smart and
grand and funny, a wonderful fable. Mr. Rubin is a great hope for comic
fiction in the 21st century. He’s got the spirit and the ear.”
—Sam Lipsyte, New York Times bestselling author of The Ask
A hilarious and dazzling debut novel about a master impressionist at risk of losing his true self
All his life, Giovanni Bernini has possessed an uncanny gift: he can imitate anyone he meets. Honed by his mother at a young age, the talent catapults him from small-town obscurity to stardom. As Giovanni describes it, “No one’s disguise is perfect. There is in every person, no matter how graceful, a seam, a thread curling out of them. . . . When pulled by the right hands, it will unravel the person entire.” As his fame grows, Giovanni encounters a beautiful and enigmatic stage singer, Lucy Starlight—the only person whose thread he cannot find—and becomes increasingly trapped inside his many poses. Ultimately, he must assume the one identity he has never been able to master: his own.
In the vein of Jonathan Lethem’s and Kevin Wilson’s playful surrealism, Jacob Rubin’s The Poser is the debut of a major literary voice, a masterfully written, deeply original comic novel, and the moving story of a man who must risk everything for the chance to save his life and know true love.
About the Author
JACOB RUBIN’s writing has appeared in the anthology Best New American Voices, The New Yorker online, New York magazine, Slate, n+1, and The New Republic. Times Square, a screenplay he co-wrote, was recently acquired by Focus Features. He lives in New York.
Description
The debut novel everyone is talking about... “The last page is as satisfying as the first.” —Kathryn Stockett “I really loved this book... I can't praise it enough.”—Anne Rice “It's a book to read and reread, one that will only get better with time.”—Tom Franklin It was the summer everything changed.… My Sunshine Away unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish, and passionate football fandom. But in the summer of 1989, when fifteen-year-old Lindy Simpson—free spirit, track star, and belle of the block—experiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too.
In My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh brilliantly juxtaposes the enchantment of a charmed childhood with the gripping story of a violent crime, unraveling families, and consuming adolescent love. Acutely wise and deeply honest, it is an astonishing and page-turning debut about the meaning of family, the power of memory, and our ability to forgive.
About the Author
M.O. Walsh’s fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, The Southern Review, American Short Fiction, Epoch, and Best New American Voices, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and is currently the director of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, where he lives and works, happily, with his wife and family.
Description
An engrossing and tragic literary thriller that evokes the sinister realism of Cormac McCarthy and the inescapable family bonds of Daniel Woodrell, "The Marble Orchard" tells the story of Beam, the black sheep of the Sheetmire family, a large and entrenched rural Kentucky clan. Beam finds himself on the run after killing a man who was trying to rob him, a man who turns out to be the son of Loat Duncan, a powerful local businessman and cold-blooded killer.
With Loat--who is hiding a devastating secret about Beam's past--and Elvis, the local sheriff, hot on his trail, Beam leads a nomadic existence as he descends deeper into his own heart of darkness, slipping from one place to the next, each more mysterious than the last. The people he meets during his journey--an enigmatic trucker dressed in a suit, a cemetery-dwelling Good Samaritan, an armless brothel owner--are pieces of a puzzle that hold the key to Beam's past, as well as his possible future salvation.
Alex Taylor holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and has taught creative writing at Western Kentucky University and McNeese State University. His debut collection, "The Name of the Nearest River," was published to great critical acclaim in 2010. Taylor has received the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, the Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction. His stories have appeared in the "Oxford American," "Black Warrior Review," "Carolina Quarterly," "American Short Fiction," the "Greensboro Review," and elsewhere. He hails from Rosine, Kentucky.
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