Showing results by narrator "Elisabeth Rodgers" in All Categories

Nathanael West: novelist, screenwriter, playwright, devoted outdoorsman was one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). Seventy years later, The Day of the Locust remains the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood.

Katharine Congreve, a Boston society figure, is summering at her country house in Hawthorne, Maine, in the late 1930s, looking after the children of her cousin Maeve, as she does every year. Maeve and her husband, John Shipley, spend their summers in Europe, leaving their son and two daughters in Katharine’s care, but something is different this time: Shipley has promised to leave his wife for Katharine if his failing marriage with Maeve can’t be revived before the end of their vacation.

A music therapist who thrives on helping others, Kendra Michaels cherishes the ordinary life she has achieved after stem cell surgery restored her sight. The skills she perfected during those sightless years - the ability to pick up the most subtle audio, olfactory, and tactile cues in the world around her - coupled with her laser-sharp mind - have made her a uniquely potent observer and problem solver. Kendra’s uncanny way of connecting the dots is as baffling to law enforcement as it is legendary.

The fascinating history of American bookishness as told through the sale of Charles Lamb’s library in 1848.

"Her technique was simple: aim for the top", an envious colleague wrote of Clare Boothe Luce. No American woman of the twentieth century aimed so accurately or rose so far as this legendary playwright, politician, and social seductress.

Black Market Billions blows the lid off the world's fastest-growing illicit industry: organized retail crime. Hitha Prabhakar reveals how criminals with ties to terrorist groups around the world are committing huge product thefts, and using the profits to fund terrorist acts. Prabhakar connects the dots and follows the money - from consumers dying for a deal to terrorist cells eager to do the killing.

It’s been said that at the core of every legend lies a seed of truth. For four American tourists vacationing in Greece, this is a lesson learned the hard way. When the group sets out to find a subterranean pool that’s rumored to be the one by which the demi-god Narcissus once wasted away in self-obsession, what started as a fun excursion quickly escalates into a full-blown nightmare.

Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan knows what it’s like to be haunted by the past. For years after her daughter, Bonnie, was stolen from her, she fought for closure. When her mother, Sandra, asks Eve to find a missing friend named Beth Avery, she wants to help but is sure that Sandra is hiding something. The fact that she adamantly refuses to go to the police reinforces Eve’s suspicions that something is very wrong. Eve learns that Beth has been locked away in a mental hospital for years....

Laura, a student from a modest background, escapes her small town to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield fellowship to study at Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her coursework, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation. Years later, back in the United States with a PhD and dissertation on Henry James, she loses her job as an adjunct and reconnects with the Weatherfield Foundation. Commissioned to write a history for its centennial, she becomes obsessed by the Gilded Age origins of the Weatherfield fortune.

When it comes to Eve Duncan, never say never....Is she dead or alive? That is the question on everybody’s lips. Eve appears to have been the victim of James Doane, the psychopath who kidnapped her and forced her to use her skills as a forensic sculptor to reconstruct the skull of his depraved son. That’s what everyone attending her funeral thinks, at least.

Hell - part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story - is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century expert on domestic management. While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance. Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the spirit of Antonin Careme.

On July 6, 2011, Richard Oland, scion of the Moosehead brewing family, was murdered in his office. The brutal killing stunned the city of Saint John, and news of the crime reverberated across the country. In a shocking turn, and after a two-and-half-year police investigation, Oland's only son, Dennis, was arrested for second-degree murder.

Erica Donato - Brooklyn girl, urban history grad student, and single mom - is researching the 1930s, when Brownsville was the home of the notorious organized criminals the newspapers called Murder, Inc. She quickly learns that even in rapidly changing Brooklyn, Brownsville remains much as it was. It is still poor, it is still tough, and it still breeds fighters and gangs.

An unnamed narrator’s life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys’ prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum’s austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft.

For two years Jenny Latham has lived alone with her young son in the Colorado mountains, trying to manage her guilt over letting an abusive husband control her for too long. Her beauty makes her the object of many men's desires, but with a broken heart and an independent streak as strong as the mountains themselves, Jenny refuses them all. But when she accidentally shoots a stranger and takes it upon herself to nurse him back to health, she finds all of her defenses wavering.

Self-taught artist Rose O'Neill leaves the Midwest for New York in 1893, determined to become an illustrator in a field dominated by males. Mindful of her duty to the impoverished family she left behind, Rose’s obligations require her to yield to the men who hold the reins of her career, as well as the men she grows to love.

It is the turn of this century. Two couples - businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife, Carole Ridingham; his partner, Coleman Snow, and Snow's wife, Ruth Farr - have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now.

Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan’s mission is to bring closure to the families whose loved ones have vanished. She knows their anguish - her own beloved daughter, Bonnie, was taken from her when Bonnie was just seven years old. It is only recently that this mystery was resolved and Eve could begin her journey to peace. Now Jim Doane wants the same kind of answers that Eve always longed for. His 25-year-old son may or may not be dead, and he has only burned skull fragments as possible evidence. But he cannot go to the police for answers without risking his own secrets and exposing his dark past, so instead he chooses a bold step to find the truth....

Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent's work, appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper's. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise. Now, at long last, Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation.

Sixteen-year-old Celstia spends every summer with her family at the elite resort at Lake Conemaugh, a shimmering Allegheny Mountain reservoir held in place by an earthen dam. Tired of the society crowd, Celestia prefers to swim and fish with Peter, the hotel's hired boy. It's a friendship she must keep secret, and when companionship turns to romance, it's a love that could get Celestia disowned. These affairs of the heart become all the more wrenching on a single, tragic day in May 1889.