Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Biographical

"Maddening, funny, playful and beautiful...Barker has once again invigorated an old form -- the historical biographical novel -- through electric wit and sheer bedazzlement."
--The Washington Post

To the world, he is Sri Ramakrishna--godly avatar, esteemed spiritual master, beloved guru. To Rani Rashmoni, she of low caste and large inheritance, he is the brahmin fated to defy tradition. But to Hriday, his nephew and longtime caretaker, he is just Uncle--maddening, bewildering Uncle, prone to entering trances at the most inconvenient of times, known to sneak out to...

From North Carolina comes the electrifying new voice of Nicole Sarrocco, whose debut novel Lit by Lightning--first in the Occasionally Trueseries--is an intensely personal and strangely universal tale of finding grace in chaos, creating meaning from nonsense, and for heaven's sake not making too much of a spectacle of yourself. A witty, hilarious, transcendent and disturbing tale of ghosts, manners, and the family we choose and the ones who choose us.

"I could sweep together the dust of our hearts. The ashes of my grandparents' house that didn't burn. The...

You know how it is. Daily life, I mean: coffee pots, the carpool lane, work schedules and voice mails. The unexpected Santeria spell. What to do with all those ashes... you know, of your loved ones. And then there's the interruptions from storytelling ghosts with no sense of decorum...

So one day you stop pretending to be normal. Because not even your shampoo is normal, and the dog has still got to be picked up from the vet, even if your house still has its original owner prowling the ground floor, looking for a blender to make Margaritas. One day, you just have to tell somebody. Even...

A Bicycle Without A Chain is the story of David Kingsley's ill-fated pursuit of the American dream. As he powerfully pedals up Mount Success, chasing after athletic fame and material prosperity, the chain suddenly snaps. Denied a place in society that he once imagined was easily attainable, Kingsley suddenly finds his life path unexpectedly circuitous. Over the course of several years he surrenders his veil of invincibility, a foolish posturing that had stripped him of his humanity. He manages to come to terms with his vulnerability as he seeks to understand the complicated nature of evil....

In the winter of 1836, a young journalist named Charles Dickens held an infant in his arms. Only eight months of age, Ruby Spriggs was living under the most deplorable conditions that existed in London. Crushing poverty seemed her only future.

Through the intervention of kind patrons, the child blossoms into a young woman instilled with a love of learning and books. But the forces that Dickens...

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as -Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness---Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had...