Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in World Literature

Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job-but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn't exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family's real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman.

He was known as the Wildman more than 100 years ago, terrorizing lumberjacks and farmers who complained that their lives were at stake. The American Indians, depending on their tribe, had many names for the Creature: Sasahevas, Sasquatch, Bukwas (wild man of the woods), See'atco (one who runs and hides). What would Native American Indians have to gain from falsifying the existence of a Beast?

In 1935, Dottie Krasinsky is the epitome of the modern girl. A bookkeeper in midtown Manhattan, Dottie steals kisses from her steady beau, meets her girlfriends for drinks, and eyes the latest fashions. Yet at heart, she is a dutiful daughter, living with her Yiddish-speaking parents on the Lower East Side. So when, after a single careless night, she finds herself in a family way by a charismatic but unsuitable man, she is desperate: unwed, unsure, and running out of options.

Wang Xiaobo's Pleasure of Thinking is an essay collection as riotous as it is contemplative. Between rollicking anecdotes about living between the East and West and serious musings on the intellectual situations at home and abroad, Xiaobo examines modern life with the levity missing from so much of today's politico-cultural discourse.

Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family's land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial of not one crime but two. While Margie is piecing the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked.

A Vegas cocktail waitress. An Indian herbalist. A British chemistry professor. An Italian-American widow. Four unique women with one thing in common: Each is haunted by a tragedy from her past. Cynthia, Rohini, Jane, and Angela meet on a food blogging site and bond over recipes. On impulse, they decide to open The Secret Spice, an elegant cafe on the magnificent ocean liner, the RMS Queen Mary, currently a floating hotel in Long Beach, California. Rich in history and tales of supernatural occurrences, the ship hides her own dark secrets.

All sixteen-year-old Rose has is what she carries: a pillowcase of clothes, her boyfriend's unborn child, and a heart full of shame. In the face of 1952's strict moral code, Seminole matriarch Ma-Ki Ebbing embraces Rose. Ma-Ki, on the fringe of society, clings to her Native American traditions and secrets surrounding her husband's murder while her adult children unravel from social injustice.

In New York, prohibition has ended, and Sam's world is turned upside down. The mob boss realizes he must expand his illegal interests if he is going to continue to live his lavish lifestyle. Some of the jobs Sam is offered go against his moral character. Transporting alcohol was one thing, but threatening lives is another.

In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called "a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin", has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, turning his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence - from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, John Ruskin to Joan Didion - this new book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading.

When Loretta surrenders her young girls to the county and then disappears, she becomes one more missing Native woman in Indian Country's long devastating history of loss. But she is also a daughter of the Mozhay Point Reservation in northern Minnesota, and the mother of Azure and Rain, ages three and four, and her absence haunts all the lives she has touched—and all the stories they tell in this novel.

Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate.

In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two sisters, Leokadia and Helena, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them were imprisoned as children in Auschwitz during World War II.

In the wake of World War II, a young, enigmatic woman named Lily arrives in Montreal on her own, expecting to be married to a man she's never met. But upon seeing her at the train station, Sol Kramer turns her down. Out of pity, his brother Nathan decides to marry her instead, and pity turns into a deep - and doomed - love. It is immediately clear that Lily is not who she claims to be.

Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. This is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and god, and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Written in Thayil's poetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis.

It begins as Henya, wife of Rabbi Mendel Kolopsky, considers an unexpected pregnancy and the hardships ahead for the children she already has. Soon after the child is born, Cossacks ransack the Kolopskys' home, severely beating Mendel. In the aftermath, he tells Henya that, contrary to his brother belief that socialism is their ticket to escaping the region's brutal anti-Semitic pogroms, he still believes America holds the answer. Henya, meanwhile, understands that any future will be perilous: she now knows their baby daughter, who has slept through this night of melee, is surely deaf.

Mikolaj Grynberg is a psychologist and photographer who has spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. In his first work of fiction, Grynberg recrafts those histories into little jewels, fictionalized short stories with the ring of truth. Both biting and knowing, I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One to Say Sorry To takes the form of first-person vignettes, through which Grynberg explores the daily lives and tensions within Poland between Jews and gentiles haunted by the Holocaust and its continuing presence.

Li Jing, a high-flying financier, has just joined his father for dinner at the grand Swan Hotel in central Shanghai when, without warning, the ground begins to rumble, shifts, then explodes in a roar of hot, unfurling air. As Li Jing drags his unconscious father out of the collapsing building, a single shard of glass whistles through the air and neatly pierces his forehead. In an instant, Li Jing's ability to speak Chinese is obliterated....

It's 1942. With the Nazi party at the height of its power, the occupying army empties Poland's towns and cities of their Jewish populations. As neighbor turns on neighbor and survival often demands unthinkable choices, Poland becomes a moral quagmire - a place of shifting truths and blinding ambiguities.

The uneventful life of a jeweler from Tel Aviv changes abruptly in 2011 after Fareed, a handsome young man from Damascus, crosses illegally into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa in search of his roots. In his pocket is a piece of a famous blue diamond known as "Sabakh".  Intending to return the diamond to its rightful owner, Fareed is soon swept up in Tel Aviv's vibrant gay scene, and a turbulent protest movement. He falls in love with both an Israeli soldier and his boyfriend - the narrator of this book - and reveals the story of his family's past.

Thirty-one years after workers first broke ground, the magnificent Hotel Neversink in the Catskills finally opens to the public. Then a young boy disappears. This mysterious vanishing - and the ones that follow - will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch whose purchase of the hotel in 1931 set a haunting legacy into motion.