Lili DeLuca set aside her plans for grad school and took over managing her family’s Italian restaurant when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Now that her mother has completed her treatment, Lili, bullied as a child because she was heavy, still has a hard time believing that she should pursue her photography career instead of continuing to manage the failing family restaurant. When she discovers Jack Kilroy, famous chef, has picked her father’s restaurant to be the showcase for his new television series pitting Jack against Lili’s father in a
Weather—a fact of nature we all live with. The extremes of this past winter are a hot topic from the news to neighborly conversations. But rarely does weather become such a dominating life force as it did for almost a decade from 1931 to 1939 in the southwest plains—the Dust Bowl. In The Worst Hard Time Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan takes us back to a time we think we know and delves so deeply that we come away with a new respect for the people who lived through the “dirty thirties.”
This book is such a great and eerie read. Hoffman’s work of historical fiction paints a despairing portrait of two lives which become intertwined through a series of odd events. Coralie is a disfigured girl who is forced to perform as a mermaid in her father’s Museum of Extraordinary Things on Coney Island.
Charlie, a modern-day Holden Caulfield, reminds me of myself when I was an uber-angsty adolescent. That’s the good thing about reading Young Adult Fiction as a middle aged adult: you have a broader worldview which allows you to appreciate teenage angst in a deeper way. You’ve been there and back. You’ve lived through it. You know there’s a way out. You understand.
Through his organization Edge Foundation, John Brockman asks academics and artists to respond to a provocative question about science that will bring something new to a discussion.
Asterios Polyp is a self-assured, domineering, wind-bag of a paper architect. A paper architect being one “whose reputation rests on his designs, rather than on the buildings constructed from them. In fact, none of his designs had ever been built.”
When we meet Asterios, his Manhattan apartment, where he wallows in self-pity while riding out a mid-life crisis, has just burned to the ground. So he takes the last of his money, hops on a bus, and “give[s] up on the one thing [he] thought defined him.” And it “prove[s] to be a lot less difficult than [he] could have imagined.”
Delia Ephron has written an entertaining group of personal essays that range from the deeply touching to the absurdly humorous in Sister Mother Husband Dog, (etc.) The first essay in the book is a tribute to her late sister, the writer Nora Ephron. The two sisters worked together writing screenplays for several popular movies, including You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. Certainly she writes of her sister in a loving way, but she also shares with us the humanness of the relationship – the jealousy and the competition.
The day after Liyana experiences her first kiss, her father announces that he is moving the family from St. Louis, to his birthplace, Jerusalem. Liyana leaves everything she knows behind, and everything that won't fit in a few boxes and embarks on an adventure to experience a different kind of life.
