Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old Florida middle school teacher, reveals her complex and sociopathically motivated seduction of a 14-year-old student in Alissa Nutting’s book Tampa with no remorse.
Jack Patrick, a charmingly unassuming man, was picked by Celeste and drawn into her web. Most importantly, Jack is ready to agree to Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—dark car rides, meet-ups at Jack’s house while his single father was working the late shift, and body-slamming arousing encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom—because he is fascinated and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher. Celeste Price is a monster of pure motivation when it comes to quenching her sexual appetite. She is remorseless and cunningly free of hesitancy. She lies to everyone, has no friends, and only cares about her own pleasure.
Tampa is a virtuoso satire that depicts a monstrously misguided yet unquenchable passion in a way that is sexually frank and American Psycho-like. Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a blistering literary debut and a vast, seriocomic study of the desire driving student/teacher affairs, laced with dark humor and crackling sexualized prose.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“His eyes took in the details of my body with a conflicted gaze that I knew well: even having seen all the facts of the case, he still wanted me. He wanted me despite knowing what that meant about him.”
“There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?”
“The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naiveté would be subtracted from my expertise to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.”
“Like most pronounced flaws, it did not live in isolation.”
“Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf life needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened.”
The heartwarming love tale of a woman who has lost her sight and her husband, who fights for their existence as they travel through Syria as refugees to Europe. Beekeeper Nuri and artist Afra are married. In the lovely Syrian city of Aleppo, they have a straightforward existence full of family and friends—until the unthinkable occurs. They are compelled to flee after the war destroys all they care about. However, Afra’s experience was so horrific that it caused her to lose her vision. As a result, they must go across Turkey and Greece at great risk in order to reach an unknown future in Britain.
Nuri is kept going on the journey by the knowledge that Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has established an apiary and is instructing other refugees in Yorkshire in beekeeping, will be waiting for them. In addition to the sorrow of their own unfathomable loss, Nuri and Afra must face perils that would weaken even the most courageous individuals as they journey through a ruined world. They must travel in order to reconnect, above all. The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a moving, potent, sympathetic, and exquisitely written example of how the human spirit may prevail. It is the kind of book that serves as a reminder of the importance of narrative.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Where there are bees there are flowers, and wherever there are flowers there is new life and hope.”
“But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know.”
“Sometimes we create such powerful illusions, so that we do not get lost in the darkness.”
“When you belong to someone and they are gone, who are you?”
“It’s amazing, the way we love people from the day we are born, the way we hold on, as if we are holding on to life itself.”
Molly Gray is unique compared to other people. She has trouble interacting with others and frequently misinterprets their intentions. Molly’s grandmother used to translate the world for her, codifying everything into clear guidelines that she could follow.
Since Gran passed away a few months ago, Molly, age 25, has had to deal with the difficulties of life on her own. Whatever the case, she enthusiastically dives into her work as a hotel maid. She is the perfect candidate for the job because of her distinctive personality, obsession with cleanliness, and understanding of the right protocol. She enjoys putting on her polished uniform every morning, filling her cart with tiny soaps and bottles, and making sure the guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel are immaculate.
The day Molly visits the opulent and infamous Charles Black’s apartment, however, her tidy life is upended when she discovers it in a chaotic state and Mr. Black dead in his bed. Before Molly realizes what’s occurring, the police have her as their top suspect due to her peculiar behavior. She soon finds herself entangled in a web of lies that she is unable to escape from. Luckily for Molly, she teams up with pals she didn’t even know she had in order to look for information about what actually happened to Mr. Black. However, will they be able to identify the real culprit before it’s too late? The Maid examines what it means to be identical to everyone else and yet very different—and illustrates that all riddles may be solved through connecting to the human heart. It is a Clue-like locked-room mystery and a delightful voyage of the soul.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
“That’s the trouble with pain. It’s as contagious as a disease. It spreads from the person who first endured it to those who love them most. Truth isn’t always the highest ideal’ sometimes it must be sacrificed to stop the spread of pain to those you love.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
“I’ll never understand it—why people find the truth more shocking than lies.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
“My truth is not the same as yours because we don’t experience life in the same way.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
“It’s easier than you’d ever think—existing in plain sight while remaining largely invisible. That’s what I’ve learned from being a maid.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
Ella Rubenstein accepts a position as a reader for a literary agent at the age of forty and in an unhappy marriage. Her first task is to read and analyze the book Sweet Blasphemy, which was authored by Aziz Zahara. Ella is captivated by his account of Shams’s quest for Rumi and the dervish’s contribution to the prosperous but dissatisfied cleric’s transformation into a dedicated mystic, passionate poet, and proponent of love. Shams’s teachings, or rules, which provide insight into an antiquated philosophy based on the equality of all people and religions and the existence of love in every single one of us, also capture her attention. As she continues to read, she comes to understand that Zahara, like Shams, has come to set her free and that Rumi’s story mirrors her own.
Elif Shafak, a renowned Turkish author, presents two enticing parallel narratives in this lyrical, vivacious sequel to her 2007 book The Bastard of Istanbul—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century when Rumi met his spiritual guide, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together embodied the poet’s eternal message of love.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
“Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighborhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful!”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
“If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”
― Elif Şafak, The Forty Rules of Love
“How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
“Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter is a dour narrative of crime, retribution, and the search for ever-elusive forgiveness. It is a story of being down and out but never down for good. The story revolves around the exploits of Jack Levitt, an orphaned youngster scraping by in the dingy pool halls and sleazy hotels of Portland, Oregon. Billy Lancing, a talented pool hustler and young black runaway, becomes pals with Jack. Jack is transferred to a reform school after a failed theft, where he is abused and placed in seclusion until being released. Billy has since become a member of the middle class, getting married, having a son, owning a business, and having a mistress. However, neither Jack nor Billy can avoid their troubled pasts, and before their unusual double drama reaches to a violent and revelatory conclusion, they will reunite in San Quentin.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”
“He did not want to see the war movie. It would be full of shit.”
“When you lose you lose forever, and when you win it only lasts a second or two.”
“He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare,”
“He came to see that marriage was not an institution, not even an idea, but a rational social process whose function was to raise children properly.”
No Longer Human, the second book by this eminent post-World War II Japanese author, presents the moving and captivating tale of a young man who is stuck between the dissolution of the customs of a northern Japanese affluent family and the influence of Western ideas. He feels “disqualified from being human” as a result (a literal translation of the Japanese title).
Having translated both The Setting Sun and this book by Dazai, Donald Keene has remarked the following about the author’s writing: “His world may be reminiscent of Chekhov or even post-World War II France, but the selection and delivery of the content have a Japanese sensibility. A Dazai novel is simultaneously very different from any other Western book and instantly understandable in Western terms.” In certain ways, his writing is evocative of Rimbaud, and he has been referred to as Yukio Mishima’s predecessor.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.
Everything passes.
That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.
Everything passes.”
“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”
“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness”
“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”
“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.”
Anna Karenina, widely regarded as the finest novel ever written, offers a comprehensive portrait of both humankind and Russian society today. In it, Tolstoy employs his keen imagination to develop some of literature’s most enduring characters. In order to satisfy her passionate nature, Anna, a smart woman, leaves her empty life as Karenin’s wife and goes to Count Vronsky, with tragic results. Tolstoy’s personal opinions and convictions are frequently expressed by Levin, who is a reflection of the author himself.
Tolstoy makes no overarching points and only invites us to observe rather than pass judgment. He departs from the kaleidoscope’s shifting patterns in order to emphasize the significance of the ominous words that follow the title, “Vengeance is mine, and I will pay back,” writes Rosemary Edmonds.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”
Toru, a shy and uncannily somber young college student in Tokyo, is deeply in love with Naoko, a lovely and reflective young woman, but their shared devotion is characterized by the devastating loss of their best friend years earlier. While Naoko finds the stresses and obligations of life intolerable, Toru starts to adjust to university life and the isolation and loneliness he experiences there. Toru discovers himself extending out to others and attracted to an independent-minded and sexually adventurous young woman as she withdraws even more into her own world.
Norwegian Wood masterfully recreates a young man’s first, hopeless, and heroic love by fusing the story of one college student’s romantic coming of age with the music, mood, and ethos of the 1960s.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment. ”
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”
“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt.”
Critics questioned whether a woman author could be accountable for The Naked Woman’s stunning sensual elements when it was first released in 1950. Fantastic concepts are contrasted with harsh portrayals of misogyny and brutality in this scathing attack on Enlightenment values, which frantically builds to a violent finish.
Readers of Clarice Lispector, Djuna Barnes, and Leonora Carrington will connect with Armona Somers now that she is finally available to an English-speaking public.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The night offered an unlimited opportunity to fulfill her desires. She was much freer than those sorry things in the sky— she was the night itself.”
“The trees had sprung up suddenly, thick, dark, and rustling; she felt the sum of their breath on her face.”
Every year, millions of tourists go to Verona, Italy, attracted by the enduring legend of Shakespeare’s pair of star-crossed lovers. But that only tells a portion of the tale. Every day, messages arrive in the city, frequently addressed simply as “Juliet, Verona.” They arrive by the truckload, penned by romantics seeking Juliet’s advice, and in practically every language imaginable. Of course, the majority of the missives discuss love—love that has been discovered and lost, sought after, and recalled. Amazingly, every letter is responded to.
In Letters to Juliet, volunteers who at first wrote privately but are now recognized by the city of Verona as members of the Juliet Club tell the tale of these letters and the volunteer who have been sending replies for more than seven decades. This poetic collection, which contains more than 75 sincere letters, retraces the background to Shakespeare’s story and visits the sites that contributed to the global fascination with Juliet and her Romeo.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Life is the messy bits.”
“One of the great joys in life is having ones hair brushed.”
“Dear Claire, “What” and “If” are two words as non-threatening as words can be. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: What if? What if? What if? I don’t know how your story ended but if what you felt then was true love, then it’s never too late. If it was true then, why wouldn’t it be true now? You need only the courage to follow your heart. I don’t know what a love like Juliet’s feels like: love to leave loved ones for, love to cross oceans for, but I’d like to believe if I ever were to feel it, that I’d have the courage to seize it. And Claire, if you didn’t, I hope one day that you will. All my love, Juliet”