This is a grand adventure of a novel that, like India itself, contains pretty much everything.
A compelling tale of a man who escaped from prison and tried to lose himself in the vastness of India, beautifully rendered here in all its sensory splendor and squalor. Lin does lose himself, and in the process, it’s how he finds himself.
This is very much a story of how the inner reflects the outer and vice versa, it is a love story between a man and a woman, a man and a culture, and a man and himself, as Lin re-learns to live and connect in the rawest and most vital place on earth.
This is a popular book among travelers, and I can see why, as the attention to detail, character, culture, and history serves as a superlative travel guide to the subcontinent.
Now a major television series from Apple TV+ starring Charlie Hunnam!
“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.”
An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters,…
A hybrid of biography and novel, Tobar has written a book that is at once a great adventure story and bildungsroman while at the same time a profound meditation on the ongoing conversation between the US and Latin America.
Tobar, from a Central American immigrant family himself, creates a kind of mirror between North and South in this thoughtful rendering of North American culture and the heartbreaking civil wars of Central America over the last few generations.
Many years in the making, Tobar had access to the diaries and novel-in-progress of the charismatic Joe Sanderson – son of the Midwest and adventurer extraordinaire who sets out to travel the world and write the great American novel and ends up accidentally becoming a Marxist guerrilla. It sounds implausible, but it’s all true, and Tobar beautifully weaves Sanderson’s writings in with his own musings on the Americas, idealism, and the urge for art and altruism.
One of the Los Angeles Times Top 10 California Books of 2020. One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Fiction Books from 2020. Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Joyce Carol Oates prize. One of Exile in Bookville’s Favorite Books of 2020.
In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.
Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a “road bum,” an…
A testament to why short stories are so essential to readers and writers, Pearlman is masterful in sketching a setting in a short burst like opening a window or a door that feels like an invitation into a watershed moment in one of her character's lives.
And what characters! Average, humble people, but Pearlman takes you directly into their dignity and the largeness of their lives and conflicts, and she does it with a humor and intimacy that makes you feel like you know them.
'The best short story writer in the world' Susan Hill, The Times
Honeydew is the first collection from Edith Pearlman since Binocular Vision, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a 'spectacular literary revelation' (Sunday Times).
Over the last few decades, Edith Pearlman has staked her claim as one of the great practitioners of the short story. Her understanding and skill have earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, John Updike and Alice Munro. Her latest work, gathered in this stunning collection of twenty new stories, is an occasion for celebration.
The stories in Honeydew are unmistakably by Pearlman;…
My latest short story collection once again covers a dizzying breadth of material – from a fantastical contemporary reworking of the life of Evita Peron, reimagined with a gay man in the starring role, to stories about ghosts in Mexico City, a widower who finds meaning adopting refugee children, a painter who in losing everything, reconnects to his son, and a peripatetic gay man who finally comes home to bond with his dying father.
I like to confront and examine history, familial relations, immigration and cultural upheaval, politics, and the profound displacement of modern lives, but I always see a flicker of hope in the hopeless, a way forward in the pathless wood, and a bridge across even the most dire and challenging of circumstances.
