The Permanent Press (ORD) – förlag

This new twist on the expatriate novel, somewhere between mystery and ethics conundrum, with nods to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, and Paul Bowles, is about two very different men and their delayed but fated battle for retribution. Paul is a promising med student from the US wending his way through heady, corrupt and gorgeous Mexico City in the 1980s. Victor is a Mexican lawyer with a web of connections on both sides of the drug business, and Victor is Paul’s would-be cultural as well as underworld guide, who eventually betrays him. What happens when the former friend reappears twenty years later as a cancer patient in the doctor’s pathology lab shows that none of us can escape our secrets.   Flashing between the post-9/11 US and 1980s Mexico, The Cleansing details a love triangle, or diamond, if you will. Adele, a fearless American and photojournalist, attracts both Paul and Victor, and the three become uneasy friends. Mexico City itself is the fourth player in this game, beautiful and decadent, urban and cosmopolitan, torn between policia and narcos, with the division not as clear as the expatriates first think.  The Cleansing is about a reckoning of moral culpability in a corrupt setting. No matter our excuses, the past will come to find us.

A white man and a black woman discover the depth of their differences, and an unexpected bond, in this urban drama.   Edmund, long-divorced and lonely, offers shelter to Careese, who is temporarily homeless. Good intentions on both sides give way to mutual distrust and resentment, but what begins as a clash of language and culture turns into something else entirely.   Told in the two distinct voices of its protagonists, this novel cuts to the bone in dissecting Edmund’s and Careese’s hidden prejudices, faults and strengths. As their attitudes change, their seemingly simple story becomes a complex exploration of America’s unhealed wound.

Harry Cauley’s third novel, Millersburg (Bridie and Finn and The Botticelli Angel preceding), might well be described as “New Jersey Gothic.” It’s set in 1939 in a small town in Northern New Jersey, narrated by Ben, a 17-year-old boy. He’s part of a family ruled by Mamu, his tyrannical grandmother, and starts with a grisly double murder that eventually involves his family and changes the family dynamics forever as long-kept secrets begin to unravel.   Among the other beautifully rendered members of the family are Ben’s mother Eulalie, vague, distracted, and ineffective, his sister Estella, who pines for a local sheriff’s deputy she is allowed to see only in the presence of Mamu, and Uncle Josh, Mamu’s reclusive younger half-brother who lives alone in a shack on a creek and provides the only culture—and respite—that Ben and Estella know.

When Hali’s father asks her to help him commit suicide to spare the family the misery of a long illness, she reluctantly agrees. Hali’s family insists on letting “God’s will” decide. Hali, brooding upon the idea of predetermination and an afterlife in a way that is both challenging and deeply moving, is ultimately unable to do what her father wishes. She is forced to accept the help of a manipulative male nurse, adding further complications and a slow and painful end.

Set in England, Boston, and the Caribbean, this Pinteresque, artfully crafted story describes a relationship between Justine, a young dancer, and Roy, her philosophy teacher at Oxford. It is a story of love and sex, pain and intellect, and ultimate redemption. The story is narrated by Justine, who chronicles her own awakening from disciple to equal; from blind, yet innocent masochism to full personhood; from student/lover/wife to emancipation from Roy a tormented, though brilliant man who is obsessed with the question of free will and his own intense, yet twisted sexuality. Ultimately, this first novel describes a spiritual journey that leads Justine and Roy beyond pleasure, beyond renunciation, to a transcendent knowledge of the deepest meanings of love and loyalty.

“. . . Tomorrow is our anniversary. Tomorrow we have been married at least one thousand years.” How does a woman move from one life to another? Can she? In this lyrical and often very funny novel, thirty-seven-year old Dore Dover searches for answers both in the familiar territories of old friendships and the mapless terrain of marriage.   What hope can there be for a woman who says aloud, “I drag that old life with me like a dead cat in a sack”?   “It has been pointed out to me that I am undefined, that I don’t know what I want, and that this is my whole problem. It is entirely probable. If I knew what I wanted, I’d just go get it. But as it is, I don’t know, and so here I sit on this damp stoop, outside a house we no longer own, leaving, with a husband whom, it is quite probable, I do not love, to go live in a rather isolated area, which, some time ago, gave me a great deal of pleasure.   “I am too old for this . . .”   Dore takes on the world and herself in this first novel by acclaimed poet Renée Ashley. While the ground is shifting beneath her, Dore discovers what her truths might be in the troubled places within herself.

Mr. Right is a novel that defies categorization, at once scary, erotic and very funny. It is a measure of the book’s spell that at the precise moment it has us on the edge of our seats, it can still make us laugh out loud.

“In this world there is love, there is fame, there is wealth, but the glory of the glories is to be a new girl in a little beach town in June.” The girl is Virginia and this is the story of her sexual awakening and admission into the never-changing mysteries in a southern California seaside town in the golden, long-ago summers of the 1930s. The little beach town is San Soleo (not to be found on any map), jerry-built just in time for the Great Depression, where time stopped when the money ran out. Virginia, in the course of the novel, evades rape, seduction, and drowning to reach a higher rung on the ladder of maturity. Bonnie Barrett has taken the oldest of themes and closed the time gap: she has caught the period and place with the fidelity of an old Glenn Miller recording, yet made it new, eventful, spicy, funny and harrowingly true. But more than that, she has evoked the bittersweet redolence of lost summers, lost youth, lost love, the time that for all of us lies drowning like Atlantis, now in a sea of changes.

A woman’s obsession drives an affair out of control, violating social contracts and devastating the people in its path. For years, Ann and David shared weekends and holidays with country friends Flora and Edwin, even after womanizing Edwin took Ann away to pick grapes and started a year-long affair. The ground rules were clear from the start: Flora accepted what she called Edwin’s meaningless “things,” and Edwin stipulated no divorces. But Ann’s empty marriage (to which David was providing neither money nor sex) and growing need for Edwin causes her to ask for more, leading to estrangement and a startling climax.

Thirty-year old Eve Sterling is a ’90s woman with a hankering for the 18th century. A literature scholar writing her thesis on Jane Austen, Eve lives alone in Manhattan, is eclipsed by her domineering mother, Maxie, and doubts she’ll ever find a man to rival her beloved fictional heroes. When a friend sets her up with Hart—a funny, gentle photographer—Eve simultaneously discovers true love and loses control over her own fate.   Eve aims to achieve a choreographed, graceful existence, one modeled on the elegant world portrayed in Austen’s novels. But, in a series of both comic and painful mishaps, she learns just how clumsy and chaotic real life can be. Irrevocably changed by marriage and motherhood, Eve struggles to reconcile contrasting allegiances: those to herself versus those to her family. And, if carving out a niche for herself while balancing the demands of a new baby isn’t enough, Eve has the additional burden of living in the shadow of an imposing celebrity—her mother! Suddenly thrust into the limelight, Maxie has been transformed into a media darling just as her own daughter’s career begins to falter. Embarking on a journey to reclaim her lost sense of purpose, Eve is forced to face the toughest question of all: can she fulfill herself without severing the bonds to those she loves most?   By turns witty and poignant, Redeeming Eve is an accomplished, engaging first novel. Anyone who has ever risked old dreams for a richer, more complex life—or ever longed to do so—will identify with its very contemporary heroine.

Rick Borsten’s extraordinary first novel tells the story of Benny Horowitz, a young man who, terrified of the prospects of life after commencement, drops out of college just two weeks before graduation and finds a temporary job working at a halfway house for eight mentally challenged adults whose “deviant” and “inappropriate” behavior he is charged with reshaping. It isn’t long, however, before Benny begins to appreciate the uniqueness of each of the resident’s personalities and the richness of their worlds, and discovers that it is he, not they, who is being reshaped; and reshaped by one resident in particular—Nadia Christov, a mysterious 26 year old artist. It is Nadia’s rare ability to see the world with fresh eyes—to appreciate the natural wonders surrounding her “everywhere and all the time”—that finally convinces Benny it is she who holds the keys to the greatest of his post-commencement fears.   While Benny’s story is unfolding, a series of flashbacks traces his unusual family history, beginning with his grandfather, Joseph, who comes to America from Poland in the early 1900s and whose pessimistic vision of death as life’s “great equalizer” is transformed over three generations into one of hope, renewal and wonder.   Like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, The Great Equalizer is a book to cherish, for it nourishes the spirit by reminding us of the transformational power of love.

East Justice is a small fictional town in rural Iowa, which harbors a tiny enclave of Jewish families. Among them lives Grace, a young woman with the cauterized “tongue of a bird,” farmer, quilter, and keeper of family secrets.   Through a succession of lucid scenes delivered in the measured pace of true memory, Grace tells her own coming of age story in a language evocative of the rolling Midwestern landscape. What emerges is a sometimes dream-like family saga, peopled with characters both human and not: an immigrant grandmother, an absent father, an unhappy mother, a family home, a small prolific farm.   A novel of loss and recovery, East Justice reads like a long drive among the hills. Braverman’s richly textured prose and clear, searching eye delivers to us an American Midwest that is varied, beautiful, and dramatic for its simplicity, infusing the secret rituals of daily life with meaning and light.

The waters are roiled in a small New England college when a part-time professor takes up with her teaching assistant. In succinct, often somberly beautiful language, Brookhouse (Running Out, etc.) writes about a breast cancer survivor, Caroline, and her yearlong relationship with Gabe, a much younger man. Caroline, an adjunct English professor at a small college, has just recovered from a mastectomy when Gabe is assigned to be her assistant.

The second novel by the author of Passing Game, a story set in a privately funded workshop in an isolated Amish village.

Brought back into print after 14 years and published in paperback for the first time, this leisurely meditation on the art of acting and on the author’s life in that art demonstrates a good-natured sense of humor and an engaging style. In a series of essays, Broun gently knocks the theatrical world—the audience traveling from small town to small town only to have a production fold right outside of New York; the trauma of doing live TV; getting bit parts in commercials or horror movies after years of classical training; and so on. Oddly enough, while deglamorizing his profession, he makes a good case for it: he enjoyed his life.

This is the talented Burkholz’s (Strange Bedfellows) ninth novel, the first volume of his projected Ibiza Tapestry trilogy. Max Levi-Morris, a well-known novelist teaching creative writing at a small, prestigious North Carolina college, uses the five graduate students in a seminar as subjects for his novel-in-progress, eventually involving them in its writing as well. Burkholz interweaves the stories of Levi-Morris, his pupils and friends with the gestating novel, which deals with a famous artist and his annual ritual of burning that year’s paintings, apparently in reaction to the deaths of his wife and best friend.

This first novel charts the tragic path of a writer, Kate, and an archaeologist, Nick, as romance blooms among the ruins of Greece, then fades and is later restored in California, even after Kate has married another man. Kate’s attraction to Nick is immediate, and she quits her job as a travel writer to stay with him on a paradisiacal Greek island. But Nick’s diffidence and refusal to tie himself down eventually defeat her, and she flees back to America to marry Henry, a man she had formerly abandoned. Not surprisingly, Kate is quickly dissatisfied with Henry and longs for the more adventurous and challenging Nick, who conveniently returns to Berkeley. But Nick hasn’t changed, and even as they start an affair he seems to toy with Kate’s emotions, finally pushing her to a crisis when she discovers that she is pregnant.

Townie takes place in Oldon, Massachusetts, a burgeoning New England village that has become the favored residence of the mega-rich, a town whose historic past has been preserved and polished until it gleams with the arrogant intensity of a Colonial theme park.   Alan Lowe inhabits a different Oldon, however, a town that he loved as a boy for the “power and rightness of its countryside.” Now, in early middle age, he finds himself living on the margins of the changing town, in a camp deep within Oldon Woods, “inelegantly sheltered by a stale, army-surplus sheet, perforated here and there with pinholes and rudely draped into the equivalent of a teepee.”   Then Alan’s seemingly rootless life converges with that of Arthur Worthy, a member of the recently-arrived elite, whose life “bristles with appointments, trips, activities, possessions, responsibilities, and business urgencies.” But Arthur lives on the margin, too, as alone and isolated in his mansion as Alan is in his teepee.   They share, as they discover, an unexpected connection, a woman named Anna, “who must be understood as a catalytic force in both of our lives, the intoxicating girl who devolved into the equable woman whose existence served to define our own.”   Alan abandons his camp in order to temporarily look after Arthur’s mansion and their lives soon become deeply intertwined in an adventure that is ostensibly a business deal but is, more essentially, a search for love and connection with place.  Townie is a picaresque novel of the countryside, funny and skewering about our social and business pretensions, moving and true about our need for roots and authenticity.

Harriet Scott Chessman’s Ohio Angels is an intimate and a lyrical story about friendship and family struggles. Hallie, a painter who now lives in Brooklyn, returns to her family home in Ohio, where she unearths a secret about her parents. Her discovery sheds light on her mother’s depression, which shadowed her own childhood, and helps her understand her own inability to have children. In her hometown, Hallie reconnects with a beloved childhood friend, Rose, who is now a writer and pregnant with her third child.   Chessman beautifully evokes the childhood memories of the two friends, illuminating their very different lives. As in Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, Chessman’s compassionate and perceptive gaze reveals an entire new world for us—one that is subtle, alive, and deeply honest.

David is a refugee from the late sixties and early seventies, now teaching at a community college in Western Massachusetts. Committed to helping his working-class students, he is also a part-time father who is trying to raise his son in a responsible and loving way.   When he meets an old lover from the seventies who runs a center for battered women in Boston, and she asks him to help out in an emergency, David finds that his life and his son’s begin to spiral into an increasingly dangerous and terrifying sequence of events.   David is finally forced to confront his own violence and to examine his life from a different perspective.

Written with the drama and suspense of a detective story, KAL Flight 007: The Hidden Story takes the reader through the process of piecing together the evidence surrounding the unexplained flight of a Korean airliner over Soviet strategic territories on September 1, 1983—a flight brought to a tragic end when a Soviet interceptor shot down the airliner, killing all 269 people aboard.

Set on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, but ranging afield to a small college town in North Carolina, to the streets of Manhattan, and to the barrio chino of Barcelona, Writer-in-Residence tells the story of a successful American painter named David Bloom, who, to the horror of his family, his friends, and his fellow artists, is obsessed with destroying everything he paints. For the past five years he has burned every single painting that he has produced over the past 12 months in one glorious bonfire on Midsummer Eve.

Fellow Travelers is the story of the women in the brothers lives: Katya, the peasant girl Victor rescues from the streets of Moscow; Tania, the communist party functionary who eventually becomes his wife; and Yelena, the singer and cabaret entertainer Manny marries and ultimately destroys. Though the story centers on the rivalry between the two brothers, it also reflects the ambitions of their father, a millionaire co-founder of the American Communist Party; his suffragist wife Eva; and Eva’s son Eddie, a professional labor organizer and committed defender of workers’ rights. Spread across 50 years of history, the scene ranges from the mining camps of Siberia to the opulent mansions of post-revolutionary Moscow, from the political turmoil of New York in the early years of the century to the corporate affluence of postwar America.

This finely etched account of the disintegration of morale in an Eighth Air Force squadron in England during World War II when its losses were staggering, is told through the eyes of a young bombardier named Whipple who had been injured before completing his tour of duty. He is relying on his now-healed wounds to keep him safely on the ground while wanting to retain the esteem of his friends who are still flying. When the squadron gets a new C.O., Whipple’s problems are compounded as this inexperienced, dogmatic ideologist, Major Harris, who makes Whipple his confidante, is soon hated and feared by those he commands.

The Sorcerer weaves the mystery of the cave paintings into the story of a youth, crippled by a bear’s attack, who had become useless to his hunter society. In his attempt to win respect he apprentices himself to the tribe’s witch doctor in order to learn the secrets of sorcery.

From the war-torn Jordan Valley to our nation’s capital, Exiles reaches into the life of one man and one woman to explore one of the longest-lasting and most painful situations in our time: the displacement of the Palestinians and the unceasing turmoil in the Middle East. This is a story about the search and battle for identity of a people who have paid the price of no peace in the land of the Bible, who are expected to pay a debt to the dead and disinherited, and who are fated to act out decisions made by others long ago.   When Harry Mann arrives in Amman for a tour of diplomatic duty in 1969, he finds a nation heading for upheaval and he sets about to put it right. His Chicana wife, Mercedes, fresh out of an alcoholic treatment center, is discontent to play the empty and unfulfilling role of a Foreign Service Officer’s wife. She is, in many ways, as displaced a person as are the Palestinian refugees who now life in Jordan.   Nabil Dajani is one of those Palestinians who now serves as Minister of Public Works in King Hussein’s cabinet. Like Mercedes, he is a man in great conflict: torn by the inner struggle between his liberal, internationalist outlook and the confines of traditional and provincial Islamic fundamentalism. Alienated from his wife, it is only a matter of time before he and Mercedes seek, in one another, some solace for their discontents.   In its careful evocation, Exiles transports us to a land that resonates with ancient majesty and today’s heartaches and joys. One reads not only to discover the fate of its characters, but also to gain a growing understanding of the complex changes occurring in the Islamic world.

Growing up in Oklahoma, Darcy endures her parent’s battling, her father’s abandonment, and her mother’s determination to make their way in the world by taking in a succession of boarders. Frank Wilson, an itinerant worker, appears at the dinner table one evening and soon becomes the man she loves. He can unstick her from her everyday existence, and she marries him. Too late, she finds escape is not that easy.

It’s 1941 and Swing is King. But as the late Cab Calloway said, in those days, music belonged to the mob. Carl Carlson is on the verge of Big Band stardom. He would do anything to make his dream come true and the damned war is just a nuisance. The draft board doesn’t see it that way. After being wounded in North Africa, the Army assigns Carl to translation duties in a German prisoner of War camp conveniently near Musso, the Cleveland, Ohio, gangster who can put him back on top.   Musso doesn’t ask much in return: one hand washes the other. All Carl has to do is use his charm to seduce the promiscuous Natalie Bixby, locate her thieving boyfriend, and toss him to Musso like raw meat to a shark. Meanwhile, dark undercurrents are also flowing in the prisoner of war camp—Nazi intimidation, torture, escapes, and the murder of a child.   How much evil is Carl willing to ignore in his single-minded quest for stardom? Is he so far gone that he does not care who murdered a boy? Will his attraction to the young and beautiful Italian translator Elizabeth revive the conscience he’s been suppressing? Or is Carl in too deep, so tangled in corruption that he is a dead man no matter what he does?

“Fat girls have fewer choices in life. This is painful but true. You’ll never be the center of attention; never the belle of the ball. No one gives fat girls the benefit of the doubt. Skinny, pretty girls get the best of everything. We get whatever’s left.”   So warns the mother of Wilma “Sunnie” Sundstrom, a bright, precious, overweight 13-year-old whose lifelong dream is to meet her idol Johnny Carson, and appear as a guest on The Tonight Show. The year is 1978, and Sunnie a straight-A student and aspiring filmmaker deals with constant teasing from her eighth-grade classmates by dreaming of Hollywood accolades and writing a screenplay, “Girl on the Lam,” which she is certain will star teen sensations Kristy McNichol and Robby Benson.   Sunnie lives in suburban Milwaukee with her banker father, her stay-at-home mother, her sullen older sister, Ingrid, and her brilliant younger brother, Max. Sunnie’s closest friend and confidante is Grannie Lassen who encourages Sunnie’s show-biz dreams. Grannie’s own tap-dancing ambitions were cut short by the untimely death of Grannie’s younger sister, Wilma.   A devastating loss plunges Sunnie into despair and her family packs her off to an all-girls summer “fat-camp” in Northern Minnesota, where her days revolve around skimpy meals, calisthenics, and humiliating daily public weigh-ins on the camp’s livestock scale. Love enters Sunnie’s life in the form of a dashing boy from the Pentecostal Bible camp across the lake. When his late night canoe visits suddenly and mysteriously cease, Sunnie and her friend Cherise take matters into their own hands, with nearly tragic results. Rather than return home in shame, Sunnie takes a desperate leap of faith and embarks on a cross-country journey. Challenged more deeply than she ever expected, she discovers the unorthodox ways that dreams really can come true.