Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a novelist of unequalled insight, grace and emotional power. My Nine Lives represents a new and fascinating strand in her outstanding canon of work: as she puts it, the 'potentially autobiographical'. Behind her poised, eloquent prose Ruth Prawer Jhabvala deftly tussles with the existential question of how destiny is shaped. In each chapter of My Nine Lives the narrator faces a startlingly different fate. One story takes place in India, the next in New York; in one the narrator is a grown married woman, in another a dependent daughter, in one a scholar, in another an uneducated ingenue. But a complex thread interlinks the seemingly disparate stories: the 'I' of each chapter has Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Jewish, Central European background. Here are nine different answers to the central question: what would happen if I were granted an alternative life?

My Nine Lives : Chapters of a Possible Past

JHABVALA, Ruth Prawer

Shoemaker Hoard

Joe Jones: A Novel

Anne

Lamott

"If love is details, so is storytelling, and Anne Lamott excels at it. Her way with analogy, metaphor, and evocative detail is subtle; her ability to shift from the specific to the general to the specific again, superb."The Nation Joe Jones is Anne Lamott’s raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie’s Café, "a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan." Jessie, "thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine," inherited the café years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, "sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat"; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie’s gay grandson, ("I thought he just had good posture," said Jessie); Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott’s rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind.

Biographies & Memoirs

Lamott, Anne

Arts & Literature

In the literary world, there is little that can match the excitement of opening a new book by David Markson. From Wittgenstein’s Mistress to Reader’s Block to Springer’s Progress to This Is Not a Novel, he has delighted and amazed readers for decades. And now comes his latest masterwork, Vanishing Point, wherein an elderly writer (identified only as "Author") sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with notecards into a noveland in so doing will dazzle us with an astonishing parade of revelations about the trials and calamities and absurdities and often even tragedies of the creative lifeand all the while trying his best (he says) to keep himself out of the tale. Naturally he will fail to do the latter, frequently managing to stand aside and yet remaining undeniably central throughoutuntil he is swept inevitably into the narrative’s starting and shattering climax. A novel of death and laughter bothand of extraordinary intellectual richness.

Vanishing Point: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

MARKSON, DAVID

United States

The continuing war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the political sniping engendered by the Supreme Court nominations―contemporary American society is characterized by divisive anger, profound loss, and danger. Wendell Berry, one of the country's foremost cultural critics, responds with hope and intelligence in a series of essays that tackle the major questions of the day. Whose freedom are we considering when we speak of the “free market” or “free enterprise”? What is really involved in our national security? What is the price of ownership without affection? Berry answers in prose that shuns abstraction for clarity, coherence, and passion, giving us essays that may be the finest of his long career.

The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays

Berry, Wendell

Essays & Correspondence

Hannah Coulter: A Novel

Hannah Coulter is Wendell Berry’s seventh novel and his first to employ the voice of a woman character in its telling. Hannah, the now-elderly narrator, recounts the love she has for the land and for her community. She remembers each of her two husbands, and all places and community connections threatened by twentieth-century technologies. At risk is the whole culture of family farming, hope redeemed when her wayward and once lost grandson, Virgil, returns to his rural home place to work the farm.

Hannah Coulter

Danger on Peaks

As a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, bioregional activist, Zen Buddhist, and reluctant counterculture guru, Gary Snyder has been a major artistic force in America for over five decades, extending far beyond the Beat poems that first brought his work into the public eye. Danger on Peaks begins with poems about Snyder’s first ascent of Mount St. Helens in 1945 and his learning that atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the morning of his descent. Containing work in a surprising variety of styles, creating an arc-shaped trail from these earliest climbs to what the poet calls poems of intimate, immediate life, gossip and insight,” Danger on Peaks is Snyder’s most personal work ever.

Danger on Peaks: Poems

SNYDER, Gary

Genre Fiction

When he discovered that the city he lived in for many years was actually entirely rebuilt during the mid-1800s, Leonard Pitt plunged into Paris's history and began photographing what he learned had changed. Eventually, he led tours and gave lectures on the demolition and reconstruction that changed the city forever. Walks Through Lost Paris chronicles Paris's great periods of urban reconstruction through four walking tours. With a special focus on the work of Georges-Eugene Haussmann, this book provides a history of each site along with the motives behind the urban redesign and the reactions of Parisians who witnessed it. Detailed maps take you through a city whose changes were captured by photographers and artists in each stage. Hundreds of color photos, diagrams, and engravings splendidly survey the massive transformation that resulted in the Paris of today.

Walks Through Lost Paris: A Journey Into the Heart of Historic Paris

History

Pitt, Leonard

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Set in present day West Virginia, Ann Pancake’s debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, tells the story of a coal mining familya couple and their four childrenliving through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their mountain life. As the mine turns the mountains to slag and wastewater, workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters. Strange As This Weather Has Been follows several members of the family, with a particular focus on fifteen-year-old Bant and her mother, Lace. Working at a scab” motel, Bant becomes involved with a young miner while her mother contemplates joining the fight against the mining companies. As domestic conflicts escalate at home, the children are pushed more and more outside among junk from the floods and felled trees in the hollowsthe only nature they have ever known. But Bant has other memories and is as curious and strong-willed as her mother, and ultimately comes to discover the very real threat of destruction that looms as much in the landscape as it does at home.

Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

Pancake, Ann

Shame in the Blood (Shinobugawa) is considered one of the finest contemporary love stories in all of modern Japanese literature. The narrator, a young college student, has had two brothers disappear, lost two sisters to suicide, and his third sister is physically disabled. He is determined not only to survive but to thrive in spite of tormented thoughts that his family’s blood is cursed.Told as six interlocked and layered stories, the novel builds and deepens as the particulars of everyday life provide a moving, beautiful testimony to the love and power of youth and commitment. The whole story is tinged with melancholic sadness often associated with Japanese literature, where the feeling of love itself is a little death.”First published in Japan, Shame in the Blood was made into a film directed by Obayashi Nobuhiko, and won the Akutagawa Prize for Literature, launching Tetsuo Miura’s career. Working in the great tradition of Japanese novelists from Soseki to Kawabata, from Mishima to Abe, Miura takes his place as one of the greatest living Japanese writers.

Shame in the Blood

Tetsuo Miura

Literary

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Books by Shoemaker Hoard

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Shoemaker Hoard publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

My Nine Lives : Chapters of a Possible Past

Joe Jones: A Novel

Joe Jones: A Novel

Vanishing Point: A Novel

The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays

Hannah Coulter

Danger on Peaks: Poems

Walks Through Lost Paris: A Journey Into the Heart of Historic Paris

Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

Shame in the Blood