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The Cider House Rules
John Irving
1985
Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--obstetrician and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Clouds. It is also the story of his favorite orphan, Homer, who is never adopted.
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The Hotel New Hampshire
John Irving
1981
The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany.
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The World According to Garp
John Irving
1978
This is the life of Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes. Rich with "lunacy and sorrow"; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust.
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The 158-Pound Marriage
John Irving
1974
The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this sensual, ironic tale about a ménage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on each other; but the sexual intrigue between them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well-intentioned, destructive.
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The Water-Method Man
John Irving
1972
Fred Trumper, a floundering late-twenty-something graduate student with serious commitment and honesty issues that earn him the nickname "Bogus," humorously recounts his various failures in life and love, from his New England childhood through his experiences on foreign study in Vienna, Austria, and as a graduate student in Iowa, leading up to the present-day, early-1970s New York.
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Setting Free the Bears
John Irving
1968
Modern-day Quixote, to whom zoo animals' imprisonment symbolizes the persecution of his ancestors, climaxes his wanderings with the dramatic freeing of all the animals of Vienna's Hietzinger Zoo.
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Moon Witch, Spider King
Marlon James
2-15-2022
From Marlon James, author of the bestselling National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the second book in the Dark Star trilogy, his African Game of Thrones. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Sogolon the Moon Witch proved a worthy adversary to Tracker as they clashed across a mythical African landscape in search of a mysterious boy who disappeared. In Moon Witch, Spider King, Sogolon takes center stage and gives her own account of what happened to the boy, and how she plotted and fought, triumphed and failed as she looked for him. It's also the story of a century-long feud-seen through the eyes of a 177-year-old witch-that Sogolon had with the Aesi, chancellor to the king. It is said that Aesi works so closely with the king that together they are like the eight limbs of one spider. Aesi's power is considerable-and deadly. It takes brains and courage to challenge him, which Sogolon does for reasons of her own. Part adventure tale, part chronicle of an indomitable woman who bows to no man, it is a fascinating novel that explores power, personality, and the places where they overlap.
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Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Marlon James
2019
In the first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child
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A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel
Marlon James
2014
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.
Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts—A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the ‘70s, to the crack wars in ‘80s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the ‘90s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James’ place among the great literary talents of his generation. -
The Book of Night Women
Marlon James
2009
It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings, desires, and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link. But the real revelation of the book-the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose-is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once breathtakingly daring and wholly in command of his craft.
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John Crow's Devil
Marlon James
2005
This debut novel tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. In the village of Gibbeah, magic coexists with religion, and good and evil are never as they seem in this tale of religious mania, redemption, and sexual obsession.
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A Song Everlasting
Ha Jin
7-27-2021
From the universally admired, award-winning author of Waiting and The Boat Rocker, an urgent, timely novel that follows a famous Chinese singer severed from his country as he works to find his way in the United States. After popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York at the end of a tour with his state-supported choir, expecting to pick up some extra cash for his daughter's tuition fund, the consequences of his choice spiral out of control. On his return to China, he is informed that the sponsors of the event were in support of Taiwan's secession and that he must deliver a formal self-criticism. When he is asked to forfeit his passport to his employer, he impulsively decides instead to return to New York to protest the government's threat to his artistic integrity. With the help of his old friend, Yabin, Tian's career begins to flourish in the United States. Soon placed on a government blacklist and thwarted by the State at every turn, it becomes increasingly clear that he may never return to China unless he denounces the freedoms that have made his new life possible. But Tian nevertheless insists on his identity as a performer, refusing to give up his art. Timely, moving, and important, A Song Everlasting is a story of hope in the face of hardship, from one of our most celebrated authors.
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Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai
Ha Jin
2019
From the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting: a narratively driven, deeply human biography of the 8th century poet, Li Bai...also known as Li Po...one of the most beloved poets ever to emerge from China. With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the life story of Li Bai (701-762), whose poems...shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life...rang throughout the Tang Dynasty and continue to be celebrated today. Jin follows Li Bai from his birth on China's western frontier through his travels as a young man seeking a place among the empire's civil servants, his wanderings allowing him to hone his poetic craft, share his verses, and win him friends and admirers along the way. In his later years, he becomes swept up in a military rebellion that alters the course of China, and his death is surrounded by speculation and legend that continues to be spun to this day. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses in the world
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A Distant Center
Ha Jin
4-28-2018
In the bold tradition of the “Misty Poets,” Ha Jin confronts China’s fraught political history while paying tribute to its rich culture and landscape. The poems of A Distant Center speak in a voice that is steady and direct, balancing contemplative longing with sober warnings from a writer who has confronted the traumas of censorship and state violence. With unadorned language and epigrammatic wit, Jin conjures scenes that encompass the personal, historical, romantic, and environmental, interrogating conceptions of foreignness and national identity as they appear and seep into everyday interactions and being. These are poems that offer solace in times of political reaction and uncertainty. Jin’s voice is wise, comforting, and imploring; his words are necessary and his lessons are invaluable. Question your place in the world―do not be complacent―look for strength and hope in every nook: “Keep in mind the meaning of / your existence: wherever you land, / your footprints will become milestones.”
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The Boat Rocker
Ha Jin
2016
"New York, 2005. Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin is a fiercely principled reporter at a small news agency that produces a website read by Chinese all over the world. Danlin's explosive exposés have made him legendary among readers--and feared by Communist officials. But his newest assignment may be his undoing: investigating his ex-wife, Yan Haili, an unscrupulous novelist who has willingly become a pawn of the Chinese government in order to realize her dreams of literary stardom. Hanli's scheme infuriates Danlin both morally and personally--he will do whatever it takes to expose her as a fraud. But in outing Haili, he is also provoking her powerful political allies, and he will need to draw on all of his journalistic cunning to come out of this investigation with his career--and his life--still intact. A brilliant, darkly funny story of corruption, integrity, and the power of the pen, The Boat Rocker is a tour de force"-- Provided by publisher
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A Map of Betrayal: A Novel
Ha Jin
2014
When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her father’s diary after the death of her parents, she is shocked by the secrets it contains. She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary—an astonishing chronicle of his journey from 1949 Shanghai to Okinawa to Langley, Virginia—reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed. The trail leads Lilian to China, to her father’s long-abandoned other family, whose existence she and her Irish American mother never suspected. As Lilian begins to fathom her father’s dilemma—torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country—she sees how his sense of duty distorted his life. But as she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from damaging yet another generation of her family.
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Nanjing Requiem: A Novel
Ha Jin
2011
During the 1937 attack on Nanjing, American missionary and women's college dean Minnie Vautrin decides to remain at her school during a violent Japanese attack that renders the school a refugee center for ten thousand women and children.
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A Good Fall
Ha Jin
2009
Jin gives readers a collection that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America.
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The Writer as Migrant
Ha Jin
2008
Ha Jin's journey from an uneducated soldier in the People's Liberation Army in China to a resident of the United States raises questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a globalizing world. This book looks at these questions and sets Ha Jin's own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles.
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A Free Life
Ha Jin
2007
1990s America. We follow the Wu family - father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao - as they fully sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and begin a new, free life in the United States.
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War Trash
Ha Jin
2004
Captured by enemy forces, Yu Yuan, a Chinese army officer serving in Korea in 1951, takes on the role of interpreter due to his proficiency in English, a role that places him in a conflict between his fellow prisoners and their captors.
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The Crazed
Ha Jin
2002
Assigned to care for his fiancee's father, Professor Yang, after he suffers a stroke, Jian Wan is disturbed when the professor begins to rave against his family and colleagues, and takes great risks to uncover the truth.
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Wreckage
Ha Jin
2001
Ha Jin's poems follow the chronological order of Imperial China's dynastic history from ancient legend, through centuries of emperors, to the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.
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The Bridegroom: Stories
Ha Jin
2000
A collection of comical and deeply moving tales of contemporary China that are as warm and human as they are surprising, disturbing, and delightful.
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Waiting: A Novel
Ha Jin
1999
This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.
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