Lily Tuck

From National Book Award winner Lily Tuck, a beguiling and subversive short novel of jealousy and desire that tells the story of a new marriage from its surprising inception through its disturbing conclusion

Sisters

The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano -- the future dictator of Paraguay -- begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and ahorse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunción and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated imperial dream -- one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay. With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

A Novel

The News from Paraguay

Kiz Kardesler

The National Book Award-winning author of The News from Paraguay follows the vigil of a woman at the deathbed of her long-time husband, during which she remembers defining moments in their marriage while considering the life she imagined and their prospects for a shared afterlife.

I Married You for Happiness

Heathcliff Redux and Other Stories

Lily, Molly, and Inez are women of a certain age, of a certain bearing, of a certain class. Late one dire night, Molly telephones from Connecticut to catch Lily up with the news: Inez's corpse -- near-naked but wearing boots -- has been discovered propped up "like a broom" in a corner of her Soho loft. It is an occasion ripe for an all-night heart-to-heart conversation, bouncing deliriously from one evasion to the next -- until the pair of talk-crazy, talk-weary women have successfully diverted themselves with all the wonderfully vagrant stuff of life . . . with everything, in fact, except grief.

Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up

The woman who walked on water

"As the child of a German movie producer father who lives in Italy and a beautiful, artistically talented mother who resides in New York, Liliane's life is divided between those two very different worlds. A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane uncovers the stories of family members as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Mary Queen of Scots and an early German adventurer, and pieces together their vivid histories, through both World Wars and across continents. What unfolds is an astonishing and riveting metanarrative: an exploration of self, humanity, history and family. Told with Tuck's inimitable elegance and filled with documents, photos, and a rich and varied array of characters, The Double Life of Liliane is an intimate and poignant coming-of-age portrait of the writer as a young woman."--Jacket.

a novel

The double life of Liliane

Traces the life and work of the Italian author from her half-Jewish childhood in Rome and her flight from Nazi occupation to her marriage to celebrated writer Alberto Moravia and her prize-winning novels, in a portrait that also discusses her relationships with such contemporaries as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Carlo Levi.

A Life of Elsa Morante

Woman of Rome

Ambos enxergam a vida através de temperamentos próximos de suas paixões – a sensibilidade e o sentimentalismo da artista plástica e a curiosidade analítica do matemático –, o que às vezes os distancia, embora em nenhum momento haja dúvida de que existe amor entre os dois. Uma das obsessões e assunto de estudo de Philip, o cálculo das probabilidades, também ajuda a conduzir a história: quais as chances de duas pessoas se conhecerem em um país estrangeiro e começarem ali uma vida em conjunto? Qual a probabilidade de o amor durar até o fim da vida? O romance também aborda constantemente a questão dos segredos que os amantes mantêm entre si, o quanto se revela e o quanto se esconde para preservar o amor. Os temas centrais do livro são o tempo e a memória, ilustrados no trecho: "Imaginem uma xícara de chá se espatifando no chão (...). Se vocês tivessem filmado isso, poderiam passar o filme de trás pra frente e ver todos os pedaços surgindo e se juntando de novo. (...) Essa desordem ou entropia dentro de um sistema fechado sempre aumenta com o tempo. Em outras palavras, deixado por sua própria conta, tudo decairá. (...) O aumento da desordem ou entropia com o tempo é um exemplo do que é chamado de a seta da vida. A seta da vida distingue o passado do futuro", diz Philip. Casei com você para ser feliz recupera a trajetória de uma vida, e a anatomia de um casamento.

Casei com você para ser feliz

Elsa Morante was born in 1912 to an unconventional family of modest means. She grew up with an independent spirit, a formidable will, and a commitment to writing—she wrote her first poem when she was just two years old. During World War II, Morante and her husband, the celebrated writer Alberto Moravia, were forced to flee occupied Rome—Moravia was half-Jewish (as was she) and wanted by the Fascists—and hide out in a remote mountain hut. After the war, Morante published a series of prize-winning novels, including Arturo's Island and History, a seminal account of the war, which established her as one of the leading Italian writers of her day. Lily Tuck's elegant and unusual biography also evokes the heady time during the postwar years when Rome was the film capital of the world and Morante's counted among her circle of friends the filmmakers Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, and the young Bernardo Bertolucci. A charismatic and beautiful woman, Morante had a series of love affairs—most unhappy—as well as friendships with such famous literary luminaries as Carlo Levi, Italo Calvino, and Natalia Ginzburg. As a couple, Morante and Moravia—the Beauvoir-Sartre of Italy—captivated the nation with their intense and mutual admiration, their arguments, and their passion. Wonderfully researched with the cooperation of the Morante Estate, filled with personal interviews, and written in graceful and succinct prose, Woman of Rome introduces the American reader to a woman of fierce intelligence, powerful imagination, and original talent.

"His hand is growing cold, still she holds it," is how this riveting, deeply moving story of a forty-three year old marriage by National Book Award winner Lily Tuck begins. Unfolding over a single night, Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Too shocked yet to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long marriage, beginning with their first meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician--it was a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. Slender, powerful, and utterly engaging, "I Married You For Happiness" is not only an elegant elegy to a man and a marriage, but also a meditation on the theory of probability and how chance can affect both a life and one's consideration of an afterlife.

The culture shock of a newly arrived American woman in 1967 Thailand, wife of an engineer building airfields for the bombing of Vietnam. It is hot, the Thais don't want to be friends, servants steal and the food gives her indigestion.

Or the Woman Who Shot a Man

Siam

National Book Award-Winning Author: A second wife is haunted by the first in a novel that “expertly deploys revelations like land mines” (The Minneapolis Star Tribune). From the acclaimed author of I Married You for Happiness, Sisters is a “masterpiece” (The Boston Globe) that gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies of a new marriage sprung from betrayal. Lily Tuck’s unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife—known only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. Will the narrator ever equal she intellectually, or ever forget the betrayal that lies between them? And what of the secrets between her husband and she, from which the narrator is excluded? The daring and precise build up to an eerily wonderful denouement is a triumph of subtlety and surprise, in a riveting psychological portrait of marriage, infidelity, and obsession.

A provocative and haunting new collection from critically acclaimed writer Lily Tuck, Heathcliff Redux, A Novella and Stories explores, with cool precision, the hidden dynamics and unspoken conflicts at the heart of human relationships. In the novella, a married woman reads Wuthering Heights at the same time that she falls under the erotic and destructive spell of her own Heathcliff. In the stories that follow, a single photograph illuminates the intricate web of connections between friends at an Italian café; a forgotten act of violence in New York’s Carl Schurz Park returns to haunt the present; and a woman is prompted by a flurry of mysterious emails to recall her time as a member of the infamous Rajneesh cult. With keen psychological insight and delicate restraint, Heathcliff Redux, A Novella and Stories pries open the desires, doubts, and secret motives of its characters and exposes their vulnerabilities to the light. Sharp and unflinching, the novella and stories together form an exquisitely crafted collection from one of our most treasured, award-winning writers.

A Novella and Stories

Heathcliff Redux

Lily Tuck understands that emotional transformations cannot-and should not -- be easily explained. In her elegant and penetrating first collection, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, Tuck offers a portrait of the subtle shifts that can render the accommodations we make to our lives or to our partners suddenly impossible. Tuck's characters are in the midst of a composed yet profound rebellion, the basis of which is a growing estrangement from the self, a need to return to some fundamental truth whose discovery, as often as not, will force significant change. These characters travel to unknown, exotic places, and, while there, find themselves deeply immersed in observation-of the natives of the locality, of the local customs, of the foreign landscape -- in an effort to discern some elemental truth about who they themselves are. Yet rather than see the self reflected back clear as rainwater, these women meet instead with disorientation, confusion; they are disappointed by the people closest to them -- lovers, husbands, members of their families. Tuck is a writer of such grace and understatement that one does not immediately recognize the piercing psychological acuity and deftness of her observations. Her characters are full of poignant yearning and guarded optimism, of unwavering honesty, even in the face of painful disappointment or physical chaos. It is the elements of pain and confusion that bring these women back to themselves in precisely the way they need to be; to the sometimes heartbreaking but finally optimistic realization that the answers they seek lie not in other people, or places, but rather within themselves. Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived is a brilliant collection from a writer of exceptional poise and insight.

Stories

Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived

Nina bereitet das Abendessen vor, als ihr Mann Philip nach Hause kommt und sich für einen Moment hinlegt – nur wenig später findet sie ihn tot. Für Nina beginnt eine Nacht des Abschiednehmens, eine letzte Nacht, in der sie allein sein will mit ihrem Mann. Sie waren ein gegensätzliches Paar, er Mathematiker, sie Künstlerin. Doch gerade das machte ihr gemeinsames Leben so reich. Schlaglichtartig lässt Nina ihr Leben mit Philip an sich vorüberziehen, sie erinnert sich an überwältigende Glücksmomente, intime Augenblicke, an ihre erste Begegnung, das erste Gespräch, den Frühling in Paris, die Ferien am Meer – bis die Nacht in einen neuen Morgen übergeht, in einen klaren Tag ...

Das Glück mit dir

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Chad Harbach

Anjali Joseph

Will Wiles

Nicci Cloke

Evan Mandery

Sam Thompson

Darran McCann

A taster of some of the brightest and best new novels from the rising stars of fiction.

Fiction4theFuture: Free New Fiction

The first biography in any language of one of the most celebrated Italian writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1912 to an unconventional family of modest means, Elsa Morante grew up with an independent spirit, a formidable will, and an unshakable commitment to writing. Forced to hide from the Fascists during World War II in a remote mountain hut with her husband, renowned author Alberto Moravia, she re-emerged at war's end to take her place among the premier Italian writers of her day. When Rome was film capital of the world, she counted Pasolini, Visconti, and the young Bertolucci among her circle of friends. She was charismatic, beautiful, and fiercely intelligent; her marriage, a passionate union of literary giants, captivated a nation; her love affairs were intense and often tragic. And until now few Americans have known of this remarkable woman and her powerful, original talent.

Lily Tuck

Books

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