Enter The Aardvark

Download or read book Enter the Aardvark written by Jessica Anthony and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It's a long time since I have enjoyed a novel so much. Fresh, witty and smart it also has a heart.' KATE ATKINSON 'Sizzles with uproarious fun, from its snout to the sting in its tale.' INDEPENDENT 'The perfect tonic for testing times.' GUARDIAN We all know politics is absurd. But could a Republican be brought down by a stuffed aardvark? Republican congressman Alexander Paine Wilson is determined that nothing will stop him in his campaign for re-election. Not the fact that he is a bachelor, not the fact that his main adversary Nancy Beavers - married, with children - is rising in the polls. Nothing. That is, until one hot day in August, he receives a large parcel via FedEx. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark. This aardvark has a surprising history - from the Victorian naturalist who discovered it to the taxidermist who deemed it his finest creation. But for Wilson, the entrance of the aardvark sets off a chain of events that threaten to ruin his entire career. Constantly surprising, brilliantly comic and piquantly provocative, Enter the Aardvark is a tale for our times, a biting satire with a tender underbelly. ____________________________________________ 'Sometimes, a paragraph near the start of a novel is so perfect and funny that you read it over and over, laugh every time, and know you're in for a treat...I'm loving this. Completely insane but utterly hilarious'. JOHN BOYNE 'Spry, slim, clever...the inventiveness is impressive and the story has heart' THE SUNDAY TIMES 'What begins as a topical takedown of the American political system deepens into a hugely enjoyable romp through history.' OBSERVER 'Fresh, astute and mouthwateringly sharp, this is a rare thing; a political satire that tugs on the heartstrings in unconventional ways.' IRISH TIMES 'Sharp, inventive and very funny, it's an entertainingly bizarre political satire.' TATLER 'Part 21st-century political satire, part unexpectedly affecting 19th-century love story...It's every bit as strange as it sounds, and yet somehow it works' DAILY MAIL 'Old, dead creature brings down flash, vain senator... Out in front as the most fizzing and amusing novel of the year.' STRONG WORDS magazine 'A blisteringly innovative and outrageous novel.' NY OBSERVER 'Weird, wonderful, and very much of the moment, Enter the Aardvark is a landmark political novel of the Trump era...With heart and humor, Anthony expertly skewers our current political climate.' ESQUIRE 'Inventive and darkly funny...as Anthony connects characters from today with those from 19th-century England, she offers an original and unsettling lens through which to view male power as it has evolved over time.' TIME 'Enter Jessica Anthony. With her highly inventive, ever attentive, and morally serious (as all great comedy must be) Enter the Aardvark, she estranges all over again our deplorable political moment, and thereby helps make it bearable.' JOSHUA FERRIS 'Mischievously zoological and darkly satirical - a brilliant novel' JOHN IRONMONGER, author of NOT FORGETTING THE WHALE 'A feverish, rollicking beast of a book. Totally assured, completely unpredictable, Jessica Anthony has created a true original.' SIMON WROE, author of CHOP CHOP and HERE COMES TROUBLE

Download or read book The Convalescent written by Jessica Anthony and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most amusing and poignant anti-heroes since Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum” lives up to his misfit heritage in this ribald debut (Spike Magazine). Ask Rovar Ákos Pfliegman about himself and he’ll say: “I have no life. I have no known relatives, no known friends. I’m barely human. I’m a hairy little Hungarian pulp. I am a sorry gathering of organs. That is all.” But there is more to Rovar than meets the eye. He has a pet beetle named Mrs. Kipner, he is a butcher plagued by rare ailments, he sells meat out of a broken-down bus next to a river in suburban Virginia, and he is the last of the Pfliegman line, a not-too-bright pagan clan that reaches back to pre-medieval Hungary. He also believes he’ll fulfill the ignoble destiny of inbred self-destruction that has wiped out all Pfliegmans before him. But against all odds, and the cruel laws of nature, this unlikely loner, seller of fresh mutton at unbeatable prices, unloved lover, and historian of the unimportant is still capable of being reborn in the most extraordinary way. “Innocent and wise, grave and hilarious, bleak and hopeful, fast-paced and meditative, heartbreaking and heart healthy, evanescent and concrete” (Heidi Julavits), The Convalescent “nods to all sorts of greats—Kafka, Rushdie, Darwin and Grass, to name a few. But Anthony’s style—funny, immediate and unapologetically cerebral—carves out a space all its own” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Download or read book Can an Aardvark Bark? written by Melissa Stewart and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning author Melissa Stewart and Caldecott honoree Steve Jenkins comes a noisy nonfiction exploration of the many sounds animals make. Can an aardvark bark? No, but it can grunt. Lots of other animals grunt too… Barks, grunts, squeals—animals make all kinds of sounds to communicate and express themselves. With a growling salamander and a whining porcupine, bellowing giraffes and laughing gorillas, this boisterous book is chock-full of fun and interesting facts and is sure to be a favorite of even the youngest animal enthusiasts.

Download or read book Chopsticks written by Jessica Anthony and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Told entirely with images, this is the story of Glory, a piano prodigy. Brilliant and lonely, Glory falls in love with Frank, who moves in next door, and is soon unable to play anything but the song "Chopsticks."

Download or read book Silence Is a Sense written by Layla AlAmmar and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is not just good storytelling, but a blueprint for survival." —The New York Times Book Review A transfixing and beautifully rendered novel about a refugee’s escape from civil war—and the healing power of community. A young woman sits in her apartment, watching the small daily dramas of her neighbors across the way. She is an outsider, a mute voyeur, safe behind her windows, and she sees it all—the sex, the fights, the happy and unhappy families. Journeying from her war-torn Syrian homeland to this unnamed British city has traumatized her into silence, and her only connection to the world is the magazine column she writes under the pseudonym “the Voiceless,” where she tries to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it—or revealing anything about herself. Gradually, though, the boundaries of her world expand. She ventures to the corner store, to a bookstore and a laundromat, and to a gathering at a nearby mosque. And it isn’t long before she finds herself involved in her neighbors’ lives. When an anti-Muslim hate crime rattles the neighborhood, she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own? Layla AlAmmar, a Kuwaiti American writer and student of Arab literature, delivers here a brilliant and affecting story about memory, revolution, loss, and safety. Most of all, and with melodic prose, Silence Is a Sense reminds us just how fundamental human connection is to survival.

Download or read book The Most written by Jessica Anthony and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page” (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out. It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out. A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, THE MOST breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

Download or read book Enter the Aardvark written by Jessica Anthony and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young congressman discovers a mysterious stuffed aardvark on his doorstep and sets out on a journey to find out what it means in this "weird, wonderful" novel about the secrets we keep from ourselves and their history-shaping consequences (Esquire). It's early one morning on a hot day in August, and millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R), planning his first reelection campaign and in deep denial about his sexuality, receives a mysterious, over-sized FedEx delivery on his front stoop. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark. This outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between contemporary Washington, D.C., where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England--where we meet Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffed the aardvark, and Richard Ostlet, the naturalist who hunted her. Our present world, we begin to see, has been shaped in profound and disturbing ways by the secret that binds these men. At once a ghost story, a love story, and a stunningly prescient political satire, Enter the Aardvark confronts the consequences of repressed male love meeting oppressive male power, and is a searing condemnation of our current American blindness. It is also that rarest of creatures: a work of art so utterly original and masterfully built that it seems to have spring fully formed from its visionary maker's head.