Very Cold People

Download or read book Very Cold People written by Sarah Manguso and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The masterly debut novel from “an exquisitely astute writer” (The Boston Globe), about growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of small-town America. “Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”—The New York Times “Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend.”—The New Yorker ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping “My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.” For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield. As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.

Download or read book 300 Arguments written by Sarah Manguso and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you. Bad art is from no one to no one. Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you whether you are. Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude. I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll escape the worst of it. —from 300 Arguments A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.

Download or read book The Cold People written by Christopher Pike and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frozen enemies make for a chilling challenge in this fifth book in New York Times bestselling author Christopher Pike’s Spooksville series—now on TV! Adam and his friend are exploring the forest near Spooksville when they come across huge blocks of ice, hidden among the trees. They decide to melt one of the blocks, but when they do, a strange man comes out of the ice and tries to grab them! The man has very cold hands—and his eyes aren’t too warm either. Soon there are dozens of Cold People running around Spooksville, freezing the residents. Adam and his friends have an idea that just might save the day. Or will it get them turned into human popsicles?

Download or read book The Midnight Library: A GMA Book Club Pick written by Matt Haig and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year "A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."—The Washington Post The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book. Don’t miss Matt Haig’s latest instant New York Times besteller, The Life Impossible, available now Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Download or read book Cold People written by Tom Rob Smith and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-01-19 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'An ambitious, cinematic thriller' Observer 'A talented storyteller' The Times 'A cinematic epic' Daily Mail What if the only hope for survival becomes the greatest threat? From the brilliant, bestselling author of Child 44 comes a suspenseful and fast-paced novel about a colony of global apocalypse survivors seeking to reinvent civilisation under the most extreme conditions imaginable. The world has fallen. Without warning, a mysterious and omnipotent force has claimed the planet for their own. There are no negotiations, no demands, no reasons given for their actions. All they have is a message: humanity has thirty days to reach the one place on Earth where they will be allowed to exist… Antarctica. Cold People follows the journeys of a handful of those who endure the frantic exodus to the most extreme environment on the planet. But their goal is not merely to survive the present. Because as they cling to life on the ice, the remnants of their past swept away, they must also confront the urgent challenge: can they change and evolve rapidly enough to ensure humanity’s future? Can they build a new society in the sub-zero cold? Original and imaginative, as profoundly intimate as it is grand in scope, Cold People is a masterful and unforgettable epic. Praise for Tom Rob Smith ‘A remarkable achievement’ Jeffery Deaver ‘Amazing’ Lee Child ‘Chilling, hypnotic and thoroughly compelling’ Mark Billingham ‘Truly original and chilling’ Jojo Moyes ‘Tom Rob Smith’s mastery of suspense will make any reader’s heart pound’ Financial Times ‘A thrilling, intense piece of fiction’ Observer ‘Ingeniously plotted... a high voltage story’ New York Times ‘Perfectly plotted, utterly terrifying’ Daily Mail ‘A mind-blowing, addictive plot that will have you on the edge of your seat’ Stylist ‘A powerful page-turner’ GQ ‘Taut and atmospheric’ Irish Independent ‘Masterly... read this and shiver’ Telegraph

Download or read book The Cold Nowhere written by Brian Freeman and published by Quercus. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgar Award finalist and international bestselling author Brian Freeman brings the long-awaited return of Lieutenant Jonathan Stride to the bitter cold of Duluth, Minnesota. Sixteen-year-old Catalina Mateo shows up unannounced one night in Detective Jonathan Stride's home, dripping wet from a desperate plunge into the icy waters of Lake Superior. Her sodden clothes stained with blood, Cat spins a tale of a narrow escape from a shadowy pursuer. Stride decides to trust this girl, but his judgment may be clouded by memories of Cat's mother. Ten years earlier, Cat hid under the porch of her family home while her mother was brutally butchered by her ex-con father. Stride still blames himself for not preventing the slaughter. But is Cat telling the truth? Stride's police partner, Maggie Bei, doubts the homeless girl, who has been living rough on the streets of Duluth since her mother's death--and now sleeps with a knife hidden under her pillow. As Stride investigates Cat's story, more violence trails in the teenager's wake--and Maggie's suspicions about her deepen. Now a single question haunts the void between them: Should Stride be afraid for--or of--this terribly damaged girl?

Download or read book The Two Kinds of Decay written by Sarah Manguso and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poet and author recounts her nine-year struggle with a rare autoimmune disease in this spare and unsparing memoir of illness and recovery. At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be. Praise for The Two Kinds of Decay A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Best Book of the Year, San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out Chicago “Moving . . . a fiercely truthful memoir.” —The Boston Globe “Hers is not a day-by-day description of this grueling time, but an impressionistic text filled with bright, poetic flashes. . . . Many sick people learn to live in the moment, but the power of Manguso’s writing makes that truism revelatory.” —The Washington Post Book World “Sarah Manguso has miraculously elevated the act of memory. She has found honesty, fear, longing and beauty in every moment of her young life, giving this book an intensity found nowhere else. You put it down panting with wonder and grief, but never with pity. A breakthrough in the memoir, and in writing.” —Andrew Sean Greer