Kirjahaku

This stunning novel combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous conjoined twins. Born in Siam in 1811--on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River--Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world's stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage. Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss's narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century's most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.

From Darin Strauss, the bestselling author of Chang and Eng (A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year), comes the unforgettable story of "Kid" McCoy: boxer, jewel thief, scam artist, and the most married man in America. A fascinating mirror of the tumultuous backdrop of America at the turn of the century, The Real McCoy is "a muscular and entertaining novel about lies, scams, flimflams, and the inconvenience of truth" (GQ)

Read Darin Strauss's posts on the Penguin Blog Josh Goldin's happy yet unexamined existence is shattered one morning when his wife, Dori, rushes their eight-month- old son to the emergency room in severe distress. Dr. Darlene Stokes, an African-American physician and single mother, suspects Munchausen by proxy, a rarely diagnosed and controversial phenomenon where a mother intentionally harms her baby. As each of them is forced to confront a reality that has become a nightmare, Darlene, Dori, and Josh are pushed to their breaking points. Darin Strauss's extraordinary novel is set in a world turned upside down-where doctors try to save babies from their parents, police use the law to tear families apart, and the people you think you know best end up surprising you the most.

In this powerful, unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Darin Strauss examines the far-reaching consequences of the tragic moment that has shadowed his whole life. In his last month of high school, he was behind the wheel of his dad's Oldsmobile, driving with friends, heading off to play mini-golf. Then: a classmate swerved in front of his car. The collision resulted in her death. With piercing insight and stark prose, Darin Strauss leads us on a deeply personal, immediate, and emotional journey--graduating high school, going away to college, starting his writing career, falling in love with his future wife, becoming a father. Along the way, he takes a hard look at loss and guilt, maturity and accountability, hope and, at last, acceptance. The result is a staggering, uplifting tour de force. Look for special features inside, including an interview with Colum McCann.

Lucille Ball, Hollywood's first true media mogul, stars in this "bold" (The Boston Globe), "boisterous novel" (The New Yorker) with a thrilling love story at its heart--from the award-winning, bestselling author of Chang & Eng and Half a Life A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - "A gorgeous, Technicolor take on America in the middle of the twentieth century."--Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Nickel Boys This indelible romance begins with a daring conceit--that the author's grandfather may have had an affair with Lucille Ball. Strauss offers a fresh view of a celebrity America loved more than any other. Lucille Ball--the most powerful woman in the history of Hollywood--was part of America's first high-profile interracial marriage. She owned more movie sets than did any movie studio. She more or less single-handedly created the modern TV business. And yet Lucille's off-camera life was in disarray. While acting out a happy marriage for millions, she suffered in private. Her partner couldn't stay faithful. She struggled to balance her fame with the demands of being a mother, a creative genius, an entrepreneur, and, most of all, a symbol. The Queen of Tuesday--Strauss's follow-up to Half a Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award--mixes fact and fiction, memoir and novel, to imagine the provocative story of a woman we thought we knew.

Following the successful literary musings on art at the Frick, The Sleeve Should Be Illegal and Cocktails with a Curator, this anthology of newly commissioned texts from graduate students in New York University s Creative Writing Program pays homage to one of the institution s most celebrated paintings. Gathered here are fourteen fictional stories inspired by one of Ingres s most captivating portrait paintings. A detail of the work the fine silk dress, a red ribbon, a shawl casually draped over the arm of a chair, the contents of a tabletop, the contemplative pose is the starting point for each story. The pieces range from gothic tales that take place at the time of the painting in the mid-nineteenth century and stories that use the countess as a key character to a present-day ghost story and inventive sagas that take representations of the countess to faraway lands: Poland, Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, India, and a heaven that is populated solely by Black people. The faculty adviser for the project is best-selling novelist Darin Strauss, who writes the book s introduction. Illustrated with Ingres s famous portrait as well as with many lush details, this one-of-a-kind volume is an ode, both traditional and postmodern, to a glorious work of art.