Kirjahaku

"ThisBeautiful Life is a gripping, potent and blisteringly well-written story offamily, dilemma, and consequence. . . . I read this book with white-knuckledurgency, and I finished it in tears. Helen Schulman is an absolutely brilliantnovelist." --Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love Theevents of a single night shatter one family's sense of security and identity inthis provocative and deeply affecting domestic drama from Helen Schulman, theacclaimed author of A Day at the Beach and Out of Time. In thetradition of Lionel Shriver, Sue Miller, and Laura Moriarty, Schulman crafts abrilliantly observed portrait of parenting and modern life, cunningly exploringour most deeply-held convictions and revealing the enduring strengths thatemerge in the face of crisis.

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, A New York Post Best Book of the WeekRecommended by Vogue, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Skimm, The BBC, Southern Living, Pure Wow, Hey Alma, Esquire, EW, Refinery 29, Bust, and Read It or Weep“Mind-blowingly brilliant…. Provocative, profound and yes, a little unsettling, Come With Me is about how technology breaks apart and then reconfigures a family, and though it has hints of sci-fi, it’s so beautifully grounded in reality that it seems to breathe. Although it takes place over just three days, what’s so fascinating is that so many lives, and many possibilities, are lived through it. Truly, it’s a novel like its own multiverse.” — San Francisco ChronicleFrom Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller This Beautiful Life, comes another "gripping, potent, and blisteringly well-written story of family, dilemma, and consequence" (Elizabeth Gilbert)—a mind-bending novel set in Silicon Valley that challenges our modern constructs of attachment and love, purpose and fate."What do you want to know?"Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?Amy’s husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn’t felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan’s betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.

The paths of two women on opposite ends of a high-profile sexual abuse scandal set them on a devastating collision course. "Part thriller, part Hollywood satire, Lucky Dogs is a brash, sometimes heartbreaking saga in which trauma and self-preservation converge across decades and continents. This is Helen Schulman's best novel yet."--Jennifer Egan, best-selling author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House On a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet in line at an ice cream kiosk on the Ile de la Cit . One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness. When leering male tourists hassle the pair, the blonde pulls out a knife and a sisterhood is born. Both women have been victims of male violence, and both are warriors--one trained and calculating, one instinctually ferocious. They each think they know who they are dealing with. But both are very, very wrong. In a story that unfolds with unexpected humor and the pace of a thriller, acclaimed novelist Helen Schulman lays bare what happens to women--no matter how fortunate they may appear to be on the surface--whose lives have been warped by brutality and misogyny. The issues are universal, but the core of the story is intimate: a passionate exploration of love, betrayal, and survival. Lucky Dogs asks and answers a shattering question: How could one woman so utterly betray another?

A virtuosic, laugh-out-loud collection of stories that explore the fraught and fantastic nature of human connection--featuring women, men, various couples, and one terribly precocious baby enmeshed in tangled romances of all shapes and sizes. The wide-ranging and inventive stories that make up Helen Schulman's Fools for Love are funny, sexy, sometimes sad, and always surprising. A single American mother and a French Orthodox rabbi fall in love over poetry, as she helps to dismantle a shuttered bookstore in Paris. A rebellious young woman marries a series of men who are all wrong for her and proceeds to cheat on each of them; her widowed mother finds her deceased husband's sex diaries and decides she needs to make up for lost time. And in the title story, a blossoming East Village playwright realizes that her marriage to a brilliant actor is doomed, after watching his performance in an alternative production of Sam Shepard's iconic play. Characters wander in and out of one another's stories--and beds--in these hilarious tales of lust and attachment--a rollicking feast of love and loss that is not unlike the experience of life itself. Fools for Love is a vital addition to Schulman's acclaimed body of work--a collection that showcases at every turn what Katie Kitamura has referred to as her "sharp observation, buoyant wit, and unfailing empathy."

Louise Harrington's ten-year marriage ended for reasons she has yet to fathom even four years later. At thirty-eight she is as confused about the men in her life as she was at seventeen. So, when the double of her high-school sweetheart appears in her life, she can't tell if she's gone mad, if it's a joke or a miracle. When her best friend Missy gets involved (it has taken Louise years to forgive her for stealing him in the first place) history begins to repeat itself...

It could happen to any family... What if it happened to yours?When the Bergamots move to the city, they're unsure how well they'll adapt. Soon though, Richard is consumed by his new job and Liz, who has given up her career, is hectically playing mother to six-year-old Coco and fifteen-year-old Jake. But the day Jake unthinkingly forwards a sexually explicit email attachment sent to him by a thirteen-year-old girl is the last day of the Bergamots' comfortable middle-class existence. Within hours, the video clip is not only all over Jake's school, but all over the city - and all over the internet. Faced with impossible choices, what Richard and Liz do next risks destroying not only their marriage, their daughter and their place in the community, but also Jake - the child they have set out to protect.

Traditionally, the haiku poetry form has 3 lines of 17 syllables (5-7-5), but that is in Japanese. When translating haiku or writing one's own in English, one often has to take some liberties with this form. Thus, an English haiku may end up with one, two or three syllables more or less. A traditional short 3-line haiku generally makes a point using an example from nature as a metaphor. In this collection of haiku, I often use the form to make a single philosophical point and don't always use a reference from nature to do so. For me, the form seems to lend itself well to expressing brief single thoughts and questions for which humanity seeks answers that haven't yet been found. If one wishes to explore traditional Japanese haiku, one can research the four great Japanese haiku masters. These are: Matsuo Basho (1644-1694); Yosa Buson (1716-1784); Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827); and Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Experimenting with writing one's thoughts in the haiku form can be a lot of fun. Once I got started on this track, my mind kept going non-stop on putting my thoughts as haiku, but taking a few liberties with the form.