Kirjahaku

The basis for the major motion picture 5 Flights Up starring Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman. New York City is on high alert--a gasoline truck is "stuck" in the Midtown tunnel and the driver has fled. Through panic and gridlock, Alex and Ruth must transport their beloved old dachshund--whose back legs are suddenly paralyzed--to the animal hospital, using a cutting board as a stretcher. But this is also the weekend when Alex and Ruth must sell the apartment in which they have lived for most of their adult lives. Over the course of forty-eight hours, as the mystery of the missing truck driver terrorizes the city and the dachshund's life hangs in the balance, the bidding war over their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair. Told in shifting points of view--Alex's, Ruth's, and the little dog's--Heroic Measures is a moving, deft novel about urban anxiety and the love that deepens over years.

Unflinchingly honest, moving, and funny, Half a Life shows how a girl without means or promise and with only a loving mother, chutzpah, a bit of fraud, and a lot of luck turned into somebody. In 1964 the Ciment family left middle-class Montreal for the fringe desert communities of Los Angeles, where their always unstable father lost the last vestiges of his sanity. Terrified and broke, in a world he could neither understand nor control, he came apart. When the family finally threw him out, he lived for weeks in his car at the foot of their driveway. Ciment turned herself into a girl for whom a father is unnecessary-a tough girl who survived any way she could. She and her brother Jack helped support the family by working for a shady market researcher, quickly learning to supply their own answers to burning questions like, "Did we like Swanson TV dinners? If so, why? On a scale of one to ten, how would we rate the new Talking Barbie? Arrow wax? Dr. Ross's dog food?" She became a gang girl, a professional forger, and a Times Square porn model. Using a friend's SAT score she cheated her way into art school, and seduced and eventually married her art teacher, a married man thirty years her senior. By turns comic, tragic, and heartrending, Half a Life is a bold, unsentimental portrait of the artist as a girl from nowhere, making herself up from scratch, acting up, and finally overcoming the consequences of being the child of a father incapable of love and responsibility.

*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR *** A 52 year-old photographer and a 41 year-old anatomy professor are jurors sequestered during a sensational three-week trial: a toddler murdered by one of his twin sisters. At the court appointed cut-rate motel off the interstate, they fall into an intense, furtive affair, but it is only during deliberations that the lovers learn they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens. After the trial, the photographer returns to her much older husband amidst an ongoing media frenzy over the case. But the judge has received an anonymous letter about the affair, and she is preparing to release the jurors names. From that point on, the photographer's "one last dalliance before she is too old" takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences, as The Body in Question moves to its affecting, powerful, and surprising conclusion.

From the acclaimed novelist ("A virtuoso" --Donna Seaman, Booklist), a deft, shocking memoir that asks whether we can judge past behavior by today's moral codes, as the author reevaluates her decades-long marriage to the forty-seven-year-old man she met when she was seventeen, revisiting a singular passion in the 21st-century aftermath of #MeToo. "Few writers can tackle the bedroom--or female libido . . . but Ciment is a master: in exquisitely spare prose, she nails it." -- The New York Times In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between Jill Ciment and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, she not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. Ciment asks herself if she told the whole truth back then and what truth looked like to her in that era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility around a May-December romance. In the light of #MeToo, Ciment reexplores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband's death at ninety-three. This riveting book about art, memory, and morality asks many questions: Does a story's ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself? Suffused with the wisdom that comes with time, Consent is an author's brave recasting of her life's settled narrative and an urgent read for women of all ages.

A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR - From the acclaimed novelist ("A virtuoso"--Donna Seaman, Booklist), a deft, shocking memoir that asks whether we can judge past behavior by today's moral codes, as the author reevaluates her decades-long marriage to the forty-seven-year-old man she met when she was seventeen, revisiting a singular passion in the 21st-century aftermath of #MeToo. "Few writers can tackle the bedroom--or female libido . . . but Ciment is a master: in exquisitely spare prose, she nails it." -- The New York Times In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1996 memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility around a May-December romance. In the light of #metoo, with new understanding about the balance of power between an older man and an underage girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband's death at ninety-three. This riveting book about art, memory, and morality asks many questions along the way: Does a story's ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself? Suffused with the wisdom that comes with time, Consent is an author's brave recasting of her life's settled narrative, and an urgent read for women of all ages.

It's the summer of 2015, Brooklyn, and the city is sweltering from another record-breaking heat wave, this one accompanied by biblical rains. Edith, a recently retired legal librarian, and her identical twin sister, Kat, have discovered something ominous in their hall closet: it's shaped like a mushroom, it's phosphorescent, and it's rapidly consuming their wall. But that's only the beginning ... Part suspense, part screwball comedy, Jill Ciment's brilliant novel looks at what happens when our lives--so seemingly set and ordered--break down in the wake of calamity.

In 1970, Sara Ehrenreich boards a small plane and returns to New York City with much fanfare; she will be featured in Life magazine. She has not left Ta'un'uu-the South Seas island upon which she and her husband, Philip, were marooned during a storm-in more than thirty years. Sara doesn't know that man has landed on the moon. She has never seen a ballpoint pen. Her body is covered, head to toe, in tattoos. Flashback: it's 1918 and Sara, a shop girl and aspiring artist, meets Philip, a wealthy member of the avant-garde elite. The two fall in love, marry, and collaborate to make art, surrounded by socialites and revolutionaries-until the Depression cripples not just Sara and Philip, but most of their patrons. When Philip is offered a job gathering masks from the South Seas, they jump at a chance to escape America's sorrows, traveling to Ta'un'uu for what they think will be a week's stay. The rest is history-a history Sara records on her skin through the traditional tattoos that become her masterpiece and provide an accounting of her days. Narrated in vivid and starkly moving prose, The Tattoo Artist reminds us of the unforeseeable forces that shape each human life.

From the author of the highly praised Small Claims comes an unlikely and beguiling mother-daughter story as they navigate through uniquely puzzling parts of their lives. Gloria is a modern-day "snake oil" saleswoman and a quixotic entrepreneur who sells everything from metal detectors to aphrodisiac perfumes, but her real stock-in-trade is hope. She and her teenage daughter, Kim, drive throughout the Southwest, pulling their trailer from town to town, staying one small step ahead of the postmaster general and the FDA the entire time. This is the only world Kim has ever known, until Arthur, a widow thirty years older than her, crashes into her life and takes her heart hostage. As the young girl and senior fall in love, Gloria has a vision in a car wash, launching her into a scheme she hopes will be her greatest triumph. Both laugh-out-loud funny and heartachingly poignant, The Law of Falling Bones is not only a delicate, loving portrayal of a daughter's fierce devotion to her wildly unconventional mother, but it is a surprisingly magical story of a genuine relationship between two significant opposites.