In this engaging first novel, narrator Dolores Price recounts her life story from age four to age 40. The troubled product of a stormy marriage, she is already sipping Maalox in grade school. Then her father walks out on her mother, who suffers a nervous collapse, and Dolores moves to her repressive grandmother's house in Rhode Island. By the time she reaches eighth grade, she has only one friend: a boarder who eventually rapes her. Anesthetizing herself with junk food and soap operas, Dolores becomes an obese, isolated young woman who attempts suicide during her first semester in college and spends seven years in a mental institution.
S'Mother - The Story of a Man, His Mom, and the Thousands of Altogether Insane Letters She’s Mailed Him
Adam Chester is the son of a very loving, somewhat crazy Mom who for almost 30 years has peppered his life with unsolicited advice, news updates, opinions and the occasional Tarragon Chicken recipe. In truth, Adam has saved over 800 letters of the thousands of inappropriate, embarrassing and utterly mad directives she's sent - some of which, out of the sheer frustration of their regularity, he has yet to open. S'MOTHER is a memoir based on these letters and postcards and is about the relationship between an only son and his mother and the pathological extremes maternal instincts can take.
The English title refers to a later episode in the book involving an attempt to make a deal with the devil. Most of the book's spirit is however lost in translation, as the Portuguese original is written in a register that is both archaic and colloquial, making it a very difficult book to translate. The combination of its size, linguistic oddness and polemic themes caused a shock when it was published, but now it is considered one of the most important novels of South American literature. In a 2002 poll of 100 noted writers conducted by Norwegian Book Clubs, the book was named among the top 100 books of all time.
When he stumbles upon Ricky, a young Navajo man, beaten and dying in the newly fallen snow, part-time history professor Ben Bailey questions everything in his life, including his relationship with his fiancee Sara, and decides to discover the truth about Ricky's death, for his sake and the sake of Ricky's sister, Shadi.
The Unknown Knowns — its title is a reference to a quote from former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — is a brilliant send-up of the insidious language and sometimes tragically comic focus of our country’s Homeland Security Department. Combining the social satire of Kurt Vonnegut with the paranoid delusions of Thomas Pynchon, Rotter takes everyday domestic fixations and turns them into a hilarious assessment of the human condition. Fresh, imaginative, and deft, The Unknown Knowns marks the arrival of a unique new voice in literary fiction.
