In The Garden Of The Fugitives

Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives an email from her old benefactor, Royce. Once, she was one of his brightest protges; now her career has stalled and Royce is ailing, and each has a need to settle accounts. Beyond their murky shared history, both have lost beloveds, one to an untimely death, another to a strange disappearance. And both are trying to free themselves from deeper pasts, Vita from the inheritance of her birthplace, Royce from the grip of the ancient city of Pompeii and the secrets of the Garden of the Fugitives. Between what's been repressed and what has been excavated are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries. Addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterpiece of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising - about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create, and the dangerous morphing of desire into control. It is the breakthrough work of one of Australia's most exciting emerging writers.

Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives a letter from a man who has long stalked her from a distance. Once, Royce was her benefactor and she was one of his brightest protégées. Now Royce is ailing and Vita’s career as a filmmaker has stalled, and both have reasons for wanting to settle accounts. They enter into an intimate game of words, played according to shifting rules of engagement. Beyond their murky shared history, they are both aware they can use each other to free themselves from deeper pasts. Vita is processing the shameful inheritance of her birthplace, and making sense of the disappearance of her beloved. Royce is haunted by memories of the untimely death of his first love, an archaeologist who worked in the Garden of the Fugitives in Pompeii. Between what’s been repressed and what has been disguised are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries. But not everything from the past is precious: each gorgeous age is built around a core of rottenness. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterful novel of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising—about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create and control, and the dangerous morphing of desire into obsession.

In their growing involvement with one another, each becomes a pawn in the other's game. As we weave among these characters, learning about their lives and motivations, and uncovering the conflicts and contradictions between their stories, we realize that the storyteller is not the only one with secrets to conceal that all three are fugitives of one kind or another. All the Sorrentino touches that have thrilled admirers are here: sparkling dialogue, satirical wit, attention to the details of everyday life, dizzyingly inventive prose but it is the deeply imagined interior lives of its all too human main characters that set this novel apart. Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives is a love story, a ghost story, and a crime thriller.

Vita is South African but she lives in Australia. ROyce is older, American, a ghost from her days as a freshman on a Harvard scholarship. AFter years of silence, Royce writes to Vita, determined to excavate the past. THe conversation that follows is an adversarial dance, a duelling confession and a mutual reckoning, digging through the archaeologies of desire, shame and power.

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR PUBLISHING TRIANGLE'S EDMUND WHITE DEBUT FICTION AWARD In the last weeks of her pregnancy, a Muslim Indian lesbian living in San Francisco receives a visit from her estranged mother and sister that surfaces long held secrets and betrayals in this "sweeping family saga . . . with the beautiful specificity of real lives lived, loved, and fought for" (Entertainment Weekly) Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris’s attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the Black father of her unborn son, Seema seeks solace in the company of those she once thought lost to her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, a doctor living in Texas with her husband and children. But instead of a joyful reconciliation anticipating the birth of a child, the events of this fateful week unearth years of betrayal, misunderstanding, and complicated layers of love—a tapestry of emotions as riveting and disparate as the era itself. Told from the point of view of Seema’s child at the moment of his birth, and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and verses from the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is a moving tale of a family and a country grappling with acceptance, forgiveness, and enduring love.

The heroic story of Jewish resistance and survival during the Second World War.

Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk's tonsils currently reside? Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets? What goes on at the Scum Center? How do you get to the Apocalypse Cafe? In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers, and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America's "fugitives and refugees." Get to know these folks, the "most cracked of the crackpots," as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise believe actually exist. Here are strange personal museums, weird annual events, and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers' sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe's famous 1940s Self-Cleaning House. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa Rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland zoo. Oh, the list goes on and on.

Shrouded in government secrecy, clouded by myths and propaganda, the enigmatic tale of Nazi fugitives in the early Cold War has never been properly told—until now. In the aftermath of WWII, the victorious Allies vowed to hunt Nazi war criminals “to the ends of the earth.” Yet many slipped away to the four corners of the world or were shielded by the Western Allies in exchange for cooperation. Most prominently, Reinhard Gehlen, the founder of West Germany's foreign intelligence service, welcomed SS operatives into the fold. This shortsighted decision nearly brought his cherished service down, as the KGB found his Nazi operatives easy to turn, while judiciously exposing them to threaten the very legitimacy of the Bonn Government. However, Gehlen was hardly alone in the excessive importance he placed on the supposed capabilities of former Nazi agents; his American sponsors did much the same in the early years of the Cold War. Other Nazi fugitives became freelance arms traffickers, spies, and covert operators, playing a crucial role in the clandestine struggle between the superpowers. From posh German restaurants, smuggler-infested Yugoslav ports, Damascene safehouses, Egyptian country clubs, and fascist holdouts in Franco's Spain, Nazi spies created a chaotic network of influence and information. This network was tapped by both America and the USSR, as well as by the West German, French, and Israeli secret services. Indeed, just as Gehlen and his U.S sponsors attached excessive importance to Nazi agents, so too did almost all other state and non-state actors, adding a combustible ingredient to the Cold War covert struggle. Shrouded in government secrecy, clouded by myths and propaganda, the tangled and often paradoxical tale of these Nazi fugitives and operatives has never been properly told—until now.