My East Was Gorgeous

A sweeping tale of love and redemption, honor and war, Robert Girardi's Gorgeous East follows three French For eign legionnaires of very different backgrounds from the cliffs of Mont Saint-Michel to Istanbul's ancient alley ways, from raucous Parisian bars to the desolate Sahara. Gorgeous East takes us on an epic and unfor get table ad ven ture with the wonderful John Smith, a lost Brooklynite they call the Handsome American Cowboy; Colonel de Noyer, the elder statesman slowly going mad; and Cap tain Pinard, whose past is so hideous he can't find love outside the Legion's walls. When a mission in the Sahara goes horribly wrong, one legionnaire must wage battle against a rogue terrorist group and rescue his brothers-in-arms. In this tremendous return to form, Girardi show cases his sheer love of language and lumi n ous sense of place to deliver a masterful novel of the hearts and minds of soldiers of fortune.

A sweeping tale of love and redemption, honor and war, Robert Girardi's Gorgeous East follows three French Foreign legionnaires of very different backgrounds from the cliffs of Mont Saint-Michel to Istanbul's ancient alley ways, from raucous Parisian bars to the desolate Sahara. Gorgeous East takes us on an epic and unforgettable adventure with the wonderful John Smith, a lost Brooklynite they call the Handsome American Cowboy; Colonel de Noyer, the elder statesman slowly going mad; and Captain Pinard, whose past is so hideous he can't find love outside the Legion's walls. When a mission in the Sahara goes horribly wrong, one legionnaire must wage battle against a rogue terrorist group and rescue his brothers-in-arms. In this tremendous return to form, Girardi show cases his sheer love of language and lumi n ous sense of place to deliver a masterful novel of the hearts and minds of soldiers of fortune.

In the summer of 1955, local men gather in Charlesetta's Top o' the Hill Cafe in East Texas. Over drinks and card games, the men joke and discuss the changing times, the rise of the Klan, and the murder or disappearance of young black men. Tensions slowly rise, leading to a life-changing climax.

The instant New York Times Bestseller • Nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016 A richly mythic, colour-saturated tale from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Swimming Home—Deborah Levy explores the violently primal bond between mother and daughter. Two women arrive in a Spanish village—a dreamlike place caught between the desert and the ocean—seeking medical advice and salvation. One of the strangers suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair, her legs unusable. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother's illness. Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr. Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity. Hot Milk is a labyrinth of violent desires, primal impulses, and surreally persuasive internal logic. Examining female rage and sexuality, Deborah Levy's dazzling new novel explores the strange and monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent and child to breaking point.