The Woman Who Couldn T Die

"The Woman Who Couldn't Die" by Arthur Stringer is a science fiction tale that follows a brilliant, if also eccentric, scientist, Dr. Parseo, who captures the interest of a young reporter who wishes to learn more about his experiments. With the further help of a young Viking, this unlikely trio goes on a quest to find a woman who has been frozen in ice in the wilderness for hundreds of years to learn the secrets she might hold.

We have a brilliant scientist in Dr. Pareso, a foreigner who has come mysteriously to this country. He interests a young reporter, David Law, in some of his experiments, and when, with the assistance of a young Viking, Knutsson, and Law, the three start on their astounding quest for the woman who has been frozen in the northern ice tomb for centuries—then the story really starts. The descriptions of the hardships the three men endured on their way north thru the wilds before discovery of the Lost Tribe, are very good. The plot is absolutely unique and the result is an entirely different mystery story.

For use in schools and libraries only. When his best friend dies in a plane crash, 16-year-old Ken has a ritual performed that will make him invulnerable, but soon learns that he had good reason to be suspicious of the woman he paid to lock his soul away.

Drawing on firsthand experience, distinguished South African writer Lauretta Ngcobo depicts the lives of rural women in South Africa, paying homage to the extraordinary courage and remarkable endurance of these unsung heroines of the struggle against apartheid. Set in the barren Sabelweini Valley in the 1950s to 1980s, the novel centers around one young woman, Jezile, whose political consciousness deepens as state laws threaten her earnings and her land. Arrested along with hundreds of others and sentenced to six months hard labor in prison, Jezile returns home to find her child dying of starvation. When her husband is arrested for stealing milk to save the child, Jezile must fight to ensure her family’s survival.

In 1990s Russia, the wife and stepdaughter of a paralyzed veteran conceal the Soviet Union’s collapse from him in order to keep him—and his pension—alive. Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die tells the story of how two women try to prolong a life—and the means and meaning of their own lives—by creating a world that doesn’t change, a Soviet Union that never crumbled. After her stepfather’s stroke, Marina hangs Brezhnev’s portrait on the wall, edits the Pravda articles read to him, and uses her media connections to cobble together entire newscasts of events that never happened. Meanwhile, her mother, Nina Alexandrovna, can barely navigate the bewildering new world outside, especially in comparison to the blunt reality of her uncommunicative husband. As Marina is caught up in a local election campaign that gets out of hand, Nina discovers that her husband is conspiring as well—to kill himself and put an end to the charade. Masterfully translated by Marian Schwartz, The Man Who Couldn’t Die is a darkly playful vision of the lost Soviet past and the madness of the post-Soviet world that uses Russia’s modern history as a backdrop for an inquiry into larger metaphysical questions. “Darkly sardonic…oddly timely, for there are all sorts of understated hints about voter fraud, graft, payoffs, and the endless promises of politicians who have no intention of keeping them…. Slavnikova is a writer American readers will want to have more of.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A funhouse mirror worth looking into, especially in today’s United States with its alternative facts, unpoetic assertions, and morbid relationship with the past.”—Leeore Schnairsohn, Los Angeles Review of Books

Three classic novellas from “one of our master chroniclers of human hungers, flaws, and frustrations.” (The Kansas City Star). Jim Harrison’s vivid, tender, and deeply felt fictions have won him acclaim as an American master of the novella. His highly acclaimed volume of novellas, The Summer He Didn’t Die, is a sparkling and exuberant collection about love, the senses, and family, no matter how untraditional. In the title novella, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian, is trying to parent his two stepchildren and take care of his family’s health on meager resources. (It helps a bit that his charms are irresistible to the new dentist in town.) Republican Wives is a wicked satire on the sexual neuroses of the right, the emptiness of a life lived for the status quo, and the irrational power of love that, when thwarted, can turn so easily into an urge to murder. And Tracking is a meditation on Harrison’s fascination with place, telling his own familiar mythology through the places his life has seen and the intellectual loves he has known. With wit as sharp and prose as lush as any Harrison has yet written, The Summer He Didn’t Die is a resonant, warm, and joyful ode to our journey on this earth. “Harrison has proved to be one of our finest storytellers. These novellas are urgent and contemporary, displaying his marvelous gifts for compression and idiosyncratic language.” —Los Angeles Times

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

Devy Bruch, adopted in the late 1930s from the infamous Tennessee Children's Home Society, has lived a life of both privilege and despair. She searched for her biological family for the first seven decades of her life. In 1937, as an infant, she was stolen from her mother by the infamous Georgia Tann, bundled up, and sold to a wealthy couple from Pennsylvania. In her youth, Devy attended exclusive private schools, spent weekends at the Naval Academy, and experienced a debutante season befitting a fine upbringing. Then, as a young woman, she was plunged into deep despair when her husband left her with four young children and no income. She survived through her inner strength, determination, and spirituality. At the age of seventy-one, Devy made the decision to investigate her adoption and found that she had a sister that destiny had denied her for decades. She learned of the heinous truth of her origins-that of a small, sickly baby stolen from her birth mother and sold for profit during the depression. Now life has brought her full circle to enjoy both her own family and the birth family she finally discovered late in life.