A Meaningful Life
10 best books like A Meaningful Life (L.J. Davis): The Slaves of Solitude, The Vet's Daughter, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Butcher's Crossing, So Long, See You Tomorrow, The Big Clock, Great Granny Webster, Turtle Diary, Wish Her Safe at Home
| Author | Patrick Hamilton |
| ISBN | 1590172205 |
England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter.
Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated...
| Author | Barbara Comyns |
| ISBN | 1590170296 |
The Vet’s Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife’s death, the vet...
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
| Author | Jenny Odell |
| ISBN | 1612197493 |
This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, shows us a new way to connect with our environment and reveals all that we’ve been too distracted to see about our selves and our world.
When the technologies we use every day collapse...
| Author | Peter Hedges |
| ISBN | 0671038540 |
Just about everything in Endora, Iowa (pop. 1,091 and dwindling) is eating Gilbert Grape, a twenty-four-year-old grocery clerk who dreams only of leaving. His enormous mother, once the town sweetheart, has been eating nonstop ever since her husband's suicide, and the floor beneath her TV chair is...
| Author | John Williams |
| ISBN | 1590171985 |
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up...
So Long, See You Tomorrow
My heart was sliced to ribbons by this story. The narrator, an elderly man whose boyhood was scarred by a horrendous event, attempts to make sense of it all – and to make amends, as he tells it – 50 years down the road during the course of writing his memoirs.
In his memoirs, he talks about his...
| Author | Kenneth Fearing |
| ISBN | 1590171810 |
George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate that bears a striking resemblance to Time, Inc. in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend...
| Author | Caroline Blackwood |
| ISBN | 1590170075 |
Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer. This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the...
| Author | Russell Hoban |
| ISBN | 0747548315 |
Review published in 3:AM Magazine: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/turtle...
It would be understandable to expect Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary to be a light-hearted romantic comedy, one where two lonely protagonists come together over a crazy caper, a plan to set free...
Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city--and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity,...
| Author | Barry Hannah |
| ISBN | 0802119689 |
Once again, foiled by the inaccuracy and wholesale brutality of a five-tiered rating system. Barry Hannah, based on this collection, got slightly worse - or at least less concerned about the vagaries of plot and the finely tuned sentence - but the first two collections are simply astounding. If I weren't...
| Author | Millen Brand |
| ISBN | 1590173597 |
The Outward Room is a book about a young woman’s journey from madness to self-discovery. It created a sensation when it was first published in 1937, and has lost none of its immediacy or its power to move the reader.
Having suffered a nervous breakdown after her brother’s death in a car...
| Author | Edward Lewis Wallant |
| ISBN | 1590170709 |
Norman Moonbloom is a loser, a drop-out who can't even make it as a deadbeat. His brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds from apartment to apartment, Moonbloom confronts a wildly varied assortment of brilliantly described urban characters,...
| Author | Luc Sante |
| ISBN | 0374523657 |
Non-Fiction. Fifty-five black and white photographs taken by the New York Police Department during the beginning of the 20th century, presented without commentary or context.
Edward Gorey, in an interview with Clifford Ross, said of the photographs: They're ravishingly beautiful crime...
| Author | Iris Owens |
| ISBN | 1590173635 |
Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it’s Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. She will stay and exact revenge—or would have...
| Author | Elliott Chaze |
| ISBN | 1596542136 |
Chaze's long-lost noir classic, a legend among noir buffs, is back in print for the first time in nearly half a century. The one book Black Lizard never published, it's the dream-like tale of a man after a jailbreak, who meets up with the woman of his dreams... and his nightmares. Phenomenal work of the...
