Jonathan Carroll Ordre des livres

Graham Patterson is a middling comedian whose career (and love life) has gone up in smoke. After buying a new car, he embarks on a cross country road trip to see his brother Joel, to try and figure what he should do with himself and his career. Midway, after his car breaks down, he enters a tattoo parlor, mesmerized by the unique beauty of the tattoo work on display. After paging through a catalog of styles, he chooses a very rare tattoo -- a bee inside a frog inside a hawk inside a lion-- that the tattooist's Japanese mentor created. It is a tattoo with strange qualities, to the extent that the tattoo will allow the protagonist to explore alternative versions of his own life and ultimately choose his preferred life. This was something the tattooist was once offered but she preferred to keep the life she had. From this moment on, Graham Patterson will no longer be a simple comedian on the path of decline, nor a man who has to decide whether to marry his partner with whom he is deeply in love, nor the great world-famous photographer that everyone knows and admires for the famous image depicting Mr. Breakfast. From this moment Graham Patterson will gain the opportunity to travel in three different lives, until he finally gets to choose one, the definitive one. At what price, though? And how to choose between fame and love?

Set in the 1940s, the story follows Davis Sterling, a privileged heir who shifts from a carefree lifestyle to a serious pursuit in sports writing, defying his father's expectations. His journey leads him to cover a baseball team, where he encounters the groundbreaking first white player in the Negro Baseball Leagues. Along the way, he also discovers love, challenging societal norms and personal ambitions. This narrative explores themes of identity, ambition, and the complexities of race in sports during a transformative era.

Эта преломленная в художественной форме исповедь человека, который сумел выбраться из бездны и уцелеть, протаранила все списки бестселлеров и заслужила восторженные сравнения с произведениями лучших писателей нового времени, от Мелвилла до Хемингуэя

This collection of 27 never-before published stories from an impressive cast—Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stuart O'Nan, among others—sets out to shift genre paradigms. The overarching theme is fantastic fiction, or fiction of the imagination, with fantasy being used in the most broad-sweeping sense rather than signaling the familiar commercial staples of elves, ghouls, and robots. Consequently, the collection's offerings run a wide gamut. In Joe Hill's Devil on the Staircase, an Italian boy commits a crime of passion and subsequently meets an emissary of Satan. In Jodi Picoult's Weights and Measures, a young couple who have just lost their daughter struggle to hold their marriage together as they both start noticing strange changes taking place. Chuck Palahniuk's The Loser features a college kid on acid as a contestant on a game show, and in Kurt Andersen's Human Intelligence, a geologist meets an explorer from another planet who has been studying humans for the past 1,600 years. The range of voices and subjects practically guarantees something for any reader, but the overall quality is frustratingly variable: most stories are good, some aren't, and few are exceptional —Publishers Weekly

For connoisseurs of imaginative fiction, the novels of Jonathan Carroll are a special treat that occupy a space all their own. His surreal fictions, which deftly mix the everyday with the extraordinary, have won him a devoted following. Now, in Glass Soup, Carroll continues to astound . . . .The realm of the dead is built from the dreams--and nightmares--of the living. Octopuses drive buses. God is a polar bear. And a crowded highway literally leads to hell.Once before, Vincent Ettrich and his lover, Isabelle Neukor, crossed over from life to death and back again. Now Isabelle bears a very special child, who may someday restore the ever-changing mosaic that is reality. Unless the agents of Chaos can lure her back to the land of the dead--and trap her there forever.Glass Soup is another exquisite and singular creation from the author January magazine described as "incapable of writing a bad book much less an uninteresting one."

Vincent Ettrich, an engaging philanderer, discovers that he has died and come back to life - but he has no idea why. He gradually discovers that he was deliberately brought back to life by his one true love, Isabelle, so he could educate their son who, if correctly raised, would save the universe.

Frannie McCabe realizes something seriously weird is going on when the dead dog he buried keeps turning up again. The Sciavos, a couple whose domestic war has the police involved, disappear completely. And Frannie's teenage self arrives to help him sort out his mistakes - before its too late.

When bestselling novelist Sam Bayer decides it's time he wrote his "Great Book", he chooses as his subject the death of a teenage beauty, Pauline Ostrova - the 'Beehive'. The town of Crane's view never felt the same after he discovered her body, floating in the lake, over twenty years before. Her boyfriend, Edward Durant, was arrested for the murder, tried and imprisoned. He died in Sing Sing jail. Sam Bayer's new book will tell her story, bring her to life again, and restore something of what the town had lost. But, for Samuel Bayer, the journey into his past becomes a terrifying jolt into the reality of the present. Bayer's gesture of respect to his youth turns sour in the face of all that he unearths; for many of the people close to him, this leads to devastating - and fatal - consequences.