In this funny, honest, and poignant book for readers of Jessi Klein, Allie Brosh and Roxane Gay, the former child actress who starred in Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire shares stories from her unique coming of age
Mara Wilson has always felt a little young and out of place: as the only kid on a film set full of adults, the first daughter in a house full of boys, a Valley girl in New York and a neurotic in California, and a grown-up the world still remembers as a little girl. Tackling everything from what she learned about sex on the set of Melrose Place,
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Lucky Strike is the story of a young widow who is prospecting uranium with her children in Utah in 1954. Zafris’ characters, all mildly desperate, are searching less for ore than for themselves—for redemption, connection, even hope. Jean has sped west with her young children to give her seriously ill son one last adventure and to escape from the weight of too many failed relationships; camp neighbor, Jo, is struggling to endure marriage to a hateful man; and Harry, a salesman, is alienated from his Mormon heritage.
Only Jean’s daughter, Beth, recognizes the epic that is their common search for a thread of ore and riches in the desert Southwest.
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Whale Season is a literary murder mystery in the tradition of Tom Robbins, about the quintessentially weird heart of Florida where sunburn is the only thing you can be sure of. Set in Whale Harbor, a town that has no whales, it is the story of Leon Pettit, an RV Salesman who once loved a one-ton alligator, but has a lot of trouble with non lizard-like women. One Christmas Eve, Leon is visited by a man who thinks he’s Jesus and claims to be looking for a game of poker. But, as usual, things are not quite what they seem.
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When figurative painter Jeffrey Finelli is run over by a cab in front of the Simon Pryce Gallery on the night of his first opening, the art world falls all over itself for a piece of the instantly in-demand work by the late “emerging artist.” At the center of the show is an enormous painting called Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him that becomes the object of most desire. As the artist philosophically muses before meeting his untimely end, “It represents the creative endeavor.”
After Finelli’s death, the gallery receptionist, aspiring artist and protagonist Mia McMurray,
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When God descends to Earth as a Dinka woman from Sudan and subsequently dies in the Darfur desert, the result is a world both bizarrely new yet eerily familiar. In Ron Currie’s provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God’s demise; a group of young men who, fearing the end of the world, take fate into their own hands; mental patients who insist that a god still exists; armies taking up the eternal war between fate and free will;
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My Latest Grievance stars the beguiling teenager Frederica Hatch, the “Eloise of Dewing College.” Born and raised in the dormitory of this small women’s college and chafing under the care of “the most annoyingly evenhanded parental team in the history of civilization,” Frederica is starting to feel that her life is stiflingly snug. That all changes with the arrival on campus of a new dorm mother, the glamorous Laura Lee French, the frenetic center of her own universe.
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