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Author
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2023 Reading Challenge: Science Fiction or Fantasy
2024 Reading Challenge: Read a book with a friend or book club
2024 Reading Challenge: Read a book with a friend or book club
Description
It seems like any other day: You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live. From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In an instant, the world is thrust into a collective frenzy. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean?...
Author
Language
English
Description
Joining an anthropologist's 1950 expedition to discover a lost tribe on a remote Micronesian island, a young doctor investigates and proves a theory that the tribe's considerable longevity is linked to a rare turtle, a finding that brings worldwide fame and unexpected consequence.
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
These 12 stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as King's novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel 'the exhilartion of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,' and in You Like It Darker, listeners will feel that exhilaration too, again and again. "Two Talented Bastids explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got...
4) Calypso
Author
Language
English
Description
David Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk, and also Sedaris' darkest and warmest book yet.
Author
Publisher
Drake Community Press
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Description
This book is not about the organization Above + Beyond Cancer. It is about the philosophical journeys of ordinary people--caregivers, patients, survivors and loved ones--whose lives have been touched by cancer. In these pages, you'll find excerpts from real-life narratives encompassing themes such as mortality, equity, surrender, compassion, and spiritual awe. Breathtaking professional photography accompanies the narratives, which captures a variety...
Author
Publisher
Bethany House Publishers
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
"When your baby dies, you find yourself in a life you never expected. And even though pregnancy and infant loss are common, they are not common to you. In Unexpecting, bereaved mom Rachel Lewis is the friend you never hoped to need, walking you through the unique grief of baby loss. When nothing about life after loss makes sense, this book will"--
Author
Series
Harry Bosch mysteries volume 2
Language
English
Formats
Description
LAPD detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch returns in a procedural thriller set in and around the drug-trafficking underworlds of inner-city Los Angeles and the wastelands of Mexico.
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England, which is 'her last love'. She wants to 'see it all before she dies'. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son,...
10) Rouge: a novel
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother's considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother's demise, followed by a cryptic...
Author
Publisher
Little A
Pub. Date
[2024]
Language
English
Description
"She still has all the time in the world to be who she wants to be.... Doesn't she? Olivia Strauss is turning thirty-nine. No major milestone. She still considers herself young. At least young enough to assume she has decades (emphasis on the plural) to check the unchecked boxes of her life's to-do list. Ballerina? Too late. But not too late for poet. Or for reigniting the romantic spark in her marriage, spending more quality time with her son, switching...
Author
Publisher
W.W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"A moving and incandescent volume from a poet celebrated for her 'unfailing mastery of her medium' (New York Times Book Review). In poems of graceful lyricism and penetrating observation, award-winning poet Linda Pastan sheds new light on the complexities of ordinary life and the rising tide of mortality. Drawing from Pastan's five most recent volumes-including The Last Uncle (2002), Traveling Light (2011), and Insomnia (2015)-and with over thirty...
15) Intervention
Author
Publisher
Down East
Pub. Date
c2012
Language
English
Description
"Ray is a self-obsessed realtor who must confront his own mortality, yet doesn't seem especially interested in winning the battle. A surprising revelation about his father, and his realization of an unlikely friendship, however, lead him to believe he just might like to stick around.".
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Description
"Only one hundred years ago, in even the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers--of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O'Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln's...
17) Mortality
Author
Pub. Date
2012
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this book, the author of Hitch-22 describes his losing battle with esophageal cancer while writing columns for Vanity Fair on politics and culture and also describing his personal and philosophical view of life and death. On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour, the author was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston, Texas on December 15, 2011, he...
18) 10:04: : a novel
Author
Publisher
Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
"A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now, his second novel departs from...
Author
Publisher
Doubleday
Pub. Date
[2024]
Language
English
Description
"From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor and Wallace Stegner Fellow Zach Williams comes a staggering debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life's broken promises. Parents awaken in a home in the woods, again and again, to find themselves aging as their toddler remains unchanged. An employee is menaced by a conspiracy-minded security guard and accused of sending a sinister viral email. An aging tour guide leads a troublesome...
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