Safety of Objects: Stories

«Да будем мы прощены» – одна из самых ярких и необычных книг десятилетия. Полный парадоксального юмора, язвительный и в то же время трогательный роман о непростых отношениях самых близких людей.

Еще недавно историк Гарольд Сильвер только и мог, что завидовать старшему брату, настолько тот был успешен в карьере и в семейной жизни.

Но внезапно блеск и успех обернулись чудовищной трагедией, а записной холостяк и волокита Гарольд оказался в роли опекуна двух подростков-племянников – в роли, к которой он, мягко говоря, не вполне готов…

Так начинается эта история, в которой привычное соседствует с невероятным, а печальное – со смешным. Впрочем, не так ли все, в сущности, бывает и в реальной жизни?..

Things You Should Know is a collection of dazzling stories by one of the most talented and daring young American writers. Homes' distinctive narratives demonstrate how extraordinary the ordinary can be. A woman pursues an unconventional strategy for getting pregnant; a former First Lady shows despair and courage in dealing with her husband's Alzheimer's; a teacher's list of 'things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don't' becomes an obsession for someone wasn't at school the day it was given out; and adult tragedy intrudes into a childhood friendship. The stories are full of magic and strangeness and humour, but also demonstrate an uncanny emotional accuracy and compassion.

Short listed for the Richard & Judy Book Club 2007. An uplifting story set in Los Angeles about one man's effort to bring himself back to life. Richard is a modern day everyman; a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill, until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time a wide sinkhole appears outside his living room window, threatening the foundations of his house. A vivid novel about compassion and transformation, "This Book Will Save Your Life" reveals what can happen if you are willing to open up to the world around you. Since her debut in 1989, A.M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years.

No relationship is more charged than that between a psychotherapist and her patient — unless it is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This disturbing literary thriller explores what happens when the line between those relationships blurs.

Jody Goodman enters psychotherapy with questions of career and love on her mind. But Claire Roth, her therapist, keeps changing the focus of their sessions to Jody's parentage — Jody was adopted; Claire gave up a baby for adoption who would now be exactly Jody's age. As the two women become increasingly involved, speculation turns into certainty, fantasy into fixation. Until suddenly it is no longer clear just which of them needs the other more — or with more terrifying consequences.

Only a work of such searing, meticulously controlled brilliance could provoke such a wide range of visceral responses. Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal — and revel in — their obsessive desires, Homes creates in a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.

An acclaimed novelist's riveting memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family.

Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a twenty-two- year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with children of his own. is the story of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.

Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and emotional intensity of her storytelling, tells how her birth parents initially made contact with her and what happened afterward (her mother stalked her and appeared unannounced at a reading) and what she was able to reconstruct about the story of their lives and their families. Her birth mother, a complex and lonely woman, never married or had another child, and died of kidney failure in 1998; her birth father, who initially made overtures about inviting her into his family, never did.

Then the story jumps forward several years to when Homes opens the boxes of her mother's memorabilia. She had hoped to find her mother in those boxes, to know her secrets, but no relief came. She became increasingly obsessed with finding out as much as she could about all four parents and their families, hiring researchers and spending hours poring through newspaper morgues, municipal archives and genealogical Web sites. This brave, daring, and funny book is a story about what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity and how all of us define our sense of self and family.

Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper. They have been uneasy rivals since childhood. Then one day George's loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life. In , Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st-century domestic life — at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history. The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death. But it is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive satire on contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer — the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants' desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel's heart are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself.

May We Be Forgiven

Paul and Elaine have two boys and a beautiful home, yet they find themselves thoroughly, inexplicably stuck. Obsessed with 'making things good again', they spin the quiet terrors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens well and truly out of control. As A. M. Homes's incendiary novel unfolds, the Kodacolor hues of the American good life become nearly hallucinogenic: from a strange and hilarious encounter on the floor of the pantry with a Stepford-wife neighbour, to a house-cleaning team in space suits, to a hostage situation at the school. Homes lays bare the foundations of marriage and family life, and creates characters outrageously flawed, deeply human and entirely believable.

«McSweeney’s» — ежеквартальный американский литературный альманах, основанный в 1998 г. для публикации альтернативной малой прозы. Поначалу в «McSweeney’s» выходили неформатные рассказы, отвергнутые другими изданиями со слишком хорошим вкусом. Однако вскоре из маргинального и малотиражного альманах превратился в престижный и модный, а рассказы, публиковавшиеся в нём, завоевали не одну премию в области литературы. И теперь ведущие писатели США соревнуются друг с другом за честь увидеть свои произведения под его обложкой.

В итоговом сборнике «Лучшее от McSweeney's» вы найдете самые яркие, вычурные и удивительные новеллы из первых десяти выпусков альманаха. В книгу вошло 27 рассказов, которые сочинили 27 писателей и перевели 9 переводчиков. Нам и самим любопытно посмотреть, что у них получилось.

An anthology of stories edited by Zadie Smith

A stellar host of writers explore the cornerstone of fiction writing: character

The Book of Other People is about character. Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words (and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures). But the purpose of the book is variety: straight "realism"-if such a thing exists-is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this anthology features a rich assortment of exceptional examples.

The writers featured in The Book of Other People include:

Aleksandar Hemon

Nick Hornby

Hari Kunzru

Toby Litt

David Mitchell

George Saunders

Colm Tóibín

Chris Ware, and more.