Literary Escape Recommended Reading
With The Beverly Hills Literary Escape Recommended Reading List, that stack of books on your nightstand is about to topple over. Throughout the weekend you will have various opportunities to discuss these works with their talented writers, but don't worry if you don't have time to get to them all, there won't be a test! Local Independent Booksellers will be selling all of the featured works at the Escape at various locations throughout the weekend. If you are unable to attend any of the events, you may special order signed books by email.
Point Dume
Set in Malibu, POINT DUME is cast with a fascinating crew of characters – among them, the thirty- something surf goddess Ellis, Pedro the weed poacher who deals out of his camper, over-privileged Frank who takes pride in his mansion and vineyard, and the illegal immigrant Felix who makes the dangerous journey from Mexico to work at a cartel-run pot farm in Southern California.
Jane Austen: The Complete Novels
Professor Batten's discussion will include all of the novels of Jane Austen
Few novelists have conveyed the subtleties and nuances of their own social milieu with the wit and insight of Jane Austen. Here in one volume are her seven great novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Lady Susan. Through her vivacious and spirited heroines and their circle, Austen vividly portrays English middle-class life as the eighteenth century came to a close and the nineteenth century began. Each of the novels is a love story and a story about marriage—marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not romances; ironic, comic, and wise, they are masterly evocations of the society Jane Austen observed. This beautiful volume covers the literary career of one of England’s finest prose stylists of any century.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother — her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother — tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.
Happiness is an Inside Job
From renowned Buddhist teacher Boorstein comes a small, polished gem of a book that seems somehow even more intimate and heartfelt than her previous books. Boorstein begins with an anecdote about a day when her writing was interrupted by a call from a friend with a very ill brother; the effort of consoling her made Boorstein forget what she had been about to write. Boorstein uses her moment of resentful impatience at the interruption to illustrate how easily the mind can fall out of caring connection. The whole idea of this book, she writes, is that "restoring caring connection... and maintaining it when it is present, is happiness."
America, America
In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family’s generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president. Before long, Corey finds himself involved with one of the Metarey daughters as well, and he begins to leave behind the world of his upbringing. As the Bonwiller campaign gains momentum, Corey finds himself caught up in a complex web of events in which loyalty, politics, sex, and gratitude conflict with morality, love, and the truth. Ethan Canin’s stunning novel is about America as it was and is, a remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Durrow's novel was the Winner of the 2008 Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. Inspired by a real event, this debut novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop. With her strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel moves to a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring mixed attention her way.
Dracula in Love
London, 1890. Mina Murray, the rosy-cheeked, quintessentially pure Victorian heroine, becomes Count Dracula’s object of desire. To preserve her chastity, five male “defenders” rush in to rescue her from the vampire’s evil clutches. This is the version of the story we've been told. But now, from Mina’s own pen, we discover that the story is vastly different when told from the female point of view.
A Thread of Sky
As Irene Chen’s husband of thirty years was leaving her, she shut the door behind him and half-jokingly said, “Good riddance,” to the collective eye-rolling of her three daughters. But when he dies suddenly in an accident shortly thereafter, Irene’s family falls apart.
A Reliable Wife
Set in a small Wisconsin farming town crumbling under the impact of the troubled economic times of the 1890s, A Reliable Wife tells the story of Ralph Truitt, a wealthy businessman who advertises for “a reliable wife” in a Chicago newspaper. The woman who answers, Catherine Land, describes herself as “a simple, honest woman,” but in truth she is both complex and devious -- not the missionary’s daughter she describes in her letter but a courtesan of great beauty, kept by men and haunted by a terrible past.
Blame
Patsy MacLemoore, a twenty-eight-year-old history professor with a brand-new Ph.D. and a wild streak, wakes up in jail—yet again—after another epic alcoholic blackout. This time, though, a mother and daughter are dead, run over in Patsy’s driveway. Patsy will spend the next decades of her life atoning for this unpardonable act. She goes to prison, sobers up, marries a much older man she meets in AA, and makes ongoing amends to her victims’ family. Then, another piece of news turns up, casting her crime, and her life, in a different and unexpected light. Brilliant, morally complex, and often funny, BLAME is a breathtaking story of contrition and what it takes to rebuild a life from the bottom up.
- 1 of 3
- ››
