We Seldom Talk About The Past

We Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna's first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected represent a culmination of MacKenna's work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. MacKenna's stories examine the quotidian truths of our lives, of the momentousness of small moments

We all carry other people inside our heads - actors, leaders, writers, people from history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than the people we know.Pico Iyer investigates the mysterious closeness he has always felt with Graham Greene and follows him from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American. The further he delves, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself. Drawing upon experiences across the globe - from Bolivia to Berkhamsted to Bhutan - one of our most resourceful cultural explorers gives us his most personal and revelatory book.

Book store nation, in the history of mankind there has never been a greater country than America. You could say we're the #1 nation at being the best at greatness. But as perfect as America is in every single way, America is broken! And we can't exchange it because we're 236 years past the 30-day return window. Look around--we don't make anything anymore, we've mortgaged our future to China, and the Apologist-in-Chief goes on world tours just to bow before foreign leaders. Worse, the L.A. Four Seasons Hotel doesn't even have a dedicated phone button for the Spa. You have to dial an extension! Where did we lose our way?! It's high time we restored America to the greatness it never lost! Luckily, America Again will singlebookedly pull this country back from the brink. It features everything from chapters, to page numbers, to fonts. Covering subject's ranging from healthcare ("I shudder to think where we'd be without the wide variety of prescription drugs to treat our maladies, such as think-shuddering") to the economy ("Life is giving us lemons, and we're shipping them to the Chinese to make our lemon-flavored leadonade") to food ("Feel free to deep fry this book-it's a rich source of fiber"), Stephen gives America the dose of truth it needs to get back on track.

The description of the Nazi "selection" days contains some of the most terrifying events in the memoir.

The recent tumult of Ukraine's Orange Revolution and its aftermath has exposed some of the deep political, social, and cultural divisions that run through the former Soviet republic. Examining Odessa, the Black Sea port that was once the Russian Empire's southern window onto Europe, Kaleidoscopic Odessa provides an ethnographic portrait of these overlapping divisions in a city where many residents consider themselves separate and distinct from Ukraine. Exploring the tensions between local and national identities in a post-Soviet setting from the point of view of everyday life, Tanya Richardson argues that Odessans's sense of distinctiveness is both unique and typical of borderland countries such as Ukraine. Kaleidoscopic Odessa provides a detailed account of how local conceptions of imperial cosmopolitanism shaped the city's identity in a newly formed state. Richardson draws on her participation in history lessons, markets, and walking groups to produce an exemplary study of urban ethnography. Ethnographically sophisticated and methodologically innovative, Kaleidoscopic Odessa will interest anthropologists, Slavists, sociologists, historians, and scholars of urban studies.

In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.

Natasha Collins remembers knowing Ashton Greene since she was three. Everything was fine between them until she developed a crush on him at sixteen. Confused with her growing admiration, she confessed to Ashton. And she even tried to seal the confession with a kiss. Being friends with her parents, Ashton Greene has always known Natasha Collins from the day she was born. He is fond of, adores, and cares for her, but only like his niece. That is why he felt nothing but disappointment when he heard the 16-year-old Natasha's confession of young love. With their ten-year age gap, it is natural for Ashton to turn Natasha down. However, the hurt and embarrassment she felt made her slowly drift away. But what will happen when fate brings them back together six years later?

Fiction. Get ready. These are not your mother's bedtime stories. In this mesmerizing debut collection, Aubrey Hirsch will lead you into the darkest recesses of human life, where hope and longing and love and loss look all too much like one another. Each of these sixteen stories may be filled with its own kind of despair, but they are not despairing as Hirsch enters with deep sympathy into the souls of lonely women, broken men, young recruits, and dutiful daughters. With a hard intelligence, Hirsch considers the toll of heartache and loss, and the simple cost of longing. Taut and tension filled, these stories will transport you into the heart of what it means to be human. But be careful. Hirsch's compassion arrives on a knife blade. And you just may find your own heart cut open. "In WHY WE NEVER TALK ABOUT SUGAR, Aubrey Hirsch posits an uncertain world, offering us her characters at their most confused, frightened, obsessed. As protection against their troubles, these men and women cling often to science, and also to story and if these two ways of seeing cannot always save them, then still they might provide some comfort, some necessary and sustaining faith, the mechanisms of what greatest mysteries might await us all, when all else is stripped away." --Matt Bell "Aubrey Hirsch is a bright shining star of a writer and the stories in her flawless debut collection, WHY WE NEVER TALK ABOUT SUGAR, are a little disturbing and a little strange and a little sweet but always a lot to hold on to. Hirsch shows us the charm of her imagination and how carefully she will break your heart. This is a book you will keep coming back to, the one you won't be able to stop talking about because it's that damn good."--Roxane Gay "Each story in WHY WE NEVER TALK ABOUT SUGAR is a Petri dish, a distinct world in which a particle is discovered, a lake vanishes, but the narrative microscope never forgets that what really matters are the characters. This fiction is lyrical and wicked smart, reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Miranda July. So, here's my hypothesis: Aubrey Hirsch is a bright new voice in American fiction."--Cathy Day

**THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** "An unforgettable—and Hollywood-bound—new thriller... A mix of Hitchcockian suspense, Agatha Christie plotting, and Greek tragedy." —Entertainment Weekly The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive. Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word. Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London. Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....