[PDF] Knockemstiff eBook

Author : Donald Ray Pollock
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 40,38 MB
Release : 2008-03-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0385525400

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"More engaging than any new fiction in years." —Chuck Palahniuk An unforgettable work of fiction that peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place. Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.

Author : Donald Ray Pollock
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 22,38 MB
Release : 2011-07-12
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0385535058

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Now a Netflix film starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson A dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic over­tones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting. Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right. Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

Author : Donald Ray Pollock
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 397 pages
File Size : 33,84 MB
Release : 2016-07-12
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0385541309

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From Donald Ray Pollock, author of the highly acclaimed The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff, comes a dark, gritty, electrifying (and, disturbingly, weirdly funny) new novel that will solidify his place among the best contemporary American authors. It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family's entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it? In the gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers will find their lives colliding in increasingly dark and horrific ways, placing Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the genre's literary masters.

Author : Joe Oestreich
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 46,79 MB
Release : 2012-06-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0762785950

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A classic underdog story about a local band that almost hits the big time. Everyone knows the price of fame. Hitless Wonder measures the price of obscurity. What happens when you chase a dream into middle age and, in doing so, risk losing the people you love?

Author : Donald Ray Pollock
Publisher : Random House
Page : 19 pages
File Size : 47,63 MB
Release : 2011-11-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1448128994

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In 'Blessed', a thief's career is cut short when he falls from a rooftop. Since the accident he has been subsisting on a disability cheque, a potent painkiller prescription and having his wife sell her blood. In 'The Fights', Bobby has been off the sauce for five long months. On the advice of his Alcoholics Anonymous mentor, he pays his family a visit in Knockemstiff-where even the wood smoke reminds him of whiskey. While his father and brother amuse themselves by watching pre-recorded boxing and his mother mopes in the kitchen, the inertia infusing his old home threatens to take hold. Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Author : Will Cohu
Publisher : Random House
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 28,67 MB
Release : 2015-06-11
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 147352198X

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In the summer of 1875, two travellers walk south across the Lincolnshire Wolds to a village riven with dark secrets. When Norman Tanner kills his workmate on a cold February morning a century later, he thinks he’s got away with murder. But Norman doesn’t know about the workmate’s girlfriend, or the child that will come back to haunt him; and how he is caught up in a story that stretches back to that Victorian summer. For some in the village of Southby and its nearby grand estate, man is master of his fate, and the world is full of meaning; for others there is nothing but grass.

Author : Jimmie Allen
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 33 pages
File Size : 25,49 MB
Release : 2021-07-13
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 0593352181

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*"The rhythm and flow of words perfectly match the art while advising readers to choose love and use their voices in a powerful song." --School Library Journal (starred review) From rising country star Jimmie Allen comes a lyrical celebration of the many types of voices that can effect change. From voices tall as a tree, to voices small as a bee, all it takes is confidence and a belief in the goodness of others to change the world. Coming at a time when issues of social justice are at the forefront of our society, this is the perfect book to teach children in and out of the classroom that they're not too young to express what they believe in and that all voices are valuable. The perfect companion for little readers going back to school!

Author : Hampton Fancher
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 175 pages
File Size : 18,41 MB
Release : 2012-09-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1101600667

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Best known as the original screenwriter of Blade Runner, author Hampton Fancher makes his debut with this extraordinary collection that bears all of the hallmarks that have made him beloved to film fans. These are stories about people and places that exist just outside our perceptions of space and time: in “Narrowing the Divide,” an escaped lab rat winds up in a philosophical conversation with a man whose wife sleeps in the next room; in “Cargot,” a failed actor is reincarnated as a garden snail and avenges himself with a Hollywood producer’s wife; and in “The Black Weasel,” a washed-up bartender finds an unlikely traveling partner in a slow-witted drifter with a suspicious bankroll. These are also stories about survival and instinct, with elements of the absurd and the sublime. The Shape of the Final Dog is a rare literary work that is mordantly funny, deftly written, and bound to delight and entertain.

Author : Scott Sparling
Publisher : Tin House Books
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 14,25 MB
Release : 2011-05-24
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1935639064

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With its cast of train-hopping, drug-dealing, glue-huffing lowlifes, Scott Sparling's debut--an homage to the American crime novel--chronicles the lives of damaged people doing their meager best and often finding the worst. Wire to Wire assembles a cast of train-hopping, drug-dealing, glue-huffing lowlifes, in a stunning homage to one of our most popular enduring genres—the American crime novel. While riding a freight car through Detroit, Michael Slater suffers a near-fatal accident—a power line to the head. After a questionable recovery and a broken relationship, he abandons his new home in the Arizona desert, though not before leaving a man for dead. Slater returns to Michigan in a busted-up Ford to reunite with an old train-hopping pal, but quickly discovers that the Pleasant Peninsula of his youth is none too pleasant. As Slater’s past catches up with his present—a love triangle, a local drug dealer, the damaged residents of a destitute Northern Michigan town—rock bottom keeps slipping farther away. Three years later, Slater sits in a dark video-editing suite, popping speed like penny candy, attempting to reconcile himself with the unfilmed memories that haunt his screens and his conscience.

Author : Frank Bill
Publisher : Random House
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 34,89 MB
Release : 2013-01-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1446457710

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Welcome to Heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms that kept the white on the picket fences have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling. Frank Bill's Southern Indiana is haunted by a deep, abiding sense of place, and his people are men and women pressed to the brink - and beyond. They are survivors, and in Frank Bill's hands, their stories bristle with noir energy.