Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in World Literature

The Connoisseur trails the evolution of Muhlbach, an insurance executive on a business trip in Taos, New Mexico, who develops an obsession with pre-Columbian figurines after meandering through a curio shop. Entranced yet bewildered by his sudden affinity for a little figurine, Muhlbach succumbs to his intrigue and, 30 dollars later, begins his journey as a connoisseur. With superb delivery and subtle clarity, Connell allows us to see and feel Muhlbach’s emerging mania, with its impending tension and sudden exhilaration.

Solitario Cisneros thought his life was over long ago. He lost his wife, his family, even his country in the late 1870s when the Rio Grande shifted course, stranding the Mexican town of Olvido on the Texas side of the border. He’d made his brooding peace with retiring his gun and badge, hiding out on his ranch, and communing with horses and ghosts.

Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym—aimer, to love—resonates in every minute, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit, and intelligence of Vietnamese people.

Fueled by tomato sandwiches and green milkshakes, and obsessed with cars, Philbet struggles with life and love as a gay boy in rural Georgia. He’s happiest when helping Grandaddy dig potatoes from the vegetable garden that connects their houses. But Philbet’s world is shattered and his resilience shaken by events that crush his innocence and sense of security; expose his misshapen chest skillfully hidden behind shirts Mama makes at home; and convince him that he’s not fit to be loved by Knox, the older boy he idolizes to distraction.

Nils Shapiro accepts what appears to be an easy, lucrative job: find out if Beverly Mayer’s grandson is foolishly throwing away his trust fund in Hollywood, especially now, in the wake of his fiancée’s tragic death. However, that easy job becomes much more complicated once Nils arrives in Los Angeles, a disorienting place where the sunshine hides dark secrets. Nils quickly suspects that Ebben Mayer’s fiancée was murdered and that Ebben himself may have been the target.

Fifteen-year-old Esperance Darbois, the only daughter of philosophy professor François Darbois, is determined to become a woman of the stage. But becoming an actress will sully the respectability of the Darbois family, damage her marriage prospects, and harm her father’s distinguished reputation.

Twelve-year-old Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother, who, for unclear reasons, keeps herself away from her son. Everything changes when Bo Bo discovers the story of his parents’ great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events, and of his mother’s mysterious sickness.

After the tragic death of her parents when she was just four years old, Raqi is sent to live with her uncle Dodge in Escondido, California. Taking after her Mexican father, Raqi immediately faces hostility from the members of Dodge’s all-White, one-percenter motorcycle club, the Lawless, and from her uncle himself. Being raised by a drug addict is no picnic, and Raqi must quickly learn how to survive. She manages to form a few friendships. Still, as soon as she can, she leaves the violence and bigotry behind and doesn’t look back.

Banking heiress Ursula Nunes has lived her life on the fringes of Philadelphia’s upper class. Her Jewish heritage means she’s never quite been welcomed by society’s elite...and her quick temper has never helped, either. A faux engagement to the scion of the mid-Atlantic’s most storied family might work to repair her rumpled reputation and gain her entrée to the life she thinks she wants…if she can ignore the way her “betrothed” makes her feel warm all over and stay focused on her goal.

In Ernesto, Andrew Feldman uses his unprecedented access to newly available archives to tell the full story of Hemingway’s self-professed Cuban-ness: his respect for Cojímar fishermen, his long-running affair with a Cuban lover, the warmth of his adoptive Cuban family, the strong influences on his work by Cuban writers, his connections to Cuban political figures and celebrities, his denunciation of American imperial ambitions, and his enthusiastic role in the revolution.  

In 1785, a sensational trial began in Paris that would divide the country and captivate Europe. A leading Catholic cardinal and scion of one of the most distinguished families in France stood accused of forging the queen’s signature to obtain the most expensive piece of jewelry in Europe: a 2,800-carat diamond necklace. Known as the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, it contributed to the French populace’s disillusionment with the monarchy and precipitated the French Revolution. The Queen’s Necklace, loosely based on the Affair, is Dumas’ take on the royal scandal.

Faulkner’s second novel follows a bohemian cast of artists, socialites, and dilettantes as they set sail on a four-day excursion aboard the Nausikaa. Faulkner’s quick wit and endless appetite for satire make this audiobook a fascinating exploration of character, as well as a rare glimpse into the author himself. The novel explores questions of sex and sexuality, as well as the societal role of the artist. Inspired by his own participation in the arts community in New Orleans, Mosquitoes is an engaging and delightful novel from one of America’s greatest writers.

Set in Iran, this extraordinary debut novel takes listeners into the everyday lives of the Kurds. Leila dreams of making films to bring the suppressed stories of her people onto the global stage, but obstacles keep piling up. Leila's younger brother Chia, influenced by their father's past torture, imprisonment, and his deep-seated desire for justice, begins to engage with social and political affairs. But his activism grows increasingly risky and one day he disappears in Tehran. Seeking answers about her brother's whereabouts, Leila fears the worst and begins a campaign to save him.

Saeed is the comic hero, the luckless fool, whose tale tells of the aggression and resistance, terror and heroism, reason and loyalty, that typify the hardships and struggles of Arabs in Israel. An informer for the Zionist state, his stupidity, candor, and cowardice make him more of a victim than a villain; but in a series of tragicomic episodes, he is gradually transformed from a disaster-haunted, gullible collaborator into a Palestinian—no hero still, but a simple man intent on survival and, perhaps, happiness.

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside”. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay”.

In her last days, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes. Drawing on recently available court records, archives, and interviews, and reevaluating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, Carl Rollyson rehabilitates the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written.

The Crux is the story of group of women who move from New England to Colorado in order to run a boardinghouse for men. One of these women, the young Vivian Lane, falls in love with a man who has both gonorrhea and syphilis. It then falls to Vivian, when she learns of his illnesses, to decide whether she should marry and have children with this man. She is torn between her own heart and the “duty” of motherhood, as one doctor in the novel puts it, to have children with a healthy father.

Twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user’s short-term memory, have left single mom Mellie with her mind in fragments. With the help of a tough-minded sponsor, and motivated by her own medically challenged daughter, Mellie clings to a fragile sobriety. Then, on the evening of her 29th day sober, a stranger pulls into her driveway and her heart surges. However, when Mellie’s pursuit of this man and the past they may share threatens her sponsor, Mellie will have to put her tiny family and her recovery at risk in hopes of saving the woman who saved her first.

A teenager in pre-revolutionary Tehran, Massoumeh is an average girl, passionate about learning. On her way to school she meets a local man and falls in love, but when her family discover his letters, they accuse her of bringing them dishonor. She is badly beaten by her brother, and her parents hastily arrange for her to marry a man she has never met. Facing a life without love and the prospect of no education, Massoumeh is distraught, but a female neighbor urges her to comply: “We each have a destiny, and you can’t fight yours.” 

The hurricane of 1900, America’s worst natural disaster, left the island city of Galveston in ruins. Thousands perished, including all 93 children at the Sisters of the Incarnate Word orphanage—except six-year-old Hester, who miraculously survived. Oleander City is the tale of this little girl and the volatile collision between the American Red Cross, the Ku Klux Klan, and one of the most famous boxing matches in American history.