Books by Elizabeth Graver
Awake
by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma
Harald Voetmann’s eye-opening English debut, Awake, is the first book of his erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy about mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No―to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies.
In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.
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Awake
by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma
A mother seeks freedom for her young son—and rediscovers her own need for it in the process—in this powerful novel about family, identity, and love
Once a painter, a traveler, a lover of light, Anna Simon has been living in the dark ever since she gave birth to Max, a child with a rare genetic disease for whom even an hour in sunlight could prove fatal. For years, Anna has home schooled Max and structured her life around his, despite the fact that her husband, Ian, favors mainstreaming. When Anna learns of a camp in upstate New York for children with the disease, she sees room for a compromise—a sanctuary for Max, a place where he can interact with other children and be both safe and free.
And so the summer that Max is nine, the family heads off to Camp Luna. At first, it seems like the answer to their problems. But as Anna is drawn into life there and gets to know Hal, the camp’s charismatic founder, freedom and safety prove to be complicated things. What begins as a novel about a mother with a sick child quickly becomes an intricate examination of one woman’s identity as Anna—given sudden breathing room—looks around at her life and finds that she has lost track of essential pieces of herself. What, exactly, are safety and freedom? And at what cost—to one’s self and the people in one’s life—should they be protected and pursued?
Beautifully written, emotionally wrenching, Awake showcases the strengths of Elizabeth Graver’s acclaimed previous novel, The Honey Thief, the focus shifting from childhood to adulthood, to limn the passions and intricacies of a woman’s mind and heart.
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Awake
by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma
In a big, big city
on a busy street
at the tipity-top of a tall building
lives a girl.
One night, after a story,
a snuggle,
and one last sip of water,
she was getting sleepy...when out of the corner of her eye...
\\ () //
//(__)\\
SPIDER
The girl was no longer sleepy. Now, she was...AWAKE.
In a brilliant debut, Mags DeRoma gives us an empowered young child who is trying to solve the biggest problem she's ever faced: how to get the spider out of her room without actually having to go near it.
With bold cut-paper art, AWAKE is sure to stay with readers for a long time.
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Awake
by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma
She's on the run from a past she can't remember in this twisty psychological thriller from Natasha Preston, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of THE CELLAR!
Scarlett Garner doesn't remember anything before the age of four―until a car accident changes everything. She starts to remember pieces of a past that frighten her. A past her parents hid from her…and a secret that could get her killed.
Teen thrillers also by Natasha Preston:
The Cellar
The Cabin
You Will Be Mine
The Lost
The Twin
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Awake
by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma
First published in 1990 and now back in print, this much sought-after collection marked the stunning debut of poet Dorianne Laux. Awake chronicles Laux's coming to terms with a childhood darkened by violence and sexual abuse--a struggle at once to embrace and to forgive the past.
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Kantika: A Novel
A dazzling Sephardic multigenerational saga that moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, exploring displacement, endurance, and family as home.
A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries, Kantika―“song” in Ladino―follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way―a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge―her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose feistiness equals her own and whose challenges pit new family against old.
Exploring identity, place and exile, Kantika also reveals how the female body―in work, art and love―serves as a site of both suffering and joy. A haunting, inspiring meditation on the tenacity of women, this lush, lyrical novel from Elizabeth Graver celebrates the insistence on seizing beauty and grabbing hold of one’s one and only life.
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Kantika A Novel
A dazzling Sephardic multigenerational saga that moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, exploring displacement, endurance, and family as home.
A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries, Kantika—“song” in Ladino—follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way—a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge—her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose feistiness equals her own and whose challenges pit new family against old.
Exploring identity, place and exile, Kantika also reveals how the female body—in work, art and love—serves as a site of both suffering and joy. A haunting, inspiring meditation on the tenacity of women, this lush, lyrical novel from Elizabeth Graver celebrates the insistence on seizing beauty and grabbing hold of one’s one and only life.
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No copies available.