Kate’s 2¢: “Bleak Harbor” by Brian Gruley
“Bleak Harbor” by Brian Gruley
saying…
How many times have we condemned, looked down, or otherwise discounted someone who looked a bit different from us or acted strangely?
MacKenzie Beyer did a good job of reading this story. I enjoyed spending time on Bleak Harbor.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
www.bryangruley.com
Bryan Gruley (born November 9, 1957) is an American writer. He has shared a Pulitzer Prize for journalism[1] and been nominated for the “first novel” Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.[2]
Career[edit]
Gruley studied at the University of Notre Dame where he majored in American Studies and graduated in 1979.[3] Gruley is currently a reporter for Bloomberg News, writing long form features for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.[1][4] He worked more than 15 years for The Wall Street Journal[1] including seven years as Chicago bureau chief.[5][6]
With the Journal, he also helped cover breaking news including the September 11 World Trade Center attack, and shared in the staff’s Pulitzer Prize for that work, which cited “its comprehensive and insightful coverage, executed under the most difficult circumstances, of the terrorist attack on New York City, which recounted the day’s events and their implications for the future.”[1][7]
Gruley’s first novel, Starvation Lake: a mystery, was published in 2009 as a trade paperback original by the Touchstone Books imprint of Simon & Schuster. It is set in the fictional town of Starvation Lake, based on Bellaire, the seat of Antrim County, Michigan.[5] The real Starvation Lake is a lake in the next county, but the fictional town is on the lake, and the novel begins when the snowmobile of a long-missing youth hockey coach “washes up on the icy shores”.[5] Two sequels have followed in the so-called Starvation Lake series, The Hanging Tree (2010) and The Skeleton Box (2012). As of May 2013 Gruley is working on a new novel set in a different town with different characters.[citation needed]
Gruley played ice hockey as a boy and continues to play in his fifties, and to root for the Detroit Red Wings. He was schooled in Detroit, at Detroit Catholic Central, but the family vacationed up north and acquired a cottage in 1971 on Big Twin Lake near Bellaire, which the six siblings used until some time after their parents died. His first newspaper job was in the region as a 1978 summer intern at Antrim County News.[1][5]
Gruley and his wife Pam currently live on the North Side of Chicago.[5] They have three grown children.[1]
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
Bleak Harbor DB93541
Gruley, Bryan. Reading time: 11 hours, 29 minutes.
Read by MacKenzie Beyer.
Suspense Fiction
Psychological Fiction
Shortly before he turns sixteen, Danny Peters–who has autism–disappears from Bleak Harbor, the town his ancestors founded. Danny’s mother and stepfather–both alarmed that their own secret actions led to his abduction–scramble to obtain ransom funds. Strong language, some violence, and some explicit descriptions of sex. 2018.
Downloaded: January 8, 2024
Download Bleak Harbor
Uncategorized
by kate
Comments Off on Kate’s 2¢: “Seasons of purgatory” by Shahriyār Mandanīʹpūr
Kate’s 2¢: “Seasons of purgatory” by Shahriyār Mandanīʹpūr
“Seasons of purgatory” by Shahriyār Mandanīʹpūr
Translated by Sara Khalili
This was a book chosen at random by NLS and sent to me on a cartridge that contained seven books.
I enjoyed reading about the myths and beliefs of these people. a
Fajer Al-Kaisi did a good job of reading this translation.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shiraz, Iran, is an Iranian writer, journalist and literary theorist.[3]
Mandanipour was born and raised in Shiraz, Iran. In 1975 he moved to Tehran and studied Political Sciences at the University of Tehran, graduating in 1980. In 1981, he enlisted in the army for his military service. To experience war and to write about it, he volunteered to join the front during the Iran-Iraq war and served there as an officer for eighteen months.
Following his military service, Mandanipour returned to Shiraz, where he worked as director of the Hafiz Research Center and National Library of Fars. In 1998, he became chief editor of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal.
In 2006, Mandanipour traveled to the United States as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. In 2007 and 2008, he was a writer in residence at Harvard University and in 2009 at Boston College. In September 2011, Mandanipour returned to Brown University as a visiting literary arts professor, teaching contemporary Persian literature and modern Iranian cinema. He is now a Professor of Practice at Tufts University.
Works[edit]
Mandanipour started writing at fourteen and published his first short story, Shadows of the Cave, in 1985 in the literary journal Mofid Magazine. In 1989, his first collection of short stories was published under the same title.
Regarded as one of the most accomplished and promising writers of contemporary Iranian literature, Mandanipour’s creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time, and space, as well as his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers alike.[citation needed] In his stories, Mandanipour creates his unique surreal world in which illusion seems as natural as terrifying reality. The nightmares and realism of his stories are rooted in the historical horrors and sufferings of the people of Iran.
At the outset, Mandanipour’s stories are enigmatic. Yet, they jolt awake the reader’s imagination and provoke him or her to peel away the intricately woven and fused layers in which past, present, tradition, and modernity collide. His characters do not conform to conventional molds. Traditional identities are blurred as the lines between right and wrong, friend and foe, and sanity and insanity become fluid. Often driven by the most basic human instincts of fear, survival, and loneliness, Mandanipour’s characters struggle in a world of contradictions and ambiguities and grapple with self-identity, social dilemmas, and everyday life.
In a collection of essays on creative writing, The Book of Shahrzad’s Ghosts (Ketab-e Arvāh-e Shahrzād), Mandanipour discusses the elements of the story and the novel, as well as his theories on the nature of literature and the secrets of fiction. He writes, “Literature is the alchemy of transforming reality into words and creating a new phenomenon called fictional reality.”
His novel The Courage of Love (Del-e Del Dadegi), published in 1998, is structured around a love quadrangle with the four main characters representing earth, fire, water, and wind. The novel’s events occur during two different periods of war and earthquakes. Mandanipour compares the devastation, savagery, futility, and dark consequences of war and earthquakes by placing the two timeframes laterally, like mirrors facing each other. In the novel, Mandanipour employs a stream of consciousness. Numerous critics, including Houshang Golshiri, have regarded the 900-page work of fiction as a masterpiece of contemporary Iranian literature. In 2008, he cooperated in writing the screenplay of a documentary named Chahar Marge Yek Nevisandeh (Four Deaths of a Writer). It is about the life of a writer showing how he dies four times in his works, and the screenplay was directed by Ali Zare Ghanat Nowi.[4]
In 2009, Mandanipour published Censoring an Iranian Love Story, his first novel to be translated into English. Ostensibly a tale of romance, the book delves deeply into themes of censorship as the author struggles, in the text, with writing a love story that he’ll be able to get past Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance’s Office of Censorship to publish an account of life in post-Islamic Revolution Iran.
In the novel, two narratives are intertwined. In one, we read of the difficulties, fears, and trepidations that surround the meeting of a young couple in modern-day Iran at a time when gender separation is forcefully imposed on society. Scene by scene, we become more familiar with their struggles to preserve their love and their creative schemes to lessen the risk of discovery and arrest. In a parallel storyline, Mandanipour enters as his alter ego and takes us along as he composes each sentence and scene, revealing his frustrations and his methods of battling against censorship. The penalties that the writer self-censors appear as strikethroughs in the text. The writer’s comical efforts at surmounting censorship and advancing his story resemble the struggles of the young lovers to preserve their love.
Translated into English by Sara Khalili, Censoring an Iranian Love Story was well received by critics worldwide. The New Yorker named it one of the Reviewers’ favorites from 2009, and National Public Radio listed it as one of The Best Debut Fictions of 2009.
In his review for The New Yorker, James Wood wrote, “Mandanipour’s writing is exuberant, bonhomous, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references.”[2] For The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote, “Some of Mr. Mandanipour’s efforts to inject his story with surreal, postmodern elements feel distinctly strained (the intermittent appearances of a hunchbacked midget, in particular, are annoyingly gratuitous and contrived), but he’s managed, by the end of the book, to build a clever Rubik’s Cube of a story, while at the same time giving readers a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran: arduous, demoralizing and constricted even before the brutalities of the current crackdown.” And writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Salter Reynolds commented, “Censorship, seen as its art form, is just another way of messing with reality. It’s hard enough to generate ideas without someone else’s superimposed over them. Still, the fictional Mandanipour tries … He writes a love story that is convincingly, achingly impossible in a place where men and women cannot even look at each other in public. The effect (as every good Victorian understood) is deliriously sensual prose.
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
Seasons of purgatory DB109146
Mandanīʹpūr, Shahriyār; Khalili, Sara Reading time: 5 hours, 44 minutes.
Fajer Al-Kaisi
Short Stories
“The first English-language story collection from “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (Guardian). In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.” — Provided by publisher. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. 2022.