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Jonathan Carroll

    January 26, 1949

    Jonathan Carroll is an American author celebrated for his modern fantasy and slipstream novels. His narratives often explore the intrusion of imagination into reality, blurring the lines between the ordinary world and the surreal. Frequently compared to magical realists of South America, Carroll masterfully employs elements like talking animals and realms that hover on the edge of dreams. His distinctive style probes the delicate boundary between what is real and what is imagined, offering readers a unique and captivating literary experience.

    Jonathan Carroll
    The Wooden Sea
    Glass Soup
    A Child Across The Sky
    From the Teeth of Angels
    Sleeping in Flame
    Outside the Dog Museum
    • 2023

      Graham Patterson is a middling comedian whose career (and love life) has gone up in smoke. After buying a new car, he embarks on a cross country road trip to see his brother Joel, to try and figure what he should do with himself and his career. Midway, after his car breaks down, he enters a tattoo parlor, mesmerized by the unique beauty of the tattoo work on display. After paging through a catalog of styles, he chooses a very rare tattoo -- a bee inside a frog inside a hawk inside a lion-- that the tattooist's Japanese mentor created. It is a tattoo with strange qualities, to the extent that the tattoo will allow the protagonist to explore alternative versions of his own life and ultimately choose his preferred life. This was something the tattooist was once offered but she preferred to keep the life she had. From this moment on, Graham Patterson will no longer be a simple comedian on the path of decline, nor a man who has to decide whether to marry his partner with whom he is deeply in love, nor the great world-famous photographer that everyone knows and admires for the famous image depicting Mr. Breakfast. From this moment Graham Patterson will gain the opportunity to travel in three different lives, until he finally gets to choose one, the definitive one. At what price, though? And how to choose between fame and love?

      Mr Breakfast
    • 2021

      Barnstorming

      A Negro Baseball Story

      • 308 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      Set in the 1940s, the story follows Davis Sterling, a privileged heir who shifts from a carefree lifestyle to a serious pursuit in sports writing, defying his father's expectations. His journey leads him to cover a baseball team, where he encounters the groundbreaking first white player in the Negro Baseball Leagues. Along the way, he also discovers love, challenging societal norms and personal ambitions. This narrative explores themes of identity, ambition, and the complexities of race in sports during a transformative era.

      Barnstorming
    • 2010

      Шантарам

      • 864 pages
      • 31 hours of reading

      Эта преломленная в художественной форме исповедь человека, который сумел выбраться из бездны и уцелеть, протаранила все списки бестселлеров и заслужила восторженные сравнения с произведениями лучших писателей нового времени, от Мелвилла до Хемингуэя

      Шантарам
    • 2010

      Stories

      All-New Tales Edited By

      • 428 pages
      • 15 hours of reading
      3.8(5207)Add rating

      This collection of 27 never-before published stories from an impressive cast—Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stuart O'Nan, among others—sets out to shift genre paradigms. The overarching theme is fantastic fiction, or fiction of the imagination, with fantasy being used in the most broad-sweeping sense rather than signaling the familiar commercial staples of elves, ghouls, and robots. Consequently, the collection's offerings run a wide gamut. In Joe Hill's Devil on the Staircase, an Italian boy commits a crime of passion and subsequently meets an emissary of Satan. In Jodi Picoult's Weights and Measures, a young couple who have just lost their daughter struggle to hold their marriage together as they both start noticing strange changes taking place. Chuck Palahniuk's The Loser features a college kid on acid as a contestant on a game show, and in Kurt Andersen's Human Intelligence, a geologist meets an explorer from another planet who has been studying humans for the past 1,600 years. The range of voices and subjects practically guarantees something for any reader, but the overall quality is frustratingly variable: most stories are good, some aren't, and few are exceptional —Publishers Weekly

      Stories
    • 2006

      Glass Soup

      • 324 pages
      • 12 hours of reading
      3.9(1239)Add rating

      For connoisseurs of imaginative fiction, the novels of Jonathan Carroll are a special treat that occupy a space all their own. His surreal fictions, which deftly mix the everyday with the extraordinary, have won him a devoted following. Now, in Glass Soup, Carroll continues to astound . . . .The realm of the dead is built from the dreams--and nightmares--of the living. Octopuses drive buses. God is a polar bear. And a crowded highway literally leads to hell.Once before, Vincent Ettrich and his lover, Isabelle Neukor, crossed over from life to death and back again. Now Isabelle bears a very special child, who may someday restore the ever-changing mosaic that is reality. Unless the agents of Chaos can lure her back to the land of the dead--and trap her there forever.Glass Soup is another exquisite and singular creation from the author January magazine described as "incapable of writing a bad book much less an uninteresting one."

      Glass Soup
    • 2003

      White apples

      • 320 pages
      • 12 hours of reading
      3.8(1906)Add rating

      Vincent Ettrich, an engaging philanderer, discovers that he has died and come back to life - but he has no idea why. He gradually discovers that he was deliberately brought back to life by his one true love, Isabelle, so he could educate their son who, if correctly raised, would save the universe.

      White apples
    • 2001

      The Wooden Sea

      • 256 pages
      • 9 hours of reading
      3.6(11)Add rating

      Frannie McCabe realizes something seriously weird is going on when the dead dog he buried keeps turning up again. The Sciavos, a couple whose domestic war has the police involved, disappear completely. And Frannie's teenage self arrives to help him sort out his mistakes - before its too late.

      The Wooden Sea
    • 1998

      Kissing the Beehive

      • 248 pages
      • 9 hours of reading

      Bestselling author Sam Bayer is stuck. Burned out from his third divorce, bored with the formulaic rut his writing has fallen into, and unable to deliver the manuscript for which he has been paid a stratospheric advance, he is desperate for inspiration. But a chance visit to his hometown of Crane's View, New York, sparks his imagination. Soon he immerses himself in an unsolved case of murder that took place when he was a teenager--Sam himself had discovered the body of the victim, a beautiful and wild teenage girl named Pauline. At the same time he is drawn into an explosive affair with a gorgeous but seriously loopy fan with the improbable name of Veronica Lake. As Sam learns the disturbing facts about his lover's past, Pauline's murderer reappears--not only endangering Sam but putting his beloved fifteen-year-old daughter in jeopardy as well. Not knowing whom to trust, Sam has to brace himself for the truly unexpected resolution to this decades-old mystery.

      Kissing the Beehive