Bucks County Idyll


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From the author of One Smart Indian and Moments Captured comes the frightful story of a couple paid to occupy a mansion in order to discourage a possible burglary as they realize what was supposed to be a month-long vacation may turn out to be a much darker agreement. When Nick Young and Stephanie Harold are offered a monthly stipend and a year-long stay in a magnificent house on a country estate in the farmland of Bucks County, it is an offer they can’t refuse. A well-stocked wine cellar, a beautiful pool, luxury amenities, and one of the finest art collections in the country are theirs for the time, as long as they agree that one person will always be present in the house. Dismissing the request as upper-class paranoia, Nick and Stephanie find themselves living in a museum-like estate. But as they learn more about the sculptures and paintings that surround them, they become frightened and annoyed at the power the objects have over them. When Nick discovers evidence of a prowler, he begins to monitor the property nightly, developing an obsession to catch the intruder fueled by an urge to prove himself as Stephanie’s protector. Drawn deeper into the intriguing mystery of the house and its priceless art, Stephanie and Nick see aspects of each other that they had never seen before, finding themselves in a nightmarish test of their wits and stamina that threatens not only their relationship but also their lives.




Art in America


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Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone


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"Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone represents the definitive work on origins as they appear in Stevens's poetry. Author Thomas Francis Lombardi, a poet himself, traces Stevens's originary influences - place, family, tradition, the feminine, ethnic heritage, and religious roots - against the cosmopolitan influences of Cambridge and New York and demonstrates the extent to which Stevens's formative and early adult years shaped his entire life and influenced the grand sweep of his poetry." "That influence spread itself across Stevens's entire canon, from the early verse through Harmonium, Ideas of Order, Parts of a World, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer, The Auroras of Autumn, The Rock, and finally Opus Posthumous. Though Lombardi acknowledges the importance of the global presence in Stevens's poetry, he argues that the hallmark of the poet's vision is the presence of his Pennsylvania provincialism and the increasing significance he attached to his roots as he grew older." "Stevens's life epitomized a personal and irresistible rite of passage toward origins, a universal odyssey that sensitive people undertake over the course of their lives - the ethnocentric pull toward the native experience. That attraction to his native soil would inform much of the content of his poetry. To this end, he wished to be one with his ancestors for the reason of experiencing a sense of identity with the provincial past, not in spite of, but because of it. Without an adequate understanding of this relationship, no in-depth comprehension of Stevens's poetry seems possible."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved







The Nation


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A Queen in Bucks County


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An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.




Rough Animals


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The 25 Best Thriller Books of the Summer—New York Post Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 —Southern Living 46 Great Books to Read This Summer—Nylon Dazzling Debuts"—WYPR, "The Weekly Reader" Summer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge—Refinery29 8 New Books You Should Read This June—vulture.com What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May—Outside “Furious and electric . . . a fever dream."—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review!* Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men... Ever since their father's untimely death five years before, Wyatt Smith and his inseparably close twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, just after spotting one of their steers lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with a TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right. They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the dawning realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution for what's been lost. Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands; a world that pitches him not only against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape, but also against himself. As he winds his way down from the mountains of Box Elder to the mesas of Monument Valley and back, Wyatt is forced to look for the first time at who he is and what he’s capable of, and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice.




Bucks County Idyll


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Partisan Review


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Once


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"Of all my far back memories two remain most vivid, as if they had just happened. The first is of an incident that occurred in a few minutes' time; the second, a matter of months. The first happening surely was the key to my survival of the second...." So begins, veiled in mystery, Gridelda Jackson Ohannessian's beautifully rendered childhood memoir about growing up on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, beneath "the friendly blue bowl" of the sky, and the dangerous, preternatural events of the summer of 1939 that changed her life forever. Once: As It Was is narrated through the lens of the author's twelve-year-old self. Her farm-home was a world of little dirt roads, kerosene lamps, and visiting hobos. There is her dear father Bousie ("rhymes with Howsie"), her loving Ma, her two sisters and brother, and the Owls, the Cherokee Indian farmhands who were also part of the family, as well as many other friends and passers-by. Ohannessian's writing-memory meanders intently like a bright creek, through her schoolhouse where Margeret Toomer, the writer Jean Toomer's daughter, was one of two black students, through the living presene of books and pen pals, amany secret places, a brief run-in with Professor Einsten, and even a little "s.e.x." Then the fateful day arrives when a band of writers, led by the poets Laura Riding and Robert Graves, moves onto the farm. Photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, poems, and a few bars of Morse code provide lively counterpoint to Ohannessia's endearing tale of what was -- and is -- Once.