Far Tortuga

Far Tortuga PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0394756673
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself. "Beautiful and original...a resonant and symbolical story of nine doomed men who dream of an earthly paradise as the world winds down around them." —Newsweek

Far Tortuga

Far Tortuga PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0394756673
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself. "Beautiful and original...a resonant and symbolical story of nine doomed men who dream of an earthly paradise as the world winds down around them." —Newsweek

Far Tortuga

Far Tortuga PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819698
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself. "Beautiful and original...a resonant and symbolical story of nine doomed men who dream of an earthly paradise as the world winds down around them." —Newsweek

Killing Mister Watson

Killing Mister Watson PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679734058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Drawn from fragments of historical fact, Matthiessen's masterpiece brilliantly depicts the fortunes and misfortunes of Edgar J. Watson, a real-life entrepreneur and outlaw who appeared in the lawless Florida Everglades around the turn of the century.

Tortuga

Tortuga PDF Author: Rudolfo Anaya
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504011805
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
American Book Award Winner: A novel of a New Mexico teenager’s journey of physical and spiritual recovery from the author of Bless Me, Ultima. When the story opens, the eponymous hero of Rudolfo Anaya’s novel is in an ambulance en route to a hospital for crippled children in the New Mexican desert. A poor boy from Albuquerque, sixteen-year-old Tortuga takes his name from the odd, turtle-shaped mountain that is rumored to possess miraculous curative powers. Tortuga is paralyzed, and not even his mother’s fervent prayers can heal him. But under the mountain’s watchful gaze, with the support of fellow patients, he begins the Herculean task of breaking out of his shell and becoming whole again. Drawn from personal experience and imbued with the phantasmagorical vision quests that distinguish Anaya’s work, Tortuga is a joyful, life-sustaining book about hope, faith, friendship, and love that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit in the physical world. “An extraordinary storyteller.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

At Play in the Fields of the Lord PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819647
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash in this novel from the National Book Award-winning author. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on the behalf of the local comandante. Out of this struggle Peter Matthiessen creates an electrifying moral thriller—adapted into a movie starring John Lithgow, Kathy Bates, and Tom Waits. A novel of Conradian richness, At Play in the Fields of the Lord explores both the varieties of spiritual experience and the politics of cultural genocide.

Men's Lives

Men's Lives PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
An eloquent portrayal of a disappearing way of life of the Long Island fishermen whose voices--humorous, bitter and bewildered--are as clear as the threatened beauty of their once quiet shore.

In Paradise

In Paradise PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1594633525
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The bestselling final novel by a writer of incomparable range, power, and achievement, a three-time winner of the National Book Award. Peter Matthiessen was a literary legend, the author of more than thirty acclaimed books. In this, his final novel, he confronts the legacy of evil, and our unquenchable desire to wrest good from it. One week in late autumn of 1996, a group gathers at the site of a former death camp. They offer prayer at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the sparse quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews in this camp to their deaths. Clements Olin has joined them, in order to complete his research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions both political and personal surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to resolution or healing. Caught in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to bear witness, not only to his family’s ambiguous history but to his own. Profoundly thought-provoking, In Paradise is a fitting coda to the luminous career of a writer who was “for all readers. He was for the world” (National Geographic).

Tortuga

Tortuga PDF Author: Thomas Erikson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615957647
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Cayona, 1669: The streets are not mean, they are downright vicious in the pirate port of Tortuga. Orphans like Jack Higgins scratch a living from errands and mugging drunken pirates, roaming the taverns, whorehouses, alleys, and gambling dens in search of prey, or a dropped penny. The tales told around tavern tables are tall and exotic: sea battles, typhoons, tortures, cannibal islands, lost cites, haunted jewels, rare honey, great treasures won with blood. They incite cruel laughter, dry asides, grim shakes of the head, and dubious guffaws. Jack, just months from manhood, sees little hope of adding to these tales. But during a hurricane's deluge Jack pulls a retching body from the flooded street. It is Old Kit, Cayona's patriarch, by legend oldest man in the Caribbean. Jack's reward is to be his prot�g� and scion. He is learning fast, wearing his first boots, received at the best brothels, meeting those who control the town and mock the pirates as fools. But can Kit's battered health hold long enough for Jack to learn to survive Cayona's literally cutthroat commerce? To win the merchant's niece he craves? Jack discovers ancient Kit owes his unnaturally long life to a dead Arawak shaman's "magic" stone, now near useless. Jack treks to Hispaniola's high country to find the shaman's holy cave - and a new stone. One touch tips him into a terrifying hallucination; or a reality where the Indian dead still live and speak. Jack must escape it and return to Tortuga to save Old Kit, his own future, and soon his own life.

Lost Man's River

Lost Man's River PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819655
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
When his novel Killing Mister Watson was published in 1990, the reviews were extraordinary. It was heralded as "a marvel of invention . . . a virtuoso performance" (The New York Times Book Review) and a "novel [that] stands with the best that our nation has produced as literature" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now Peter Matthiessen brings us the second novel in his Watson trilogy, a project that has been nearly twenty years in the writing. A story of epic scope and ambition, Lost Man's River confronts the primal relationship between a dangerous father and his desperate sons and the ways in which his death has shaped their lives. Lucius Watson is obsessed with learning the truth about his father. Who was E. J. Watson? Was he a devoted family man, an inspired farmer, a man of progress and vision? Or was he a cold-blooded murderer and amoral opportunist? Were his neighbors driven to kill him out of fear? Or was it envy? And if Watson was a killer, should the neighbors fear the obsessed Lucius when he returns to live among them and ask questions? The characters in this tale are men and women molded by the harsh elements of the Florida Everglades--an isolated breed, descendants of renegades and pioneers, who have only their grit, instinct, and tradition to wield against the obliterating forces of twentieth-century progress: Speck Daniels, moonshiner and alligator poacher turned gunrunner; Sally Brown, who struggles to escape the racism and shame of her local family; R. B. Collins, known as Chicken, crippled by drink and rage, who is the custodian of Watson secrets; Watson Dyer, the unacknowledged namesake with designs on the remote Watson homestead hidden in the wild rivers; and Henry Short, a black man and unwilling member of the group of armed island men who awaited E. J. Watson in the silent twilight. Only a storyteller of Peter Matthiessen's dazzling artistry could capture the beauty and strangeness of life on this lawless frontier while probing deeply into its underlying tragedy: the brutal destruction of the land in the name of progress, and the racism that infects the heart of New World history.

Shadow Country

Shadow Country PDF Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 1588368246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 912

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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “Altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.”—Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone—Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic about Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century—were originally conceived as one vast, mysterious novel. Now, in this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has marvelously distilled a monumental work while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. Praise for Shadow Country “Magnificent . . . breathtaking . . . Finally now we have [this three-part saga] welded like a bell, and with Watson’s song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate.”—Los Angeles Times “Peter Matthiessen has done great things with the Watson trilogy. It’s the story of our continent, both land and people, and his writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes.”—Don DeLillo “The fiction of Peter Ma­­tthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyone’s highest expectations for great writing.” —Richard Ford “Shadow Country, Matthiessen’s distillation of the earlier Watson saga, represents his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy.”—W. S. Merwin “[An] epic masterpiece . . . a great American novel.”—The Miami Herald