Bøger af Benjamin Markovits

What's left when your kids grow up and leave home?When Tom Layward's wife had an affair he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned eighteen.

In print for the first time in the United States, acclaimed novelist Benjamin Markovits's Playing Days is a mostly autobiographical narrative concerning the author's season playing minor league professional basketball in Germany and the love affair with another player's estranged wife that ushers him into adulthood.Growing up in Texas, Ben experienced basketball as a mostly solitary pursuit, one he gave up after riding the bench in high school. But as his college classmates prepare for the real world, Ben is seized by an idea. All he needs is a video camera, an empty court, and his mother's German citizenship.Improbably, he lands a roster spot on a lower division pro team in Landshut, forty-five minutes outside of Munich. It's Ben's first taste of competition in years, not to mention his first job. And like most jobs, it's defined by repetition, boredom, and gossip. There's Charlie, the trash-talking mercenary from Chicago; the coach, Herr Henkel, a recently retired player anxious to justify his paycheck; and Karl (based on the author's real life relationship with Dirk Nowitski), a gangly teenage prodigy flashing the raw talent that will make him an NBA star. As a group of men learn how to navigate one another, Ben falls in love with the young mother of a teammate's child, and begins an affair that will change his life.Wry, poignant, and tenderly observed, Playing Days is an evocative meditation on the joys of youth, the triumphs and terrors of post-college life, and one of the best books ever written about what basketball can mean to an American man.

When the four Essinger children gather in Austin for Christmas, they all bring their news. But their parents have plans, too, and invite Dana to stay, hoping to bring the couple back together.

Award-winning adult author Benjamin Markovits delivers a poignant coming-of-age middle grade story that will give comfort to anyone feeling like a small fish in a Texas-size sea.

Over the course of the weekend, several generations of domestic tension are brought to boiling point . Recalling some of America's most celebrated novelists - this is John Updike's Rabbit for a new generation - Benjamin Markovits' writing reminds us of the heights that social realism can reach.

Ten years out of Yale, with an extra degree from Oxford, and all Greg Marnier has to show for it is a rambling academic career that has landed him in Aberystwyth. At his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk, he runs into an old friend who offers him an extraordinary way out.Robert James, wealthy and influential, a success story of the dotcom bubble, wants to become a political player. His plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit - the poster child for urban decline - and build a new America from their boarded-up ruins. For a small investment, Marnier can transform himself into a twenty-first-century pioneer. The realities of life on America's urban frontier soon become apparent. For every hopeful misfit who's come for a fresh start there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by the new colonials. Marnier finds himself caught in the middle of everyone else's battles - between local and outsider, rich and poor, black and white - until a terrible accident forces him to take sides.

Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits' Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father - professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it. It's an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement - and often intense disappointment - of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself. Beautifully written, Playing Days is entirely recognisable in its depiction of the first long summer after university. Tinged with the melancholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, it's the story of a young man's first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations.

Douglas Pitt is a man obsessed. Laughed at, mocked, and dismissed at every turn, Pitt has dedicated the best part of an unremarkable academic career attempting to prove the genius of Samuel Highgate Syme (b.1794, Baltimore; soldier, geologist, inventor). Pitt's postulation is simple enough: Syme, through some fault, wrong-doing, conspiracy or mischance, has not been credited with the recognition he deserves for hitting upon a key discovery in the advance of modern science - the theory of continental drift.Lacking the crucial last piece of the puzzle to convince his peers and normalize his family life, Pitt's emotional equilibrium is stabilised in a magical stroke of fortune when he uncovers a contemporary manuscript written by a fledgling German scientist, Friedrich Muller, which recounts a year (1821) in the company of the irrepressible Syme.Switching between these beguiling and colourful narratives, The Syme Papers takes the reader on an odyssey into the heart of Maryland and Virginia in the 1820s by way of London and Texas today. An epic stew of intellectual procrastination, early nineteenth-century picaresque and late twentieth-century angst, it is a novel of genius and failure; of a man who thought he could prove the world was hollow, and in the glorious process of discovery, broke his own heart.Teeming with comic detail and fierce intelligence, The Syme Papers recreates a time when to question the world and the origins of creation was the greatest project a scientist could undertake.