Bøger udgivet af Adelaide Books

"Reading Living Among Strangers is like watching a series of Beckett plays recast in the percussive, irreverent voice of a writer who takes nothing for granted, who follows the possibilities inherent in language and in everyday human failings. Here are characters estranged from the world: unparented kids walking the train trestle, a widowed mother whose pack of daughters push her toward assisted living, an alcoholic trying to give up drink by questioning the very root of desire. It is in the characters' estrangement that the reader finds kinship. As with the manicured Floridian lawns of Bahia Vista Estates in the title story, in this collection, "[t]here are rumors, things under the surface, things man-made and not." Richard Schmitt is a writer who digs beneath the surface to yield up beauty in the coarse, wisdom in the baffled." Jessie van Eerden , the author of a novel Glorybound "Richard Schmitt is a storyteller. His stories seem not to start so much as startle, drawing us into a world that might feel familiar, but that we've never seen quite this way. Like one of his narrators, he knows to ignore the map, point his nose, and go. The magic is in his sentences, which at their best are sleek and strange and urgent, surprising and illuminating." Peter Turchi, the author of A Muse and A Maze Linked by fear and yearning, awash with spirituality and its opposites, Richard Schmitt's Living Among Strangers covers all: from children perplexed by the aims of classmates and adults, to adults perplexed by the world of living creatures. These are stories to be read and reread, with many epiphanies in between. George Singleton, The Half-Mammals of Dixie

"The spiritual part of my body had taken over the rest of my mortal self...My whole perception of life was totally changed. I felt detached from all material things and was thinking only of the long voyage ahead, a voyage from which no one has ever returned. Even my sleep had been disturbed by dreams of family members who had passed away. They were beckoning me to join them. The scene was like a huge jigsaw puzzle falling into place, it was the picture of my life on earth at its end." The writing style, the flow of the stories, introduction and development of the complex characters, intense and multilayered plots with exciting twists and turns, original setting of each of the stories - everything about this collection of short stories and essays is a compliment to a wordsmith's craft. (Stevan V. Nikolic, Editor, Adelaide Literary Magazine)

"It's rare to find a character like Luther van der Loon who makes such a rich and lasting impression-so vividly wounded, exuberant in characterization. Luther embodies the anxious, angst-ridden neurotic we are afraid we will become, or maybe who we aspire to be. In his grief over his mother's accidental choking vis-à-vis death, his obsession with what is the point of life is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. I could read this novel a hundred times and never tire of it." - Amy E. Wallen, Author of When We Were Ghouls: A Memoir of Ghost Stories"An original and very funny novel about a man's obsessive longing and guilt after his mother accidentally chokes on wonton soup. We follow the endearing protagonist through a period of morning, cleverly interwoven with musical theory and an attempt to sue the Chinese take-out restaurant, all brought to a hilarious finale with a last symposium on medieval music." - Sheila Kohler, Author of numerous award-winning novels

In 1939, Nobuko Ito, a young Japanese-American woman, travels from her home in California to Japan, where she is to learn the culture of her ancestors. Tensions grow between the two countries. Soon her country and the country she has grown to love are at war. The next four years are brutal, both for those who go to fight (Hirotaka Katsuragawa, a young art student, Masato Abi, the son of local merchants, Toshio Hara, a farmer turned soldier), and those who remain behind (Nobuko, Yoko Yoshida, who manages the local pottery factory while her husband is fighting the war, and the women and children of Nishimi). In 1997, these characters are in their twilight years. Nobuko is a widow. Yoko is reduced to dusting and serving tea in the factory she once ran. Toshio has gone mad. Hirotaka has become the sensei, honored teacher. While the pottery factory is the heart of the village, Hirotaka is its soul. When a murder is committed, the motive is found buried beneath the rubble of a bridge destroyed in New Guinea, fifty-five years earlier. The noise of its fall still echoes...

"How could she wash herself of the blood and the semen? How could she cleanse herself of the betrayal? Would the memories of being raped and sodomized ever leave her mind or would they always be entrapped in her subconscious to present themselves in nightmares? Yes, the physical pain would eventually go away, but the mental anguish would never disappear. She knew that for a fact, and she shuddered at what her life would now become. She knew she was to blame for what had happened because she had been so stupid-so, so stupid to allow herself to trust those who should be trustworthy but weren't. All her life she had trusted so readily, so easily, and consistently she had been hurt and disappointed. She thought that something must be wrong with her to never learn from the painful lessons that had steadily followed her from early childhood, but she was an optimist and her heart went out to others too easily. "

Lila has no memory of who she is or how she ended up walking the streets of Manhattan alone in July of 2232. She only knows she is being hunted by day and haunted through the night by dreams of a man she can't remember apart from when her subconscious self holds him at gunpoint. Still reeling from the death of his brother, Derek seeks justice. When he views footage incriminating Lila, the woman he's come to care for perhaps too greatly, Derek knows something is very wrong. Derek's sister Desi blames herself for Damian's death, unable to forget how unkind she was to him at their last meeting and how she never repaid him for taking care of her after the death of their parents. In her guilt, she turns to Ravenna, a trained assassin and Damian's fiancée, to ensure that Lila is brought to justice while Desi herself seeks comfort in her brothers' business partner Eddie. Derek vows to find Lila before the police-and Ravenna, who is resolute that murder should be punished.