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A YOUNG MAN’S GUIDE TO LATE CAPITALISM by Peter Mountford

If for nothing else, A YOUNG MAN’S GUIDE TO LATE CAPITALISM will be remembered as a clear-eyed, unsentimental look at money and our complicated relationship with it. The protagonist in Peter Mountford’s debut novel is a young biracial man, Gabriel de Boya, who is on assignment for The Calloway Group, a New York hedge fund. He finds himself in La Paz in Bolivia—where the novel is set—on the eve of the election that would usher in Evo Morales as President.

Gabriel’s assignment is to predict first the outcome of the election, and subsequently its effect on the Bolivian gas industry. Gabriel’s boss in New York, the aggressive Priya Singh, would essentially like to speculate about whether Morales would nationalize the Bolivian gas industry right away, as he promised. To obtain such sensitive information, Gabriel works incognito in the city passing off as a freelance reporter on assignment.

April 12, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Humorous, Reading Guide, Satire, South America

CRASHED by Tim Hallinan

Well-known for his Simeon Grist and Poke Rafferty Bangkok series, Tim Hallinan introduces a new series character in CRASHED. Junior Bender is a top-of-the-line crook, hired for specific jobs, and pretty much working when his child support payments come due. Junior is also a private investigator, and most of the time, he works for the down-and-out, the underdog and/or those who can’t defend themselves. In essence, he’s a burglar with a good heart.

March 20, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Humorous, Sleuths Series

SOLO by Rana Dasgupta

How do you write about failure?

Early in this book, its protagonist, Ulrich, a young Bulgarian man studying chemistry in Berlin, is walking down a corridor after Albert Einstein, who drops a sheaf of papers. When he picks them up and runs after the great man, Einstein thanks him by saying “I would be nothing without you.” Much later in life, after his own career has been a failure by all outward measures, and life has almost been crushed out of him by Soviet austerity, Ulrich comes to learn more about Einstein and his callousness to some of those closest to him, and realizes that genius feeds off the failure of others.

March 6, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Balkans, Commonwealth Prize, Literary, World Lit, y Award Winning Author

THE BORDER LORDS by T. Jefferson Parker

In his fourth Charlie Hood thriller, three-time Edgar winner Parker continues to mine the violent drug and arms trafficking over the Mexico/California border. Hood, 32, an L.A. Sheriff’s Department officer, has been on loan to the ATF for 15 months, assigned to drug operations in this “often infernal, often violent, often beautiful desert.” It’s a place Hood has come to love – and fear.

This time out the central plot concerns an undercover ATF agent, Sean Ozburn, who seems to have gone berserk. Early one morning, while his team (which includes Hood) is monitoring a trio of cartel-affiliated teen killers in a rented safe house, owned by the ATF, the cameras suddenly go dark and all three boys die in a hail of bullets.

February 5, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: California, Mexico, Sleuths Series, Wild West, y Award Winning Author

SWAMPLANDIA! by Karen Russell

In her hotly-anticipated debut novel, SWAMPLANDIA!, Karen Russell returns to the mosquito-droves and muggy-haze of the Florida Everglades and the gator-themed amusement park featured in her short story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” that opened her widely-praised 2006 collection, ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES. It was that collection, with its exuberant mix of satire and fabulism, that secured Russell’s reputation as one of the most exciting up-and-comers around and earned her a coveted spot on The New Yorker’s much buzzed about “20 under 40” list last fall. With her energetic prose, quirky settings, and fantastical plots, Russell is a writer’s whose style forces you to sit up and take notice, sometimes at the cost of emotional involvement with her work. However, Swamplandia!, with all its flashing-neon prose is an insightful (and surprisingly funny) exploration of the loss of innocence that inevitably follows the death of a parent.

February 2, 2011 · Judi Clark · 3 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Family Matters, Florida, Humorous, Unique Narrative

SMALL KINGDOMS by Anastasia Hobbet

In the period right after the first Gulf War, an uneasiness hung all over Kuwait—its residents forever waiting for Saddam Hussein to strike again. As an American expat in the country for five years around that same time period, author Anastasia Hobbet witnessed this unease first hand. It forms a perfect backdrop for her novel, Small Kingdoms, which tells the story of an assorted set of Kuwaiti and American characters.

January 27, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Class - Race - Gender, Middle East, World Lit