Good Faith
by Jane Smiley (Knopf) Jane Smiley brings her extraordinary
gifts—comic timing, empathy, emotional wisdom, an ability to deliver slyly on
big themes and capture the American spirit—to the seductive, wishful, wistful
world of real estate, in which the sport of choice is the mind game. Her funny
and moving new novel is about what happens when the American Dream morphs into a
seven-figure American Fantasy.
Joe Stratford is someone you like at once. He makes an honest living helping
nice people buy and sell nice houses. His not-very-amicable divorce is finally
settled, and he’s ready to begin again. It’s 1982. He is pretty happy, pretty
satisfied. But a different era has dawned; Joe’s new friend, Marcus Burns from
But is Joe ready for the kind of success Marcus promises he can deliver? And
what’s the real scoop on Salt Key Farm? Is this really the development
opportunity of a lifetime?
And then there’s Felicity Ornquist, the lovely, feisty, winning (and married)
daughter of Joe’s mentor and business partner. She has finally owned up to her
feelings for Joe: she’s just been waiting for him to be available.
The question Joe asks himself, over and over, is, Does he have the gumption?
Does he have the smarts and the imagination and the staying power to pay
attention—to Marcus and to Felicity—and reap the rewards?
Good Faith captures the seductions and illusions that can seize
Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned by Kinky Friedman
006620979X (William Morrow) Walter Snow is doomed. He stares at the blank pages
in his typewriter for longer than he cares to admit, hoping for the spark that
will finally fulfill his ambition to write The Great Armenian Novel.
And then he meets Clyde Potts. She is beautiful, intelligent, charming, perhaps
psychic and, very possibly unbalanced. With Potts, Snow is caught up in a series
of pranks against corporate sprawl that they execute with a bit of booze, and
some wacky tobaccy from
Things spin out of control and Walter is left to wonder if the only things you
ever keep in this life are the things you let slip through your fingers.
A tale on the nature of sanity, the cost of inspiration, and the art and
business of creativity,
Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned has the absurd and provocative hijinks that
could have only come from the fertile and frenzied mind Kinky Friedman, the
author of 16 mysteries and a columnist for Texas Monthly.
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