Norman Rush

While in Africa to work on her thesis project, an American anthropologist falls for Nelson Denoon, the charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a highly secretive utopian society. Reprint. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

Mating

In the heart of Botswana, the live of three ex-patriate Americans--a contract CIA agent undercover in the guise of an English instructor at a private school, his disaffected wife, and an iconoclastic black holistic physician--entangle with that of a local populist leader as a violent insurrection erupts in the area. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Mortals

Ned and Nina are trying to conceive, so when Ned jets off with no notice to the funeral of Douglas, a mysterious friend from his student days, Nina follows him so they can have sex on time. Douglas was the ringleader of a fellowship of chums at NYU and Nina is baffled by the extraordinary hold the group - and Douglas in particular - have on Ned. The novel explores the reconfiguring and reappraisal of the clique following Douglas's tragic death. Subtle Bodies asks why we make the friends we do, why we keep them and how we make sense of our personal histories. It is a wise, funny and keenly observed portrayal of shifting relationships and new truths emerging from old certainties. Like all of Rush's work it embodies the dictum 'fiction is truth told excessively and beautifully'. It is a warm-hearted and pitch-perfect master class in the art of the novel.

Subtle Bodies

Georges Simenon

Marc Romano

Tropic Moon (New York Review Books Classics)

When Douglas, the ringleader of a clique of self-styled wits of "superior sensibility" dies suddenly, his four remaining friends are summoned to his luxe estate high in the Catskills to memorialize his life and mourn his passing.

Subtle bodies

Six stories deal with a student anthropologist in South Africa, vacationing couples, a young thief, a seductive conversation, a South African and his American wife, and a lonely widower

Stories

Whites

In his long-awaited new novel, Norman Rush, author of three immensely praised books set in Africa, including the best-selling classic and National Book Award-winner Mating, returns home, giving us a sophisticated, often comical, romp through the particular joys and tribulations of marriage, and the dilemmas of friendship, as a group of college friends reunites in upstate New York twenty-some years after graduation. When Douglas, the ringleader of a clique of self-styled wits of “superior sensibility” dies suddenly, his four remaining friends are summoned to his luxe estate high in the Catskills to memorialize his life and mourn his passing. Responding to an obscure sense of emergency in the call, Ned, our hero, flies in from San Francisco (where he is the main organizer of a march against the impending Iraq war), pursued instantly by his furious wife, Nina: they’re at a critical point in their attempt to get Nina pregnant, and she’s ovulating! It is Nina who gives us a pointed, irreverent commentary as the friends begin to catch up with one another. She is not above poking fun at some of their past exploits and the things they held dear, and she’s particularly hard on the departed Douglas, who she thinks undervalued her Ned. Ned is trying manfully to discern what it was that made this clutch of souls his friends to begin with, before time, sex, work, and the brutal quirks of history shaped them into who they are now––and, simultaneously, to guess at what will come next. Subtle Bodies is filled with unexpected, funny, telling aperçus, alongside a deeper, moving exploration of the meanings of life. A novel of humor, small pleasures, deep emotions. A novel to enjoy and to ponder. This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Norman Rush

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