conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The Grief of Others about Times, York, Tom with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: An engrossing and revealing look at a family sinking beneath the weight of a terrible secret. the author writes about difficult subjects with unfailing compassion and insight. * Tom Perrotta, author of 'Little Children' * With gorgeous prose, the author skillfully takes us from past to present and back again as she explores the ramifications of family loss, grief and longing. * Kirkus * the author is one of our foremost chroniclers of the mundane complexities, nuanced tragedies and unexpected tendernesses of human connection. * New York Times Book Review * In this subtle portrait of family life she shows the maddening arithmetic of marriage, the useless attempts to balance the equation. * New York Times * Part of the novel's pathos lies in its ability to offer its characters a level of perceptive acuity and sympathetic attention they cannot offer one another... The book's brilliance lies in moments like this one, these shards of devastating insight. * San Francisco Chronicle * the author's stunning writing and ruthless, beautiful magnification of soul- crushing sorrow that threatens the Ryries' day-to-day family life mesmerizes, wounds, and possibly even heals her readers. * Library Journal * With this incredibly moving commentary, the author has secured a place in the lineup of today's great writers. * Bookpage * the author's new novel is a perceptive, absorbing drama about the complex bonds of the modern American family and the treacherous paradox of the way we live now. Somehow, the more open and flexible we try to become as spouses and parents, the more emotional risks we take-and the more secrets we keep. I love how deeply the author delves into the hearts of all her characters, bringing them fully alive, from their most heroic strivings to their darkest flaws. -- Julia Glass, author of 'The Widower's Tale' How does a family transcend its own pain? How do the secrets we keep shape our lives and the lives of those we love? In this gracefully written, elegantly structured novel, the author has created an indelible cast of characters whose story is at once wrenching and redemptive. This is a beautiful book. -- Dani Shapiro, author of 'Family History' A gorgeous, absorbing, intricately told tale of one family on the brink of collapse, as well as an intimate exploration of art and its place in our lives. the author expertly juggles six characters and all their needs, yearning, wounds, and secrets with tremendous skill and even more important-deep and tender compassion. She is a masterly writer on every level. -- Lily King, author of 'Father of the Rain' A delicate, haunting, and lovely, and very difficult to leave on the shelf. -- Susanna Daniel, author of 'Stiltsville' A wise and compassionate novel that looks frankly at the ways members of a family can wound and betray each other, even when trying to do just the opposite. Readers will be tempted to vilify Ricky, but she's much too complex for that. Despite the lies, subterfuges, and silences these characters inflict on one another, there are no villains here, just a family trying to carry on. -- Suzanne Berne, author of 'The Ghost at the Table' At once compact and sweeping. the author never strikes a false note in relating the complicated emotions of her characters. She has created a world both universal and particular. She illuminates all the ways it is glorious to be burdened with full-fledged humanity in the vast universe. -- Robb Forman Dew, author of 'The Evidence Against Her' the author writes like a dream and effortlessly inhabits each of her characters. She's not much known here yet, but lovers of family relationship literary fiction, such as Anne Tyler fans, need look no further. -- John Harding * Daily Mail * the author shows how people are warped by things that they choose to keep secret; her writing is wise and incredibly moving. -- Kate Saunders * Times * The Grief of Others has a lyrical bent and is affecting in its examination of unresolved sorrow * The Age, Australia *
  						  	
  						    	--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Grief of Others
  I've read that Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll were managers of their own miniature theaters. There must have been many other such playhouses in the world.We study the history and literature of the period, but we know nothing about these plays that were being performed for an audience of one.
  His lips: how barely pink they were, the pink of the rim of the sky at winter dusk. And in their curl—in the way the upper lip rose to peaks and dipped down again, twice, like a bobbing valentine; and in the way the lower bowed out, luxuriant, lush, as if sated already from a lifetime of pleasures—how improbably expressive were his lips.
  His hands like sea creatures curled and stretched, as if charged with purpose and intent. Five of his fingers closed around one of his mother's and held it while he slept. He was capable of this.
  The whorls of his ears were as marvelously convoluted as any Escher drawing, the symmetry precise, the lobes little as teardrops, soft as peaches. The darkness of the ear hole a portal to the part of him that wasn't there, that hadn't fully formed, that spelled his end.
  His mother had been led to believe that the whole vault of his skull would be missing, raw nerve tissue gruesomely visible beneath a window of membrane. She'd pictured a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup, the top removed, the yolk gleaming and exposed. She'd braced herself for protuberant eyes, flattened nose, folded ears, cleft palate: the features of an anencephalic infant. But the opening in his skull was no bigger than a silver dollar, and all his features lovely. She believed, at first, triumphantly, that the diagnosis had been made in error, that now the doctors, seeing the baby, would be forced to downgrade their diagnosis to something less serious—still severe, perhaps, but not lethal.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'It was a hackneyed routine that remained somehow fresh, and Jess, who had recognized them both, did not suppress a laugh'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It was a hackneyed routine that remained somehow fresh, and Jess, who had recognized them both, did not suppress a laugh. At the sound the man turned toward her, shading his eyes. He looked hesitant, then surprised.
  What was his name? Greg, Gregory? They'd sat in the kitchen together for a long time, the day she'd arrived. His presence had mitigated, in a way, the awkwardness of her own unexpected arrival. Was it Jordan?
  Oh, well: "Hi!" she called, waving. She snatched up her clogs, began walking toward him. "It's Jess.We met"—jabbing a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the Ryries' house and enjoying, even as the words flew out of her mouth unbidden, the absurdity of the statement—"over tea and Biscuit."
  When no one responded, she added this word to the board, the chalk flashing with such urgency that the final result was legible only by broad stretch of the imagination. Ms. Nuñez whipped back around to face the class. She wore her hair slicked so tight it looked painted on, except at the back, where her ponytail bobbed and swung.
  Here it came now, so predictable Paul could almost laugh, a jibe from Stephen Boyd, speaking low enough that his remark didn't carry all the way to the front, loud enough to set off a staccato burst of snorts and giggles around the desks in back: "That's how Ryrie's parents had him."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And what of the boxes? Would it alter the course of understanding in any meaningful way to know whether Madeleine's Piers was able to get the Joiner Boxes a show, either in a museum or a gallery, or to persuade the friend's colleague (or colleague's friend) to buy one, or two, or the entire lot? What, for that matter, of Madeleine? Is it necessary to know whether she and John kissed that night, whether they took off all their clothes up under the skylight in her crooked little bungalow, or whether John found himself so moved, so shaken—by the wire magician; or by the dead man whose hands had wrought it, whose loneliness had conceived it; or by Madeleine Berkowitz herself and the realization, the revelation of how small he had been and how shamed he was to have ridiculed her all these years; or by the thought of his wife, his troublesome, troubling wife, at that moment still wet-haired from her swim at the Y and waiting for him, with her mix of ingenuity and ingenuousness, her unpardonable absence and her irremediable presence, her lies and fears and honest, enduring appetite for him—that he excused himself in a jumble of apologies and went home chaste?
  Could it be that attempting to answer any of these questions might amount to arrogance, to a kind of conceit verging on blasphemy? Could there be a point beyond which it would be hubris to proceed?
  We know more than we pretend to know. More than we presume we know. Even so, what we know would fill a teaspoon.
  Elsewhere in Memorial Park, as the four Ryries kneel by the river, rinsing from their hands the ashes of the fifth, a teenage girl in an army jacket is writing curse words on her wrist with a ballpoint pen. Six boys in muscle shirts cut a diagonal across the grass, making noises in imitation of drunkenness. A girl who lost a tooth last night executes her first cartwheel. A man who lost his virginity last night tries to assemble a kite. A young woman with a cane bends to drink from the fountain. A little boy, poking in the dirt, finds what he is sure is a diamond. An old man, scrunching his sandwich wrapper, throws it toward the trash, missing by a foot.
  And now as the Ryries start the climb with their hollow box, heading for home where the pancake batter stands mixed and ready to pour, a red-haired man comes down the hill. He holds the leash of a large black dog, and as they draw even with the middle house on the block, they slow, both of them, man and dog, almost involuntarily, almost without noticing, and turn their heads in concert—a movement inadvertently beautiful, also comic—to look openly, hopefully, toward the door.