Enid Shomer's Books

Black Drum

Poems

By: Enid Shomer

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In Black Drum, Enid Shomer fuses mind with body, knowledge with physical being, and affirms the capacity of language to accomplish this fusion. With clearly fashioned images, her focus often narrows on close particulars or leaps to wide angles, as in these lines from the title poem in which the narrator is battling a fish: We had been struggling for ten minutes—a lifetime—over whose world would prevail: his, with its purled edges and continuous center, or mine with its yin and yang, its surface incised into sky and sea, the land like a scar between. The characters in Shomer’s poems discover the ceaseless motion of living in the body and the inevitability of decay. In “Notes from the Sketch book of Gustav Klimt,” Shomer boldly says, “I have always balked / at the purely decorative, / but then I saw that the symbolic / could stir us by its absence.” Black Drum insists that life on earth speaks of transformation and transience; epiphany can happen any where, with “schemes illegal and grand” with slot machines, race horses, dead or estranged relatives, and lost love. Enid Shomer signals us to make the most of life, despite our limitations and in the face of bewildering catastrophe.

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Publisher

University of Arkansas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1557284970

ISBN 13

9781557284976

Tourist Season

Stories

By: Enid Shomer

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Tourist Season

Stories

By: Enid Shomer

In Tourist Season, award-winning author Enid Shomer offers ten brilliant, richly detailed unforgettable stories of resilient women, aged seventeen to seventy, each at a pivotal point in her life. Their journeys cross distances of place and mind: A middle-aged Floridian who learns that she is the reincarnation of a Buddhist saint takes daring steps on her path to enlightenment; a long-buried secret forces one woman to leave the daughter she deeply loves; a Radcliffe student faces shocking family truths and taboos during the summer of 1966; an unexpected kinship forms between two women who land in a county jail after an excursion to Las Vegas. These travelers wander through shifting emotional landscapes of love, sex, and relationships, and often miss the destinations they’d wished to reach–of insight, connection, and understanding. Whether journeying to new geographical locales or exploring uncharted personal terrain, Tourist Season offers a provocative, engaging, and often humorous road map of the heart and soul. “[When reading Enid Shomer’s stories,] the thing one quickly senses is the will and the voice, someone saying, in effect, ‘Relax, be comfortable, I’m going to take good care of you.’ These are very fine stories.” –James Salter, in Imaginary Men “Beautifully made, surprising and inevitable, wonderfully inventive and deeply true, these stories are full of small, irreverent, straight-faced miracles. They will lead women of all ages to suspect that the best may be yet to come.” ––Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sight Hound

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Page Count

269

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307492060

ISBN 13

9780307492067

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

By: Enid Shomer

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The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

By: Enid Shomer

A tale inspired by their 1850 journey up the Nile imagines shared encounters between Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, during which they overcame considerable differences to forge a bond of intelligence, humor, and passion.

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Page Count

481

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1451642970

ISBN 13

9781451642971

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

By: Enid Shomer

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The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

By: Enid Shomer

Before she became the nineteenth century’s greatest heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled down the Nile at the same time. In the imaginative leap taken by award-winning writer Enid Shomer’s The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, the two ignite a passionate friendship marked by intelligence, humor, and a ravishing tenderness that will alter both their destinies. In 1850, Florence, daughter of a prominent English family, sets sail on the Nile chaperoned by longtime family friends and her maid, Trout. To her family’s chagrin—and in spite of her wealth, charm, and beauty—she is, at twenty-nine and of her own volition, well on her way to spinsterhood. Meanwhile, Gustave and his good friend Maxime Du Camp embark on an expedition to document the then largely unexplored monuments of ancient Egypt. Traumatized by the deaths of his father and sister, and plagued by mysterious seizures, Flaubert has dropped out of law school and writ-ten his first novel, an effort promptly deemed unpublishable by his closest friends. At twenty-eight, he is an unproven writer with a failing body. Florence is a woman with radical ideas about society and God, naive in the ways of men. Gustave is a notorious womanizer and patron of innumerable prostitutes. But both burn with unfulfilled ambition, and in the deft hands of Shomer, whose writing The New York Times Book Review has praised as “beautifully cadenced, and surprising in its imaginative reach,” the unlikely soul mates come together to share their darkest torments and most fervent hopes. Brimming with adventure and the sparkling sensibilities of the two travelers, this mesmerizing novel offers a luminous combination of gorgeous prose and wild imagination, all of it colored by the opulent tapestry of mid-nineteenth-century Egypt.

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Page Count

481

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1451642989

ISBN 13

9781451642988

Tourist Season

Stories

By: Enid Shomer

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Tourist Season

Stories

By: Enid Shomer

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Page Count

269

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307492060

ISBN 13

9780307492067

Simon & Schuster 2012 Fiction Sampler

By: John Irving,Carol Anshaw,Chris Cleave,Vaddey Ratner,Enid Shomer,Natalie Bakopoulos

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Simon & Schuster 2012 Fiction Sampler

By: John Irving,Carol Anshaw,Chris Cleave,Vaddey Ratner,Enid Shomer,Natalie Bakopoulos

This free sampler features extended excerpts from six novels coming in 2012 from Simon & Schuster. The books and authors presented in this sampler include In One Person, the first new novel in three years from John Irving, Carry the One by Carol Anshaw, Gold by Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee, In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer, and The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos. In addition to these exclusive previews, the sample includes interviews with the writers and commentary from the books’ editors.

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