Download or read book Accabadora written by Michela Murgia and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award winning Accabadora is an exceptional English–language debut, written with intriguing subtlety reflecting a sensual picture of local Italian life and death in villages during the 1950's. A time where family ties and obligations still decide much of life's ebb and flow. A must read for those who love a touch of the unusual. Formerly beautiful and at one time betrothed to a fallen soldier, Bonaria Urrai has a long held covenant with the dead. Midwife to the dying, easing their suffering and sometimes ending it, she is revered and feared in equal measure as the village's Accabadora. When Bonaria adopts Maria, the unloved fourth child of a widow, she tries to shield the girl from the truth about her role as an angel of mercy. Moved by the pleas of a young man crippled in an accident, she breaks her golden rule of familial consent, and in the recriminations that follow, Maria rejects her and flees Sardinia for Turin. Adrift in the big city, Maria strives as ever to find love and acceptance, but her efforts are overshadowed by the creeping knowledge of a debt unpaid, of a duty and destiny that must one day be hers. Accabadora has been awarded seven major literary prizes, including Italy's prestigious Premio Campiello.
Download or read book How to Be a Fascist written by Michela Murgia and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first and only guide to turning your 21st century democracy into a fascist paradise. Democracy is difficult, flawed and unstable. It involves barely distinguishable political parties taking part in lengthy, overcomplicated and expensive decision-making processes. Trying to engage so many people with political issues seems to lead only to complexity and disagreement. So why bother? Doesn't fascism guarantee a more effective and efficient management of the state? In this short, bitingly ironic mixture of On Tyranny and The Psychopath Test, Italian political activist Michela Murgia explores the logic that is attracting increasing numbers of voters to right-wing populism. Far from its origins in the 20th century, fascism is once again on the rise in an age of increased connectivity and globalism. Murgia shows how many of the elements of our society that we might think would combat closed-mindedness and xenophobia actually fan the flames. Closing with a "fascistometer" to measure the reader's own authoritarian inclinations, How to be a Fascist is a refreshingly direct, polemical book that asks us to confront the fascisim in our governments, in our societies, and in our own political leanings.
Download or read book A Girl Returned written by Donatella Di Pietrantonio and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the best Italian novels of the year” in a pitch-perfect rendering in English by Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator (Huffington Post, Italy). Winner of the Campiello Prize A 2019 Best Book of the Year (The Washington Post Kirkus Reviews Dallas Morning News) Told with an immediacy and a rare expressive intensity that has earned it countless adoring readers and one of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes, A Girl Returned is a powerful novel rendered with sensitivity and verve by Ann Goldstein, translator of the works of Elena Ferrante. Set against the stark, beautiful landscape of Abruzzo in central Italy, this is a compelling story about mothers and daughters, about responsibility, siblings, and caregiving. Without warning or explanation, an unnamed thirteen-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, tension, and conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build a new and enduring sense of self. “An achingly beautiful book, and an utterly devastating one.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Di Pietrantonio [has a] lively way with a phrase (the translator, Ann Goldstein, shows the same sensitivity she does with Elena Ferrante) [and] a fine instinct for detail.” —The Washington Post “A gripping, deeply moving coming-of-age novel; immensely readable, beautifully written, and highly recommended.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Captivating.” —The Economist
Download or read book At the Wolf s Table written by Rosella Postorino and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The international bestseller based on a haunting true story that raises provocative questions about complicity, guilt, and survival. They called it the Wolfsschanze, the Wolf’s Lair. “Wolf” was his nickname. As hapless as Little Red Riding Hood, I had ended up in his belly. A legion of hunters was out looking for him, and to get him in their grips they would gladly slay me as well. Germany, 1943: Twenty-six-year-old Rosa Sauer’s parents are gone, and her husband Gregor is far away, fighting on the front lines of World War II. Impoverished and alone, she makes the fateful decision to leave war-torn Berlin to live with her in-laws in the countryside, thinking she’ll find refuge there. But one morning, the SS come to tell her she has been conscripted to be one of Hitler’s tasters: three times a day, she and nine other women go to his secret headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, to eat his meals before he does. Forced to eat what might kill them, the tasters begin to divide into The Fanatics, those loyal to Hitler, and the women like Rosa who insist they aren’t Nazis, even as they risk their lives every day for Hitler’s. As secrets and resentments grow, this unlikely sisterhood reaches its own dramatic climax, as everyone begins to wonder if they are on the wrong side of history.
Download or read book Far from My Father written by Véronique Tadjo and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To attain some sort of universal value," Véronique Tadjo has said, "a piece of work has to go deep into the particular in order to reveal our shared humanity." In Far from My Father, the latest novel from this internationally acclaimed author, a woman returns to the Côte d'Ivoire after her father’s death. She confronts not only unresolved family issues that she had left behind but also questions about her own identity that arise amidst the tensions between traditional and modern worlds. The drama that unfolds tells us much about the evolving role of women, the legacy of polygamy, and the economic challenges of daily life in Abidjan. On a more autobiographical level, the author depicts a daughter’s efforts to come to terms with what she knew and did not know about her father. Set against the backdrop of civil strife that has wracked the Côte d'Ivoire since the turn of the century, this story shows Tadjo’s remarkable ability to inhabit a character’s inner world and emotional landscape while creating a narrative of great historic and cultural dimensions. CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from the French
Download or read book I Francis written by Carretto, Carlo and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The 40th anniversary edition of an Orbis classic-Francis of Assisi's spirituality and life explained in the inimitable voice of Carlo Carretto"--
Download or read book Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio written by Amara Lakhous and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author (Publishers Weekly). Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building’s elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. With language as colorful as the neighborhood it describes, each character takes his or her turn “giving evidence.” Their various stories reveal much about the drama of racial identity and the anxieties of a life spent on society’s margins, but also bring to life the hilarious imbroglios of this melting pot Italian culture. “Their frequently wild testimony teases out intriguing psychological and social insight alongside a playful whodunit plot.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Tom s Midnight Garden written by Philippa Pearce and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tom is not prepared for what is about to happen when he hears the grandfather clock strike thirteen. Outside the back door is a garden, which everyone tells him does not exist."--Page 4 de la couverture.
Download or read book 70 Acrylic 30 Wool written by Viola Di Grado and published by Europa Editions UK. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this courageous, inventive, irreverent, and shrewd novel, Viola Di Grado tells the story of a suicide and what follows. She gives voice to an astonishing vision of life after life, portraying the awful longing and sense of loss that plague the dead, together with the solitude provoked by the impossibility of communicating. The afterlife itself is seen as a dark, seething place where one is preyed upon by the cruel and unrelenting elements. Hollow Heart will frighten as it provokes, enlighten as it causes concern. If ever there were a novel that follows Kafka's prescription for a book to be an axe for the frozen sea within us, it is Hollow Heart. In this, Di Grado's second novel after 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, the twenty-seven-year-old prodigy gives proof of her reputation as a singular and explosive talent.
Download or read book A Winter Book written by Tove Jansson and published by Sort of Books. This book was released on 2011-12-14 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Beautifully crafted and deceptively simple-seeming, these stories are like pieces of scattered light.' Ali Smith Following the widely acclaimed and bestselling The Summer Book, here is A Winter Book collection of some of Tove Jansson's best loved and most famous stories. Drawn from youth and older age, and spanning most of the twentieth century, this newly translated selection provides a thrilling showcase of the great Finnish writer's prose, scattered with insights and home truths. It has been selected and is introduced by Ali Smith. A Winter Book features 13 stories from Tove Jansson's first book for adults, The Sculptor's Daughter (1968) plus seven of her most cherished later stories (from 1971 to 1996), translated into English and published here for the first time.
Download or read book Cosima written by Grazia Deledda and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cosima" tells the story of an aspiring writer growing up in Nuoro, Sardinia during the last decades of the nineteenth century when formal education for women was rare and literary careers unheard-of. Based on Deledda's own life, the work describes a young woman's struggle against the dismay and disapproval of her family and friends at her creative ambitions. Yet it also reads like a charming fable with details of family life, rural traditions and wild bandits, and it is as much a novel of memory as of character or action. Deledda's characters are poor country folk driven by some predetermined force. Their loves are tragic, their lives as hard and as rigidly controlled as nature itself in the hills of Sardinia. Deledda creates memorable figures who play out their lives against this backdrop of mountains and bare plains, sheepfolds and vineyards. Shimmering in the distance is the sea and escape - for a few - to the Continent or America. In 1926 Grazia Deledda became the second woman and the second Italian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She wrote thirty-three novels, including "Reeds in the Wind," and many books of short stories, almost all set on Sardinia. Her work has become well known to English-speaking readers through Martha King's translations for Italica Press.
Download or read book Reeds in the Wind written by Grazia Deledda and published by Italica Pr. This book was released on 1999 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rugged landscape of Baronia on Sardinia sets the scene for this novel of crime, guilt and retribution. This novel presents the story of the Pintor sisters - from a family of noble landowners now in decline - their nephew Giacinto, and their servant Efix, who is trying to make up for a mysterious sin committed many years before. Around, below, and inside them the raging Mediterranean storms, the jagged mountains, the murmuring forests, and the gushing springs form a Greek chorus of witness to the tragic drama of this unforgiving land. Deledda tells her story with her characteristic love of the natural landscape and fascination with the folk culture of the island, with details about the famous religious festivals held in mountain encampments and the lore of the "dark beings who populate the Sardinian night, the fairies who live in rocks and caves, and the sprites with seven red caps who bother sleep." Introduction by the Sardinian ethnographer, Dolores Turchi.
Download or read book The Little Russian written by Susan Sherman and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an exciting new voice in historical fiction, an assured debut that should appeal to readers of Away by Amy Bloom or Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. The Little Russian tells the story of Berta Alshonsky, who revels in childhood memories of her time spent with a wealthy family in Moscow—a life filled with salons, balls and all the trappings of the upper class—very different from her current life as a grocer's daughter in the Jewish townlet of Mosny. So when a mysterious and cultured wheat merchant walks into the grocery, Berta's life is forever altered. She falls in love, unaware that he is a member of the Bund, The Jewish Worker's League, smuggling arms to the shtetls to defend them against the pogroms sweeping the Little Russian countryside. Married and established in the wheat center of Cherkast, Berta has recaptured the life she once had in Moscow. So when a smuggling operation goes awry and her husband must flee the country, Berta makes the vain and foolish choice to stay behind with her children and her finery. As Russia plunges into war, Berta eventually loses everything and must find a new way to sustain the lives and safety of her children. Filled with heart–stopping action, richly drawn characters, and a world seeped in war and violence; The Little Russian is poised to capture readers as one of the hand–selling gems of the season.
Download or read book The Eyelid written by S. D. Chrostowska and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Greater America, with sleep under siege, this lucid and prophetic novel of ideas depicts the end of human reverie. An unnamed, unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, diplomat of Onirica, a foreign republic of dreams, to resist a prohibition on sleep in near-future Greater America. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people’s nightmares and dreams. As Comprehensive Illusion – a social media-like entity that hijacks creativity – overtakes the masses, Chevauchet, the old radical, weakens and disappears, leaving our narrator to take up Chevauchet's dictum that "daydreaming is directly subversive” and forge ahead on his own. In slippery, exhilarating, and erudite prose, The Eyelid revels in the camaraderie of free thinking that can only happen on the lam, aiming to rescue a species that can no longer dream. "A slight but quick-witted and thoughtful philosophical parable that falls somewhere between Camus and Gaiman’s Sandman universe." —Kirkus Reviews "S. D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid is a brilliant, visionary satire on the digital mindscape of twenty-first-century late capitalism embodied in the new global state of Greater America. Insomnia is in; dreams are seditious; sleep is outlawed. Lulled by false fantasies projected by Artificial Intelligence (CI in the book), video games, and media collaborators, humans drug themselves to stay awake so they can slave through the now standard twenty-hour work days. Witty, oracular, Surreal, trenchant, politically astute, and often hilarious, The Eyelid is a throwback to the classics of the genre, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Samuel Butler's Erewhon. We are turning into a race of sleep-deprived automatons, Chrostowska warns, increasingly unable to mount political opposition or even dream a different future." —Douglas Glover
Download or read book The Passage Home to Meuse written by Gail Noble-Sanderson and published by Gail Noble-Sanderson. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteen twenty three France and as the world recovers from WWI, Marie Durant Chagall leaves the lavender fields of her home for New York, returning to study at La Hospital Pitie-Salpetriere with a grand scheme of opening a health clinic in rural Verdun. "The Passage Home to Meuse" is a riveting story of determination, tenacity and renewal.
Download or read book The World of Italian Folk Magic written by Rose Inserra and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient magical practices to integrate into everyday life. Drawing on her Italian strega (witch) heritage, Rose Inserra's guide to the folk magic of this ancient culture is a treasure trove of Italian folklore, customs, magic and healing practices that will simplify your life and declutter your mind and heart. These practices fulfill the most basic needs of life: warmth, nourishment and connection to the magical and the spiritual. Discover unique Italian witchcraft such as spells, charms and curse removal and learn how to make divination tools, protective amulets and invocations. You'll also find kitchen and herbal witchery with natural remedies to create, spells for love and potions, and recipes for food, wine and even beauty. Delve into Italian spiritual practices and learn about dreams, divination and working with your ancestors, saints and angels, deities, fairies and nature spirits. Brimming with history, culture, remedies, folklore, recipes and – most of all – magic, this book is for anyone fascinated by ancient magical practices with deep connections to nature and the environment – or who wants to discover their Italian heritage.
Download or read book Ring of Bright Water written by Gavin Maxwell and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume weaves together the Scottish otter stories from Gavin Maxwell's three non-fiction books, Ring of Bright Water (1960), The Rocks Remain (1963), and Raven Meet Thy Brother (1969). Maxwell was both an extraordinarily evocative writer and a highly unusual man. While touring the Iraqi marshes, he was captivated by an otter and became a devoted advocate of and spokesman for the species. He moved to a remote house in the Scottish highlands, co-habiting there with three otters and living an idyllic and isolated life – at least for a while. Fate, fame, and fire conspired against this paradise, and it, too, came to an end, though the journey was filled with incident and wonder. Maxwell was also talented as an artist, and his sinuous line drawings of these amphibious and engaging creatures, and the homes they occupied, illustrate his story. This book stands as a lasting tribute to a man, his work, and his passion. It was received and has endured as a classic for its portrait not only of otters but also of a man who endured heartaches and disappointments, whose life embodied both greatness and tragedy. He writes with rare eloquence about his birth, his devotion to the beloved Scottish highlands, and the wildlife he loved, while refusing to ignore the darker aspects of his nature and of nature in its larger sense.
