Download or read book The Shadow of Memory written by Bernard Comment and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this eerie, compelling, and playful novel, a young man tormented by his feeble memory meets an elderly man, Robert, endowed with the recall of an elephant. Soon, in exchange for becoming his live-in servant, Robert agrees to allow his young protégé to inherit his prodigious memory upon his death. While this might seem a fair if absurd exchange, Robert's demands become progressively more macabre, until the narrator is forced to decide what he is truly willing to sacrifice for the ability to remember. The debut novel of Bernard Comment, acclaimed author and editor, now available in English for the first time, The Shadow of Memory brings a fairy-tale premise into the modern world, where information—and its loss—can be a matter of life and death.
Download or read book The Hooligan s Return written by Norman Manea and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the center of The Hooligan’s Return is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea’s book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny. Manea speaks of the bloodiest time of the twentieth century and of the emergence afterward of a global, competitive, and sometimes cynical modern society. Both a harrowing memoir and an ambitious epic project, The Hooligan’s Return achieves a subtle internal harmony as anxiety evolves into a delicate irony and a burlesque fantasy. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the work of a writer with an acute understanding of the vast human potential for both evil and kindness, obedience and integrity.
Download or read book October Eight O clock written by Norman Manea and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1994-01-21 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short stories stemming from the Romanian author's detention in a Nazi concentration camp as a child evokes a sense of the horror and absurdity of war and Romanian politics.
Download or read book On Clowns written by Norman Manea and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Survivor of the Nazi camps and Ceausescu's Romania, winner of the National Book Award, recipient of a MacArthur Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Norman Manea, an extraordinary man of letters, "gives us a taste of something beyond the scope of even our twentieth-century imagination. . . . Manea is too profound a witness to place his gift for observation in the service of another sensualist account. . . . What matters for him is the phenomenon of an entire nation's life under this simultaneously grotesque and terrifying rule." -- The New Republic
Download or read book The Living Fire written by Edward Hirsch and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and significant collection of more than one hundred poems, drawn from a lifetime of “wild gratitude” in poetry. In poems chronicling insomnia (“the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark, those crossroads / where we meet the dead”), art and culture (poems on Edward Hopper and Paul Celan, love poems in the voices of Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein, a meditation on two suitcases of children’s drawings that came out of the Terezin concentration camp), and his own experience, including the powerful, frank self-examinations in his more recent work, Edward Hirsch displays stunning range and quality. Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the “skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.” Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that burns with a ferocious intensity.
Download or read book The Silent Woman written by Monika Zgustová and published by Feminist Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rapturous novel of love, longing and exile, The Silent Woman depicts a woman's life against a backdrop of war and political turmoil. Sylva, half Czech and half German, is born into an aristocratic family and lives outside Prague. She marries a man she doesn't love and is seduced by the joyful madness of Paris in the 1920s. When the Nazis force her to state her loyalty, she yields, not realising how this decision will haunt the rest of her life. Later in communist Prague, Sylva is destitute. When she learns a long lost love was sent to the Gulags, she goes searching for him.
Download or read book The Bear Boy written by Cynthia Ozick and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Sparky, mischievous, witty, dazzlingly clever' Ali Smith 'A cause for celebration. Here we have a heroine to love, a story we can't let go of' Ann Patchett It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. 1930s New York is filling with Europe's ousted dreamers, turned overnight into refugees. Rose Meadows, book-loving and orphaned at eighteen, takes a job as assistant to the eccentric Professor Mitwisser. Cast out from Berlin's elite, the Mitwisser family's household is chaotic and Rosie's fate there hangs on the arrival of the Mitwissers' mysterious benefactor, James A'Bair. Inspired by the real Christopher Robin, James is the Bear Boy, the son of a famous children's author. Running from his own fame, James was boy adored by the world but has grown into a bitter man. It falls to Rosie to help them all resist James's reckless orbit.
Download or read book Foreign Bodies written by Cynthia Ozick and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her sixth novel, Cynthia Ozick retells the story of Henry James’s The Ambassadors as a photographic negative, retaining the plot but reversing the meaning. Foreign Bodies transforms Henry James’s prototype into a brilliant, utterly original, new American classic. At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to leave New York for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of her brother’s family and even, after so long, her ex-husband. Every one of them is irrevocably changed by the events of just a few months in that fateful year. Traveling from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, facing her ex-husband and finally shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past, Bea Nightingale is a newly liberated divorcee who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the very people she tries to help.
Download or read book Unquiet Vietnam written by Gibson Square Books, Limited and published by Gibson Square. This book was released on 2022-07-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unquiet Vietnam retraces the ancient Vietnamese civilisation that has has been crushed by an avalanche of 21st century foreign investment following the violent mixture of French Colonialism and American imperialism. Visiting people such as the last remaining member of the Vietnamese imperial family, he becomes paints Indochina's twisted history as the military playground of empires--like the Middle East today--and uncovers an ancient culture struggling to remain alive as global forces pile in.
Download or read book The Lair written by Norman Manea and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leaving their motherland behind, a professor, his ex-wife, and her lover seek a place and voice in America, where they discover that the shackles of their native totalitarian and nationalist ideologies are impossible to break.
Download or read book Captives written by Norman Manea and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning novel set in postwar Romania about language, identity, and loss.
Download or read book Redefining Europe written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On May 1, 2004, the European Union expanded dramatically. Ten new countries on the periphery of the old union were absorbed, changing the EU in many ways. How can we redefine Europe now? What is its meaning? Is “Europe” just a theoretical concept or, worse yet, merely a small geographical region? Or, on the contrary, is Europe re-emerging as a Western civilization of its own, a North Atlantic partner? Many scholars believe that federalism should play the central role as 25 member states seek to cooperate fully while simultaneously retaining their sovereignty. This volume, with new and thought-provoking contributions by leading experts, clarifies the issues and proposes ways in which federalism can rescue and preserve the new Europe.
Download or read book Ceau written by Christoph Büchel and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicolae Ceaucescu was Romanias leader between 1965 and December 1989, assisted by his wife Elena. As a result of the personality cult characteristic of any dictatorship, within this period hundreds of portraits of Elena and Nicolae were realized by artists all over the country. CEAU is an art book that presents a selection of these portraits preserved in the storage vaults of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. These artworks had either been commissioned by a variety of political bodies within the Socialist Republic of Romania or had been offered to the Ministry of Culture as a gift by the artists themselves before the fall of the Ceaucescu regime. A transcript of the trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceaucescu on the 25th December 1989 rounds off the publication.
