Download or read book City of Tranquil Light written by Bo Caldwell and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What ardent, dazzling souls emerge from these American missionaries in China . . . A beautiful, searing book that leaves an indelible presence in the mind." —Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist's Daughter Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve the lives of the people of Kuang P'ing Ch'eng— City of Tranquil Light, a place they come to love—and face incredible hardship, will their faith and relationship be enough to sustain them? Told through Will and Katherine's alternating viewpoints—and inspired by the lives of the author's maternal grandparents—City of Tranquil Light is a tender and elegiac portrait of a young marriage set against the backdrop of the shifting face of a beautiful but torn nation. A deeply spiritual book, it shows how those who work to teach others often have the most to learn, and is further evidence that Bo Caldwell writes "vividly and with great historical perspective" (San Jose Mercury News).
Download or read book The Distant Land of My Father written by Bo Caldwell and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna had a charmed childhood in 1930s Shanghai with her smuggler father. Anna and her mother fled the Japanese occupation and settled in California, but her father stayed behind. Fifteen years later, Anna is grown with a family of her own in Los Angeles when her father reappears.
Download or read book A Lady Cyclist s Guide to Kashgar written by Suzanne Joinson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1923 and Evangeline English, keen lady cyclist, arrives with her sister Lizzie and their zealous leader Millicent at the ancient city of Kashgar to establish a mission. As they encounter resistance and calamity, Eva commences work on her Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar...In present-day London, Frieda opens her door to find a man sleeping on the landing. Tayeb, a Yemeni refugee, has arrived in Frieda's life just as she learns that she is next-of-kin to a stranger, a woman whose abandoned flat contains many surprises. The two wanderers embark on a journey that is as great, and as unexpected, as Eva's.
Download or read book Peaceful Places Los Angeles written by Laura Randall and published by Menasha Ridge Press. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During her 1930s screenwriting days in Hollywood, wordsmith Dorothy Parker famously pegged Los Angeles as "72 suburbs in search of a city." Today even more communities radiate from the downtown core, creating a metropolitan universe of noise, speed, and congestion amid the glitter and bling. Los Angeles–based author Laura Randall knows just where to go for some urban stress relief. The second in a new guidebook series spotlighting calming sites in major U.S. cities, Peaceful Places: Los Angeles serves up a medley of soothing sanctuaries, panoramic vistas, fragrant gardens, restorative hideaways, and unexpected urban oases. Altogether, the entries present a feast for all five of the senses — not to mention the sixth sense, that perception that "this place quiets my soul."
Download or read book You Are Gods written by David Bentley Hart and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Bentley Hart offers an intense and thorough reflection upon the issue of the supernatural in Christian theology and doctrine. In recent years, the theological—and, more specifically, Roman Catholic—question of the supernatural has made an astonishing return from seeming oblivion. David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods presents a series of meditations on the vexed theological question of the relation of nature and supernature. In its merely controversial aspect, the book is intended most directly as a rejection of a certain Thomistic construal of that relation, as well as an argument in favor of a model of nature and supernature at once more Eastern and patristic, and also more in keeping with the healthier currents of mediaeval and modern Catholic thought. In its more constructive and confessedly radical aspects, the book makes a vigorous case for the all-but-complete eradication of every qualitative, ontological, or logical distinction between the natural and the supernatural in the life of spiritual creatures. It advances a radically monistic vision of Christian metaphysics but does so wholly on the basis of credal orthodoxy. Hart, one of the most widely read theologians in America today, presents a bold gesture of resistance to the recent revival of what used to be called “two-tier Thomism,” especially in the Anglophone theological world. In this astute exercise in classical Christian orthodoxy, Hart takes the metaphysics of participation, high Trinitarianism, Christology, and the soteriological language of theosis to their inevitable logical conclusions. You Are Gods will provoke many readers interested in theological metaphysics. The book also offers a vision of Christian thought that draws on traditions (such as Vedanta) from which Christian philosophers and theologians, biblical scholars, and religious studies scholars still have a great deal to learn.
Download or read book Territory of Light written by Yuko Tsushima and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the most significant contemporary Japanese writers, a haunting, dazzling novel of loss and rebirth “Yuko Tsushima is one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation.” —Foumiko Kometani, The New York Times I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back . . . It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become. At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire, and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time. It won the inaugural Noma Literary Prize.
Download or read book At Home in Mitford written by Jan Karon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-08 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A romance between an Anglican priest and a children's book writer who moves into his neighborhood. It is set in Mitford, North Carolina, where life is peaceful and problems are overcome with prayer and some good cooking." --Publisher.
Download or read book A Tranquil Star written by Primo Levi and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English publication of 17 classic Primo Levi stories marks the 20thanniversary of his death.
Download or read book Drifts written by Kate Zambreno and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work.” —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29 “Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.” —Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29 Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything. A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.
Download or read book Sea of Tranquility written by Emily St. John Mandel and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads “One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
Download or read book Hidden Gardens of Paris written by Susan Cahill and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the seasoned Parisian traveller or the novice looking to get off the beaten track Cahill provides a roadmap to parts of the city most visitors will never see In a city that is the destination of millions of travelers every year, it can be difficult to find your way to its lovely, serene spaces. Away from the madding crowds, the gardens of Paris offer the balm of flowers, tall old trees, fountains, ponds, sculptures, with quiet Parisians reading Le Monde, taking the sun, relishing the peace. These places are often tucked away, off the beaten tourist track, and without a guide they're easy to miss: The Jardin de l'Atlantique, out of sight on the roof of Gare Montparnasse. The enchanting Jardin de la Vallée Suisse, invisible from the street, accessible only if you know how to find the path. The Square Boucicaut, its children's carousel hidden inside a grove of oak and maples. Square Batignolles, the shade of the old chestnut trees an inspiration to the painter Édouard Manet and poet Paul Verlaine. Hidden Gardens of Paris features 40 such oases in quartiers both posh and plain, as well as dozens of others "Nearby" to the featured green space. It is arranged according to the geographic sections of the city—Île de la Cité, Left Bank, Right Bank, Western Paris, Eastern Paris—a lively and informative guide that focuses on each place as a site of passionate cultural memory.
Download or read book Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots written by Jessica Soffer and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A troubled teen turns to cooking lessons to win her emotionally distant mother’s love in this “moving [and] extraordinary” novel (The Atlantic). Lorca spends her life poring over cookbooks to earn the love of her distracted, angry mother, a prominent Manhattan chef who left Lorca’s father and is now packing her off to boarding school. Desperate to prove herself, Lorca resolves to track down the recipe for her mother’s ideal meal. She signs up for cooking lessons from Victoria, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant profoundly shaken by her husband’s death. Soon these two develop a deeper bond while their concoctions—cardamom pistachio cookies, baklava, and masgouf—bake in Victoria’s kitchen. But their individual endeavors force a reckoning with the past, the future, and the truth—whatever it might be. “Sassy, brash, acrobatic and colorful…I want to read it again and again.” —Time “Impressive…Soffer’s style is natural and assured.”—Meg Wolitzer, All Things Considered, NPR “Breathtaking…a profoundly redemptive story about loss, self-discovery, and acceptance.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Soffer’s prose is as controlled as it is fresh, as incisive as it is musical.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin
Download or read book The Seamstress written by Allison Pittman and published by NavPress. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully crafted story breathes life into the cameo character from the classic novel A Tale of Two Cities. France, 1788 It is the best of times . . . On a tranquil farm nestled in the French countryside, two orphaned cousins—Renée and Laurette—have been raised under the caring guardianship of young Émile Gagnon, the last of a once-prosperous family. No longer starving girls, Laurette and Renée now spend days tending Gagnon's sheep, and nights in their cozy loft, whispering secrets and dreams in this time of waning innocence and peace. It is the worst of times . . . Paris groans with a restlessness that can no longer be contained within its city streets. Hunger and hatred fuel her people. Violence seeps into the ornate halls of Versailles. Even Gagnon’s table in the quiet village of Mouton Blanc bears witness to the rumbles of rebellion, where Marcel Moreau embodies its voice and heart. It is the story that has never been told. In one night, the best and worst of fate collide. A chance encounter with a fashionable woman will bring Renée’s sewing skills to light and secure a place in the court of Queen Marie Antoinette. An act of reckless passion will throw Laurette into the arms of the increasingly militant Marcel. And Gagnon, steadfast in his faith in God and country, can only watch as those he loves march straight into the heart of the revolution.
Download or read book Rising Up Book One in the Tranquility Series written by Tanya Ross and published by Tanya Ross. This book was released on 2021-09-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A city under glass. A girl under pressure. When secrets come out, which one will break first? Sixteen-year-old empath Ember Vinata is devastated by her mother’s mysterious death. But in a disease-free domed metropolis where happiness is electronically monitored and enforced, expressing her grief means exile to The Outside. The only person who can help her is a smoking-hot government agent. When strange prophetic dreams compel her to investigate, and she discovers the source of the fatal illness, Ember is stunned to discover the perfect city in which she lives is nothing like it seems. And when her new boyfriend appears to be torn between seeking justice and remaining loyal to his oaths, she fears there is no one she can trust… …Or would her world be rocked by a criminal from The Outside? Ember’s quest for the truth could set her free – or make her a captive pawn.
Download or read book The Rings of Saturn written by W. G. Sebald and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The Rings of Saturn—with its curious archive of photographs—records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."
Download or read book The Poisoned City written by Anna Clark and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives. It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that time, twelve people had died and Flint’s children had suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun. In the first full account of this American tragedy, Anna Clark's The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.
Download or read book Living at the Crossroads written by Michael W. Goheen and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can Christians live faithfully at the crossroads of the story of Scripture and postmodern culture? In Living at the Crossroads, authors Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew explore this question as they provide a general introduction to Christian worldview. Ideal for both students and lay readers, Living at the Crossroads lays out a brief summary of the biblical story and the most fundamental beliefs of Scripture. The book tells the story of Western culture from the classical period to postmodernity. The authors then provide an analysis of how Christians live in the tension that exists at the intersection of the biblical and cultural stories, exploring the important implications in key areas of life, such as education, scholarship, economics, politics, and church.
