Download or read book Escape from Oblivia written by Brian Kindall and published by Diving Boy Books. This book was released on 2021-02-14 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will Kirby is floundering. Day in, day out, the poor slob trudges through the rain-drenched city with his mind drifting off to the adventurous fantasies by which he'd like to rewrite his life. Nothing ever seems to change. Until he meets Martine. Miraculously, Will's encounter with the sexy French librarian sets free the he-man adventurer chained in his soul, blurring the lines between reality and his fantasy world. The result is not exactly pretty. Let's just say, the guy is a bit rusty at being suave and heroic. Not to mention Martine is half his age. But these are mere technicalities Will is determined to ignore as he sets out to shape his life into the stuff of an action-packed adventure novel. It's a rough journey, one that will take him ever deeper into a world of she-bitch monsters, old-school tough guys, buxom nymphos, and apocalyptic mayhem. As Will nears the point of no return, he'll have to decide if the rewards of living an all-but-fictional existence are worth annihilating both his sanity and the very world he shares with his loving wife and daughter. Escape from Oblivia is a postmodernist homage to the men's adventure fiction of the 1950s and a satirical exploration of male tropes - damsel-saving hero, pants-wearing breadwinner, sensitive stay-at-home dad - Will falls hilariously short of any of these expectations. At turns sexist and sensitive, comic and circumspect, Escape from Oblivia is the story of one man's descent into the mind-erasing abyss of a midlife crisis gone primal.
Download or read book The Secret War written by Matt Myklusch and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sequel to: Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation.
Download or read book Pearl written by Brian Kindall and published by Diving Boy Books. This book was released on 2015-02-02 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pearl can’t move. She’s never wanted to, until now. Life above the waves beckons to her as she watches the boats moving along the surface of the water above her. Pearl is a statue carved of milk-white stone that has stood on the floor of an ancient sea for a thousand years, but she’s waking up, and she wants more. As desire builds within her, it propels her on a journey that takes her to an exotic island grotto, into the midst of a bloody revolution, underground into a rat-infested tomb, and, at last, to a magical mountain paradise. Crazed rebels, wise philosophers, greedy grave robbers, and a few other friendly people and fish accompany her along the way, as she asks the question, “Is desire enough?” She'll have to have faith in the stars. She'll have to muster more courage than she's ever imagined. But perhaps by journey's end, Pearl will believe in herself, experience a miracle, and realize her greatest desire of all.
Download or read book A Quest for Remembrance written by Madeleine Scherer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero’s quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a ‘memorious genre’ related to but distinct from the quest narrative.
Download or read book Delivering Virtue written by Brian Kindall and published by Diving Boy Books. This book was released on 2015-11-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fortuna and the Scapegrace written by Brian Kindall and published by Diving Boy Books. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Didier Rain has never been so destitute, forlorn, and in dire need of a bath. As he roams the rain-muddied streets of San Francisco, it appears the angels of good fortune have finally forsaken him. Hunted by factions that would seek to do him harm, and suffering an acute case of soul pain, the once dandy rogue sees little promise for sunnier days. But then, miraculously, all the stars of the cosmos move into a seemingly favorable position as a seductive albino soothsayer launches Rain onto the next leg of his life’s stormy voyage. Will said voyage carry Rain to the soft bosom of comfort and contentment he so longs for? Is he the Chosen One, singled out by providence to lead God’s people in their new South Seas church? And is Rain truly the newfangled man he believes himself to be? Or, as he fears, are the gods just having a bit of fun with their favorite gullible scalawag? At turns ribald, horrifying, and hilarious, Fortuna and the Scapegrace follows Delivering Virtue as book two in Didier Rain’s unfolding epic adventure of foibles, hope, and quest for love and redemption.
Download or read book Unseasonable written by Sarah Dimick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific. In Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities. In chapters ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s journals to Alexis Wright’s depiction of Australia’s catastrophic bushfires, from classical Tamil poetry to repeat photography, Dimick illustrates how seasonal rhythms determine what flourishes and what perishes. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when. Amid misaligned and broken rhythms, attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities within the climate crisis.
Download or read book Thirteenth Night written by Daniel Curzon and published by IGNA Books. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malvolio seeks revenge upon the whole pack of the, as promised in Twelfth Night
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel written by Nicholas Birns and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and provide vivid and original examples of what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler fiction by women writers through to literary images of the Anthropocene, from sexuality in the novels of Patrick White to Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's call for a sovereign First Nations literature. This book is an invitation to students, instructors, and researchers alike to expand and broaden their knowledge of the complex histories and crucial present of the Australian novel.
Download or read book Reimagining Urban Nature written by Chantelle Bayes and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reimagining Urban Nature questions some of the underlying imaginaries which have for so long allowed us humans to develop technologically at great cost to the more-than-human world and ourselves. In urban places, cultural and more-than-human entities are in frequent contact; however, the non-human is often seen as expendable in these human-centric places. While much important work has been done on improving care for the more rural and wild areas of the globe, to really address environmental damage we must work towards reimagining the city. These are places where the majority of people live and work, and where the majority of decisions are made about the care and protection of many environments within and beyond the city. This book contributes to the still under-developed field of urban ecocriticism by adding a posthumanist perspective, as well as expanding current discussions within urban studies and environmental activism that seek to shift political and cultural imaginaries of urban nature. Importantly, this investigation is grounded in the Australian (and more broadly, the Australasian) context to allow for the analysis of a more diverse set of voices, texts and ecologies in an area still dominated by the northern hemisphere and the Global North.
Download or read book Sparrow written by Brian Kindall and published by Diving Boy Books. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moonbeam Children's Book Awards Gold Medal for Pre-teen fiction 2022! Global Book Awards Gold Medal winner for children's literature 2022. A boy. A wish. A secret desire gone horribly wrong. Timothy Sperling misses his mom and dad terribly. Left behind with his morose uncle while they’re off on an expedition to avert an environmental crisis, the bird-boned boy would give anything to see them again. But when he spies a shooting star, instead of wishing to be reunited with his parents, he falters and asks for snow… only to conjure up a blizzard that won't quit! As a town that never sees winter is buried in mountains of white, Timothy teams up with a wise explorer to figure out how to stop the relentless frozen flakes. And with all the blame being shoveled on his family, the clever kid’s connection to sparrows may be his one chance to pull the city out of its deep freeze. Can Timothy undo his fateful wish and bring back the sunshine? Sparrow is a high-flying middle-grade novel. If you or your child like relatable characters, timeless settings, and high-stakes adventure, then you’ll love Brian Kindall’s feathered flurries. Buy Sparrow to take to the skies today!
Download or read book Neo Gothic Narratives written by Sarah E. Maier and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neo-Gothic Narratives defines and theorises what, exactly, qualifies as such a text, what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times, whether nostalgia plays a role and whether there is room for humour besides the sobriety and horror in these narratives across various media. What attracts us to the Gothic that makes us want to resurrect, reinvent, echo it? Why do we let the Gothic redefine us? Why do we let it haunt us? Does it speak to us through intertexuality, self-reflectivity, metafiction, immersion, affect? Are we reclaiming the history of women and other subalterns in the Gothic that had been denied in other forms of history? Are we revisiting the trauma of English colonisation and seeking national identity? Or are we simply tourists who enjoy cruising through the otherworld? The essays in this volume investigate both the readerly experience of Neo-Gothic narratives as well as their writerly pastiche.
Download or read book The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma written by Meera Atkinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relationship to broader society. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma adopts an interdisciplinary approach in examining how the literary testimony of familial transgenerational trauma, with its affective and relational contagion, illuminates transmissive cycles of trauma that have consequences across cultures and generations. It offers bold and insightful readings of works that explore those consequences in story-Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), H�l�ne Cixous's Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (1999), and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), concluding that such testimony constitutes a fundamentally feminist experiment and encounter. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma challenges the casting of familial trauma in ahistorical terms, and affirms both trauma and writing as social forces of political import.
Download or read book The Swan Book written by Alexis Wright and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hypnotic and “astonishingly inventive” (O, The Oprah Magazine) novel about an Aboriginal girl living in a future world turned upside down—where ancient myths exist side-by-side with present-day realities. Oblivia Ethelyne was given her name by an old woman who found her deep in the bowels of a gum tree, tattered and fragile, the victim of a brutal assault by wayward local youths. These are the years leading up to Australia’s third centenary, and the woman who finds her, Bella Donna of the Champions, is a refugee from climate change wars that devastated her country in the northern hemisphere. Bella Donna takes Oblivia to live with her on an old warship in a polluted dry swamp and there she fills Oblivia’s head with story upon story of swans. Fenced off from the rest of Australia by the Army, its traditional custodians left destitute, the swamp has become “the world’s most unknown detention camp” for Indigenous Australians. When Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia invades the swamp with his charismatic persona and the promise of salvation, Oblivia agrees to marry him, becoming First Lady, a role that has her confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. In this multilayered novel, winner of the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal, Wright toys with the edges of the world we live in and “deftly highlights the racial and cultural politics facing Australia's indigenous people in a story that defies genre. It is a challenging and heartbreaking story that illuminates the culture and struggles of an often overlooked people” (Publishers Weekly).
Download or read book The Giraffe Tree and Other Tall Stories written by Eric Johns and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warning! Strange things happen in The Giraffe Tree and Other Tall Stories. Do you know what to do if the evil Investigator Black from the Ministry of Birthdays invites himself to your party? Or what you must definitely not do if you are locked in a library overnight? Or what to do if you are a garden gnome who has lost his garden. Or how to save yourself if you are a helpless snail about to be eaten by a thrush? And who should you trust if you are sold as a slave? You can find out the unexpected answers in these stories which Eric Johns has gathered together because they are all very strange and get on well together. Also, how does a giraffe become a tree?
Download or read book Literature and the Senses written by Annette Kern-Stähler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-06 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means by which literary texts engage with, open up, or make uncertain dominant views of the nature of perception. Considering the ways in which literary texts intersect with and diverge from scientific, epistemological, and philosophical perspectives, these essays explore a wide variety of literary moments of sensation including: the interspecies exchange of a look between a swan and a young Indigenous Australian girl; the sound of bees as captured in an early modern poem; the noxious smell of the 'Great Stink' that recurs in the Victorian novel; the taste of an eggplant registered in a poetic performance; tactile gestures in medieval romance; and the representation of a world in which the interdependence of human beings with the purple hibiscus plant is experienced through all five senses. The collection builds upon and breaks new ground in the field of sensory studies, focusing on what makes literature especially suitable to engaging with, contributing to, and challenging our perennial understandings of, the senses.
Download or read book Larry McMurtry and the West written by Mark Busby and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first major single-authored book in almost twenty years to examine the life and work of Texas' foremost novelist and to develop coherent patterns of theme, structure, symbol, imagery, and influence in Larry McMurtry's work. The study focuses on the novelist's relationship to the Southwest, theorizing that his writing exhibits a deep ambivalence toward his home territory. The course of his career demonstrates shifting attitudes that have led him toward, away from, and then back again to his home place and the "cowboy god" that dominates its mythology. The book utilizes original materials from five library special collections, as well as interviews with McMurtry, his family, and his friends, such as Ken Kesey.
