Download or read book Island of Bewilderment written by Simin Daneshvar and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-six-year-old college graduate, artist, and employee of the Ministry of Art and Culture, Hasti Nourian aspires to be a "new woman"—independent-minded, strong-willed, and in control of her own destiny. A destiny that includes Morad, an idealistic young architect and artist with whom Hasti is deeply in love. Morad is a sharp critic of Iran’s Westernized bourgeois class, the one that Hasti’s mother relishes. After Hasti’s father died, her mother had married a wealthy businessman and moved to an exclusive neighborhood of northern Tehran. Socializing with a mixed group of Americans, English-speaking Iranians, and British expats, her mother’s life revolves around gym visits, hairdressers, and party planning. When her mother persuades Hasti to join her at the spa, she introduces her to Salim, an eligible young man from a wealthy family whose British education and proper comportment, as well as his economic status, make him an ideal suitor for Hasti in her mother’s eyes. Against her better judgment, Hasti finds herself attracted to Salim and tempted by her mother’s comfortable lifestyle. As the novel unfolds, Hasti is torn between her first love and the radical politics of her university friends, and her love for her mother and the freedom economic security can bring. Set in Tehran in the mid-1970s, just a few years before the 1977–79 revolution, Daneshvar’s unforgettable novel depicts the tumultuous social, cultural, and economic changes of the day through the intimate story of a young woman’s struggle to find her identity.
Download or read book Sutra and Other Stories written by Simin Daneshvar and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six stories by an Iranian novelist. The title piece is on a smuggler who forces his wife and daughter into prostitution, Potshard is about a white woman who tries to adopt a village orphan, and Anis is on how a woman adjusts to new husbands. By the author of Savushun.
Download or read book Bewilderment A Novel written by Richard Powers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION An Instant New York Times Bestseller Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain… With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?
Download or read book Island written by Aldous Huxley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While shipwrecked on the island of Pala, Will Farnaby, a disenchanted journalist, discovers a utopian society that has flourished for the past 120 years. Although he at first disregards the possibility of an ideal society, as Farnaby spends time with the people of Pala his ideas about humanity change. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Download or read book Daneshvar s Playhouse written by Simin Daneshvar and published by Mage Pub. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These stories not only portray, with incomparable perception, humour, and compassion, women from the various strata of Iranian society, but they also capture the essence of a rich traditional culture undergoing change. A nanny lets go of a little girl's hand in Shiraz's exotic and crowded Vakil Bazaar, and goes off to flirt with the nutseller -- the child is lost. In The Accident, the author portrays, in hilarious parody, a young woman who forsakes husband, children, and home just to own a car. The Playhouse is a traditional Persian theatre where the play and the players act on many levels both real and fantastic. The Traitor's Intrigue lets you into the life of a middle-class couple and brilliantly shows how a colonel's allegiance passed from Shah to Khomeini. To Whom Can I Say Hello? tells of an old woman's memories, her life, love, tragic outcome, and eventual hope. Loss of Jalal is a moving chronicle of the final days of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of Iran's great writers and the author's husband. Simin Daneshvar draws from over a thousand years of Persian storytelling tradition and combines this with modern techniques of short fiction and cinema. The result is both entertaining and a key of uncompromising honesty, rich detail, and a dazzling range of voices that guides the reader into the centre of a complex society and its concerns.
Download or read book Hafez in Love written by Iraj Pezeshkzad and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez is in love. He is in love with a girl, with a city, and with Persian poetry. Despite his enmity with the new and dangerous city leader, the jealousy of his fellow court poets, and the competition for his beloved, Iran’s favorite poet remains unbothered. When his wit and charm are not enough to keep him safe in Shiraz, his friends conspire to keep him out of trouble. But their schemes are unsuccessful. Nothing will chase Hafez from this city of wine and roses. In Pezeshkzad’s fictional account, Hafez’s life in fourteenth-century Shiraz is a mix of peril and humor. Set in a city that is at once beautiful and cutthroat, the novel includes a cast of historical figures to illuminate this elusive poet of the Persian literary tradition. Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins’s translation brings the beloved poetry of Hafez alive for an English audience and reacquaints readers with the comic wit and original storytelling of Pezeshkzad.
Download or read book The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale written by Nesta Ramazani and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2002-02-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an extraordinary autobiography of a young girl growing up in Iran. The daughter of an English Christian mother and an Iranian Zoroastrian father, Nesta Ramazani sketches her personal life story against the backdrop of a society marked by the fusion of Iranian, Islamic, and Western cultures, and by the efforts of an authoritarian state to force modernization on a traditional society. Within this multicultural tapestry of personal, cultural, and national life, the author portrays how she came to love Persian and Western music, poetry, and dance. But translating this love into practice seemed an insurmountable task until an American woman pioneered the establishment of the first indigenous Iranian ballet company. As a member of this troupe, the author violated convention, performing first in her native land and then traveling abroad to exhibit this beautiful synthesis of Persian/Western forms to foreign audiences. The significance of this work transcends an autobiography penned by an Iranian woman—still a taboo in traditional Iranian society—it is a unique microcosm of today’s universal quest for a dialogue among civilizations. Ramazani’s story will appeal not only to students of Iran, the Middle East, and women’s studies, but also to general readers.
Download or read book A Journey with Jonah written by Paul Murray and published by Word on Fire. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonah is the only ancient prophet with whom Jesus identifies in the Gospels. But when we turn to read the book of Jonah itself, we discover that this so-called "book" is only two pages long-and that Jonah's prophesying is limited to one short sentence. And yet, around this small book, as if it were around Jonah's own troubled ship, high waves of controversy and mystery have swirled for centuries. In A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment, Fr. Paul Murray strives to uncover the great lesson of this story. Following Fr. Murray's exploration is a 2003 lectio divina on Jonah by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger-published here in English for the first time. Book jacket.
Download or read book Island Encounters written by Lisa Palmer and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Island Encounters is a narrative of Timor shaped by a journey from the outside in. Incorporating the author’s experiences from more than two decades of involvement with Timor-Leste and, more particularly, the months she spent travelling with her family from west to east in 2018, Palmer traces paths redolent in longing and learning, belonging and bewilderment, courage and conviction to tell of an island divided by colonialism and conflict. The book’s themes shuttle back and forth across the island, weaving together the past, present and future in deeply felt histories and personal stories that create the shared fabric of Timorese people’s lives. Offering a counterpoint to modernising development narratives, Island Encounters tells of people’s quiet determination to maintain their relationships between their lands, waters, traditions and each other. By foregrounding the ways in which ancestral pathways and cultural politics inform and course through everyday life on island Timor, Palmer reveals the richness of the rituals and customary practices that underpin Timorese lives and the lives of those entwined with them. And, all along the way, Island Encounters shows how Timor and its diverse peoples are working with, and re-working, confounding and being confounded by, the ever-desirous heart of development. ‘A poignant, at times heart-wrenching, honest account of life in Timor-Leste.’ — José Ramos-Horta ‘Island Encounters is a shimmery blend of anthropology, memoir and reportage. Palmer journeys her way across the island of Timor and uncovers human stories of pasts not yet passed and of an uncertain present. Island Encounters will be the definitive contemporary explainer of why things work the way they do on both sides of the border, in West Timor and Timor-Leste. Not only is Palmer a deeply knowledgeable scholar, she is an absolute dream of a writer.’ — Gordon Peake, author of Beloved Land: Stories, Struggles, and Secrets from Timor-Leste ‘Palmer is the best kind of insider-outsider to translate a culture from the inside so outsiders can understand. Living with Timorese family, Palmer has had access to levels of cultural knowledge not usually shared with outsiders and she takes readers on a journey into the Timorese psyche. Island Encounters is a great intellectual gift to everyone wanting to better understand the complex new nation of Timor-Leste.’ — Sara Niner, author of Xanana: Leader of the Struggle for Independent Timor-Leste
Download or read book How to Escape from a Leper Colony written by Tiphanie Yanique and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enthralling debut collection from a singular Caribbean voice For a leper, many things are impossible, and many other things are easily done. Babalao Chuck said he could fly to the other side of the island and peek at the nuns bathing. And when a man with no hands claims that he can fly, you listen. The inhabitants of an island walk into the sea. A man passes a jail cell's window, shouldering a wooden cross. And in the international shop of coffins, a story repeats itself, pointing toward an inevitable tragedy. If the facts of these stories are sometimes fantastical, the situations they describe are complex and all too real. Lyrical, lush, and haunting, the prose shimmers in this nuanced debut, set mostly in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place. Like Gabriel García Márquez, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Condé before her, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a book that is heartbreaking, hilarious, magical, and mesmerizing. An unforgettable collection.
Download or read book A Persian Requiem written by Simin Daneshvar and published by Halban Publishers. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tribal leaders in opposition to the government, the corruption of occupation, society torn apart by shifting political loyalties... this is the background to one woman's powerful story. A Persian Requiem is a powerful and evocative novel. Set in the southern Persian town of Shiraz in the last years of World War II, when the British army occupied the south of Persia, the novel chronicles the life of Zari, a traditional, anxious and superstitious woman whose husband, sef, is an idealistic feudal landlord. The occupying army upsets the balance of traditional life and throws the local people into conflict. sef is anxious to protect those who depend upon him and will stop at nothing to do so. His brother, on the other hand, thinks nothing of exploiting his kinsmen to further his own political ambitions. Thus a web of political intrigue and hostilities is created, which slowly destroys families. In the background, tribal leaders are in open rebellion against the government, and a picture of a society torn apart by unrest emerges. In the midst of this turbulence, normal life carries on in the beautiful courtyard of Zari's house, in the rituals she imposes upon herself and in her attempt to keep the family safe from external events. But the corruption engendered by occupation is pervasive - some try to profit as much as possible from it, others look towards communism for hope, whilst yet others resort to opium. Finally even Zari's attempts to maintain normal family life are shattered as disaster strikes. An immensely moving story, A Persian Requiem is also a powerful indictment of the corrupting effects of colonization. A Persian Requiem (first published in 1969 in Iran under the title Savushun), was the first novel written by an Iranian woman and, sixteen reprints and half a million copies later, it remains the most widely read Persian novel. In Iran it has helped shape the ideas and attitudes of a generation in its revelation of the factors that contributed to the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Simin Daneshvar's A Persian Requiem ... goes a long way towards deepening our understanding of Islam and the events leading up to the 1979 Revolution ... The central characters adroitly reflect different Persian attitudes of the time, attitudes that were eventually to harden into support for either the Ayatollah and his Islamic fundamentalism or, alternatively, for the corrupting Westernisation of the Shah. The value of the book lies in its ability to present these emergent struggles in human terms, in the day-to-day realities of small-town life ... Complex and delicately crafted, this subtle and ironic book unites reader and writer in the knowledge that human weakness, fanaticism, love and terror are not confined to any one creed. The Financial Times A Persian Requiem is not just a great Iranian novel, but a world classic. The Independent on Sunday ... it would be no exaggeration to say that all of Iranian life is there. Spare Rib For an English reader, there is almost an embarrassment of new settings, themes and ideas ... Under the guise of something resembling a family saga - although the period covered is only a few months - A Persian Requiem teaches many lessons about a society little understood in the West. Rachel Billington, The Tablet This very human novel avoids ideological cant while revealing complex political insights, particularly in light of the 1979 Iranian revolution. Publishers Weekly A Persian Requiem, originally published [in Iran] in 1969, was a first novel by Iran's first woman novelist. It has seen sixteen reprints, sold over half a million copies, and achieved the status of a classic, literally shaping the ideas of a generation. Yet when asked about the specific appeal of the novel, most readers are at a loss to pinpoint a single, or even prominent aspect to account for this phenomenal success. Is it the uniquely feminine perspective, allowing the read
Download or read book Wolfe Island written by Lucy Treloar and published by Picador Australia. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE BARBARA JEFFERIS AWARD 2020 'Atmospheric...evocative...important.' Tom Keneally Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation... Until one night her granddaughter blows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept herself to herself - with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl - unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these. And when trouble comes following her granddaughter, no one is more surprised than Kitty to find she will fight to save her as fiercely as her name suggests... A richly imagined and mythic parable of home and kin that cements Lucy Treloar's place as one of our most acclaimed novelists. SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIME MINISTER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR NSW PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR ABIA LITERARY FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE VOSS LITERARY AWARD 2020 PRAISE FOR LUCY TRELOAR 'A capacious talent' The Australian 'Deeply moving' The Age 'This lovely, atmospheric book sings of the inherent human drama, rising fragility of home-country and the recurrent need to flee and to protect. The journey told in this book is so evocative it will stay with the reader as an important literary fable of our period of history, in which a fraught world threatens all of us with flight, exile and bewilderment.' Tom Keneally, bestselling author of Schindler's Ark 'A work that is more than powerful: it's transformative.' Australian Book Review 'Disturbing but beautiful' Susan Wyndham
Download or read book The Island of the Day Before written by Umberto Eco and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-06-05 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 17th century Italian nobleman is marooned on an empty ship in this “astonishing intellectual journey" by the author of Foucault’s Pendulum (San Francisco Chronicle). In the year 1643, a violent storm in the South Pacific leaves Roberto della Griva shipwrecked—on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis, he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing. As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he looks back on various episodes from his life: Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale, that meaningless chess move in the Thirty Years' War in which he lost his father and his illusions; and the lessons given him on Reasons of State, fencing, the writing of love letters, and blasphemy. In this “intellectually stimulating and dramatically intriguing” novel, Umberto Eco conjures a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and an old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood (Chicago Tribune).
Download or read book Vanderbilt written by Anderson Cooper and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty—his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts. One of the Washington Post's Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021 When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father’s small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires—one in shipping and another in railroads—that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by “the Commodore,” subsequent generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers—the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that Cornelius’s grandson and namesake had built—the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all. Now, the Commodore’s great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family’s empire, basked in the Commodore’s wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts of Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any other. Written with a unique insider’s viewpoint, this is a rollicking, quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly captures.
Download or read book Little Boxes of Bewilderment written by Jack Ritchie and published by St Martins Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Beach written by Alex Garland and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-07-05 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The irresistible novel that was adapted into a major motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The Khao San Road, Bangkok -- first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach." The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden. Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck -- the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man -- and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents. Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach by Alex Garland -- both a national bestseller and his debut -- is a highly accomplished and suspenseful novel that fixates on a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.
Download or read book The Israeli Republic written by Jalal Al-e Ahmad and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Israeli Republic "suggests how the Iranian and Israeli leaders who feel such intense mutual hostility today actually mirror one another in certain ways, particularly in their foundational attitudes toward religious authority, political and economic populism and the West. That a writer such as Al-e Ahmad, guru to the ayatollahs, liked Israel now seems touching. What he liked about Israel seems cautionary." —Bernard Avishai, Foreign Affairs Written by a preeminent Iranian writer who helped lay the popular groundwork for the Iranian Revolution, The Israeli Republic should be required reading for anyone interested in the history and current political landscape of the Middle East. Documenting Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s two-week-long trip to Israel in February of 1963, his account “Journey to the Land of Israel” caused a firestorm when it was published in Iran, upsetting the very revolutionary clerics whose anti-Western sentiments Al-e Ahmad himself had fueled. Yet, in the thriving Jewish State, Jalal Al-e Ahmad saw a model for a possible future Iran. Based on his controversial travelogue, supplemented with letters between the author and his wife, Simin Daneshvar (the first major Iranian woman novelist), and translated into English for the first time, The Israeli Republic is a record of Al-e Ahmad’s idealism, insight, and ultimate disillusionment toward Israel. Vibrantly modern in its sensibility and fearlessly polemical, this book will change the way you think about the Middle East.
