Download or read book Journey through a Tragicomic Century written by Francis Nenik and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francis Nenik's thrilling slice of narrative non-fiction "Journey through a Tragicomic Century" is about the life of the forgotten writer Hasso Grabner, told with great joy in language and love of absurdity. The journey takes us from the Young Communists in 1920s Leipzig to wartime Corfu, with Grabner falling from steelworks director to a vilified author banned from publishing his work in the GDR. Francis Neniks "Reise durch ein tragikomisches Jahrhundert" handelt vom Leben des vergessenen Schriftstellers Hasso Grabner — erzählt mit großer Freude am Fabulieren und Liebe zur Absurdität. Die Reise führt uns nebst anderen Stationen von den Jungen Kommunisten Leipzigs in den 1920er Jahren nach Korfu, ganz nah begleiten wir Grabner auf seinem wilden Ritt vom Stahlwerksdirektor zum verunglimpften Autor, dem es verboten war, sein Werk in der DDR zu veröffentlichen.

Download or read book Daughters written by Lucy Fricke and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucy Fricke's "Daughters" tells the story of two women either side of forty on a road trip across Europe, each of them dealing with difficult fathers along the way. A bestseller and booksellers' favourite in Germany, "Daughters" evokes laughter and tears by way of life and death, friendship and family. Lucy Frickes "Töchter" erzählt die Geschichte von zwei Frauen um die vierzig, die sich auf einem Roadtrip durch Europa mit ihren jeweils ganz unterschiedlichschwierigen Vätern auseinandersetzen. "Töchter" bringt uns zum Lachen und zum Weinen — über das Leben und den Tod, über Freundschaft und Familie. Im deutschsprachigen Raum avancierte der Roman zum Buchhandelsliebling und Bestseller.

Download or read book The Blacksmith s Daughter written by Selim Özdogan and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part one of the Anatolian Blues trilogy Told with great affection for his characters, Selim Özdoğan's trilogy traces out the life of Gül, a Turkish girl who grows up in 1950s Anatolia and then moves to Germany as a migrant worker. Book one details her initially idyllic childhood, ruptured by her mother's early death. Ever close to her loving father, Gül grows into a warm-hearted, hard-working young woman. The Blacksmith's Daughter is a novel full of carefree summers and hard winters, old wives' tales and young people's ambitions – the melancholy beauty and pain of an ordinary life.

Download or read book The Peacock written by Isabel Bogdan and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding trip, an overwhelmed psychologist, a housekeeper with a broken arm, and an ingenious cook; get Lord and Lady McIntosh to try and keep it all together; and top it off with all sorts of animals – soon no one will know exactly what's going on. Selling 500,000 copies, Isabel Bogdan's book is a big hitter in Germany – and now it's coming home to roost.

Download or read book Soul Mountain written by Xingjian Gao and published by HarperCollins Australia. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: the worldwide bestselling novel by the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature.Soul Mountain is a picaresque novel of immense wisdom and sparse beauty, bursting with knowledge and experience and portraying a culture as vast and fascinating as the history of humankind itself.In China in the early eighties, the book's central character embarks on a cross-country journey in search of the mysterious 'Mountain'. Along the way he collects stories, lovers, spiritual wisdom and undergoes myriad experiences that are sometimes violent, sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, but always enriching. He researches the origins of humankind and Chinese culture, and explores philosophical issues such as truth, knowledge and how oneᱠchildhood affects later life. At the end of the book, he realises that all along what was important was not finding the elusive Soul Mountain, but rather the journey itself. Part love story, part fable, part philosophical treatise and part travel journal, this is one of the most challenging, rewarding and inventive works of fiction since Ulysses.

Download or read book The Bureau of Past Management written by Iris Hanika and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each of us has something that feels essential to who we are. For Hans Frambach, it's the crimes of the Nazi era, which have hurt him for as long as he can remember. That's why he became an archivist at the Bureau of Past Management; now, though, he's wondering if he should make a change. For his best friend, Graziela, that past was also her focal point – until she met a man who desired her. From then on, sexual pleasure became the key to her life; a concept she's now beginning to doubt. Hans and Graziela thought the Nazi crimes were the inheritance that neither could bear, but can we really blame Nazism for everything? Iris Hanika shows how the crimes of the Nazi era hold the Germans in their clutches to this day, and the absurdities to which institutionalising commemoration leads.Can a country manage its past, or ought we to remain helpless in the face of the horrific crimes of the Holocaust?

Download or read book New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust written by Frédéric Bonnesoeur and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-11-06 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies. Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, this peer-reviewed volume provides detailed engagement with a variety of historical sources, such as documents, artifacts, photos, or text passages. The contributors investigate particular aspects of sound, materiality, space and social perceptions to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, which have often been overlooked or generalised in previous historical research. Yet, as we approach an era of no first hand witnesses, this multidisciplinary, micro-historical approach remains a fundamental aspect of Holocaust research, and can provide a theoretical framework for future studies.

Download or read book 52 Factory Lane written by Selim Özdoğan and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You'll live out your lives in a foreign country," Gül is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you're far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before her house in Turkey is built and she can return. Until then, there will be fireworks, young love, and the cassette tapes of the summer played on repeat. In these years, Gül will learn all kinds of longing: for her two daughters, for her father the blacksmith, for scents and colours and fruit. Yet imperceptibly, Factory Lane in this cold, incomprehensible country becomes a different kind of home. A novel about how home is found in many places and yet still eludes us.

Download or read book Love Novel written by Ivana Sajko and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us into a war between kitchen and bedroom. He, an unemployed humanist, is trying to change the world and write a novel. She, a passable actress, has given up her safe job at the theatre to care for their child. He is delirious, she is on edge. With the rent overdue and violence looming on all sides, the two of them circle one another in a dizzying dance towards the abyss.

Download or read book The Road Home written by Rose Tremain and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-05-13 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Rose Tremain does not disappoint. As always her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision.' Observer A wise and witty look at the contemporary migrant experience. Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work. Behind him loom the figures of his dead wife, his beloved young daughter and his outrageous friend Rudi who - dreaming of the wealthy West - lives largely for his battered Chevrolet. Ahead of Lev lies the deep strangeness of the British: their hostile streets, their clannish pubs, their obsession with celebrity. London holds out the alluring possibility of friendship, sex, money and a new career and, if Lev is lucky, a new sense of belonging... 'A novel of urgent humanity' Sunday Telegraph Praise for Rose Tremain: 'One of my favourite writers' Nina Stibbe 'Tremain is one of the best novelists writing today' Sara Collins 'Pulsatingly alive . . . no one can break your heart quite like this' Neel Mukherjee

Download or read book In the Belly of the Queen written by Karosh Taha and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2023-04-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amal shocks the whole neighbourhood by beating up her classmate Younes. Her father defends her behaviour and encourages her to assert herself. From then on everyone avoids Amal – and then her father leaves. Searching in vain for an explanation, Amal finds unexpected refuge with Younes and his mother Shahira, both outsiders like her. Years later, when the situation comes to a head and the conflict with Raffiq's gang escalates, Amal flees to Kurdistan to look for her father. Raffiq's friend Younes is the reluctant centre of attention in their neighbourhood – thanks to his free-spirited mother Shahira, who breaks all the rules. Raffiq thinks about Shahira all the time, at once fascinated and repulsed by her. Unable to bear the situation any longer, Younes plans to leave. When Raffiq's girlfriend Amal also wants to move away, Raffiq's world begins to break apart. He attempts to sabotage their plans. The question is: what does Raffiq actually want to do with his life? In her kaleidoscopic novel, Karosh Taha expands our ideas of class, race and gender as she loops two stories around an invisible lynchpin: a woman who defies all expectations, a blank canvas for projections from all those around her. Deftly translated by Grashina Gabelmann, the book can be explored from either end, creating two very different narratives.

Download or read book A Light Still Burns written by Selim Özdoğan and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2023-04-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee.' After eight years in Turkey, Gül leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her ability to connect to the people around her remains constant. Gül's life is shaped by the melancholy of separation, but with her warm-hearted and accepting outlook she has learned to endure homesickness and longing. Full of emotions and poetry but told without sentimentality, Selim Özdoğan's account of Gül's journey is a tender and moving novel about home, cultural identity and a life between two worlds.

Download or read book Paula written by Sandra Hoffmann and published by V&Q Books. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sandra Hoffmann's "Paula" is a moving piece of autofiction about the writer's relationship to her grandmother, a devout Swabian Catholic who refused to reveal who fathered her child in 1946. Growing up in a family where silence reigns, Hoffmann asks: What kind of person, what kind of writer, does this environment produce? Sandra Hoffmanns "Paula" ist ein bewegendes Stück Autofiktion über das Verhältnis der Schriftstellerin zu ihrer Großmutter — einer gläubigen, schwäbischen Katholikin, die sich bis zu ihrem Lebensende weigerte, zu enthüllen, wer ihr Kind im Jahre 1946 gezeugt hat. In einer Familie aufgewachsen, in der die Stille herrscht, fragt Hoffmann: Welche Art von Person, welche Art von Autorin produziert eine solche Umgebung?

Download or read book Fun Home written by Alison Bechdel and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

Download or read book In the Distance written by Hernan Diaz and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD WINNER OF THE WHITING AWARD WINNER OF THE SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING WINNTER OF THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD WINNER OF THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR The first novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust, an exquisite and blisteringly intelligent story of a young Swedish boy, separated from his brother, who becomes a legend and an outlaw A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing west. Driven back again and again, he meets criminals, naturalists, religious fanatics, swindlers, American Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.

Download or read book Our Man written by George Packer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

Download or read book Arthur Miller for the Twenty First Century written by Stephen Marino and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas brings together both established Miller experts and emerging commentators to investigate the sources of his ongoing resonance with audiences and his place in world theatre. The collection begins by exploring Miller in the context of 20th-century American drama. Chapters discuss Miller and Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, as well as thematic relationships between Miller’s ideas and the explosion of significant women and African American dramatists since the 1970s. Other essays focus more directly on interpretations of Miller’s individual works, not only plays but also essays and fiction, including a discussion of Death of a Salesman in China. The volume concludes by considering Miller and current cultural issues: his work for human rights, his depiction of American ideals of masculinity, and his anticipation of contemporary posthumanism.