Download or read book Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Cafe written by M. Henderson Ellis and published by New Europe Books. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not long ago, John Shirting--quiet young Chicagoan, wizard of self-medication--held down a beloved job as a barista at Capo Coffee Family, a coffee chain and global business powerhouse. When he is deemed "too passionate" about his job, he is let go. Shirting makes it his mission to return to the frothy Capo's fold by singlehandedly breaking into a new market and making freshly post-communist Prague safe for free-market capitalism. Unfortunately, his college nemesis, Theodore Mizen, a certified socialist, has also moved there, and is determined to reverse the Velvet Revolution, one folk song at a time. After Shirting experiences the loss of his sole "new-hire" -- a sad, arcade game-obsessed prostitute -- it is not long before his grasp on his mission and, indeed, his sanity, comes undone, leaving him at the mercy of two-bit Mafiosi, a pair of Golem trackers, and his own disgruntled phantom. A dazzling combination of Everything is Illuminated and Don Quixote, with a jigger of Confederacy of Dunces, and Lord of the Barnyard, Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Café is the first novel to so exquisitely capture the ambiance of expat Prague. Poised to be an underground classic, it asks: what does it mean to be sane in a fast-changing world? From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Cafe written by M. Henderson Ellis and published by New and Young Europe Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not long ago, John Shirting held down a beloved job as a barista at Capo Coffee Family, a coffee chain and global business powerhouse. When he is deemed "too passionate" about his job, he is let go. Shirting makes it his mission to return to the frothy Capo's fold by single-handedly breaking into a new market and making freshly post-communist Prague safe for free-market capitalism.
Download or read book Petra K and the Blackhearts written by M. Henderson Ellis and published by Young Europe Books. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to Pava, a city where miniaturized show-dragons are pitted against each other in secret, forbidden tournaments, and magic has been outlawed by a cruel child dictator. Here lives Petra K, the daughter of a shut-in mother, who becomes the master of a dragonka everyone wants to get their hands on. In a complicated world of sorceresses, gypsies, child gangs, and secret police, Petra K needs to decide whom to trust, and whom to betray in order to keep herself and her pet safe. But revolution is in the air, and she too is caught up in its pull. Only the Blackhearts, a gang of orphan children, dare to defy the new dictator’s rule, selling potions to survive. Along with the Blackhearts, Petra K faces a murderous pack of mechanical dragonka, a phantom secret agent—and, most harrowing, her own weaknesses. Will the Blackhearts’ adventures and courage inspire the terrified population to rise up again, and return Pava to a place of prosperity, where dragonka run free? Petra K and the Blackhearts is the first thrilling book of a trilogy by M. Henderson Ellis, whose previous novel Booklist called "a wild, manic ride . . . thoroughly enjoyable." From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book The Upright Heart written by Julia Ain-Krupa and published by New Europe Books. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Stylistic virtuosity, penetrating emotional power, and a post-apocalyptic vision . . . a brilliant literary achievement. . . . Julia Ain-Krupa gives us something luminous." — Philip K. Jason, Jewish Book Council The Upright Heart chronicles the return from Brooklyn of a Jewish man, Wolf, to his native Poland soon after World War II. He is haunted by the memory of his Catholic lover, Olga, whom he abandoned to marry a woman of his own faith and start a new life in America, and who perished sheltering the parents and younger sister he left behind. Harassed on the streets of postwar Poland, Wolf is watched over by the spirits of those who died during and after the war but have yet to let go. His story is woven together with those of others, living and dead, Catholic and Jew, including the deceased students of a school for girls, a battalion of fallen German soldiers, and an orphan boy who wanders the streets of Krakow, believing in a magic pill he has conjured up as a way to survive. Set amid the ruins of the Holocaust and the Nazis' total war, this haunting novel is at once a page-turning drama and a meditation on what it means to be human, part of a community, alive. The Upright Heart's dreamlike qualities and fluent lyricism draw the reader toward a consecrated realm, while its narrative force guides the story into the present, where survivors and their children, beset by the devastations of the past, struggle alongside the dead to perceive and appreciate the beauty of that which remains and that which might yet be. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book The Devil is a Black Dog written by Sandor Jaszberenyi and published by New Europe Books. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteen extraordinary stories that comprise The Devil Is a Black Dog and Other Stories, writer and photojournalist Sándor Jászberényi shows us the human side of war and revolution in the contemporary Middle East and Africa, and of the social upheaval that has held Eastern Europe in its grip since the fall of communism. Characters contemplate the meaning of home, love, despair, family, and friendship against the backdrop of brutality. From Cairo to the Gaza Strip, from Benghazi to Budapest, religious men have their faith challenged, and people under the duress of war or traumatic personal memories deal with the feelings that emerge. Often they seem to suppress these feelings . . . but, no, not quite. Set in countries the author has reported from or lived in, these stories are all told from different perspectives, but always with the individual at the center: the mother, the soldier, the martyr, the religious man, the journalist, and so on. They form a kaleidoscope of miniworlds, of moments, of decisions that together put a face, an emotion, a thought behind humans who confront war and conflict. Although they are fiction, they could have all happened exactly as they are told. Each story leaves a powerful visual image, an unforgettable image you conjure up again and again. Jászberényi is able to do all this so convincingly, in part, because he himself is not a "helicopter journalist" but rather lives in a residential Cairo neighborhood. He is, moreover, from a corner of Eastern Europe where cynicism almost equates with survival, and yet his writing evinces not only wry humor but great sensitivity and a profound sense of beauty. He speaks Arabic (in addition to English and his native Hungarian) and immerses himself in the society he reports on. But, in doing so, he still remains a reporter, and as such the stories are approached with the clinical, observant eye of an outsider. Whether addressing the contradictions of international humanitarian work or the moral dilemmas faced by those who seek to improve the health and lives of women and girls, he does so in a singularly provocative and yet intelligent manner.
Download or read book The Night Circus written by Erin Morgenstern and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in the spellbinding novel that captured the world's imagination. • "Part love story, part fable ... defies both genres and expectations." —The Boston Globe The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.
Download or read book World War Z written by Max Brooks and published by Broadway Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the decade-long conflict between humankind and hordes of the predatory undead is told from the perspective of dozens of survivors who describe in their own words the epic human battle for survival, in a novel that is the basis for the June 2013 film starring Brad Pitt. Reissue. Movie Tie-In.
Download or read book The Parsifal Mosaic written by Robert Ludlum and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Havelock’s world died on a moonlit beach on the Costa Brava as he watched his partner and lover, double agent Jenna Karas, efficiently gunned down by his own agency. There’s nothing left for him but to quit the game, get out. Then, in one frantic moment on a crowded railroad platform in Rome, Havelock sees Jenna. Racing around the globe in search of his beautiful betrayer, Havelock is now marked for death by both U.S. and Russian assassins, trapped in a massive mosaic of treachery created by a top-level mole with the world in his fist: Parsifal. Praise for Robert Ludlum and The Parsifal Mosaic “[Robert] Ludlum’s narrative imagination is a force of nature.”—The New York Times “As fast-paced and absorbing as any he’s written.”—Newsday “The suspense never lets up.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “A crackling good yarn.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Download or read book A Confederacy of Dunces written by John Kennedy Toole and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
Download or read book Side Effects written by D.B. Wright and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2016-10-21 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) is a trauma that can occur in anyone who witnesses the suffering of others or helps another through a traumatic experience. Those at risk include health care providers, first responders, people in journalism, law, teaching, correctional services, animal health care and those caring for loved ones at home, among others. STS can profoundly impact both your professional and personal life. Dismissing the symptoms only make matters worse. But STS does not need to be a life sentence. Overcoming traumatic stress is possible and can even be transformational as this heart-warming and sometimes humorous memoir suggests. This book provides information about STS, its symptoms and treatment, as well as ways to help prevent it.
Download or read book SHOW BOAT written by EDNA FERBER and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee written by Dee Brown and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “fascinating” #1 New York Times bestseller that awakened the world to the destruction of American Indians in the nineteenth-century West (The Wall Street Journal). First published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee generated shockwaves with its frank and heartbreaking depiction of the systematic annihilation of American Indian tribes across the western frontier. In this nonfiction account, Dee Brown focuses on the betrayals, battles, and massacres suffered by American Indians between 1860 and 1890. He tells of the many tribes and their renowned chiefs—from Geronimo to Red Cloud, Sitting Bull to Crazy Horse—who struggled to combat the destruction of their people and culture. Forcefully written and meticulously researched, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee inspired a generation to take a second look at how the West was won. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
Download or read book The Golem s Eye written by Jonathan Stroud and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second adventure in the Bartimaeus trilogy finds our young apprentice magician Nathaniel working his way up the ranks of the government, when crisis hits. A seemingly invulnerable clay golem is making random attacks on London. Nathaniel and the all-powerful, totally irreverent djinni, Bartimaeus, must travel to Prague to discover the source of the golem's power. In the ensuing chaos, readers will chase a dancing skeleton across London's skyline, encounter the horror of the dreaded Night Police, witness a daring kidnapping, and enter the Machiavellian world of the magician's government. Eventually, Nathaniel and Bartimaeus have to go head to head with the fearsome golem before the surprise identity of his master is finally revealed.
Download or read book Drinking with Men written by Rosie Schaap and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NPR “Best Books of 2013” BookPage Best Books of 2013 Library Journal Best Books of 2013: Memoir Flavorwire 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2013 A vivid, funny, and poignant memoir that celebrates the distinct lure of the camaraderie and community one finds drinking in bars. Rosie Schaap has always loved bars: the wood and brass and jukeboxes, the knowing bartenders, and especially the sometimes surprising but always comforting company of regulars. Starting with her misspent youth in the bar car of a regional railroad, where at fifteen she told commuters’ fortunes in exchange for beer, and continuing today as she slings cocktails at a neighborhood joint in Brooklyn, Schaap has learned her way around both sides of a bar and come to realize how powerful the fellowship among regular patrons can be. In Drinking with Men, Schaap shares her unending quest for the perfect local haunt, which takes her from a dive outside Los Angeles to a Dublin pub full of poets, and from small-town New England taverns to a character-filled bar in Manhattan’s TriBeCa. Drinking alongside artists and expats, ironworkers and soccer fanatics, she finds these places offer a safe haven, a respite, and a place to feel most like herself. In rich, colorful prose, Schaap brings to life these seedy, warm, and wonderful rooms. Drinking with Men is a love letter to the bars, pubs, and taverns that have been Schaap’s refuge, and a celebration of the uniquely civilizing source of community that is bar culture at its best.
Download or read book Austerlitz written by W.G. Sebald and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. “Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.
Download or read book It s So Easy written by Duff McKagan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musician Duff McKagan shares details about his life and career, discussing the creation and rise of Guns n' Roses, his struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction, his path to sobriety, and more.
Download or read book Artificial Hells written by Claire Bishop and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.
