Download or read book Land of Marvels written by Barry Unsworth and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barry Unsworth, a writer with an “almost magical capacity for literary time travel” (New York Times Book Review) has the extraordinary ability to re-create the past and make it relevant to contemporary readers. In Land of Marvels, a thriller set in 1914, he brings to life the schemes and double-dealings of Western nations grappling for a foothold in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Somerville, a British archaeologist, is excavating a long-buried Assyrian palace. The site lies directly in the path of a new railroad to Baghdad, and he watches nervously as the construction progresses, threatening to destroy his discovery. The expedition party includes Somerville’s beautiful, bored wife, Edith; Patricia, a smart young graduate student; and Jehar, an Arab man-of-all-duties whose subservient manner belies his intelligence and ambitions. Posing as an archaeologist, an American geologist from an oil company arrives one day and insinuates himself into the group. But he’s not the only one working undercover to stake a claim on Iraq’s rich oil fields. Historical fiction at its finest, Land of Marvels opens a window on the past and reveals its lasting impact.
Download or read book In the Land of Marvels written by Paola Bertucci and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book explores the early advent of electricity as a pivotal phenomenon in the cultivation of popular cultural scientific interest"--
Download or read book The Book of Marvels and Travels written by Sir John Mandeville and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his Book of Marvels and Travels, Sir John Mandeville describes a journey from Europe to Jerusalem and on into Asia, and the many wonderful and monstrous peoples and practices in the East. A captivating blend of fact and fantasy, Mandeville's Book is newly translated in an edition that brings us closer to Mandeville's worldview.
Download or read book Church of Marvels written by Leslie Parry and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all. New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her. A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both. As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.
Download or read book Minnesota Marvels written by Eric Dregni and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book All of the Marvels written by Douglas Wolk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale “Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it—seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.
Download or read book A Garden of Marvels written by Robert Ford Campany and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 300 and 600 C.E., Chinese writers compiled thousands of accounts of the strange and the extraordinary. Some described weird spirits, customs, and flora and fauna in distant lands. Some depicted individuals of unusual spiritual or moral achievement. But most told of ordinary people’s encounters with ghosts, demons, or gods; sojourns in the land of the dead; eerily significant dreams; and uncannily accurate premonitions. The selection of such stories presented here provides an alluring introduction to early medieval Chinese storytelling and opens a doorway to the enchanted world of thought, culture, and religious belief of that era. Known as zhiguai, or “accounts of anomalies,” they convey a great deal about how people saw the cosmos and their place in it. The tales were circulated because they were entertaining but also because their compilers meant to document the mysterious workings of spirits, the wonders of exotic places, and the nature of the afterlife. A collection of more than two hundred tales, A Garden of Marvels offers an authoritative yet accessible introduction to zhiguai writings, particularly those never before translated or adequately researched. This volume will likely find its way to bedside tables as well as into classrooms and libraries, just as collections of zhiguai did in early medieval times.
Download or read book City of Marvels written by Eduardo Mendoza and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Marvels of the World written by Rebecca Bushnell and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-03-12 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal. Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.
Download or read book Marvels in the Muck written by Doug Wechsler and published by Boyds Mills Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The salt marsh is not so friendly to humans, but it's the only place to be for many creatures and plants. Breathtaking photographs and fascinating facts reveal the secrets of the salt marsh and celebrate this squishy and surprising habitat.
Download or read book Midwest Marvels written by Eric Dregni and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to unusual and one-of-a-kind roadside sights in the Midwest includes Minnesota's Spam Museum, North Dakota's forty-five-foot tower of discarded oil cans, and South Dakota's Outhouse Museum.
Download or read book Marvels and Mysteries of the World Around Us written by Reader'S Digest and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Heroes and Marvels of the Middle Ages written by Jacques Le Goff and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-09-02 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heroes and Marvels of the Middle Ages is a history like no other: it is a history of the imagination, presented between two celebrated groups of the period. One group consists of heroes: Charlemagne, El Cid, King Arthur, Orlando, Pope Joan, Melusine, Merlin the Wizard, and also the fox and the unicorn. The other is the miraculous, represented here by three forms of power that dominated medieval society: the cathedral, the castle, and the cloister. Roaming between the boundaries of the natural and the supernatural, between earth and the heavens, the medieval universe is illustrated by a shared iconography, covering a vast geographical span. This imaginative history is also a continuing story, which presents the heroes and marvels of the Middle Ages as the times defined them: venerated, then bequeathed to future centuries where they have continued to live and transform through remembrance of the past, adaptation to the present, and openness to the future.
Download or read book The Marvels written by Brian Selznick and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don't miss Selznick's other novels in words and pictures, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, which together with The Marvels, form an extraordinary thematic trilogy! A breathtaking new voyage from Caldecott Medalist Brian Selznick.Two stand-alone stories--the first in nearly 400 pages of continuous pictures, the second in prose--create a beguiling narrative puzzle.The journey begins at sea in 1766, with a boy named Billy Marvel. After surviving a shipwreck, he finds work in a London theatre. There, his family flourishes for generations as brilliant actors until 1900, when young Leontes Marvel is banished from the stage.Nearly a century later, runaway Joseph Jervis seeks refuge with an uncle in London. Albert Nightingale's strange, beautiful house, with its mysterious portraits and ghostly presences, captivates Joseph and leads him on a search for clues about the house, his family, and the past.A gripping adventure and an intriguing invitation to decipher how the two stories connect, The Marvels is a loving tribute to the power of story from an artist at the vanguard of creative innovation.
Download or read book Morality Play written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book In medieval England, a runaway scholar-priest named Nicholas Barber has joined a traveling theater troupe as they make their way toward their liege lord’s castle. In need of money, they decide to perform at a village en route. When their traditional morality plays fail to garner them an audience, they begin to stage the “the play of Thomas Wells”—their own depiction of the real-life drama unfolding within the village around the murder of a young boy. The villagers believe they have already identified the killer, and the troupe believes their play will be a straightforward depiction of justice served. But soon the players soon learn that the details of the crime are elusive, and the lines between performance and reality become blurred as they discover, scene by scene, line by line, what really happened. Thought-provoking and unforgettable, Morality Play is at once a masterful work of historical fiction, a gripping murder mystery, and a literary work of the first order.
Download or read book Land in America written by Peter M. Wolf and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1981 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Abu and the 7 Marvels written by Richard Matheson and published by Gauntlet Press. This book was released on 2002-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To win the hand of the lonely princess Alicia, Abu is sent on a virtually impossible mission to bring back tokens of each of the Seven Marvels of the World.
