Download or read book Marzahn Mon Amour written by Katja Oskamp and published by Peirene Press. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman approaching the 'invisible years' of middle age abandons her failing writing career to retrain as a chiropodist in the East Berlin suburb of Marzahn, once the GDR's largest prefabricated housing estate. From her intimate vantage point at the foot of the clinic chair, she observes her clients and co-workers, listening to their stories with empathy and curiosity. Part memoir, part collective history, Katja Oskamp's love letter to the inhabitants of Marzahn is a tender reflection on life's progression and our ability to forge connections in the unlikeliest of places. Each person's story stands alone as a beautifully crafted vignette, but together they form a portrait of a community.
Download or read book Amour written by Stefania Rousselle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning journalist and filmmaker Stefania Rousselle, a stunning collection of photographs and essays that seek to understand the universality of love Journalist and filmmaker Stefania Rousselle found herself overwhelmed and dejected with the horrors of the news after covering terrorist attacks, human trafficking, and the rise of extremism. To renew her faith in humanity, she took off on a solo road trip across France, determined to see if love still exists. Traveling from village to village, farming towns to industrial cities, heart to heart, Rousselle sought out ordinary women and men, all to ask them one question, What is love? Collecting more than 90 personal testimonies, each one moving and beautiful in its own way, alongside over 100 intimate photographs, Rousselle reveals the many facets of love, and discovers that love can still be found even in the darkest of places. From a baker in Normandy to a shepherd in the Pyrenees, from a tree trimmer in Martinique to a mail woman in the Alps, Amour is a visual testament to love in all its many forms.
Download or read book The Intentions Book written by Gigi Fenster and published by Victoria University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morris Goldberg is a man who can’t cry. Semi-retired from his career as a metadata analyst, he lives alone and conducts imaginary conversations with his recently-deceased wife, Sadie. Then news arrives that his daughter Rachel is missing in the bush, with bad weather on the way. While Morris waits for news, memory and dream start to merge. Key scenes from his childhood and marriage play out in his imagination and the urgent questions of a lifetime press forward. What happens in moments of crisis? Are people capable of change? How can one express their true feelings? How does society survive the endless dance of estrangement and intimacy? The Intentions Book is a tender and funny novel about love, communication, and the ways families shape people.
Download or read book Brief Loves That Live Forever written by Andreï Makine and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully observed and moving account of love and the human spirit in the Soviet era In Soviet Russia the desire for freedom is also a desire for the freedom to love. Lovers live as outlaws, traitors to the collective spirit, and love is more intense when it feels like an act of resistance. Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him-a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover. As the dreary Brezhnev era gives way to perestroika and the fall of Communism, the orphan uncovers the truth behind the life of Dmitri Ress, whose tragic fate embodies the unbreakable bond between love and freedom. "Makine has been compared to Stendhal, Tolstoy and Proust; our best historians of the Soviet era queue up to pronounce him one of the finest living writers on the period; and he is regularly tipped to be among the contenders for the next Nobel in literature." -The Daily Telegraph
Download or read book Texas written by Carmen Boullosa and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical examination of tension and conflict on the Texas-Mexico border, told from the Mexican perspective, that's especially relevant today.
Download or read book A Ladder to the Sky written by John Boyne and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A satire of writerly ambition wrapped in a psychological thriller . . . An homage to Patricia Highsmith, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, but its execution is entirely Boyne’s own.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE Maurice Swift is handsome, charming, and hungry for fame. The one thing he doesn’t have is talent—but he’s not about to let a detail like that stand in his way. After all, a would-be writer can find stories anywhere. They don’t need to be his own. Working as a waiter in a West Berlin hotel in 1988, Maurice engineers the perfect opportunity: a chance encounter with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann. He quickly ingratiates himself with the powerful – but desperately lonely – older man, teasing out of Erich a terrible, long-held secret about his activities during the war. Perfect material for Maurice’s first novel. Once Maurice has had a taste of literary fame, he knows he can stop at nothing in pursuit of that high. Moving from the Amalfi Coast, where he matches wits with Gore Vidal, to Manhattan and London, Maurice hones his talent for deceit and manipulation, preying on the talented and vulnerable in his cold-blooded climb to the top. But the higher he climbs, the further he has to fall. . . . Sweeping across the late twentieth century, A Ladder to the Sky is a fascinating portrait of a relentlessly immoral man, a tour de force of storytelling, and the next great novel from an acclaimed literary virtuoso. Praise for A Ladder to the Sky “Boyne's mastery of perspective, last seen in The Heart's Invisible Furies, works beautifully here. . . . Boyne understands that it's far more interesting and satisfying for a reader to see that narcissist in action than to be told a catchall phrase. Each step Maurice Swift takes skyward reveals a new layer of calumny he's willing to engage in, and the desperation behind it . . . so dark it seems almost impossible to enjoy reading A Ladder to the Sky as much as you definitely will enjoy reading it.”—NPR “Delicious . . . spins out over several decades with thrilling unpredictability, following Maurice as he masters the art of co-opting the stories of others in increasingly dubious ways. And while the book reads as a thriller with a body count that would make Highsmith proud, it is also an exploration of morality and art: Where is the line between inspiration and thievery? To whom does a story belong?”—Vanity Fair
Download or read book The Book of Aron written by Jim Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed National Book Award finalist—“one of the United States’ finest writers,” according to Joshua Ferris, “full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity”—now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust. Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo. When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape—as his mentor suspected he could—to spread word about the atrocities? Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child’s-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron’s voice will remember it forever.
Download or read book All Our Wrong Todays written by Elan Mastai and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Entertainingly mixes thrills and humor.”—Entertainment Weekly “[An] amazing debut novel....Dazzling and complex....Fearlessly funny storytelling.”—The Washington Post “Instantly engaging....A timeless, if mind-bending, story about the journeys we take, populated by friends, family, lovers, and others, that show us who we might be, could be—and maybe never should be—that eventually leads us to who we are.”—USA Today Elan Mastai's acclaimed debut novel is a story of friendship and family, of unexpected journeys and alternate paths, and of love in its multitude of forms. It's 2016, and in Tom Barren's world, technology has solved all of humanity's problems—there's no war, no poverty, no under-ripe avocadoes. Unfortunately, Tom isn't happy. He's lost the girl of his dreams. And what do you do when you're heartbroken and have a time machine? Something stupid. Finding himself stranded in a terrible alternate reality—which we immediately recognize as our 2016—Tom is desperate to fix his mistake and go home. Right up until the moment he discovers wonderfully unexpected versions of his family, his career, and the woman who may just be the love of his life. Now Tom faces an impossible choice. Go back to his perfect but loveless life. Or stay in our messy reality with a soulmate by his side. His search for the answer takes him across continents and timelines in a quest to figure out, finally, who he really is and what his future—our future—is supposed to be. Filled with humor and heart and packed with insight, intelligence, and mind-bending invention, All Our Wrong Todays is a powerful and moving story of life, loss, and love.
Download or read book Of Things Gone Astray written by Janina Matthewson and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mrs Featherby had been having pleasant dreams until she woke to discover the front of her house had vanished overnight ...
Download or read book Anatomy of a Soldier written by Harry Parker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anatomy of a Soldier is a stunning first novel—of patriotism, heroism, and profound humanism—that will immediately take its place on the shelf of classics about what it truly means to be at war. Let’s imagine a man called Captain Tom Barnes, aka BA5799, who’s leading British troops in the war zone. And two boys growing up together there, sharing a prized bicycle and flying kites before finding themselves estranged once foreign soldiers appear in their countryside. And then there’s the man who trains one of them to fight against the other’s father and all these infidel invaders. Then imagine the family and friends who radiate out from these lives, people on all sides of this conflict where virtually everyone is caught up in the middle of something unthinkable. But then regard them not as they see themselves but as all the objects surrounding them do: shoes and boots, a helmet, a bag of fertilizer, a medal, a beer glass, a snowflake, dog tags, and a horrific improvised explosive device that binds them all together by blowing one of them apart—forty-five different narrators in all, including the multiple medical implements subsequently required to keep Captain Barnes alive. The result is a novel that reveals not only an author with a striking literary talent and intelligence but also the lives of people—whether husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter—who are part of this same heart-stopping journey. A work of extraordinary humanity and hope, created out of something hopeless and dehumanizing, it makes art out of pain and suffering and takes its place in a long and rich line of novels that articulate the lives that soldiers lead. In the boom of an instant, and in decades of very different lives and experiences, we see things we’ve never understood so clearly before.
Download or read book Your Fathers Where Are They And the Prophets Do They Live Forever written by Dave Eggers and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of The Circle delivers a tour de force of one man struggling to make sense of his country, seeking solutions the only way he knows how. A "story about someone who takes revenge against the world because he can't fathom how he fits into it.... This is a one-sitting read" (USA Today). What do you do when you’re full of questions: what happened to missions to the moon? Why spend a trillion dollars on war? Where did America go wrong? If you’re Thomas, a young man nursing migraines and a lack of direction, this calls for drastic action. To find some answers, Thomas kidnaps a NASA astronaut and brings him to an abandoned military base on the edge of the California coast. Then the questioning begins. The answers must be honest. The back and forth might even hurt. It might get uncomfortable. But eventually the truth will emerge.
Download or read book My Struggle written by Karl Ove Knausgaard and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative, audacious, brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel that has unquestionably been the main event of contemporary European literature. It has earned favorable comparisons to its obvious literary forebears "A la recherche du temps perdu" and "Mein Kampf"Nbut has been celebrated as the rare magnum opus that is intensely, addictively readable.
Download or read book Em and the Big Hoom written by Jerry Pinto and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The devastatingly original debut novel from a winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. “Profoundly moving . . . I cannot remember when I last read something as touching as this.” —Amitav Ghosh, author of The Glass Palace First published by a small press in India, Jerry Pinto’s debut novel has already taken the literary world by storm. Suffused with compassion, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Em and the Big Hoom is a modern masterpiece, and its American publication is certain to be one of the major literary events of the season. Meet Imelda and Augustine, or—as our young narrator calls his unusual parents—Em and the Big Hoom. Most of the time, Em smokes endless beedis and sings her way through life. She is the sun around which everyone else orbits. But as enchanting and high-spirited as she can be, when Em’s bipolar disorder seizes her she becomes monstrous, sometimes with calamitous consequences for herself and others. This accomplished debut is graceful and urgent, with a one-of-a-kind voice that will stay with readers long after the last page.
Download or read book Winter Flowers written by Angélique Villeneuve and published by Peirene Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's October 1918 and the war is drawing to a close. Toussaint Caillet returns home to his wife, Jeanne, and the young daughter he hasn't seen growing up. He is not coming back from the front line but from the department for facial injuries at Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he has spent the last two years. For Jeanne, who has struggled to endure his absence and the hardships of wartime, her husband's return marks the beginning of a new battle. With the promise of peace now in sight, the family must try to stitch together a new life from the tatters of what they had before.
Download or read book All This By Chance written by Vincent O'Sullivan and published by Victoria University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: f we don’t have the past in mind, it is merely history. If we do, it is still part of the present.Esther’s grandparents first meet at a church dance in London in 1947. Stephen, a shy young Kiwi, has left to practise pharmacy on the other side of the world. Eva has grown up English, with no memory of the Jewish family who sent their little girl to safety. When the couple emigrate, the peace they seek in New Zealand cannot overcome the past they have left behind.Following the lives of Eva, her daughter Lisa and her granddaughter Esther, All This by Chance is a moving multigenerational family saga about the legacy of the Holocaust and the burden of secrets never shared, by one of New Zealand’s finest writers.
Download or read book Plan D written by Simon Urban and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: October 2011. While West Berlin enjoys all the trappings of capitalism, on the crowded, polluted, Eastern side of the Wall, the GDR is facing bankruptcy. The ailing government's only hope lies in economic talks with the West, but then an ally of the GDR’s chairman is found murdered – and all the clues suggest that his killer came from within the Stasi. Detective Martin Wegener is assigned to the case, but, with the future of East Germany hanging over him, Wegener must work with the West German police if he is to find the killer, even if it means investigating the Stasi themselves. It is a journey that will take him from Stasi meeting rooms to secret prisons as he begins to unravel the identity of both victim and killer, and the meaning of the mysterious Plan D. Plan D is a gripping thriller and a thought-provoking alternative history in the vein of Robert Harris’s Fatherland and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Download or read book Life And Death of Harriett Frean written by May Sinclair and published by Lindhardt og Ringhof. This book was released on 2022-06-13 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: May Sinclair’s ‘Life And Death of Harriett Frean’ tells the story of the titular character, Harriett, who has been raised as the embodiment of the perfect Victorian woman; loving, honourable, and obedient. She idolizes her parents and learns from childhood that love is equal to self-sacrifice but when she falls in love with her closest friend’s fiancé, she is forced to question everything she thought she thought she knew. Described as a "small, perfect gem of a book" by author Jonathan Coe, this historical romance novella was adapted into a BBC television show in 1986 and is a brilliant study of female ideals that stands alongside works by Virginia Woolf. May Sinclair was the pen name of Mary Amelia St. Clair, born 1863. May was a popular British writer who wrote over 20 novels, short stories, and poetry. She was also an active suffragist, and a member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. Her activities for women’s voting rights were remembered by Sylvia Pankhurst, and May Sinclair once even dressed up as a rebel Jane Austen during a suffrage fundraising event.
