Download or read book Notes from an Island written by Tove Jansson and published by Sort of Books. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless skerry in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietilä, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the solitude and shifting seascapes. Notes from an Island, published in English for the first time, is both a chronicle of this period and a homage to the mature love that Tove and 'Tooti' shared for their island and for each other. Tove's spare prose, and Tuulikki's subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty. '... Tooti wandered aimlessly around the island and stood stock still for long periods. I thought I knew what she was doing. She was working again. Copperplate etchings and wash drawings. Mostly the lagoon, the lagoon as a consummate mirror for clouds and birds, the lagoon in a storm, in fog. And the granite, first and foremost, the granite, the cliff, the rocks. It's all peace and quiet now.'

Download or read book Notes from a Small Island written by Bill Bryson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before New York Times bestselling author Bill Bryson wrote The Road to Little Dribbling, he took this delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation of Great Britain, which has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie’s Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey.

Download or read book Notes From an Even Smaller Island written by Neil Humphreys and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Letters from Tove written by Tove Jansson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A virtual memoir in letters by the beloved creator of the Moomins Tove Jansson’s works, even her famed Moomin books, fairly teem with letters of one kind or another, from messages bobbing in bottles to whole epistolary novels. Fortunately for her countless readers, her life was no different, unfolding as it did in the letters to family, friends, and lovers that make up this volume, a veritable autobiography over the course of six decades—and the only one Jansson ever wrote. And just as letters carry a weight of significance in Jansson’s writing, those she wrote throughout her life reflect the gravity of her circumstances, the depth of her thoughts and feelings, and the critical moments of humor, sadness, and grace that mark an artist’s days. These letters, penned with characteristic insight and wit, provide an almost seamless commentary on Jansson’s life within Helsinki’s bohemian circles and on her island home. Shifting between hope and despair, yearning and happiness, they describe her immersion in art studies and her ascension to fame with the Moomins. They speak frankly of friendship and love, loneliness and solidarity, and also of politics, art, literature, and society. They summon a particular place and time reflected through a mind finely attuned to her culture, her world, and her own nature—all clearly put into biographical and historical context by the volume’s editors, both longtime friends of Tove Jansson—and, in the end, draw a complex, intimate self-portrait of one of the world’s most beloved authors.

Download or read book Island of the Blue Dolphins written by Scott O'Dell and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1960 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far off the coast of California looms a harsh rock known as the island of San Nicholas. Dolphins flash in the blue waters around it, sea otter play in the vast kep beds, and sea elephants loll on the stony beaches. Here, in the early 1800s, according to history, an Indian girl spent eighteen years alone, and this beautifully written novel is her story. It is a romantic adventure filled with drama and heartache, for not only was mere subsistence on so desolate a spot a near miracle, but Karana had to contend with the ferocious pack of wild dogs that had killed her younger brother, constantly guard against the Aleutian sea otter hunters, and maintain a precarious food supply. More than this, it is an adventure of the spirit that will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down. Karana's quiet courage, her Indian self-reliance and acceptance of fate, transform what to many would have been a devastating ordeal into an uplifting experience. From loneliness and terror come strength and serenity in this Newbery Medal-winning classic.

Download or read book A Fan s Notes written by Frederick Exley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1988-08-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.

Download or read book Our Island Story written by H. E. Marshall and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Island Story is the "history" of England up to Queen Victoria's Death. Marshall used these stories to tell her children about their homeland, Great Britain. To add to the excitement, she mixed in a bit of myth as well as a few legends.

Download or read book The Water Is Wide written by Pat Conroy and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 2002-03-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “miraculous” (Newsweek) human drama, based on a true story, from the renowned author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw Island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence unless, somehow, they can learn a new way. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher—until one man gives a year of his life to the island and its people. Praise for The Water Is Wide “Miraculous . . . an experience of joy.”—Newsweek “A powerfully moving book . . . You will laugh, you will weep, you will be proud and you will rail . . . and you will learn to love the man.”—Charleston News and Courier “A hell of a good story.”—The New York Times “Few novelists write as well, and none as beautifully.”—Lexington Herald-Leader “[Pat] Conroy cuts through his experiences with a sharp edge of irony. . . . He brings emotion, writing talent and anger to his story.”—Baltimore Sun

Download or read book The Imagined Island written by Pedro L. San Miguel and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-05-18 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a landmark study of history, power, and identity in the Caribbean, Pedro L. San Miguel examines the historiography of Hispaniola, the West Indian island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He argues that the national identities of (and often the tense relations between) citizens of these two nations are the result of imaginary contrasts between the two nations drawn by historians, intellectuals, and writers. Covering five centuries and key intellectual figures from each country, San Miguel bridges literature, history, and ethnography to locate the origins of racial, ethnic, and national identity on the island. He finds that Haiti was often portrayed by Dominicans as "the other--first as a utopian slave society, then as a barbaric state and enemy to the Dominican Republic. Although most of the Dominican population is mulatto and black, Dominican citizens tended to emphasize their Spanish (white) roots, essentially silencing the political voice of the Dominican majority, San Miguel argues. This pioneering work in Caribbean and Latin American historiography, originally published in Puerto Rico in 1997, is now available in English for the first time.

Download or read book Notes on the Return to the Island written by Bonafide Rojas and published by . This book was released on 2017-06 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new collection Notes On The Return To The Island, Bonafide Rojas pays tribute, honors family & puts the lens on the current state of Puerto Rico. From United States colonialism to the creation of a fiscal control board due to the 70 billion dollar debt to his parents relationship with Puerto Rico. Rojas has presented a rare perspective of both "Aqu�/All� (here/there) of The Nuyorican experience in The Puerto Rican Diaspora. Notes On The Return To The Island will show you what's happening inside Puerto Rico & allow you how they see the world staring at them.

Download or read book Last Notes from Home written by Frederick Exley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Of his generation's metafictioneers, Fred Exley has created the richest and most American body of work .... LAST NOTES tells tales about corruption, confession, and the often terrible beauty of the bonds of love." - VILLAGE VOICE Frederick Exley, the splenetic and prodigiously self-destructive narrator and protagonist of A FAN'S NOTES and PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND, is alive, if not exactly well. In this exhilarating, scalding new novel, Ex recounts his death watch for his older brother, his imprisonment by a nightmarish Irishman, and his sexual enthrallment to a beautiful flight attendant whose lies are even more inventive than his own. Searching compulsively for love and inevitably betraying it, lashing out at the country in which he is perpetually an alien, Exley remains one of the most riveting characters- and mesmerizing writers - in contemporary American fiction. "[Exley] can weave a number of seemingly unrelated incidents into a single, allusive narrative leading to an unexpected, usually prickly epiphany. His books seem like the loquacious meanderings of one of the more literary and entertainingly cynical, if often terrifyingly frank, guys one might meet in a neighborhood bar.... They reveal themselves as structurally complex, thoroughly imagined, consummate works of art." -BOSTON GLOBE

Download or read book No Man is an Island written by Thomas Merton and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a stimulating series of spiritual reflections which will prove helpful for all struggling to find the meaning of human existence and to live the richest, fullest and noblest life. --Chicago Tribune

Download or read book Island of the Sequined Love Nun written by Christopher Moore and published by Harper Paperbacks. This book was released on 2000-06-21 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fantasy on a commercial pilot whose life is saved by a ghost and who has to return the favor. Pilot Tucker Case is ordered to fly to a Pacific island and save its inhabitants from human sacrifice. The victims' organs are sold to Japan.

Download or read book Page from a Cold Island written by Frederick Exley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death of Edmund Wilson precipitates an odyssey through the distorted literary landscape of America in search of Wilson's essence as the pre-eminent man of letters and the author's own creative wellsprings

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 Notes from an Island written by Tove Jansson and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2024-10-22 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a renowned artist and writer, a deeply personal nature journal about the island that informed her many works, with paintings from her longtime partner, artist Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä. In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin. Tove's signature spare, quirky prose, and Tooti's subtle ink washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty, a chronicle of living peacefully in nature and observing the island’s ecology and character. Notes from an Island is both a work of artistic collaboration and an homage to the deep love the two women shared. One feels as if Jansson’s journal, with Tooti’s sketches tucked inside, has been unearthed like a treasure from under a pile of old quilts in the back of their rustic cabin. Praise for the essay, “The Island” “At once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem, ‘The Island’ reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book and a vignette of Klovharun ... the text seems to change following mysterious tides from a timeless present to an urgent past.” —Hernan Diaz, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Praise for Tove Jansson "It could be said that everything she wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature."—The Guardian "Her style is not at all 'poetic'—quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures."—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Guardian “Tove Jansson was a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.”—Philip Pullman “It’s hard to describe the astonishing achievement of Jansson’s artistry.”—Ali Smith

Download or read book The Starship and the Canoe written by Kenneth Brower and published by Mountaineers Books. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Starship and the Canoe is neither a wilderness survival manual nor a book of blueprints. It is another of those rare books impossible to define: the kind that seeks you in time. And you will know it, live it, and consult it thereafter simply by name.” --Chicago Sun-Times “Brower’s superbly written book clutches at one’s imagination.” --Publishers Weekly “In the tradition of Carl Sagan and John McPhee, a bracing cerebral voyage past intergalactic hoopla and backwoods retreats.” --Kirkus Reviews Originally published in 1978, The Starship and the Canoe is the remarkable story of a father and son: Freeman Dyson is a world-renowned astrophysicist who dreams of exploring the heavens and has designed a spaceship to take him there. His son George, a brilliant high school dropout, lives in a treehouse and is designing a giant kayak to explore the icy coastal wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Author Kenneth Brower describes with stunning impact their lives and their visions of the world. It is a timeless tale framed by modern science, adventure, family, and the natural world.