Download or read book Picador Best New Voices Sampler Fall 2014 written by Picador and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picador Presents the Fall's Best New Voices This fall, immerse yourself in these free, select excerpts from this spellbinding list of fiction and nonfiction titles, brought to you by Picador. Discover the books at the front lines of modern fiction and nonfiction by some of our country's finest authors, and be the first to unearth the next generation with our smart, imaginative debuts. In this sampler, enjoy excerpts from Edward St. Aubyn, Keith Donohue, Euny Hong, Richard House, Fred Venturini, and many more!

Download or read book Picador Book Club Sampler Fall 2014 written by Picador and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picador Presents the Picador Book Club This fall, immerse yourself in these free, select excerpts from this year's best reading group books, brought to you by Picador. Discover the books at the front lines of modern fiction by some of our country's finest authors. These reading group books are sure to lead to some legendary chats (and arguments!) at your book club. In this sampler, enjoy excerpts from Alice McDermott, Toby Barlow, Amy Grace Loyd, Mary Kay Zurevleff, Ronald Frame, and many more!

Download or read book The Singer Songwriter Handbook written by Justin Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The singer-songwriter, someone who writes and performs their own music, is an ever-present and increasingly complex figure in popular music worlds. The Singer-Songwriter Handbook provides a useful resource for student songwriters, active musicians, fans and scholars alike. This handbook is divided into four main sections: Songwriting (acoustic and digital), Performance, Music Industry and Case Studies. Section I focuses on the 'how to' elements of popular song composition, embracing a range of perspectives and methods, in addition to chapters on the teaching of songwriting to students. Section II deals with the nature of performance: stagecraft, open mic nights, and a number of case studies that engage with performing in a range of contexts. Section III is devoted to aspects of the music industry and the business of music including sales, contract negotiations, copyright, social media and marketing. Section IV provides specific examples of singer-songwriter personae and global open mic scenes. The Singer-Songwriter Handbook is a much-needed single resource for budding singer-songwriters as well as songwriting pedagogues.

Download or read book The Good House written by Ann Leary and published by Atlantic Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOVIE STARRING KEVIN KLINE AND SIGOURNEY WEAVER LONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2014 _______________________________________ Hildy Good has reached that dangerous time in a woman's life - middle-aged and divorced, she is an oddity in her small but privileged town. But Hildy isn't one for self-pity and instead meets the world with a wry smile, a dark wit and a glass or two of Pinot Noir. When her two earnest grown-up children stage an 'intervention' and pack Hildy off to an addiction centre, she thinks all this fuss is ridiculous. After all, why shouldn't she enjoy a drink now and then? But we start to see another side to Hildy Good, and to her life's greatest passion. Soon, a cluster of secrets become dangerously entwined, with devastating consequences...

Download or read book Wolf Hall written by Hilary Mantel and published by HarperCollins Canada. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. The son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power. Narrowly escaping personal disaster—the loss of his young family and of Wolsey, his beloved patron—he picks his way deftly through a court where “man is wolf to man.” Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry’s desires. In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. Wolf Hall re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hair’s breadth, where success brings unlimited power, but a single failure means death.

Download or read book Three Minutes in Poland written by Glenn Kurtz and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--

Download or read book Mimi Malloy At Last written by Julia MacDonnell and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Mimi Malloy: A daughter of the Great Depression, Mimi was born into an Irish-Catholic brood of seven, and she has done her best to raise six beautiful daughters of her own. Now they're grown, and Mimi, a divorcée, is unexpectedly retired. But she takes solace in the comforts of her new life: her apartment in the heart of Quincy, the occasional True Blue cigarette, and evenings with Frank Sinatra on the stereo and a highball in her hand. Yet her phone is arguably the busiest in greater Boston—it rings "Day In, Day Out," as Ol' Blue Eyes would say. Her surviving sisters love to gab about their girlhood, while her eldest daughter, Cassandra, calls every morning to preach the gospel of assisted living. And when an MRI reveals that Mimi's brain is filled with black spots—areas of atrophy, her doctor says—it looks like she's destined to spend her days in "one of those storage facilities for unwanted antiques." Mimi knows her mind is (more or less) as sharp as ever, and she won't go down without a fight. Yet as she prepares to take her stand, she stumbles upon an old pendant of her mother's and, slowly, her memory starts to return—specifically, recollections of a shocking and painful childhood, including her sister who was sent away to Ireland and the wicked stepmother she swore to forget. Out of the ashes of Mimi's deeply troubled history, Julia MacDonnell gives us a redemptive story of the family bonds that break us and remake us. Mimi Malloy, At Last! is an unforgettable novel, alive with humor, unexpected romance, and the magic of hard-earned insight: a poignant reminder that it's never too late to fall in love and that one can always come of age a second time.

Download or read book Christian Interculture written by Arun W. Jones and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the remarkable growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the twentieth century, there is a dearth of primary material produced by these Christians. This volume explores the problem of writing the history of indigenous Christian communities in the Global South. Many such indigenous Christian groups pass along knowledge orally, and colonial forces have often not deemed their ideas and activities worth preserving. In some instances, documentation from these communities has been destroyed by people or nature. Highlighting the creative solutions that historians have found to this problem, the essays in this volume detail the strategies employed in discerning the perspectives, ideas, activities, motives, and agency of indigenous Christians. The contributors approach the problem on a case-by-case basis, acknowledging the impact of diverse geographical, cultural, political, and ecclesiastical factors. This volume will inspire historians of World Christianity to critically interrogate—and imaginatively use—existing Western and indigenous documentary material in writing the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include J. J. Carney, Adrian Hermann, Paul Kollman, Kenneth Mills, Esther Mombo, Mrinalini Sebastian, Christopher Vecsey, Haruko Nawata Ward, and Yanna Yannakakis.

Download or read book Internal Migration Crime and Punishment in Contemporary China written by Anqi Shen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work investigates inequality and social exclusion in contemporary Chinese society, specifically in the context of urbanization, migration and crime. Economic reforms started in the late 1970s (post-Mao) fuelled a trend of urbanization and mass migration within China, largely from rural areas to more economically developed urban regions. With this migration, came new challenges in a rapidly changing society. Researchers have extensively studied the rural-to-urban human movement, social changes, inequality and its impact on individuals and society as a whole. This volume provides a new perspective on this issue. It forges a link between internal migration, inequality, social exclusion and crime in the context of China, through qualitative research into the impact of this phenomenon on individuals’ lives. Using a series of case studies drawn from interviews with inmates – men and women – in a large Chinese prison, it focuses on migrant offenders’ subjective experiences, and analyses issues from the rarely-heard perspectives of migrant lawbreakers themselves. The research demonstrates how factors – including: the hukou system, rural-urban, class and gender inequalities, prejudices against rural migrants, and other structural problems – often lead to migrant offending. The author argues that to mitigate the effects of criminalisation, the root causes of these problems should be examined, emphasizing radical reforms to the hukou policy, cultural change in urban society to welcome newcomers, positive programs to integrate migrant workers into urban societies and improve their opportunities, rather than inflicting harsher penalties or reducing migration. While the research is based in China, it has clear implications for other regions of the world, which are experiencing similar tensions related to national and international migration. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in Asia, as well as those in related fields such as sociology, law and social justice.

Download or read book Sounding Our Way Home written by Susan Miyo Asai and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2024-01-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A product of twenty-five years of archival and primary research, Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity narrates the efforts of three generations of Japanese Americans to reach “home” through musicking. Using ethnomusicology as a lens, Susan Miyo Asai examines the musical choices of a population that, historically, is considered outside the racial and ethnic boundaries of American citizenship. Emphasizing the notion of national identity and belonging, the volume provokes a discussion about the challenges of nation-building in a democratic society. Asai addresses the politics of music, interrogating the ways musicking functions as a performance of social, cultural, and political identification for Japanese Americans in the United States. Musicking is an inherently political act at the intersection of music, identity, and politics, particularly if it involves expressing one’s ethnicity and/or race. Asai further investigates how Japanese American ethnic identification and cultural practices relate to national belonging. Musicking cultivates a narrative of a shared history and aesthetic between performers and listeners. The discourse situates not only Japanese Americans, but all Asians into the Black/white binary of race relations in the United States. Sounding Our Way Home contributes to the ongoing struggle for acceptance and equal representation for people of color in the US. A history of Japanese American musicking across three generations, the book unveils the social and political discrimination that nonwhite immigrants and their offspring continue to face when it comes to finding acceptance in US society and culture.

Download or read book Fevers Feuds and Diamonds written by Paul Farmer and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Paul Farmer brings his considerable intellect, empathy, and expertise to bear in this powerful and deeply researched account of the Ebola outbreak that struck West Africa in 2014. It is hard to imagine a more timely or important book.” —Bill and Melinda Gates "[The] history is as powerfully conveyed as it is tragic . . . Illuminating . . . Invaluable." —Steven Johnson, The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea suffered the worst epidemic of Ebola in history. The brutal virus spread rapidly through a clinical desert where basic health-care facilities were few and far between. Causing severe loss of life and economic disruption, the Ebola crisis was a major tragedy of modern medicine. But why did it happen, and what can we learn from it? Paul Farmer, the internationally renowned doctor and anthropologist, experienced the Ebola outbreak firsthand—Partners in Health, the organization he founded, was among the international responders. In Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, he offers the first substantive account of this frightening, fast-moving episode and its implications. In vibrant prose, Farmer tells the harrowing stories of Ebola victims while showing why the medical response was slow and insufficient. Rebutting misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly, he traces West Africa’s chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice. Under formal colonial rule, disease containment was a priority but care was not – and the region’s health care woes worsened, with devastating consequences that Farmer traces up to the present. This thorough and hopeful narrative is a definitive work of reportage, history, and advocacy, and a crucial intervention in public-health discussions around the world.

Download or read book Palo Alto written by James Franco and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fiercely vivid collection of stories about troubled California adolescents and misfits.

Download or read book The Ask written by Sam Lipsyte and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-02-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dark comic novel by the author of Home Land, a college development officer’s last chance to keep his job comes at a high cost. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Milo Burke—husband, father, development officer at a third-tier university—has just joined the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after off jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is relieved to get another chance from his former boss. All he has to do is reel in a potential donor who, mysteriously, has requested Milo’s involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo’s sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the “give” won’t come cheap. Exploring such themes as work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, The Ask is a hilarious tour de force from a writer who has already shown that the deepest fictions are often the funniest.

Download or read book This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage written by Ann Patchett and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'So compellingly personal you feel you're looking over her shoulder as she sits down to write' New York Times 'Electrically entertaining ... Funny, generous, spirited and kind' The Times This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is an irresistible blend of literature and memoir revealing the big experiences and little moments that shaped Ann Patchett as a daughter, wife, friend and writer. Here, Ann Patchett shares entertaining and moving stories about her tumultuous childhood, her painful early divorce, the excitement of selling her first book, driving a Winnebago from Montana to Yellowstone Park, her joyous discovery of opera, scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, the gradual loss of her beloved grandmother, starting her own bookshop in Nashville, her love for her very special dog and, of course, her eventual happy marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a memoir both wide ranging and deeply personal, overflowing with close observation and emotional wisdom, told with wit, honesty and irresistible warmth.

Download or read book Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers written by Tom Wolfe and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is classic Tom Wolfe, a funny, irreverent, and "delicious" (The Wall Street Journal) dissection of class and status by the master of New Journalism The phrase 'radical chic' was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue. That incongruous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. Radical Chic provocatively explores the relationship between Black rage and White guilt. Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, set in San Francisco at the Office of Economic Opportunity, details the corruption and dysfunction of the anti-poverty programs run at that time. Wolfe uncovers how much of the program's money failed to reach its intended recipients. Instead, hustlers gamed the system, causing the OEO efforts to fail the impoverished communities.

Download or read book Outtakes from a Marriage written by Ann Leary and published by Crown. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A sparkling debut novel...a bittersweet tale about love, marriage, and the perils of fame." —People Julia and Joe Ferraro are living the good life in Manhattan now that Joe’s finally made it; he’s the star of a hit TV show and has just been nominated for a Golden Globe. Even better, Julia and Joe are still madly in love. Or so Julia thinks until the fateful evening when she accidentally hears a voice mail on Joe’s phone—a message left by a woman who is clearly more than a friend. Suddenly Julia is in a tailspin, compulsively checking Joe’s messages, stalking him in cyberspace, and showing up unannounced on his sets, wondering all along if she should confront him. Julia’s search forces her to consider the possibility that in the long process of helping Joe become something, she has become a bit of a “nothing,” as her daughter once described her to her class on career day. When Julia and Joe first met, she was an edgy East Village girl who wrote music reviews for the Village Voice and threw famed parties in a gritty downtown loft with her friends. But after Joe won her heart, she settled into doting motherhood and a new life of comfy clothes and parenting associations. Now, faced with the looming awards show and the possibility of a destroyed marriage, Julia embarks on an accelerated self-improvement routine of Botox, hair extensions, and erotically charged shrink sessions while dodging the sancti-mommies who lie in wait for her at her son’s preschool each day. A unique take on the perennially popular issue of women trying not to lose themselves in matrimony and motherhood, Outtakes from a Marriage is expertly and humorously set against the Manhattan preschool mafia, the Hollywood machine, and the ticking clock of a waiting red carpet. "How does a free spirit turned wife and mother cope with her actor husband's infidelity?...With tears, irreverent humor and, ultimately, a reaffirmed sense of self...A witty take on marital survival in Manhattan—with heart." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Download or read book The Birth of Korean Cool written by Euny Hong and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a really unhip country suddenly become cool? How could a nation that once banned miniskirts, long hair on men and rock 'n' roll come to mass produce pop music and a K-pop star that would break the world record for the most YouTube hits? Who would have predicted that a South Korean company that used to sell fish and fruit (Samsung) would one day give Apple a run for its money? And just how does South Korea plan to use pop culture to beat America at its own game. Welcome to South Korea: The Brand. In The Birth of Korean Cooljournalist Euny Hong uncovers the roots of the 'Korean Wave': a fanaticism for South Korean pop culture that has enabled them to make the rest of the world a captive market for their products by first becoming the world's number one pop culture manufacturer. South Korea's economic development has been nothing short of staggering - leapfrogging from third-world to first-world in just a few years and continuing to grow at a rapid and unprecedented rate - and for the first time The Birth of Korean Coolwill give readers exclusive insight into the inner workings of this extraordinary country; it's past, present and future.