Download or read book Sweet Diamond Dust written by Rosario Ferre and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1996-10-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosario Ferre uses family history as a metaphor for the class struggles and political evolution of Latin America and Puerto Rico in this highly provacative, profound, and delightfully readable collection of stories. Originally published in Spanish under the title Maldito Amor ("Cursed Love"), Sweet Diamond Dust introduced American readers to a voice that is by turns lyrical and wickedly satiric. In this tale the De La Valle family's secrets, ambitions, and passions, interwoven with the fate of the local sugar mill, are recounted by various relatives, friends, and servants. As the characters struggle under the burden of privilege, the story, permeated with haunting echoes of Puerto Rico's own turbulent history, becomes a splendid allegory for a nation's past. The three accompanying stories each follow the lives of the descendants of the De La Valle family, making the book a drama in four parts, raising troubling issues of race, religion, freedom, and sex, with Ferre's trademark irony and startling imagery.
Download or read book The House on the Lagoon written by Rosario Ferré and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award: “A family saga in the manner of Gabriel García Márquez,” set in Puerto Rico, from an extraordinary storyteller (The New York Times Book Review). This riveting, multigenerational epic tells the story of two families and the history of Puerto Rico through the eyes of Isabel Monfort and her husband, Quintín Mendizabal. Isabel attempts to immortalize their now-united families—and, by extension, their homeland—in a book. The tale that unfolds in her writing has layers upon layers, exploring the nature of love, marriage, family, and Puerto Rico itself. Weaving the intimate with the expansive on a teeming stage, Ferré crafts a revealing self-portrait of a man and a woman, two fiercely independent people searching for meaning and identity. As Isabel declares: “Nothing is true, nothing is false, everything is the color of the glass you’re looking through.” A book about freeing oneself from societal and cultural constraints, The House on the Lagoon also grapples with bigger issues of life, death, poverty, and racism. Mythological in its breadth and scope, this is a masterwork from an extraordinary storyteller.
Download or read book The Youngest Doll written by and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gentle maiden aunt who has been victimized for years unexpectedly retaliates through her talent for making life-sized dolls filled with honey. “The Youngest Doll,” based on a family anecdote, is a stunning literary expression of Rosario Ferré’s feminist and social concerns. It is the premier story in a collection that was originally published in Spanish in 1976 as Papeles de Pandora and is now translated into English by the author. The daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico, Ferré portrays women loosening the constraints that have bound them to a patriarchal culture. Anger takes creative rather than polemical form in ten stories that started Ferré on her way to becoming a leading woman writer in Latin America. The upper-middle-class women in The Youngest Doll, mostly married to macho men, rebel against their doll-like existence or retreat into fantasy, those without money or the right skin color are even more oppressed. In terms of power and influence, these women stand in the same relation to men as Puerto Rico itself does to the United States, and Ferré stretches artistic boundaries in writing about their situation. The stories, moving from the realistic to the nightmarish, are deeply, felt, full of irony and black humor, often experimental in form. The imagery is striking: an architect dreams about a beautiful bridge that “would open and close its arches like alligators making love”; a Mercedes Benz “shines in the dark like a chromium rhinoceros.” One story, “The Sleeping Beauty,” is a collage of letters, announcements, and photo captions that allows chilling conclusions to be drawn from what is not written. The collection includes Ferré’s discussion of “When Women Love Men,” a story about a prostitute and a society lady who unite in order to survive, and one that illustrates the woman writer’s “art of dissembling anger through irony.” In closing, she considers how her experience as a Latin American woman with ties to the United States has brought to her writing a dual cultural perspective.
Download or read book Diamond Dust written by Anita Desai and published by HMH. This book was released on 2000-05-19 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of stories stretching from India to New England to Mexico from the author of Fasting, Feasting—an “undeniable genius” (TheWashington Post Book World). The men and women in these nine tales set out on journeys that suddenly go beyond the pale—or surprisingly lead them back to where they started. In the mischievous title story, a beloved dog brings nothing but disaster to his obsessed master; in other tales, old friendships and family ties stir up buried feelings, demanding either renewed commitment or escape. And in the final exquisite story, a young woman discovers a new kind of freedom in Delhi’s rooftop community. This is a richly diverse, “quiet but deeply satisfying” collection of stories, from a three-time Man Booker Prize finalist (Kirkus Reviews). “Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture . . . Both serious and wonderfully entertaining.” —Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Foreign Affairs “Served up with characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor and attention to the little hypocrisies of the middle class.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Flight of the Swan written by Rosario Ferré and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renowned Russian ballerina is stranded in Puerto Rico as a revolution tears her homeland apart—and she finds herself in the middle of another uprising In a truly multicultural story and a daring example of global fiction, Rosario Ferré uses her prodigious talents to deliver an unforgettable tale of love, politics, and the power of female expression. Based loosely on a real episode in the life of famous prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, Flight of the Swan follows Niura Federovsky as she flees Russia when revolution breaks out in 1917. Adrift in San Juan, Niura falls in love with a much younger man. Her passion for revolutionary Diamantino Márquez mirrors the turmoil of the strife-torn island, and her dance troupe soon becomes caught up in Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence. Niura’s maid and confidant, Masha, the heart and soul of the novel, is devastated by Madame’s apparent abandonment of her art. Masha tries to save her mistress from heartbreak—only to lose her own heart to a most unexpected arrival.
Download or read book Latino Dreams written by Paul Allatson and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2002 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A welcome addition to the fields of Latino and (trans-)American cultural and literary studies, Latino Dreams focuses on a selection of Latino narratives, published between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, that may be said to traffic in the U.S.A.'s attendant myths and governing cultural logics. The selection includes novels by authors who have received little academic attention--Abraham Rodriguez, Achy Obejas, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz--along with underattended texts from more renowned writers--Rosario Ferré, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Latino Dreams takes a transcultural approach in order to raise questions of subaltern subordination and domination, and the resistant capacities of cultural production. The analysis explores how the selected narratives deploy specific narrative tactics, and a range of literary and other cultural capital, in order to question and reform the U.S.A.'s imaginary coordinates. In these texts, moreover, national imperatives are complicated by recourse to feminist, queer, panethnic, postcolonial, or transnational agendas. Yet the analysis also recognizes instances in which the counter-narrative will is frustrated: the narratives may provide signs of the U.S.A.'s hegemonic resilience in the face of imaginary disavowal.
Download or read book The Secret Diamond Sisters written by Michelle Madow and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Savannah. Courtney. Peyton. The three sisters grew up not knowing their father and not quite catching a break. But it looks like their luck is about to change when they find out the secret identity of their long-lost dad—a billionaire Las Vegas hotel owner who wants them to come live in a gorgeous penthouse hotel suite. Suddenly the Strip's most exclusive clubs are all-access, and with an unlimited credit card each, it should be easier than ever to fit right in. But in a town full of secrets and illusion, fitting in is nothing compared to finding out the truth about their past.
Download or read book Diamonds in the Dust written by Charmaine Pauls and published by Charmaine Pauls. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “She’s a pretty wildflower destined for my brother's vase. I'll make her mine, even if how I do it will make flowers wilt.” A DARK FRENCH MAFIA ROMANCE Men like us, we see things. We do things, things that make us unfeeling. That's the price of power and money, of living la belle vie and running the French mafia. Then she came along like a pretty wildflower pushing through the cracks on a dirty pavement - fragile yet resilient, a breath of beauty among the filth. She was supposed to be just another job, a nameless person I was to pluck from her life and hand to my brother, nothing but a pawn in the gamble of our diamond business. There's a psychological label for men like us. We lack empathy and guilt. We do things to have what we want, things that make flowers wilt. Note: Diamonds in the Dust is Book 1 of the Diamonds are Forever trilogy and ends on a cliffhanger. Zoe and Maxime's story continues in Diamonds in the Rough (Book 2) and concludes in Diamonds are Forever (Book 3). This dark mafia romance trilogy is part of the Diamond Magnate collection. You don't have to read the other books to follow the story. The Diamond Magnate collection in order: Standalone Novels (Dark Arranged Marriage & Mistaken Identity Romance) Beauty in Deception Beauty in the Broken Diamonds are Forever Trilogy (Dark Mafia / Kidnapping Romance) Diamonds in the Dust (Book 1) Diamonds in the Rough (Book 2) Diamonds are Forever (Book 3) Beauty in the Stolen Trilogy (Dark Heist Romance) Stolen Lust (Book 1) Stolen Life (Book 2) Stolen Love (Book 3) Beauty in Imperfection Duology (Dark Arranged Marriage Romance) Imperfect Intentions (Book 1) Imperfect Affections (Book 2)
Download or read book Eccentric Neighborhoods written by Rosario Ferré and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1998-02-28 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eccentric Neighborhoods is a an attempt to lay bare the psychological conflicts that determine the relationships between mothers and daughters and the story of Puerto Rico's transformation, from the beginning of the century, into a spearhead of the Caribbean.
Download or read book Salvage Work written by Angela Naimou and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salvage Work examines contemporary literary responses to the law’s construction of personhood in the Americas. Tracking the extraordinary afterlives of the legal slave personality from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, Angela Naimou shows the legal slave to be a fractured but generative figure for contemporary legal personhood across categories of race, citizenship, gender, and labor. What emerges is a compelling and original study of how law invents categories of identification and how literature contends with the person as a legal fiction. Through readings of Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman, Edwidge Danticat’s Krik?Krak!, Rosario Ferre’s Sweet Diamond Dust (Maldito Amor), Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho and Mosquito, and John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon, Naimou shows how literary engagements with legal personhood reconfigure formal narrative conventions in Black Atlantic historiography, the immigrant novel, the anticolonial romance, the trope of the talking book, and the bildungsroman. Revealing links between colonial, civic, slave, labor, immigration, and penal law, Salvage Work reframes debates over civil and human rights by revealing the shared hemispheric histories and effects of legal personhood across seemingly disparate identities—including the human and the corporate person, the political refugee and the economic migrant, and the stateless person and the citizen. In depicting the material remains of the legal slave personality in the de-industrialized neoliberal era, these literary texts develop a salvage aesthetic that invites us to rethink our political and aesthetic imagination of personhood. Questioning liberal frameworks for civil and human rights as well as what Naimou calls death-bound theories of personhood—in which forms of human life are primarily described as wasted, disposable, bare, or dead in law—Salvage Work thus responds to critical discussions of biopolitics and neoliberal globalization by exploring the potential for contemporary literature to reclaim the individual from the legal regimes that have marked her.
Download or read book Sweet Boundless Diamond of the Rockies Book 2 written by Kristen Heitzmann and published by Bethany House. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly married Carina DiGratia Shephard longs to make a home for herself and her husband, Quillan, in the rugged mining town of Crystal, Colorado. Quillan, however, has turned away to confront the haunting pain of his troubled childhood. Out of her loneliness, Carina opens a restaurant, and through its success soon attains the independence and identity she has long sought. When Carina is attacked in retaliation for her kindness to the destitute families of miners, everything changes. Will Quillan exchange his bitterness for the forgiveness of God in time to save their marriage?
Download or read book Subversive Silences written by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2009 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weldt-Basson (Spanish, Wayne State U.) investigates how seven Latin American women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have used the concept of submissive silence in their works as a sign of women's rebellion against the passive silence imposed by patriarchy. Using different theoretical perspectives in each chapter, she demonstrates how Marta Brunet, Maria Luisa Bombal, Rosario Castellanos, Isabel Allende, Rosario Ferre, Laura Esquivel, and Sandra Cisneros have used silence thematically and stylistically through hyperbole, coding, irony, parody, and cultural symbol and how silence reflects different time periods and countries.
Download or read book Diamond in the Dust written by Autumn Jones Lake and published by Ahead of the Pack, LLC. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life is the dirt where I’ve buried the secrets of my past. With a few careless words, those rotting memories have been uncovered. For years, I healed the past by living in the moment. Until I found the woman who would be my future. Now all those unspoken secrets have the power to destroy everything. What started out as a simple rescue has taken me down a road I never could’ve imagined. And I’ll do anything to keep her in my life. The ugliness of my past is buried deep. But no matter how much dirt you throw on top of them, skeletons always have a way of crawling out of the darkest holes. Diamond in the Dust (Lost Kings MC #18) is the thrilling conclusion of Rooster and Shelby’s story. Rhythm of the Road and Lyrics on the Wind should be read first.
Download or read book Little Bee written by Chris Cleave and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of people have read, discussed, debated, cried, and cheered with Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee girl whose violent and courageous journey puts a stunning face on the worldwide refugee crisis. “Little Bee will blow you away.” —The Washington Post The lives of a sixteen-year-old Nigerian orphan and a well-off British woman collide in this page-turning #1 New York Times bestseller, book club favorite, and “affecting story of human triumph” (The New York Times Book Review) from Chris Cleave, author of Gold and Everyone Brave Is Forgiven. We don’t want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn’t. And it’s what happens afterward that is most important. Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.
Download or read book Afraid of the Light written by Cynthia Ruchti and published by Kregel Publications. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She helps others manage their desperate lives--but who will help her? Clinical psychologist Camille Brooks isn't put off by the lifestyle of her hoarding clients. After all, she lost her mother to the crippling anxiety disorder. She'll go a long way to help others avoid the same pain and loss. Despite Camille's expertise, her growing audience for her Let in the Light podcast, and the national recognition she's gaining for her creative coaching methods, there are some things she isn't prepared for. A client who looks far too much like her mom catches her off guard. And the revelation that she's also hoarding something sends her spinning. Can she stand to let the light into her own life with the help of a friend who wants to stand by her for life and the God who created and loves her? Or will she find that defeating her demons proves too much to bear?
Download or read book Miles from Where We Started written by Cynthia Ruchti and published by Gilead Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These no-longer-newlyweds want out of this road trip—and their marriage. Too bad they can’t find the off ramp. Weeks away from their one-year wedding anniversary, Mallory and Connor Duncan can’t even agree on how to end their marriage. But when a last-minute crisis lands them on a three-thousand-mile road trip together, Mallory wonders if their story may not be over after all. The trip begins to unravel before the key is even in the ignition. When an at-risk, trouble-seeking eleven-year-old is unexpectedly thrown into their travel plans, close quarters get even tighter. Soon, the couple believes this whole experience will spell disaster. Their first year of marriage hasn’t been the arm-in-arm togetherness Mallory and Connor expected. But is it possible they will find a new beginning at the end of the road?
Download or read book Juletane written by Myriam Warner-Vieyra and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful and moving novel, Myriam Warner-Vieyra sensitively portrays the complexities of cross-cultural relationships and, in particular, the female predicament. When Helene, a self-reliant career woman, is packing her belongings for a move and imminent marriage for which she is reluctant, she unearths a faded old book. It is the diary of young Juletane, a confused, sheltered West Indian woman struggling to find herself. Written over three weeks, it records her short life: childhood in France, marriage to an African student, and an eager return with him to Africa, the land of her ancestors. It is Juletane’s diary that brings her and Helene together. Juletane does not fit into her husband’s traditional African family, especially the Muslim cultural demands of polygamy. Full of gentle ironies, Juletane is a story about alienation, madness, shattered dreams: the disillusioned West Indian outsider’s disenchantment with Africa. Myriam Warner-Vieyra looks at women’s lives, at the paths they have taken, at the possibilities open to women in the Caribbean, in Africa, in life. She forces readers, through the double narrative of Juletane and Helene, to reexamine easy assumptions, to look again at safe generalizations. Includes valuable Introduction 2014 by the translator.
