Download or read book The Afterlife of Kenzaburo Tsuruda written by Elisabeth Wilkins Lombardo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As he stumbles through an afterlife he never believed in, scientist Kenzaboro Tsuruda must make sense of his life and confront his family’s secrets in order to save his ancestors from becoming Hungry Ghosts—a Buddhist state of purgatory. Meanwhile, his daughter, wife, and sister-in-law struggle with their own loss and take turns sharing their point of view to gradually reveal their family’s shameful history—including when, during WWII, Kenzaboro sent his wife, Satsuki, to live with family near Hiroshima, where her rape by his brother resulted in the birth of their only child, Haruna. Spanning the years during WWII and its horrific ending after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima up to Emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989, The Afterlife of Kenzaburo Tsuruda paints a beautiful and haunting portrait of ancient and modern Japan as seen through the eyes of one family as they reconcile loss, shame, honor, death, and, finally, redemption.
Download or read book Rachael s Return written by Janet Rebhan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In present-day Los Angeles, Caroline Martin has everything but the thing her soul craves most: a daughter. When she undergoes what is supposed to be a routine hysterectomy, she unwittingly aborts the little girl she’s always longed for, leaving the unborn baby’s soul in limbo. Sharing a hospital room with Caroline is a pregnant woman who’s just been shot by her boyfriend. Her unborn child is barely hanging on—and the soul of Caroline’s hovering baby cannot resist the overwhelming urge to rebirth via this unclaimed fetus. In the aftermath of these events, two engaging heavenly guides, working together through sensitive humans, struggle to find an alternate way to help Caroline and her would-be daughter forge the link that was always meant to be between them—before the child’s brutal father makes good on his vow to steal the girl and disappear with her forever. By turns comic and tragic, Rachael’s Return explores the concept of soulmates, the afterlife, reincarnation, and relationships that never die, even as it offers readers a glimpse of the mysteries that exist within the ordinary and challenges assumptions about the true nature of reality.
Download or read book Seven Sides of Self written by Nancy Joie Wilkie and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in Seven Sides of Self explore the various sides of one’s personality: the storyteller, the skeptic, the survivor, the saint (or the sinner), the scholar, the seeker, and the savior. Through the lives of central characters such as Zarce Sun De’oggo, Sister Othrosa Vella, Jarka Moosha, and Old Mims—Nancy Joie Wilkie explores themes of battling strong emotions, the lengths we might go to for self-preservation and self sacrifice, the inability to accept things different, and taking responsibility for what we create in pieces that inhabit the worlds of both sci-fi and fantasy. Original and thought provoking, these are stories that will stimulate the intellect and engage the imagination.
Download or read book Return of the Evening Star written by Diane Rios and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mysterious hospital deep in the Oregon woods is sending marauding ambulances into the countryside, looking for new patients. Mowing down anything in their path, the deadly ambulance drivers have forced the people and animals of the land into hiding. Twelve-year-old Chloe Ashton has returned to Fairfax and is desperate to find her mother. Together with her friends—the magical cook Mrs. Goodweather, carpenter Brisco Knot, and clever white rat Shakespeare—she hatches a plan to enter the hospital and stop the bloodshed. At the same time a rumor reaches them from the east: Silas the Stargazer is coming, and he is bringing an army. An animal army.
Download or read book Gravity Is Heartless written by Sarah Lahey and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “. . . thoroughly engrossing. An engaging adventure set in a deftly illustrated future.” —Kirkus Reviews Grounded in actual science and soaring in imagination, Gravity Is Heartless is science fiction at its best. This first thrilling installment of the award-winning Heartless Series will delight lovers of romance and sci-fi adventures. Earth, 2050. Scientist Quinn Buyers would rather be studying the clouds than getting ready for her wedding day. When an unexpected tragedy causes her to lose everything, including her famous scientist mother, she embarks on a quest for answers that takes her across the globe. Along the way, she discovers friends and finds love in the most unexpected places. Set in a not-too-distant future that envisages the best and the worst of human actions and creations, Quinn’s journey will keep you on your toes until the final pages.
Download or read book Gin written by Shonna Milliken Humphrey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Gin tastes like Christmas to some and rotten pine chips to others, but nearly everyone familiar with the spirit holds immediate gin nostalgia. Although early medical textbooks treated it as a healing agent, early alchemists (as well as their critics) claimed gin's base was a path to immortality-and also Satan's tool. In more recent times, the gin trade consolidated the commercial and political power of nations and prompted a social campaign against women. Gin has been used successfully as a defense for murder; blamed for massive unrest in 18th-century England; and advertised for as an abortifacient. From its harshest proto-gin distillation days to the current smooth craft models, gin plays a powerful cultural role in film, music, and literature-one that is arguably older, broader, and more complex than any other spirit. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Download or read book Show Me Good Land written by Shonna Milliken Humphrey and published by Down East Books. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in fictional Fort Angus, Maine, Show Me Good Land tells the story of a small rural town struggling with poverty and decay after decades of prosperity. Loosely linked through a grisly murder, its characters must navigate the ambiguous moral landscape of a waning community. It is a moving, sometimes melancholy, often funny novel about family, community, loss, redemption, and coming home. The pleasure lies in exploring the personalities of the characters, none of whom are all good or all bad, and eventually deciding where the reader's own moral lines are drawn. Not since Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, has a cast of characters been so shocking, beautifully rendered, and ultimately likeable.
Download or read book Dirt Roads and Diner Pie written by Shonna Milliken Humphrey and published by Central Recovery Press, LLC. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against a backdrop of highways, diners, and cheap coffee, one couple finds peace through the redemptive power of love. Told from a wife’s perspective, Dirt Roads and Diner Pie is the story of one couple’s struggle to confront the long-reaching effects of childhood sexual abuse. Musician and former lead singer of the United States Air Force Band, Travis James Humphrey lived for thirty months in a culture of childhood sexual abuse while studying at New Jersey’s prestigious American Boychoir School. After his tenure, Travis buried his memories deep. Years into the marriage, these memories began to surface and threaten their relationship. In an effort to resolve the problems, Shonna and her husband hit the road and navigated their way through the treacherous terrain of mental illness, sexual dysfunction, and shame. She details their journey within a month-long road trip throughout the southeastern United States taken shortly after Travis made his experience public. While the effect of child sex abuse informs nearly every aspect of their shared life, it does not define their relationship. That is the message Shonna offers: Sexual trauma may dominate, but it need not define the relationship. Shonna Milliken Humphrey’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Salon.com, Down East, and Maine magazine. For two years, she wrote regular food, restaurant, and lifestyle columns for the Maine Sunday Telegram. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing and Literature from Bennington College.
Download or read book Mission Defrostable written by Josh Funk and published by Lady Pancake & Sir French Toas. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our favorite breakfast food friends are back and all bready for their next adventure Can they save the fridge before all the food is iced? It's mission . . . defrostable. "And now with the two of you out of the fold, I've got my revenge and I'm serving it cold " Brrr There's a frost in the fridge--and it's hardened Pudding Pond and frozen Yogurt Falls. Agent Asparagus is on the case, and she begs Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast to join her superspy team. But when the enemy snatches Asparagus, Pancake and French Toast have only one dough man to turn to for help: the evil Baron von Waffle Will he help them save the fridge . . . or are they doomed to become frozen food?
Download or read book Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea written by Morgan Callan Rogers and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating debut, introducing a spirited young heroine coming of age in coastal Maine during the early 1960s. When her mother disappears during a weekend trip, Florine Gilham's idyllic childhood is turned upside down. Until then she'd been blissfully insulated by the rhythms of family life in small town Maine: watching from the granite cliffs above the sea for her father's lobster boat to come into port, making bread with her grandmother, and infiltrating the summer tourist camps with her friends. But with her mother gone, the heart falls out of Florine's life and she and her father are isolated as they struggle to manage their loss. Both sustained and challenged by the advice and expectations of her family and neighbors, Florine grows up with her spirit intact. And when her father's past comes to call, she must accept that life won't ever be the same while keeping her mother vivid in her memories. With Fannie Flagg's humor and Elizabeth Stroud's sense of place, this debut is an extraordinary snapshot of a bygone America through the eyes of an inspiring girl blazing her own path to womanhood.
Download or read book The Secret Life of Dust written by Hannah Holmes and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannah Holmes A mesmerizing expedition around our dusty world Some see dust as dull and useless stuff. But in the hands of author Hannah Holmes, it becomes a dazzling and mysterious force; Dust, we discover, built the planet we walk upon. And it tinkers with the weather and spices the air we breathe. Billions of tons of it rise annually into the air--the dust of deserts and forgotten kings mixing with volcanic ash, sea salt, leaf fragments, scales from butterfly wings, shreds of T-shirts, and fireplace soot. Eventually, though, all this dust must settle. The story of restless dust begins among exploding stars, then treks through the dinosaur beds of the Gobi Desert, drills into Antarctic glaciers, filters living dusts from the wind, and probes the dark underbelly of the living-room couch. Along the way, Holmes introduces a delightful cast of characters--the scientists who study dust. Some investigate its dark side: how it killed off dinosaurs and how its industrial descendents are killing us today. Others sample the shower of Saharan dust that nourishes Caribbean jungles, or venture into the microscopic jungle of the bedroom carpet. Like The Secret Life of Dust, however, all of them unveil the mayhem and magic wrought by little things. Hannah Holmes (Portland, ME) is a science and natural history writer for the Discovery Channel Online. Her freelance work has been widely published, appearing in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, National Geographic Traveler, and Escape. Her broadcast work has been featured on Living on Earth and the Discovery Channel Online's Science Live.
Download or read book At Home in the World written by Joyce Maynard and published by Picador. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author of Labor Day With a New Preface When it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship—at age eighteen—with J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life. Reviewers called her book "shameless" and "powerful" and its author was simultaneously reviled and cheered. With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her sense of self in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later—having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own—Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells—of the girl she was and the woman she became—is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.
Download or read book The Good Daughters written by Joyce Maynard and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They were born on the same day, in the same small New Hampshire hospital—but Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson are different in nearly every way. Ruth is an artist, a romantic with a rich, passionate, imaginative life—the fifth daughter born to a gentle, caring farmer and his stolid wife. Raised by a pair of capricious drifters, Dana is a scientist and realist whose faith is firmly planted in the natural world. From the 1950s to the present, the lives of the “birthday sisters” parallel and oddly intersect, as each struggles to find her place in a world in which she has never truly felt she belonged. Sharing little except a birth date—and a love for Dana’s wild and beautiful older brother, Ray—two virtual strangers will travel alternate paths winding through first love, first sex, marriage, parenthood, divorce, and tragic loss...until both are forced to reevaluate themselves and each other when past secrets and forgotten memories unexpectedly come to light.
Download or read book Bird written by Erik Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hope, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, is the thing with feathers. Erik Anderson, on the other hand, regards our obsession with birds as too sentimental, too precious. Birds don't express hope. They express themselves. But this tension between the versions of nature that lodge in our minds and the realities that surround us is the central theme of Bird. This is no field guide. It's something far more unusual and idiosyncratic, balancing science with story, anatomy with metaphor, habitat with history. Anderson illuminates the dark underbelly of our bird fetish and offers a fresh, alternative vision of one of nature's most beloved objects. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Download or read book Ocean written by Steve Mentz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience. From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, Ocean splashes the histories we thought we knew into salty and unfamiliar places. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Download or read book Tree written by Matthew Battles and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways-as keel, lodgepole, and execution site-and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. In this book Matthew Battles follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Download or read book Cell Tower written by Steven E. Jones and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Cropping up everywhere, whether steel latticework or tapered monopoles, encrusted with fiberglass antennas, cell towers raise up high into the air the communications equipment that channels our calls, texts, and downloads. For security reasons, their locations are never advertised. But it's our romantic notions of connectivity that hide them in plain sight. We want the network to be invisible, ethereal, and ubiquitous. The cell tower stands as a challenge to these desires. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
