Download or read book The Djinn in the Nightingale s Eye written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magnificent title story of this collection of fairy tales for adults describes the strange and uncanny relationship between its extravagantly intelligent heroine--a world renowned scholar of the art of story-telling--and the marvelous being that lives in a mysterious bottle, found in a dusty shop in an Istanbul bazaar. As A.S. Byatt renders this relationship with a powerful combination of erudition and passion, she makes the interaction of the natural and the supernatural seem not only convincing, but inevitable. The companion stories in this collection each display different facets of Byatt's remarkable gift for enchantment. They range from fables of sexual obsession to allegories of political tragedy; they draw us into narratives that are as mesmerizing as dreams and as bracing as philosophical meditations; and they all us to inhabit an imaginative universe astonishing in the precision of its detail, its intellectual consistency, and its splendor. "A dreamy treat.... It is not merely strange, it is wondrous." --Boston Globe "Alternatingly erudite and earthy, direct and playful.... If Scheherazade ever needs a break, Byatt can step in, indefinitely." --Chicago Tribune "Byatt's writing is crystalline and splendidly imaginative.... These [are] perfectly formed tales." --Washington Post Book World
Download or read book The End and the Beginning written by Hermynia Zur Mühlen and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in Germany in 1929, The End and the Beginning is a lively personal memoir of a vanished world and of a rebellious, high-spirited young woman's struggle to achieve independence. Born in 1883 into a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hermynia Zur Muhlen spent much of her childhood travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. After five years on her German husband's estate in czarist Russia she broke with both her family and her husband and set out on a precarious career as a professional writer committed to socialism. Besides translating many leading contemporary authors, notably Upton Sinclair, into German, she herself published an impressive number of politically engaged novels, detective stories, short stories, and children's fairy tales. Because of her outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she had to flee her native Austria in 1938 and seek refuge in England, where she died, virtually penniless, in 1951. This revised and corrected translation of Zur Muhlen's memoir - with extensive notes and an essay on the author by Lionel Gossman - will appeal especially to readers interested in women's history, the Central European aristocratic world that came to an end with the First World War, and the culture and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Master of the Jinn written by Irving Karchmar and published by Bay Street Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a tale set on the Path of the Heart, a beautifully written mystical adventure wherein a modern-day Sufi Master sends seven companions on a perilous quest for the greatest treasure of the ancient world - King Solomon's ring. The legendary seal ring is said to control the Jinn, those terrifying demons of living fire, and in seeking it the companions discover not only the truth of the Jinn, but also the path of Love and the infinite mercy of God.
Download or read book The Book on Fire written by Keith Miller and published by Immanion Press/Magalithica Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Balthazar, book thief and bon vivant, arrives in Alexandria to steal from the famous library. But once inside, he becomes obsessed with the youngest librarian, Shireen, who was born in the library and is herself more than half book.
Download or read book The Road to Oxiana written by Robert Byron and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1982 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1933 Robert Byron began a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Teheran to Oxiana--the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya which forms part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. The Road to Oxiana offers not only a wonderful record of his adventures, but also a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now inaccessible to most Western travelers.
Download or read book The Water Statues written by Fleur Jaeggy and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy Even among Fleur Jaeggy’s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth’s odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa’s flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy’s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues—with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion’s garden full of intoxicated snails)—delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.
Download or read book The Architect s Apprentice written by Elif Shafak and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A colorful, magical tale set during the height of the Ottoman Empire, from the acclaimed author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese's Book Club Pick) Chosen for Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall’s “Reading Room” Book Club In this novel, Turkey’s preeminent female writer spins an epic tale spanning nearly a century in the life of the Ottoman Empire. In 1540, twelve-year-old Jahan arrives in Istanbul. As an animal tamer in the sultan’s menagerie, he looks after the exceptionally smart elephant Chota and befriends (and falls for) the sultan’s beautiful daughter, Princess Mihrimah. A palace education leads Jahan to Mimar Sinan, the empire’s chief architect, who takes Jahan under his wing as they construct (with Chota’s help) some of the most magnificent buildings in history. Yet even as they build Sinan’s triumphant masterpieces—the incredible Suleymaniye and Selimiye mosques—dangerous undercurrents begin to emerge, with jealousy erupting among Sinan’s four apprentices. A memorable story of artistic freedom, creativity, and the clash between science and fundamentalism, Shafak’s intricate novel brims with vibrant characters, intriguing adventure, and the lavish backdrop of the Ottoman court, where love and loyalty are no match for raw power.
Download or read book Children of the New World written by Alexander Weinstein and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes "After Yang," the basis for the acclaimed A24 film After Yang, starring Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Haley Lu Richardson, and directed by Kogonada. A New York Times Notable Book “A darkly mesmerizing, fearless, and exquisitely written work. Stunning, harrowing, and brilliantly imagined.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago. In “The Cartographers,” the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. In “After Yang,” the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how real a son he has become. Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary and singular voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.
Download or read book Tristes Tropiques written by Claude Levi-Strauss and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A magical masterpiece."—Robert Ardrey. A chronicle of the author's search for a civilization "reduced to its most basic expression."
Download or read book Dozakhnama written by Rabisankar Bal and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2012-12-28 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dozakhnama: Conversations in Hell is an extraordinary novel, a biography of Manto and Ghalib and a history of Indian culture rolled into one. Exhumed from dust, Manto’s unpublished novel surfaces in Lucknow. Is it real or is it a fake? In this dastan, Manto and Ghalib converse, entwining their lives in shared dreams. The result is an intellectual journey that takes us into the people and events that shape us as a culture. As one writer describes it, ‘I discovered Rabisankar Bal like a torch in the darkness of the history of this subcontinent. This is the real story of two centuries of our own country.’ Rabisankar Bal’s audacious novel, told by reflections in a mirror and forged in the fires of hell, is both an oral tale and a shield against oblivion. An echo of distant screams. Inscribed by the devil’s quill, Dozakhnama is an outstanding performance of subterranean memory.
Download or read book A Pushcart at the Curb written by John Dos Passos and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short stories by John Dos Passos, including both fiction and nonfiction pieces. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Arab Folktales from Palestine and Israel written by Raphael Patai and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing insight into Arab culture, Patai offers extensive notes and commentary on particular Arabic phrases and images, as well as the ways of speaking and thinking found among the Arab population, especially the Bedouins, in Palestine and Israel. Patai also places the stories in the context of global folktales, and traces the transformations in the art of storytelling.
Download or read book Fantastic Tales written by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence Venuti, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Global Humanities Translation Prize, among many other awards, has translated into English these Italian Gothic tales of obsessive love, mysterious phobias, and the hellish curse of everlasting life. In this collection of nine eerie stories, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti switches effortlessly between the macabre and the breezily comical. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, his characters court spirits and blend in with the undead: passionate romances filled with jealousy and devotion are fueled by magic elixirs. Time becomes fluid as characters travel between centuries, chasing affairs that never quite prosper. First published by Mercury House in 1992.
Download or read book Xerxes written by Richard Stoneman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xerxes, Great King of the Persian Empire from 486–465 B.C., has gone down in history as an angry tyrant full of insane ambition. The stand of Leonidas and the 300 against his army at Thermopylae is a byword for courage, while the failure of Xerxes’ expedition has overshadowed all the other achievements of his twenty-two-year reign. In this lively and comprehensive new biography, Richard Stoneman shows how Xerxes, despite sympathetic treatment by the contemporary Greek writers Aeschylus and Herodotus, had his reputation destroyed by later Greek writers and by the propaganda of Alexander the Great. Stoneman draws on the latest research in Achaemenid studies and archaeology to present the ruler from the Persian perspective. This illuminating volume does not whitewash Xerxes’ failings but sets against them such triumphs as the architectural splendor of Persepolis and a consideration of Xerxes’ religious commitments. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a man who ruled a vast and multicultural empire which the Greek communities of the West saw as the antithesis of their own values.
Download or read book Emotionally Weird written by Kate Atkinson and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-07-06 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Effie, a college student, and her mother bond in a remote Scottish house.
Download or read book Ottoman Literature written by Elias John Wilkinson Gibb and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of notable poetry and poets in the history of Turkey. Some discussion of the general character, the verse-form, the meters, and the development of Ottoman poetry is included in the beginning of the collection.
Download or read book The Distance of the Moon written by Italo Calvino and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.' Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
