Download or read book The Evening Chorus written by Helen Humphreys and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of James, a pilot struggling to survive in a German POW camp, his young war-bride, Rose, back in England trying to make sense of her life, and his sister, whose own story is also rewritten by the tragedies of WWII.
Download or read book The Evening Chorus written by Helen Humphreys and published by HMH. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “delicate and incandescent” novel of love, loss, escape, and the ways the natural world can save us amid the chaos of war (San Francisco Chronicle). World War II. Downed during his first mission, James Hunter is taken captive as a German POW. To bide his time, he studies a nest of redstarts at the edge of camp. Some prisoners plot escape; some are shot. And then, one day, James is called to the Kommandant’s office. Meanwhile, back home, James’s new wife, Rose, is on her own, free in a way she has never known. Then, James’s sister, Enid, loses everything during the Blitz and must seek shelter with Rose. In a cottage near Ashdown Forest, the two women jealously guard secrets, but form a surprising friendship. Each of these characters finds unexpected freedom amid war’s privations and discover confinements that come with peace. “Beautifully written [and] extremely controlled.” —The Washington Post “Lyrical . . . Humphreys is a metaphysical novelist; for her, intricate emotional content finds specific analogues in the made world.” —The New Yorker “With her trademark prose—exquisitely limpid—Humphreys convinces us of the birdlike strength of the powerless.” —Emma Donoghue “This riveting novel is a song. Listen.” —Richard Bausch
Download or read book The Ruin of Kings written by Jenn Lyons and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Everything epic fantasy should be: rich, cruel, gorgeous, brilliant, enthralling and deeply, deeply satisfying. I loved it."—Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians When destiny calls, there's no fighting back. Kihrin grew up in the slums of Quur, a thief and a minstrel's son raised on tales of long-lost princes and magnificent quests. When he is claimed against his will as the missing son of a treasonous prince, Kihrin finds himself at the mercy of his new family's ruthless power plays and political ambitions. Practically a prisoner, Kihrin discovers that being a long-lost prince is nothing like what the storybooks promised. The storybooks have lied about a lot of other things, too: dragons, demons, gods, prophecies, and how the hero always wins. Then again, maybe he isn't the hero after all. For Kihrin is not destined to save the world. He's destined to destroy it. Jenn Lyons begins the Chorus of Dragons series with The Ruin of Kings, an epic fantasy novel about a man who discovers his fate is tied to the future of an empire.
Download or read book And a Dog Called Fig written by Helen Humphreys and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: And a Dog Called Fig is the story of one writer’s life with dogs (including a frisky new puppy), how they are uniquely ideal companions for building a creative life, and some delightful tales about dogs and their famous writers Into my writer's isolation will come a dog, to sit beside my chair or to lie on the couch while I work, to force me outside for a walk, and suddenly, although still lonely, this writer will have a companion. An artist’s solitude is a sacred space, one to be guarded from the chaos of the world, where the sparks of inspiration can be kindled into fires of creation. But within this quiet also lie loneliness, self-doubt, the danger of collapsing too far inward. An artist needs a familiar, a companion with emotional intelligence, innate curiosity, an enthusiasm for the world beyond, but also the capacity to rest contentedly for many hours. What an artist needs, Helen Humphreys would say, is a dog. And a Dog Called Fig is a memoir of the writing life told through the dogs Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime, including Fig, her new Vizsla puppy. Interspersed are stories of other writers and their own irreplaceable companions: Virginia Woolf and Grizzle, Gertrude Stein and Basket, Thomas Hardy and Wessex—who walked the dining table at dinner parties, taking whatever he liked—and many more. A love song to the dogs who come into our lives and all that they bring—sorrow, mayhem, reflection, joy—this is a book about steadfast friendship and loss, creativity and craft, and the restorative powers of nature. Every work of art is different; so too is every dog, with distinctive needs and lessons. And if we let them guide us, they will show us many worlds we would otherwise miss. Includes Black-and-White Photographs
Download or read book Imperfect Harmony written by Stacy Horn and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this one-of-a-kind celebration of singing with others, I’d call her pitch nearly perfect.”—The Atlantic For Stacy Horn, regardless of what is going on in the world or her life, singing in an amateur choir—the Choral Society of Grace Church in New York—never fails to take her to a place where hope reigns and everything good is possible. She’s not particularly religious, and her voice is not exceptional (so she says), but like the 32.5 million other chorus members throughout this country, singing makes her happy. Horn brings us along as she sings some of the greatest music humanity has ever produced, delves into the dramatic stories of conductors and composers, unearths the fascinating history of group singing, and explores remarkable discoveries from the new science of singing, including all the unexpected health benefits. Imperfect Harmony is the story of one woman who has found joy and strength in the weekly ritual of singing and in the irresistible power of song.
Download or read book A Nail the Evening Hangs On written by Monica Sok and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime—memory that is both real and imagined—according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.
Download or read book The River written by Helen Humphreys and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A breathtaking mix of observation, prose, natural history, and art We tend to look at landscape in relation to what it can do for us. Does it move us with its beauty? Can we make a living from it? But what if we examined a landscape on its own terms, freed from our expectations and assumptions? This is what celebrated writer Helen Humphreys sets out to do in this beautiful, groundbreaking examination of place. For more than a decade Humphreys has owned a small waterside property on a section of the Napanee River in Ontario. In the watchful way of writers, she has studied her little piece of the river through the seasons and the years, cataloguing its ebb and flows, the plants and creatures that live in and round it, the signs of human usage at its banks and on its bottom. The result is The River, a gorgeous and moving meditation that uses fiction, non-fiction, natural history, archival maps and images, and full-colour original photographs to get at the truth. In doing this, Humphreys has created a work of startling originality that is sure to become a new Canadian classic.
Download or read book The Pelican Chorus written by Edward Lear and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With lavish illustrations, Caldecott Honoree Marcellino brings a decidedly droll vision to three of Lear's classic tales--The New Vestments, The Pelican Chorus, and The Owl and the Pussycat--in this picture book collection. Full color. 11 x 9 1/2.
Download or read book The Night Chorus written by Harold Hoefle and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A whistling through teeth. / He shuts his eyes but still sees / the red glow of exit signs. Harold Hoefle's The Night Chorus rises out of forests and country roads, bars and buses, cities and small towns. These locales are the haunts of outsiders ranging from travellers and farmers to a soldier, a drug addict, a refugee, and the murdered. The past clings in these stark, evocative poems, "memory a closet of clothes / that hang from bent wire." In the tradition of songwriters like Gordon Lightfoot and Gord Downie and poets such as Al Purdy, Karen Solie, and David O'Meara, The Night Chorus presents so-called "obscure" lives, where dark and playful humour collides with historic and mythic characters including Ovid and Dante, Odysseus and Desdemona. Using lyric poetry and the ghazal, the prose poem and the elegy, The Night Chorus brims with images as sharp as wild geese scrawling letters against an evening sky and as humble as "pots of plum dumplings and still-warm soup." Bookended by a sequence of lyrics inspired by cross-country road trips, Hoefle references iconic places like Black Dog Road and Seldom Seen and peoples the landscape with imagined characters. Their voices – damaged, rough, intimate – will echo in the reader's mind.
Download or read book The Choral Warm Up Collection written by Sally K. Albrecht and published by Alfred Music. This book was released on with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alfred Music is proud to support ACDA (The American Choral Directors Association) with the publication of The Choral Warm-Up Collection, a new sourcebook featuring 167 favorite warm-ups contributed by 51 choral directors from across the nation. These generous directors have agreed to donate their royalties to the ACDA Endowment Trust, to be used for student scholarships and conducting awards. This incredible resource consists of warm-ups for every situation and focusing on many different vocal areas. The text is organized into several categories: beginning warm-ups, breathing, vowels, diction, flexibility, scales, intervals, intonation, phrasing, blend, dynamics, minor, range, chords and rounds. Set the mood for a successful choral rehearsal while developing and reinforcing positive ensemble vocal techniques with The Choral Warm-Up Collection.
Download or read book Wild Dogs A Novel written by Helen Humphreys and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-06-17 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A perspective on love and loss [that] will haunt you for days.”—Entertainment Weekly Alice's boyfriend abandons her dog, which joins a feral pack. Every evening, Alice and five others gather at the forest's edge, trying to call their dogs back. Most have similar tales of jealousy or vengeance enacted upon them through their dogs: Jamie is rebelling against his stepfather; Lily, who has suffered brain damage, is considered irresponsible. Becoming more deeply involved, Alice moves out to a cabin on land owned by Malcolm, one of the group, whose motives in having her there are suspicious. As she falls in love with the wildlife biologist whose wolf has gained lead of the pack, she feels the tug between love's wild power and her desire to domesticate it. After a tragic accident, all members of the group must rethink their lives and find their places in an untamed world. Wild Dogs strips away the conventions of love and passion to reveal deeper, richer truths.
Download or read book Shame and the Captives written by Thomas Keneally and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If the legendary Schindler’s List was not enough to showcase Thomas Keneally’s literary mastery, then [this novel] surely will” (New York Daily News) as the Booker Prize-winning author reimagines from all sides the drastic true events of the night more than one thousand Japanese POWs staged the largest and bloodiest prison escape of World War II. Alice is living on her father-in-law’s farm on the edge of an Australian country town, while her husband is held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian inmate at the prisoner-of-war camp down the road, is assigned to work on the farm, she hopes that being kind to him will somehow influence her husband’s treatment. What she doesn’t anticipate is how dramatically Giancarlo will change the way she understands both herself and the wider world. What most challenges Alice and her fellow townspeople is the utter foreignness of the thousand-plus Japanese inmates and their deeply held code of honor, which the camp commanders fatally misread. Mortified by being taken alive in battle and preferring a violent death to the shame of living, the Japanese prisoners plan an outbreak with shattering and far-reaching consequences for all the citizens around them. In a career spanning half a century, Thomas Keneally has proven brilliant at exploring ordinary lives caught up in extraordinary events. With this profoundly gripping and thought-provoking novel, inspired by a notorious incident in New South Wales in 1944, he once again shows why he is celebrated as a writer who “looks into the heart of the human condition with a piercing intelligence that few can match” (Sunday Telegraph).
Download or read book The Frozen Thames written by Helen Humphreys and published by Union Books. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its long history, the river Thames has frozen solid forty times. These are the stories of that frozen river. And so opens this breathtaking and original work of forty vignettes based on events that actually took place each time the river froze between 1142 and 1895. In breathtaking prose, acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys deftly draws us into these intimate moments and transports us through time. Whether it’ s Queen Matilda trying to escape her besieged castle in a snowstorm, or lovers meeting on the frozen river in the plague years, or a simple farmer persuading his oxen that the ice is safe, Humphrey’ s achingly beautiful prose acts like a photograph, capturing a moment and etching it forever on our imaginations. Stunningly designed and illustrated throughout with full-colour period art, The Frozen Thames is a genre-bending work from one of our most respected writers.
Download or read book Field Study written by Helen Humphreys and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning and beloved author Helen Humphreys discovers her local herbarium and realizes we need to look for beauty in whatever nature we have left — no matter how diminished Award-winning poet and novelist Helen Humphreys returns to her series of nature meditations in this gorgeously written and illustrated book that takes a deep look at the forgotten world of herbariums and the people who amassed collections of plant specimens in the 19th and 20th centuries. From Emily Dickinson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s collections to the amateur naturalists whose names are forgotten but whose collections still grace our world, herbariums are the records of the often-humble plants that are still with us and those that are lost. Over the course of a year, Humphreys considers life and loss and the importance of finding solace in nature. Illustrated throughout with images of herbarium specimens, Humphreys’s own botanical drawings, and archival photographs, this will be the perfect gift for Humphreys’s many fans, nature enthusiasts, and for all who loved Birds Art Life.
Download or read book The Ghost Orchard written by Helen Humphreys and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of H is for Hawk and The Frozen Thames, The Ghost Orchard is award-winning author Helen Humphreys’ fascinating journey into the secret history of an iconic food. Delving deep into the storied past of the apple in North America, Humphreys explores the intricate link between agriculture, settlement, and human relationships. With her signature insight and exquisite prose, she brings light to such varied topics as how the apple first came across the Atlantic Ocean with a relatively unknown Quaker woman long before the more famed “Johnny Appleseed”; how bountiful Indigenous orchards were targeted to be taken over or eradicated by white settlers and their armies; how the once-17,000 varietals of apple cultivated were catalogued by watercolour artists from the United States’ Department of Pomology; how apples wove into the life and poetry of Robert Frost; and how Humphreys’ own curiosity was piqued by the Winter Pear Pearmain, believed to be the world’s best tasting apple, which she found growing beside an abandoned cottage not far from her home. In telling this hidden history, Humphreys writes movingly about the experience of her research, something she undertook as one of her closest friends was dying. The result is a book that is both personal and universal, combining engaging storytelling, historical detail, and deep emotional insight.
Download or read book Coventry written by Helen Humphreys and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of the Luftwaffe's devastating bombing of Coventry, two women traverse the city and transform their hearts.
Download or read book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil written by John Berendt and published by Random House. This book was released on 1994-01-13 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic of true crime, set in a most beguiling Southern city—now in a 30th anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author “Elegant and wicked . . . might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.”—The New York Times Book Review Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. In this sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative, John Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case. It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman’s Card Club; the turbulent young gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the “soul of pampered self-absorption”; the uproariously funny drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young people dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience.
