Download or read book The Penelopiad written by Margaret Atwood and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As portrayed in Homer's Odyssey, Penelope - wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy - has become a symbol of wifely duty and devotion, enduring twenty years of waiting when her husband goes to fight in the Trojan War. As she fends off the attentions of a hundred greedy suitors, travelling minstrels regale her with news of Odysseus' epic adventures around the Mediterranean - slaying monsters and grappling with amorous goddesses. When Odysseus finally comes home, he kills her suitors and then, in an act that served as little more than a footnote in Homer's original story, inexplicably hangs Penelope's twelve maids. Now, Penelope and her chorus of wronged maids tell their side of the story in a new stage version by Margaret Atwood, adapted from her own wry, witty and wise novel. The Penelopiad premiered with the Royal Shakespeare Company in association with Canada's National Arts Centre at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in July 2007.

Download or read book Weight written by Jeanette Winterson and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-11-05 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Atlas and Heracles Atlas knows how it feels to carry the weight of the world; but why, he asks himself, does it have to be carried at all? In Weight — visionary and inventive, yet completely believable and relevant to the questions we ask ourselves every day — Winterson’s skill in turning the familiar on its head to show us a different truth is put to stunning effect. When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is “I want to tell the story again.” My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Hercules takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere. —from Jeanette Winterson’s Foreword to Weight

Download or read book The Lost Books of the Odyssey written by Zachary Mason and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

Download or read book Purple Threads written by Jeanine Leane and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the David Unaipon Award, an engaging, moving and often funny yarn about growing up in the home of two Aunties running a sheep farm in rural Gundagai. Growing up in the shifting landscape of Gundagai with her Nan and Aunties, Sunny spends her days playing on the hills near their farmhouse and her nights dozing by the fire, listening to the big women yarn about life over endless cups of tea. It is a life of freedom, protection and love. But as Sunny grows she must face the challenge of being seen as different, and of having a mother whose visits are as unpredictable as the rain. Based on Jeanine Leane's own childhood, these funny, endearing and thought-provoking stories offer a snapshot of a unique Australian upbringing.

Download or read book The Summer He Didn t Die written by Jim Harrison and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three classic novellas from “one of our master chroniclers of human hungers, flaws, and frustrations.” (The Kansas City Star). Jim Harrison’s vivid, tender, and deeply felt fictions have won him acclaim as an American master of the novella. His highly acclaimed volume of novellas, The Summer He Didn’t Die, is a sparkling and exuberant collection about love, the senses, and family, no matter how untraditional. In the title novella, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian, is trying to parent his two stepchildren and take care of his family’s health on meager resources. (It helps a bit that his charms are irresistible to the new dentist in town.) Republican Wives is a wicked satire on the sexual neuroses of the right, the emptiness of a life lived for the status quo, and the irrational power of love that, when thwarted, can turn so easily into an urge to murder. And Tracking is a meditation on Harrison’s fascination with place, telling his own familiar mythology through the places his life has seen and the intellectual loves he has known. With wit as sharp and prose as lush as any Harrison has yet written, The Summer He Didn’t Die is a resonant, warm, and joyful ode to our journey on this earth. “Harrison has proved to be one of our finest storytellers. These novellas are urgent and contemporary, displaying his marvelous gifts for compression and idiosyncratic language.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Lady Oracle written by Margaret Atwood and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale—now an Emmy Award-winning Hulu original series—and Alias Grace, now a Netflix original series. Joan Foster is the bored wife of a myopic ban-the-bomber. She takes off overnight as Canada's new superpoet, pens lurid gothics on the sly, attracts a blackmailing reporter, skids cheerfully in and out of menacing plots, hair-raising traps, and passionate trysts, and lands dead and well in Terremoto, Italy. In this remarkable, poetic, and magical novel, Margaret Atwood proves yet again why she is considered to be one of the most important and accomplished writers of our time.

Download or read book Courting the Wild Twin written by Martin Shaw and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2020 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Myth is our wild way of telling the truth, of sharing stories that have our living earth speaking through them. There is an old insistence that we each have a twin we know nothing about. A wild, curious twin that was thrown out the window the night we were born, taking much of our energy with them. This story is a quest to find and court our wild twin, for they have something important to tell us. If there was something we were here to do in our few, brief years, we can be sure that the wild twin is holding the key. In Courting the Wild Twin, Martin Shaw, an accomplished storyteller and scholar of myth and oral tradition, explores two ancient myths concerned with the wild twin and shares how vital they are to our ability to confront challenges with purpose, courage and creativity. Myths are our secret weapon. They have a radical agency of beauty in our age of amnesia, an agency far beyond concept and polemic"--

Download or read book Bodily Harm written by Margaret Atwood and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale—now an Emmy Award-winning Hulu original series—and Alias Grace, now a Netflix original series. A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply. By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love.

Download or read book Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere written by Jeanette Winterson and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere is a timely and inspiring call to arms by one of Britain’s most acclaimed and important writers. Whilst recognising how far women have come in the hundred years since getting the vote, Jeanette Winterson also insists that we must all do much more if we are to achieve true gender equality. Examining recent women’s rights movements, the worlds of politics, technology and social media and changes in the law, Winterson calls out all the ways in which women still face discrimination and disadvantage. Like the women who won the right to vote, we need to shout up, reach out, be courageous and finish the job. Also included in this volume is Emmeline Pankhurst’s landmark Suffragette speech, ‘Freedom or Death’, which she delivered in 1913.

Download or read book Photograph 51 written by Anna Ziegler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ziegler's thoughtful, empathetic play brings home with bitter comedy the unlovely male-domination of this world in the 1950s ... glorious." Independent London 1953. Scientists are on the verge of discovering what they call the secret of life: the DNA double helix. Providing the key is driven young physicist Rosalind Franklin. But if the double helix was the breakthrough of the 20th century, then what kept Franklin out of the history books? A play about ambition, isolation, and the race for greatness. Photograph 51 premiered in the UK in London's West End in 2015 in a production which starred Nicole Kidman, where it won the WhatsOnStage Award for Best New Play. Published for the first time in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features a brand-new introduction by Mandy Greenfield.

Download or read book Classical Mythology A Very Short Introduction written by Helen Morales and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-08-23 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Zeus and Europa, to Diana, Pan, and Prometheus, the myths of ancient Greece and Rome seem to exert a timeless power over us. But what do those myths represent, and why are they so enduringly fascinating? Why do they seem to be such a potent way of talking about our selves, our origins, and our desires? This imaginative and stimulating Very Short Introduction goes beyond a simple retelling of the stories to explore the rich history and diverse interpretations of classical myths. It is a wide-ranging account, examining how classical myths are used and understood in both high art and popular culture, taking the reader from the temples of Crete to skyscrapers in New York, and finding classical myths in a variety of unexpected places: from arabic poetry and Hollywood films, to psychoanalysis, the bible, and New Age spiritualism. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book Adapting Margaret Atwood written by Shannon Wells-Lassagne and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages with Margaret Atwood’s work and its adaptations. Atwood has long been appreciated for her ardent defence of Canadian authors and her genre-bending fiction, essays, and poetry. However, a lesser-studied aspect of her work is Atwood’s role both as adaptor and as source for adaptation in media as varied as opera, television, film, or comic books. Recent critically acclaimed television adaptations of the novels The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu) and Alias Grace (Amazon) have rightfully focused attention on these works, but Atwood’s fiction has long been a source of inspiration for artists of various media, a seeming corollary to Atwood’s own tendency to explore the possibilities of previously undervalued media (graphic novels), genres (science-fiction), and narratives (testimonial and historical modes). This collection hopes to expand on other studies of Atwood’s work or on their adaptations to focus on the interplay between the two, providing an interdisciplinary approach that highlights the protean nature of the author and of adaptation.

Download or read book Byobu written by Ida Vitale and published by Charco Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byobu reveals a rich inner world, one driven by its meticulous attention to our rich outer one. "a story’s existence, even if not well defined or well assigned, even if only in its formative stage, just barely latent, emits vague but urgent emanations." Byobu's every interaction trembles with possibility and faint menace. A crack in the walls of his house, marring it forever, means he must burn it down. A stoplight asks what the value of obedience is, what hopefulness it contains, and what insensible anarchy it defies. In brief episodes, aphorisms, and moments of spiritual turbulence and gentle scrutiny, reside a wealth of habits, worries, curiosities, pleasures, peculiarities, and efforts to understand. Representative of the modesty and complexity of Ida Vitale’s poetic universe, Byobu flushes the world with meaning and playfully offers another way of inhabiting the every day.

Download or read book Strange Life of Ivan Osokin written by P. D. Ouspensky and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A brilliant fantasy." -- Manchester Guardian. What would you do if you could re-live your life? In his only novel, occultist P. D. Ouspensky expands upon his concept of eternal recurrence, telling of a man who travels back in time and attempts to correct the mistakes of his schooldays and early manhood, including his romantic misadventures. Set in Moscow and Paris, the story served as an inspiration for the movie Groundhog Day.

Download or read book The Future of Nutrition written by T. Colin Campbell and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the coauthor of The China Study and author of the New York Times bestselling follow-up, Whole Despite extensive research and overwhelming public information on nutrition and health science, we are more confused than ever—about the foods we eat, what good nutrition looks like, and what it can do for our health. In The Future of Nutrition, T. Colin Campbell cuts through the noise with an in-depth analysis of our historical relationship to the food we eat, the source of our present information overload, and what our current path means for the future—both for individual health and society as a whole. In these pages, Campbell takes on the institution of nutrition itself, unpacking: • Why the institutional emphasis on individual nutrients (instead of whole foods) as a means to explain nutrition has had catastrophic consequences • How our reverence for "high quality" animal protein has distorted our understanding of cholesterol, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, environmental carcinogens, and more • Why mainstream food and nutrient recommendations and public policy favor corporate interests over that of personal and planetary health • How we can ensure that public nutrition literacy can prevent and treat personal illness more effectively and economically The Future of Nutrition offers a fascinating deep-dive behind the curtain of the field of nutrition—with implications both for our health and for the practice of science itself.

Download or read book Homer s Daughters written by Fiona Cox and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses both to the Odyssey and to the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ - memoir, poetry, children's literature, rap, novels - testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer's afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer's footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of not only classics, but also translation studies, comparative literature, and women's writing will find much to interest them, while the volume's concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman's voice.

Download or read book Good Bones written by Margaret Atwood and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasure trove of collected works from the legendary author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace Queen Gertrude gives Hamlet a piece of her mind. An ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves. A reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong. Bones and Murder is a bewitching cocktail of prose and poetry, fiction and fairytales, as well as some of Atwood's own illustrations. It's pure distilled Atwood: deliciously strong and bittersweet. 'A marvellous miniature sample case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonic talents' Times Literary Supplement