Download or read book The Singing Chair and Other Stories written by Herta Maria Moser and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of stories drawn from the author’s long and eventful life (born in 1920). Many are based on the author’s personal experience of life in Central Europe after the First World War. The writing has a sense of mystery and fantasy, but always laced with a wry sense of humour. This is a fascinating and wide ranging collection of stories, many having an almost cinematic quality from the author also being a painter. There are stories drawing on the author’s childhood and youth in Vienna, and visiting the family farm in Moravia in the aftermath of the First World War. Herta’s mother decided to leave home for Vienna as a teenager, and was taken on by a seamstress, who read to her girls while they were sewing, giving her an abiding love of literature that she passed on to her daughter. Herta experienced the rise of Nazism in Austria and Hitler’s Anchluss of the country, and several stories in this section reflect this period vividly. In the title story, The Singing Chair, a prosperous but stressed businessman is transported into a calming universe by a ‘magic’ chair. There follow other poignant and quirky tales of passion between the sexes. By contrast, others draw on Herta’s experience of postwar Germany – her British husband was part of the British Control Commission there. In Demeter, two British officers are rivals for the love of a destitute but beautiful refugee they rescue from a bombed-out street. Many of the stories add the ingredient of mystery and intrigue, but always permeated with the author’s characteristic humanity and wry sense of humour. The Magnolia Gown is set in the cut-throat world of the East London rag trade; Spash is a glorious short burst of fantasy as a woman visitor to Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace during a heatwave is lured into the baroque fountain to become one of Neptune’s mermaids.

Download or read book Sit written by Deborah Ellis and published by Groundwood Books Ltd. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nine poignant and empowering short stories from the author of The Breadwinner. The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in, often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering choice. Jafar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school. Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a supervised visit with their father at the children’s aid society. Gretchen considers the lives of concentration camp victims during a school tour of Auschwitz. Mike survives seventy-two days of solitary as a young offender. Barry squirms on a food court chair as his parents tell him that they are separating. Macie sits on a too-small time-out chair while her mother receives visitors for tea. Noosala crouches in a fetid, crowded apartment in Uzbekistan, waiting for an unscrupulous refugee smuggler to decide her fate. These children find the courage to face their situations in ways large and small, in this eloquent collection from a master storyteller. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3 Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.6 Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.9 Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres (e.g., stories and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories) in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics.

Download or read book Monster Musical Chairs written by Stuart J. Murphy and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2000-08-22 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monster Musical Chairs Every time the music stops, one more monster is OUT! Kids won't be able to sit still for this musical introduction to subtraction at its simplest.

Download or read book The Empty Chair written by Bruce Wagner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-12-30 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound and heart-wrenching work of spiritual storytelling from the internationally acclaimed author of Dead Stars Celebrated for his “up-to-the-nanosecond insider’s knowledge of the L.A. scene” (The Washington Post), Bruce Wagner takes his storytelling in a radically new direction with two linked novellas. In First Guru, a gay Buddhist living in Big Sur achieves enlightenment in the horrific aftermath of his child’s suicide. In Second Guru, Queenie, an aging wild child, returns to India to complete the spiritual journey of her youth. Told in ravaged, sensuous detail to a fictional Wagner by two strangers on opposite sides of the country, years apart from each other, these stories illuminate the random, chaotic nature of human suffering and the miraculous strength of the human spirit.

Download or read book Musical Chairs written by Amy Poeppel and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A novel about modern family life with all of its discord and harmony"--

Download or read book Orange World and Other Stories written by Karen Russell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In“Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.

Download or read book Hooray for Me written by Remy Charlip and published by Tricycle Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores an individual's relationship to family, friends, and even pets.

Download or read book Fortune Smiles written by Adam Johnson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award–winning story collection from the author of The Orphan Master’s Son offers something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world. “MASTERFUL.”—The Washington Post “ENTRANCING.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “PERCEPTIVE AND BRAVE.”—The New York Times Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear. In “Nirvana,” a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In “Hurricanes Anonymous,” a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind. WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • USA Today AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Marie Claire • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • BuzzFeed • The Daily Beast • Los Angeles Magazine • The Independent • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews “Remarkable . . . Adam Johnson is one of America’s greatest living writers.”—The Huffington Post “Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnson’s writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring.”—USA Today “Fortune Smiles [blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment.”—The Boston Globe “Johnson’s boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Musical Chairs written by Jen Knox and published by Jen Knox. This book was released on 2009-10 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical Chairs explores one family's history of mental health diagnoses and searches to define the cusp between a '90s working-class childhood and the trouble of adapting to a comfortable life in the suburbs. In order to understand her restlessness, Jennifer reflects on years of strip-dancing, alcoholism, and estrangement. Inspired by the least likely source, the family she left behind, Jennifer struggles towards reconciliation. This story is about identity, class, family ties, and the elusive nature of mental illness.

Download or read book Down the Back of the Chair written by Margaret Mahy and published by Frances Lincoln Children's Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New edition of a classic tale from one of the 20th century's bestselling children's authors.

Download or read book One More Thing written by B. J. Novak and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller A startlingly original debut from the actor, writer, director, and executive producer hailed as “a gifted observer of the human condition and a very funny writer capable of winning that rare thing: unselfconscious, insuppressible laughter” (The Washington Post). A boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes—only to discover that claiming the winnings might unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins—turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A new arrival in Heaven, overwhelmed with options, procrastinates over a long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We meet Sophia, the first artificially intelligent being capable of love, who falls for a man who might not be ready for it himself; a vengeance-minded hare, obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life; and post-college friends who try to figure out how to host an intervention in the era of Facebook. Along the way, we learn why wearing a red T-shirt every day is the key to finding love, how February got its name, and why the stock market is sometimes just . . . down. Finding inspiration in questions from the nature of perfection to the icing on carrot cake, One More Thing has at its heart the most human of phenomena: love, fear, hope, ambition, and the inner stirring for the one elusive element just that might make a person complete. Across a dazzling range of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices, the many pieces in this collection are like nothing else, but they have one thing in common: they share the playful humor, deep heart, sharp eye, inquisitive mind, and altogether electrifying spirit of a writer with a fierce devotion to the entertainment of the reader.

Download or read book The Hickory Chair written by Lisa Rowe Fraustino and published by Arthur A. Levine Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blind boy tells of his warm relationship with his grandmother and the gift she left for him after her death.

Download or read book Tenth of December written by George Saunders and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prize-winning, New York Times bestselling short story collection from the internationally bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo 'The best book you'll read this year' New York Times 'Dazzlingly surreal stories about a failing America' Sunday Times WINNER OF THE 2014 FOLIO PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2013 George Saunders's most wryly hilarious and disturbing collection yet, Tenth of December illuminates human experience and explores figures lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations. A family member recollects a backyard pole dressed for all occasions; Jeff faces horrifying ultimatums and the prospect of Darkenfloxx(TM) in some unusual drug trials; and Al Roosten hides his own internal monologue behind a winning smile that he hopes will make him popular. With dark visions of the future riffing against ghosts of the past and the ever-settling present, this collection sings with astonishing charm and intensity.

Download or read book M Is for Mama written by Abbie Halberstadt and published by Harvest House Publishers. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mama of ten Abbie Halberstadt helps women humbly and gracefully rise to the high calling of motherhood without settling for mediocrity or losing their minds in the process. Motherhood is a challenge. Unfortunately, our worldly culture offers moms little in the way of real help. Mamas only connect to celebrate surviving another day and to share in their misery rather than rejoice in what God has done and to build each other up in hard times. There has a be a better way, a biblical way, for mamas to grow and thrive. As a daughter of Christ, you have been called to be more than an average mama. Attaining excellence doesn’t have to be unsettling but it will take committed focus and a desire to parent well according to God’s grace and for His glory. M is for Mama offers advice, encouragement, and scripturally sound strategies seasoned with a little bit of humor to help you embrace the challenge of biblical motherhood and raise your children with love and wisdom. Mama, you are worthy of the awesome responsibility God has given you. Now it’s time to start believing you can live up to it.

Download or read book Nora Webster written by Colm Toibin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of contemporary literature’s bestselling, critically acclaimed, and beloved authors: a “luminous” novel (Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review) about a fiercely compelling young widow navigating grief, fear, and longing, and finding her own voice—“heartrendingly transcendant” (The New York Times, Janet Maslin). Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín’s magnificent seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable, and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be sucked back into it. Wounded, selfish, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments of stunning insight and empathy, and when she begins to sing again, after decades, she finds solace, engagement, a haven—herself. Nora Webster “may actually be a perfect work of fiction” (Los Angeles Times), by a “beautiful and daring” writer (The New York Times Book Review) at the zenith of his career, able to “sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations” (USA TODAY). “Miraculous...Tóibín portrays Nora with tremendous sympathy and understanding” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post).

Download or read book Bunny written by Mona Awad and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER Soon to be a major motion picture "Jon Swift + Witches of Eastwick + Kelly 'Get In Trouble' Link + Mean Girls + Creative Writing Degree Hell! No punches pulled, no hilarities dodged, no meme unmangled! O Bunny you are sooo genius!" —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter "A wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel." —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times "Awad is a stone-cold genius." —Ann Bauer, The Washington Post The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Rouge "We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?" Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination. Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library

Download or read book Peasants and Other Stories written by Anton Chekhov and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ever maturing art and ever more ambitious imaginative reach of Anton Chekhov, one of the world's greatest masters of the short story, led him in his last years to an increasingly profound exploration of the troubled depths of Russian society and life. This powerful and revealing selection from Chekhov's final works, made by the legendary American critic Edmund Wilson, offers stories of novelistic richness and complexity, published in the only formatp edition to present them in chronological order. Table of Contents A Woman's Kingdom Three Years The Murder My Life Peasants The New Villa In the Ravine The Bishop Betrothed