Download or read book Unnamed Country written by Dick Harrison and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 1977 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have an idea of what the Great Plains did to the people who settled there but know little about the analogous process north of the 49th parallel, or how it was reflected in fiction. Dick Harrison's Unnamed Country fills this gap. Harrison traces the varying literary responses to the Canadian prairies, from the bewilderment of the first English-speaking visitors, who saw the country in essentially negative terms -- no wood, no water -- down to the contemporary novelists who are employing sophisticated modem fictional techniques to reinterpret the whole experience from a new perspective. Between these two ends of the literary continuum he finds the early writers of fiction too loaded down with what he calls "excess cultural baggage" brought from Britain or eastern Canada to see the country as it was; the early twentieth-century writers, bemused by the myth of the garden, who portrayed the prairies subdued and fruitful; the prairie realists of the 1920s and 1930s, akin to O. E. Rolvaag in their tragic view; and their contemporaries, the popular novelists, who depicted the pioneering process in more affirmative tones.
Download or read book The Unnamed Country written by Jeffrey Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Other countries have conquered us over our long history, and sometimes they changed our name. Hundreds of years ago, our Emperor Tho tried to think of ways to protect his country from being attacked again, after he managed to drive out the last invaders. And he knew he had to change the name his enemies had given to his country. Then Tho had an idea... a way to keep other people from wanting to come here and steal his empire. He would hide it from their eyes, and their minds, and the eyes and minds of any demon lords who might try to bring more bad luck to his empire. So he gave our land the name it has to this day." "And what name is that?" "The Unnamed Country." From Jeffrey Thomas, creator of Punktown, comes The Unnamed Country, a mosaic novel weaving tales of a land and people poised between the ancient traditions of the past and the burgeoning technology of the future. Where devils, gods, and ghosts still haunt the land, and where you may just discover a unicorn.
Download or read book Home Is Not a Country written by Safia Elhillo and published by Make Me a World. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “Nothing short of magic.” —Elizabeth Acevedo, New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X From the acclaimed poet featured on Forbes Africa’s “30 Under 30” list, this powerful novel-in-verse captures one girl, caught between cultures, on an unexpected journey to face the ephemeral girl she might have been. Woven through with moments of lyrical beauty, this is a tender meditation on family, belonging, and home. my mother meant to name me for her favorite flower its sweetness garlands made for pretty girls i imagine her yasmeen bright & alive & i ache to have been born her instead Nima wishes she were someone else. She doesn’t feel understood by her mother, who grew up in a different land. She doesn’t feel accepted in her suburban town; yet somehow, she isn't different enough to belong elsewhere. Her best friend, Haitham, is the only person with whom she can truly be herself. Until she can't, and suddenly her only refuge is gone. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen—the name her parents meant to give her at birth—Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might be more real than Nima knows. And the life Nima wishes were someone else's. . . is one she will need to fight for with a fierceness she never knew she possessed.
Download or read book Lebanon written by Andrew Arsan and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2018 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reflective examination of everyday life in Lebanon in times of precarity and political torpor.
Download or read book A Far Country written by Daniel Mason and published by Picador. This book was released on 2007-03-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When they spoke of it in town, they called it simply the city, as if it was the only city in the world ... Raised in a remote village on the edge of a sugarcane plantation, Isabel was born with the gift and curse of 'seeing farther'. When drought and war grip their land, her beloved brother Isaias joins a great exodus to a teeming, labyrinthine city in the south. Soon the fourteen-year-old Isabel follows, forsaking the only home she's ever known, her sole consolation the thought of being with her brother again. But when she arrives, she discovers that Isaias has disappeared. Weeks and then months pass, until one day, armed only with her unshakeable hope, Isabel descends into the chaos of the city to find him. Told with extraordinary empathy, richly evocative, the story of Isabel's quest - of her dignity and determination, her deeply spiritual world - becomes a universal tale about the bonds of family and a sister's love for her brother, about being caught between two worlds, and about true heroism. A tour de force of emotional and narrative power, it is destined to become a classic. 'Mason is a superb storyteller. He inhabits Isabel's mind with fine sensitivity, and cleverly uses his imaginary setting to write of dauntless, timeless love and loyalty' - The Times
Download or read book A Personal Country written by A. C. Greene and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes growing up in small town West Texas in the early twentieth century focusing on fishing, festivals, and friendships. Also discusses the difficult struggles which many people experienced as well as portraying unusual people in humorous anecdotes.
Download or read book The Book of Unknown Americans written by Cristina Henríquez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning novel of hopes and dreams, guilt and love—a book that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American and "illuminates the lives behind the current debates about Latino immigration" (The New York Times Book Review). When fifteen-year-old Maribel Rivera sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it’s not long before Maribel attracts the attention of Mayor Toro, the son of one of their new neighbors, who sees a kindred spirit in this beautiful, damaged outsider. Their love story sets in motion events that will have profound repercussions for everyone involved. Here Henríquez seamlessly interweaves the story of these star-crossed lovers, and of the Rivera and Toro families, with the testimonials of men and women who have come to the United States from all over Latin America.
Download or read book This Country of Mine written by Didier Leclair and published by Deux Voiliers Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating tale of discovery and renewal
Download or read book Against the Country written by Ben Metcalf and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Against the Country is a gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction alike. Set in the Virginia pines, and overrun with failed parents, racist sex offenders, cast-off priests, and suicidal chickens, this novel challenges literary convention even as it attacks our national myth—that the rural naturally engenders good, while the urban breeds an inevitable sin. In a voice both perfectly American and utterly new, Ben Metcalf introduces the reader to Goochland County, Virginia—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, lackluster farms, and horrifying trees—and details one family’s pitiful struggle to survive there. Eventually it becomes clear that Goochland is not merely the author’s setting; it is a growing, throbbing menace that warps and scars every one of his characters’ lives. Equal parts fiery criticism and icy farce, Against the Country is the most hilarious sermon one is likely to hear on the subject of our native soil, and the starkest celebration of the language our land produced. The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here? Praise for Against the Country “Iconoclastic . . . Against the Country has obvious affinities to Southern Gothic, both in its voice and in the delight it takes in rural ignorance and grotesqueries. . . . [A] country cousin of David Foster Wallace.”—The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional in its verbal brilliance and conscientiousness, Against the Country involves us in a family’s anguished and hilarious struggle against the strange dooms that seem peculiar to white rural America. This is a savage and gladdening novel.”—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland and The Dog “Metcalf’s unnamed narrator dazzles with his Puritan deadpan and capacious intellect, not to mention his double-barreled blasts of dark humor and wicked satire. . . . There are so many brilliant turns of phrase in Against the Country that it’s hard to choose favorites, but Metcalf is at his sharpest and most seductive when his antihero does more than blast and blame, when he steps outside his sermons to say something real. . . . Every note in every solo is sounded with exquisite perfection.”—Slate “Faulknerian . . . eccentric, magnificent Southern Gothic metafiction.”—Vanity Fair “Ben Metcalf is a brilliant writer, and Against the Country is an ingenious and hilarious novel, a glittering, bitter celebration of how the lousiness of life can be redeemed in the hands (and mouth) of a top-shelf teller of life’s stories.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Fun Parts “A daring conglomeration of every trick, swindle and gimmick possible using only ink and paper, a pulpwood imagination machine so finely and expertly wrought that it can take on Jefferson, Thoreau, the church, patriotism, race relations, sexual identity, J. D. Salinger, the myth of America and a thousand other targets . . . [Against the Country] is absolutely and completely worth all investment of time and effort, because it is an undeniably beautiful object, sharp as a new razor.”—NPR “One of the more necessary—and most eloquent—expressions of a distinctly American, provincial rage in some years.”—Flavorwire
Download or read book Beasts of No Nation written by Uzodinma Iweala and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Remarkable. . . . Iweala never wavers from a gripping, pulsing narrative voice. . . . He captures the horror of ethnic violence in all its brutality and the vulnerability of youth in all its innocence.” —Entertainment Weekly (A) The harrowing, utterly original debut novel by Uzodinma Iweala about the life of a child soldier in a war-torn African country As civil war rages in an unnamed West-African nation, Agu, the school-aged protagonist of this stunning novel, is recruited into a unit of guerilla fighters. Haunted by his father’s own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family, still intact. As he vividly recalls these sunnier times, his daily reality continues to spin further downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of selfhood. In a powerful, strikingly original voice, Uzodinma Iweala leads the reader through the random travels, betrayals, and violence that mark Agu’s new community. Electrifying and engrossing, Beasts of No Nation announces the arrival of an extraordinary writer.
Download or read book In the Country of Last Things written by Paul Auster and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'That is how it works in the City. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense . . .' This is the story of Anna Blume and her journey to find her lost brother, William, in the unnamed City. Like the City itself, however, it is a journey that is doomed, and so all that is left is Anna's unwritten account of what happened. Paul Auster takes us to an unspecified and devastated world in which the self disappears amidst the horrors that surround us. But this is not just an imaginary, futuristic world: like the settings of Kafka stories, it is one that echoes our own, and in doing so addresses some of our darker legacies. In the Country of Last Things is a tense, psychological take on the dystopian novel. It continues Auster's deep exploration of his central themes: the modern city, the mysteries of storytelling, and the elusive and unstable nature of truth.
Download or read book Savage Country written by Robert Olmstead and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . .” Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother’s debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land. Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named “dead line” demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods—and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls. Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead’s gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it’s also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.
Download or read book Spook Country written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “cool and scary”(San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer. • spook (spo͞ok) n.: A specter; a ghost. Slang for “intelligence agent.” • country (ˈkən-trē) n.: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind. • spook country (spo͞ok ˈkən-trē) n.: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place we are learning to live. Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. And Hollis Henry has been told to find him... “A devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist.”—The Washington Post Book World
Download or read book Punktown written by Jeffrey Thomas and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Thomas' collection Punktown explored the streets and back alleys of a futuristic and nightmarish urbanscape in a series of unconnected short stories. In Punktown: Third Eye, Thomas has teleported authors Simon Logan, Jonathan Lyons, Charlee Jacob, Paul G. Tremblay, Michael McCarty, Mark McLaughlin, Garrett Peck, Thomas Andrew Hughes, and Scott Thomas into the city to pen their own tales of its citizens, aliens, mutations, and sentient machines. These talented authors bring a new perspective, a personal vision, a third eye view to the phantasmetropolis that is Punktown.
Download or read book The Book of Cthulhu written by Ross Lockhart and published by Start Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cthulhu Mythos is one of the 20th century's most singularly recognizable literary creations. Initially created by H. P. Lovecraft and a group of his amorphous contemporaries (the so-called "Lovecraft Circle"), The Cthulhu Mythos story cycle has taken on a convoluted, cyclopean life of its own. Some of the most prodigious writers of the 20th century, and some of the most astounding writers of the 21st century have planted their seeds in this fertile soil. The Book of Cthulhu harvests the weirdest and most corpulent crop of these modern mythos tales. From weird fiction masters to enigmatic rising stars, The Book of Cthulhu demonstrates how Mythos fiction has been a major cultural meme throughout the 20th century, and how this type of story is still salient, and terribly powerful today.
Download or read book My End Is My Beginning written by Moris Farhi and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civilisation is on the brink of collapse. The people are controlled with Big Lies, mass surveillance and brutal suppression. What price would you pay for freedom? Oric and his lover Belkis are part of a rebel band devoted to liberating people all over the world from totalitarian oppression. When Belkis is brutally murdered, Oric's world is torn apart. Haunted by the thought that he could have done more to save her, he continues the fight for freedom that they began together. But Oric knows he doesn't have long left before his nemeses, the self-professed Saviours, return for him too. As the Saviours forge new alliances and grow ever stronger, Oric must stay one step ahead to complete the mission he was born to fulfill. Here, in the darkest hour, Oric will discover that even the smallest of gestures can bring the greatest gift to humankind – hope.
Download or read book Our Country Friends written by Gary Shteyngart and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews “A perfect novel for these times and all times, the single textual artifact from the pandemic era I would place in a time capsule as a representation of all that is good and true and beautiful about literature.”—Molly Young, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) Eight friends, one country house, and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a “virtuoso performance” (USA Today) and “an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart” (The Washington Post) In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller Super Sad True Love Story.
