Download or read book When We Were Orphans written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-01-16 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes this stunning work of soaring imagination. Born in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition—and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him. Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one’s past.
Download or read book Never Let Me Go written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-03-19 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • The moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic from the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and Klara and the Sun—“a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist. “Brilliantly executed.” —Margaret Atwood “A page-turner and a heartbreaker.” —TIME “Masterly.” —Sunday Times As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
Download or read book The Unconsoled written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-09-05 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the universally acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day comes a mesmerizing novel of completely unexpected mood and matter--a seamless, fictional universe, both wholly unrecognizable and familiar. When the public, day-to-day reality of a renowned pianist takes on a life of its own, he finds himself traversing landscapes that are by turns eerie, comical, and strangely malleable.
Download or read book Madeleine Is Sleeping written by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Award Finalist, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's enchanting and inventive first novel is a groundbreaking, contemporary classic When a girl falls into a mysterious, impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer stumbles into the role of pornographer; a beautiful young wife grows to resemble her husband's viol. Madeleine, the dreamer, travels in their midst, trying to make sense of her own metamorphosis. She leaves home, joins a gypsy circus, and falls into an unexpected triangle of desire and love. Embracing the earthy and the ethereal, the comical and the poignant, Madeleine Is Sleeping is part fairy tale, part coming-of-age story, and above all, an adventure in the discovery of art, sexuality, community, and the self.
Download or read book Before We Were Yours written by Lisa Wingate and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE BLOCKBUSTER HIT—Over two million copies sold! A New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller “Poignant, engrossing.”—People • “Lisa Wingate takes an almost unthinkable chapter in our nation’s history and weaves a tale of enduring power.”—Paula McLain Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty. Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption. Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong. Publishers Weekly’s #3 Longest-Running Bestseller of 2017 • Winner of the Southern Book Prize • If All Arkansas Read the Same Book Selection This edition includes a new essay by the author about shantyboat life.
Download or read book We Were Not Orphans written by Sherry Matthews and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We were not orphans. Our parents were living; they just couldn't take care of us." This poignant remark captures the heartbreaking reality faced by thousands of Texas children from the 1920s through the 1970s. The Waco State Home provided housing and education for "dependent and neglected" children, but residents paid a price in physical and sexual abuse, military discipline, and plantation-style labor. Even so, the institution was the only home they had, and it rescued many children from an even worse fate. Now for the first time, oral histories and newly unearthed documents reveal what went on behind the gates of the Waco State Home. Sherry Matthews has tracked down former residents and uncovered criminal abuse that went unpunished and unpublicized. She first became aware of the Waco State Home at age three, when her three brothers were taken there to live. Years later, she attended a reunion at the Home and began collecting the alumni stories with assistance from author Jesse Sublett. We Were Not Orphans gathers riveting recollections from nearly sixty alumni who share the horror of abuse as well as their triumphs of spirit and ingenuity. Some alumni recall only the positive—bountiful food, caring teachers, victorious sports teams, and friendships and values that have lasted a lifetime. Others recount bloody beatings and sexual molestation that have left physical and emotional scars. These personal narratives and Matthews's relentless pursuit of the truth show how much can go wrong when a government-run institution operates without adequate public oversight. The Waco State Home finally closed after a landmark federal court decision and a courageous superintendent stopped the abuse and helped shepherd the children out of institutionalized care.
Download or read book Women and Men written by Joseph McElroy and published by . This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York - from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages, rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American, in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.
Download or read book Nocturnes written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes an inspired sequence of stories as affecting as it is beautiful. With the clarity and precision that have become his trademarks, Kazuo Ishiguro interlocks five short pieces of fiction to create a world that resonates with emotion, heartbreak, and humor. Here is a fragile, once famous singer, turning his back on the one thing he loves; a music junky with little else to offer his friends but opinion; a songwriter who inadvertently breaks up a marriage; a jazz musician who thinks the answer to his career lies in changing his physical appearance; and a young cellist whose tutor has devised a remarkable way to foster his talent. For each, music is a central part of their lives and, in one way or another, delivers them to an epiphany.
Download or read book The Remains of the Day written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is “an intricate and dazzling novel” (The New York Times) about the perfect butler and his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.
Download or read book Kazuo Ishiguro written by Sebastian Groes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-11 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the finest contemporary authors who possesses that increasingly rare distinction of being a writer who is both popular with the general reading public and well-respected within the academic community. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels presents eighteen fresh perspectives on the author's work that will appeal to those who read him for pleasure or for purposes of study. Established and rising critics reassess Ishiguro's works from the early 'Japanese' novels through to his short story cycle Nocturnes, paying particular attention to The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go. They address universal themes such as history, memory and mortality, but also provide groundbreaking explorations of diverse areas ranging from the posthuman and 'minor literature' to ethics, science fiction and Ishiguro's musical imagination. Featuring an insightful interview with Ishiguro himself, this collection of essays constitutes a significant contribution to the appreciation of his novels, and forms a lively and nuanced constellation of critical enquiry. Preface by Brian W. Shaffer. Essays by: Jeannette Baxter, Caroline Bennett, Christine Berberich, Lydia R. Cooper, Sebastian Groes, Meghan Marie Hammond, Tim Jarvis, Barry Lewis, Liani Lochner, Christopher Ringrose, Victor Sage, Andy Sawyer, Motoyuki Shibata, Gerry Smyth, Krystyna Stamirowska, Motoko Sugano, Patricia Waugh, Alyn Webley.
Download or read book Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteen interviews conducted over the past two decades on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond with the author of the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day
Download or read book We Were the Morris Orphans written by Kathi Morris and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “They’re not dead, are they?” The officer’s body visibly slumped as he delivered his final nod. From that July day in 1968 on, the Morris family became the Morris orphans: ten children who attracted nationwide attention, and a trust fund that didn’t bring out the best in those who fostered them. Kathi, the oldest, was only seventeen when her parents were killed by a drunk driver. This is her story—behind the headlines—of when the Morris orphans only had their mutual loss and each other.
Download or read book Before and After written by Judy Christie and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal—some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate’s bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family members as a result of its wide reach From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents—hiding the fact that many weren’t orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families. Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results. Advance praise for Before and After “In Before and After, authors Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate tackle the true stories behind Wingate’s blockbuster Before We Were Yours, of the orphans who survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. With a journalist’s keen eye and a novelist’s elegant prose, Christie and Wingate weave together the stories that inspired Before We Were Yours with the lives that were changed as a result of reading the novel. Readers will be educated, enlightened, and enraptured by this important and flawlessly executed book.”—Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan’s Tale and The Lost Girls of Paris
Download or read book The Orphan s Song written by Lauren Kate and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical adult debut novel by # 1 New York Times bestselling author Lauren Kate, The Orphan's Song is a breathtaking story of passion, heartbreak, and betrayal, and a celebration of the enduring nature and transformative power of love. "A tangled knot of betrayal and love, lies and redemption. Marvelous." --Fiona Davis, author of The Address A song brought them together. A secret will tear them apart. When Violetta and Mino meet, one finds true love and the other denies it. Both orphans at the Hospital of the Incurables in Venice, an orphanage and music conservatory, they meet and make music together clandestinely until Violetta is selected for the Incurables' renowned chorus. In order to join she signs an oath never to sing beyond the church doors, effectively sequestering herself for life. Mino flees, heartbroken. Too late, Violetta realizes what she has lost. In rebellion she begins a dangerous and forbidden nightlife, unknowingly drawing closer to Mino as he searches Venice for his long-lost mother. Mino and Violetta must each journey through passion, heartache, and betrayal before a dangerous secret reunites them, leading to a shocking and final confrontation.
Download or read book Two World Literature written by Rebecca Suter and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-05-31 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Rebecca Suter aims to complicate our understanding of world literature by examining the creative and critical deployment of cultural stereotypes in the early novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. “World literature” has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years: Aamir Mufti called it the result of “one-world thinking,” the legacy of an imperial system of cultural mapping from a unified perspective. Suter views Ishiguro’s fiction as an important alternative to this paradigm. Born in Japan, raised in the United Kingdom, and translated into a broad range of languages, Ishiguro has throughout his career consciously used his multiple cultural positioning to produce texts that look at broad human concerns in a significantly different way. Through a close reading of his early narrative strategies, Suter explains how Ishiguro has been able to create a “two-world literature” that addresses universal human concerns and avoids the pitfalls of the single, Western-centric perspective of “one-world vision.” Setting his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), in a Japan explicitly used as a metaphor enabled Ishiguro to parody and subvert Western stereotypes about Japan, and by extension challenge the universality of Western values. This subversion was amplified in his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which is perfectly legible through both English and Japanese cultural paradigms. Building on this subversion of stereotypes, Ishiguro’s early work investigates the complex relationship between social conditioning and agency, showing how characters’ behavior is related to their cultural heritage but cannot be reduced to it. This approach lies at the core of the author’s compelling portrayal of human experience in more recent works, such as Never Let Me Go (2005) and The Buried Giant (2015), which earned Ishiguro a global audience and a Nobel Prize. Deprived of the easy explanations of one-world thinking, readers of Ishiguro’s two-world literature are forced to appreciate the complexity of the interrelation of individual and collective identity, personal and historical memory, and influence and agency to gain a more nuanced, “two-world appreciation” of human experience.
Download or read book A Pale View of Hills written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-09-05 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day Here is the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a novel where past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan's devastation in the wake of World War II.
Download or read book The Orphan Master s Son written by Adam Johnson and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2012 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. By the author of Parasites Like Us.
