Download or read book Anil s Ghost written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winning a Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Anil’s Ghost is another award-winning novel from Michael Ondaatje. Steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition, Sri Lanka has been ravaged in the late twentieth century by bloody civil war. Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka but educated in England and the U.S., is sent by an international human rights group to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders in her homeland. Working with an archaeologist, she discovers a skeleton whose identity takes Anil on a fascinating journey that involves a riveting mystery. What follows, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love and loss, about family, identity and the unknown enemy. And it is a quest to unlock the hidden past—like a handful of soil analyzed by an archaeologist, the story becomes more diffuse the farther we reach into history. A universal tale of the casualties of war, unfolding as a detective story, the book gradually gives way to a more intricate exploration of its characters, a symphony of loss and loneliness haunted by a cast of solitary strangers and ghosts. The atrocities of a seemingly futile, muddled war are juxtaposed against the ancient, complex and ultimately redemptive culture and landscape of Sri Lanka.
Download or read book Anil s Ghost written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-01-10 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past–a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder–Michael Ondaatje’s most powerful novel yet.
Download or read book Anil s Ghost written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A breathtaking novel about love and the horrors of civil war from the bestselling author of The English Patient. 'There is much to astonish, to disturb and to admire in this book... A rare triumph' Guardian Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war. Enter Anil Tissera, a young woman and forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educated in the West, sent by an international human rights group to identify the victims of the murder campaigns sweeping the island. When Anil discovers that the bones found in an ancient burial site are in fact those of a much more recent victim, her search for the terrible truth hidden in her homeland begins. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity - a story driven by a riveting mystery.
Download or read book The Cat s Table written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Michael Ondaatje: an electrifying novel, by turns thrilling and deeply moving—one of his most vividly rendered and compelling works of fiction to date. In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly "Cat's Table" with an eccentric and unforgettable group of grownups and two other boys. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys find themselves immersed in the worlds and stories of the adults around them. At night they spy on a shackled prisoner—his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. Looking back from deep within adulthood, and gradually moving back and forth from the decks and holds of the ship to the years that follow the narrator unfolds a spellbinding and layered tale about the magical, often forbidden discoveries of childhood and the burdens of earned understanding, about a life-long journey that began unexpectedly with a sea voyage.
Download or read book Divisadero written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past. Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory.
Download or read book Coming Through Slaughter written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place. In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.
Download or read book The Masterwork of a Painting Elephant written by Michelle Cuevas and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since he was an infant, Pigeon Jones has lived on the back of an artistically gifted white elephant named Birch. Birch is a loving father, but that doesn't stop Pigeon from wondering about the human parents who abandoned him. Birch has dreams, too—of being a well-known artist, and of finding the acrobat he fell in love with while they performed together in a circus years ago. And so, on Pigeon's tenth birthday, their search for fame and lost loves begins. Pigeon and Birch paint their way across the world, dodging an evil circus ringleader, freeing zoo animals, and befriending singing hoboes along the way. But when they reach the end of their journey, Birch must master the most difficult art of all: letting go and allowing his beloved Pigeon to stand on his own two feet.
Download or read book Little Goblins Ten written by Pamela Jane and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-07-26 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over in the forest Where the trees hide the sun Lived a big mommy monster And her little monster one. "Scare!" said the mommy; "I scare," said the one. So he scared and he scampered Where the trees hide the sun. From monsters to ghosties to goblins, everyone's favorite beasties haunt and howl and rattle their way through their forest home in this silly, spooky twist on the beloved nursery rhyme "Over in the Meadow." Author Pamela Jane and New York Times bestselling illustrator Jane Manning have created a delicious Halloween treat for readers to enjoy.
Download or read book Swamplandia written by Karen Russell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The bravely imagined, wildly acclaimed debut novel from the author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove—about a thirteen year old girl who sets out on a mission through magical swamps to save her family. "Ms. Russell is one in a million.... A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book." —The New York Times Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness. As Ava embarks on her mission to save them all, we are drawn into a lush debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.
Download or read book Warlight written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient: “an elegiac thriller [with] the immediate allure of a dark fairy tale” (The Washington Post) set in the decade after World War II that tells the dramatic story of two teenagers and an eccentric group of characters. In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself—shadowed and luminous at once—we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey—through facts, recollection, and imagination—that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.
Download or read book In the Skin of a Lion written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.
Download or read book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-05-28 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. (p. 20) Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground-breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self-aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti-heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and “clippings,” astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then-little-known Ondaatje his first of several Governor General’s Awards and brazenly challenged the world’s notions of history and literature. Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid (aka William H. Bonney / Henry McCarty / Henry Antrim) is not the clichéd dimestore comicbook gunslinger later parodied within the pages of this book. Instead, he is a beautiful and dangerous chimera with a voice: driven and kinetic, he also yearns for blankness and rest. A poet and lover, possessing intelligence and sensory discernment far beyond his life’s 21 year allotment, he is also a resolute killer. His friend and nemesis is Sheriff Pat Garrett, who will go on to his own fame (or infamy) for Billy’s execution. Himself a web of contradictions, Ondaatje’s Garrett is “a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane” (p. 29) who has taught himself a language he’ll never use and has trained himself to be immune to intoxication. As the hero and anti-hero engage in the counterpoint that will lead to Billy’s predetermined death, they are joined by figures both real and imagined, including the homesteaders John and Sallie Chisum, Billy’s lover Angela D, and a passel of outlaws and lawmakers. The voices and images meld, joined by Ondaatje’s own, in a magnificent polyphonic dream of what it means to feel and think and freely act, knowing this breath is your last and you are about to be trapped by history. I am here with the range for everything corpuscle muscle hair hands that need the rub of metal those senses that that want to crash things with an axe that listen to deep buried veins in our palms those who move in dreams over your women night near you, every paw, the invisible hooves the mind’s invisible blackout the intricate never the body’s waiting rut. (p. 72)
Download or read book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World written by Partha Chatterjee and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If it isn't obvious from the title of this book that this is going to be full of postmodern jargon, it becomes clear quite quickly that Chaterjee prefers difficult terms like 'problematic', 'thematic' and 'discourse' without always defining them - he even admits his admiration for Rorty, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Nonetheless, underneath all of this verbiage is a strong and convincing argument about the three stages of nationalism in India: the moment of departure (epitomized by Bankimchandra Chatttopadhyay), the moment of manoeuvre (Gandhi) and the moment of arrival (Nehru). Chatterjee clearly shows how nationalism in India was akin to Gramsci's concept of the 'passive revolution' - i.e. merely a drive towards independence, not towards transforming or breaking up colonial instutions. He argues that, instead of supporting nationalism, we should instead challenge the marriage between reason and capital. From the title of this book one might expect Chatterjee to draw links to other anti-colonial nationalisms but he doesn't; rather he only discusses India (not even other parts of South Asia). While this approach doesn't really make this book too useful for examining anti-colonial nationalisms in general, for someone like me who has never read a book on Indian nationalism this is a good introduction." -- from Amazon.ca.
Download or read book The Dainty Monsters written by Michael Ondaatje and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place written by Howard A. Norman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir details the haunting and redemptive events of the author's life, covering such topics as his con-man father's betrayal, the murder-suicide of a houseguest, and his decade spent in the Arctic as a translator of Inuit tales.
Download or read book Human Rights Discourse in a Global Network written by Lena Khor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her innovative study of human rights discourse, Lena Khor takes up the prevailing concern by scholars who charge that the globalization of human rights discourse is becoming yet another form of cultural, legal, and political imperialism imposed from above by an international human rights regime based in the Global North. To counter these charges, she argues for a paradigmatic shift away from human rights as a hegemonic, immutable, and ill-defined entity toward one that recognizes human rights as a social construct comprised of language and of language use. She proposes a new theoretical framework based on a global discourse network of human rights, supporting her model with case studies that examine the words and actions of witnesses to genocide (Paul Rusesabagina) and humanitarian organizations (Doctors Without Borders). She also analyzes the language of texts such as Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Khor's idea of a globally networked structure of human rights discourse enables actors (textual and human) who tap into or are linked into this rapidly globalizing system of networks to increase their power as speaking subjects and, in so doing, to influence the range of acceptable meanings and practices of human rights in the cultural sphere. Khor’s book is a unique and important contribution to the study of human rights in the humanities that revitalizes viable notions of agency and liberatory network power in fields that have been dominated by negative visions of human capacity and moral action.
Download or read book Dilemma of a Ghost written by Ama Ata Aidoo and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
