Download or read book Circus Days and Nights written by Robert Lax and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though many hold him to be one of the greatest American poets of this century, Lax has maintained a low profile, living and writing in seclusion on the Greek island of Patmos. In Circus Days & Nights, Lax's three great long poems on the circus—“Circus of the Sun,†? “Mogador's Book,†? and “Sunset City†?—are collected together for the first time, placing this early masterwork in the position within American literature that it so richly deserves. Each of the three poems in this collection expresses a reverence for the acts of daring, beauty, and grace that make the circus the singular event it is. What also emerges is the drawing of a link between this world of the circus—wherein a tent is erected, acts are performed, and then the tent is disassembled only to be re-erected the next day—and Lax's faith. As Denise Levertov has said, “the radiant security of Lax’s faith appears in his work as a serenity of tone.†?
Download or read book The Night Circus written by Erin Morgenstern and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in the spellbinding novel that captured the world's imagination. • "Part love story, part fable ... defies both genres and expectations." —The Boston Globe The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.
Download or read book Nights at the Circus written by Angela Carter and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Raunchy, raucous...a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety' The Times Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake? Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia. **One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
Download or read book The Circus in Winter written by Cathy Day and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005-07-06 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a half century, a small Indiana town hosts a circus troupe during the off-seasons in linked stories “as graceful as any acrobat’s high-wire act” (San Francisco Chronicle). A Story Prize Finalist From 1884 to 1939, the Great Porter Circus made the unlikely choice to winter in an Indiana town called Lima, a place that feels as classic as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and as wondrous as a first trip to the Big Top. In Lima, an elephant can change the course of a man's life—or the manner of his death. Jennie Dixianna entices men with her dazzling Spin of Death and keeps them in line with secrets locked in a cedar box. The lonely wife of the show’s manager has each room of her house painted like a sideshow banner, indulging her desperate passion for a young painter. And a former clown seeks consolation from his loveless marriage in his post-circus job at Clown Alley Cleaners. In this collection of linked stories spanning decades, Cathy Day follows the circus people into their everyday lives and brings the greatest show on earth to the page. “[An] exquisite story collection.” —The Washington Post “Often funny, always graceful, and rich with a mix of historical and imaginative detail.” —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried “Sublimely imaginative and affecting.” —The Boston Globe
Download or read book The Starless Sea written by Erin Morgenstern and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea. Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life.
Download or read book Cirque Du Freak A Living Nightmare written by Darren Shan and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Master of Horror comes the first gripping book in the twelve book New York Times bestselling Saga of Darren Shan. Start the tale from the beginning in the book that inspired the feature film The Vampire's Assistant and petrified devoted fans worldwide. A young boy named Darren Shan and his best friend, Steve, get tickets to the Cirque Du Freak, a wonderfully gothic freak show featuring weird, frightening half human/half animals who interact terrifyingly with the audience. In the midst of the excitement, true terror raises its head when Steve recognizes that one of the performers-- Mr. Crepsley-- is a vampire! Stever remains after the show finishes to confront the vampire-- but his motives are surprising! In the shadows of a crumbling theater, a horrified Darren eavesdrops on his friend and the vampire, and is witness to a monstrous, disturbing plea. As if by destiny, Darren is pulled to Mr. Crepsley and what follows is his horrifying descent into the dark and bloody world of vampires. This is the beginning of Darren's story.
Download or read book Angela Carter s Nights at the Circus written by Helen Stoddart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-04-11 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the many interpretations of this provocative text, this guide showcases a selection of new critical essays to present those beginning a detailed study of the novel, a way through the contextual and critical material that surrounds it.
Download or read book Poems 1962 1997 written by Robert Lax and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of out-of-print and previously unpublished work from a lesser known yet highly influential American poet.
Download or read book Queen of the Air written by Dean N. Jensen and published by Crown. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true life Water for Elephants, Queen of the Air brings the circus world to life through the gorgeously written, true story of renowned trapeze artist and circus performer Leitzel, Queen of the Air, the most famous woman in the world at the turn of the 20th century, and her star-crossed love affair with Alfredo Codona, of the famous Flying Codona Brothers. Like today's Beyonce, Madonna, and Cher, she was known to her vast public by just one name, Leitzel. There may have been some regions on earth where her name was not a household expression, but if so, they were likely on polar ice caps or in the darkest, deepest jungles. Leitzel was born into Dickensian circumstances, and became a princess and then a queen. She was not much bigger than a good size fairy, just four-foot-ten and less than 100 pounds. In the first part of the 20th century, she presided over a sawdust fiefdom of never-ending magic. She was the biggest star ever of the biggest circus ever, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, The Greatest Show on Earth. In her life, Leitzel had many suitors (and three husbands), but only one man ever fully captured her heart. He was the handsome Alfredo Codona, the greatest trapeze flyer that had ever lived, the only one in his time who, night after night, executed the deadliest of all big-top feats, The Triple--three somersaults in midair while traveling at 60 m.p.h. The Triple, the salto mortale, as the Italians called it, took the lives of more daredevils than any other circus stunt.
Download or read book Nights as Day Days as Night written by Michel Leiris and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Autobiography. Translated from the French by Richard Sieburth, with a foreword by Maurice Blanchot. Hailed as an important literary document and contemporary pleasure by Lydia Davis, NIGHTS AS DAY, DAYS AS NIGHT is a chronicle of Michel Leiris's dreams. But it is also an exceptional autobiography, a distorted vision of twentieth-century France, a surrealist collage, a collection of prose poems. Leiris, author of the seminal autobiography Manhood, here disrupts the line between being asleep and awake, between being and non-being. He captures the profound strangeness of the dreamer's identity: that anonymous creature who stirs awake at night to experience a warped version of waking life. Whatever the setting (from circus shows to brothels, from the streets of Paris to Hollywood silent films), Leiris concentrates on estranging the familiar, on unsettling the commonplace. Beautifully translated by Richard Sieburth, these dream records often read like an outsider's view of Leiris's life and epoch. This outsider is the dreamer, Leiris's nocturnal double, whose incisors grow as large as a street, who describes the terror he feels at being executed by the Nazis, and who can say in all seriousness, I am dead. It is an alternate life, with its own logic, its own paradoxes, and its own horrors, which becomes alienating and intimate at once. With hints of Kafka, Pirandello, and Nerval, NIGHTS AS DAY, DAYS AS NIGHT is one of Leiris's finest works of self-portraiture. Both timeless and located in the years and places of the dreaming, this forty-year-long collection of tiny, bizarre moments and longer weird narratives displays what happens at night inside the unfettered imagination of the highly cultivated, emotional, and sensuous man that was Michel Leiris. They are strange, almost unclassifiable literary creations--part involuntary, part consciously arranged--which take as their material not only himself and his friends but also the figures and works of other writers and artists, and blend the realistic and the fantastical with an occasional leavening of pure comedy. Rendered in natural, living English by Richard Sieburth and infused with his vigilant intelligence, this is an extremely welcome re-publication, as both important literary document and contemporary pleasure.--Lydia Davis, author of Can't and Won't NIGHTS AS DAY, DAYS AS NIGHT stands as a companion piece to Leiris' great work, his memoirs (L'Age d'homme). The existence of both books establishes a stunning assertion, that the dream life of a person is as valid and telling as the more usual memoirs. In fact, Leiris seems to be suggesting that only when the unconscious mind and the conscious mind are seen together, and the network of connections between politics, sexuality, fear, the exotic and the mundane, is reconstructed in all of its mystery, can the person begin to be known. Somewhere we begin to see the total life of a person come into view, like the metamorphic vision of a paradisal dream city that recurs throughout this book. It is the surrealist New Jerusalem, where the rational and irrational come together to produce the 'supreme point, ' the place of final knowing.--Lawrence R. Smith, Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Small Days and Nights written by Tishani Doshi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize 2020 'An astonishing novel that is beautifully written but underpinned by a quiet simmering anger about injustice and unrealistic expectations of a family – and of life in contemporary India' Peter Frankopan 'A shattering study of disaffection and belonging ... This is a concise novel of staggering depth ...Disturbing, deep and utterly extraordinary' Bidisha, Observer An Irish Times Book of the Year 2019 Escaping her failing marriage, Grace has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she finds herself heir to an unexpected inheritance. First, there is the strange pink house, blue-shuttered, out on a spit of the wild beach, haunted by the rattle of fishermen in their catamarans. And then there is the sister she never knew she had: Lucia, who has spent her life in a residential facility. Soon Grace sets up a new and precarious life in this lush, melancholy wilderness, with Lucia, the village housekeeper Mallika, the drily witty Auntie Kavitha and an ever-multiplying litter of puppies. Here in Paramankeni, with its vacant bus stops colonised by flying foxes, its temples and step-wells shielded by canopies of teak and tamarind, where every dusk the fishermen line the beach smoking and mending their nets, Grace feels that she has come to the very end of the world. But Grace's attempts to play house prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury and bewilderment of life with Lucia. Luminous, funny, surprising and heartbreaking, Small Days and Nights is the story of a woman caught in a moment of transformation, and the sacrifices we make to forge lives that have meaning.
Download or read book The Circus of the Sun written by Robert Lax and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book THE HIGH AUCTION written by Misba and published by Nomad's Forge. This book was released on 2021-09-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the near future, a machinist, a monk, and a mesmerizer are looking for the Source of the universe, but among the ancient scriptures, they only find the devil ... Few humans in the future find the secrets of what words and sounds can do, for the Apocalypse and war have led them to evolve in mind and physique. Two of them end World War III with just a four-minute speech. Some say they did mass hypnosis. Others say it was their voice and will. Fifty years later in South Asia, KUSHA, a twenty-three-year-old machine-geek with social awkwardness and amnesia, tries to get the Devil’s Book with secrets of voice. But her idol of voice and everyone's beloved war heroes, YUAN and RUEM, are also after it for power. In a society that worships the evolved High Grades with voice, how you speak and which words you talk with is important. As someone who finds all solutions in books, Kusha thinks the secrets in the three-foot-long ancient book will teach her to speak mesmerizingly. She believes it will help her evolve. So, she decides to attend the auction where the book will be sold. But there's a problem; powerful High Grades want the book too. They want to code fate, rewriting the material world. They are undead, immortal mesmerizers. And being a philosopher, Kusha admires their ethics while she must fight them—the fight that starts with the book. The fight creates a chain reaction leading her to an epic journey. About the Series: THE HIGH AUCTION: WISDOM REVOLUTION is a book of genre-bending Adult Sci-fi-Fantasy series "The Machinist, The Monk, And The Mesmerizer Chronicles." Here, you'll find Metaphysical magic built around philosophy and spirituality. You'll find ancient mysteries, archaeological adventures, and, most importantly, you will meet some characters. Its inspiration was from myths/truth (read the word you prefer) of all religions where humans evolved to Sufis, Rishis, Sannashis, Monks, and sometimes, Gods. Example: Shiva Purana in Hindu epics where Sati evolved to Goddess Parvati and splits into Kali to destroy the evil is a prominent example. You'll find diverse cultures, sexuality, and faith in this series. Enjoy. What the Critiques and Reviewers are saying about it: "GEM PROSE ... YOU WILL FINISH THIS BOOK ONCE YOU START ..." "EXCEPTIONALLY THOUGHT-PROVOKING ..." "RELATABLE ... YOU KEEP NODDING AT EVERYTHING ..."
Download or read book The Queen Of The Night written by Alexander Chee and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER, New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year from NPR, Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, and others. The mesmerizing story of one woman's rise from circus rider to courtesan to world-renowned diva—"a brilliant performance" (Washington Post). The Queen of the Night tells the captivating story of Lilliet Berne, an orphan who left the American frontier for Europe and was swept into the glamour and terror of Second Empire France. She became a sensation of the Paris Opera, with every accolade but an original role—her chance at immortality. When one is offered to her, she finds the libretto is based on her deepest secret, something only four people have ever known. But who betrayed her? With epic sweep, gorgeous language, and haunting details, Alexander Chee shares Lilliet’s cunning transformation from circus rider to courtesan to legendary soprano, retracing the path that led to the role that could secure her reputation—or destroy her with the secrets it reveals. “It just sounds terrific. It sounds like opera.”—The New Yorker “Sprawling, soaring, bawdy, and plotted like a fine embroidery.”—NPR
Download or read book Circus Days Again written by Enid Blyton and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spangles Elephants Violets Me written by Victoria B. Cristiani Rossi and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2009-04-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spangles, Elephants, Violets & Me is a moving and revealing journey back to the playground of Victoria Cristiani Rossis youth. It is, quite simply, one thought-provoking train rideone that involves fairy tales, nightmares and miracles. Victoria describes the tempestuous world of her Internationally Famous Cristiani Riding Act family (former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey superstars), her life-altering convent experiences, starting at age six, and her near-fatal accident under the big top in Los Angeles. There are fascinating glimpses of Emmett Kelly, Karl Wallenda, Hugo Zacchini and disgraced 1950's quiz-show contestant Charles Van Doren. Spangles, Elephants, Violets & Me is also a story of the American dream, the confluence of wealth and fame, the strength and frailty of family, social and economic ambition, misplaced trust, conflict, loss and redemption. Victorias gift for writing is most evident as she builds dramatic contrast between days spent happily on the circus lot, and haunting nights spent away from it. Employing her authentic voice and role in circus history, Victoria honors an institution often caught publicly and unfortunately between its defenders and detractors, a situation that can preempt enjoyment of its true reason for being, or appreciation of the circus industrys numerous contributions to American culture.
Download or read book Beer and Circus written by Murray Sperber and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beer and Circus presents a no-holds-barred examination of the troubled relationship between college sports and higher education from a leading authority on the subject. Murray Sperber turns common perceptions about big-time college athletics inside out. He shows, for instance, that contrary to popular belief the money coming in to universities from sports programs never makes it to academic departments and rarely even covers the expense of maintaining athletic programs. The bigger and more prominent the sports program, the more money it siphons away from academics. Sperber chronicles the growth of the university system, the development of undergraduate subcultures, and the rising importance of sports. He reveals television's ever more blatant corporate sponsorship conflicts and describes a peculiar phenomenon he calls the "Flutie Factor"--the surge in enrollments that always follows a school's appearance on national television, a response that has little to do with academic concerns. Sperber's profound re-evaluation of college sports comes straight out of today's headlines and opens our eyes to a generation of students caught in a web of greed and corruption, deprived of the education they deserve. Sperber presents a devastating critique, not only of higher education but of national culture and values. Beer and Circus is a must-read for all students and parents, educators and policy makers.
