Download or read book God s Bits of Wood written by Sembène Ousmane and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1947 and the workers on the Dakar-Niger Railway have come out on strike. Sembène Ousmane, in this vivid and moving novel, evokes all of the colour, passion and tragedy of those decisive years in history. 'Ever since they left Thiès, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending.' God's Bits of Wood is Sembène Ousmane's internationally renowned novel, based on his own experiences of the landmark 1947 railroad strike that spread across French West Africa. 'A classic.' Guardian 'Ousmane Sembène [was] a crucial figure in Africa's postcolonial cultural awakening.' New York Times 'A powerful story.' Kirkus Translated from the French by Francis Price.
Download or read book Xala written by James S. Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-02 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji's student daughter Rama and the group of urban 'undesirables' who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite. James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory. Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.
Download or read book The Fortunes of Wangrin written by Amadou Hampaté Bâ and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel on the evils of white colonialism in Africa. Set in French-ruled Mali, the hero is a young teacher who plays the white man's idea of a good Black in order to advance his career.
Download or read book God s Bits of Wood written by Ousmane Sembène and published by Heinemann Educational Books. This book was released on 1970 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel set in West Africa, during the 1947-8 strike of the workers on the Dakar-Niger railway.
Download or read book Witch Wood written by John Buchan and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1927 and set in the 17th century, this is a wonderful story of witchcraft in the forests of England.
Download or read book The Gods of Gotham written by Lyndsay Faye and published by G.P. Putnam's Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York City, 1845. Timothy Wilde, a 27-year-old Irish immigrant, joins the newly formed NYPD and investigates an infanticide and the body of a 12-year-old Irish boy whose spleen has been removed.
Download or read book The Conscript written by Gebreyesus Hailu and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-23 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eloquent and thought-provoking, this classic novel by the Eritrean novelist Gebreyesus Hailu, written in Tigrinya in 1927 and published in 1950, is one of the earliest novels written in an African language and will have a major impact on the reception and critical appraisal of African literature. The Conscript depicts, with irony and controlled anger, the staggering experiences of the Eritrean ascari, soldiers conscripted to fight in Libya by the Italian colonial army against the nationalist Libyan forces fighting for their freedom from Italy’s colonial rule. Anticipating midcentury thinkers Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Hailu paints a devastating portrait of Italian colonialism. Some of the most poignant passages of the novel include the awakening of the novel’s hero, Tuquabo, to his ironic predicament of being both under colonial rule and the instrument of suppressing the colonized Libyans. The novel’s remarkable descriptions of the battlefield awe the reader with mesmerizing images, both disturbing and tender, of the Libyan landscape—with its vast desert sands, oases, horsemen, foot soldiers, and the brutalities of war—uncannily recalled in the satellite images that were brought to the homes of millions of viewers around the globe in 2011, during the country’s uprising against its former leader, Colonel Gaddafi.
Download or read book Abina and the Important Men written by Trevor R. Getz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an illustrated "graphic history" based on an 1876 court transcript of a West African woman named Abina, who was wrongfully enslaved and took her case to court. The main scenes of the story take place in the courtroom, where Abina strives to convince a series of "important men"--A British judge, two Euro-African attorneys, a wealthy African country "gentleman," and a jury of local leaders --that her rights matter.--Publisher description.
Download or read book Ousmane Sembene and the Politics of Culture written by Lifongo J. Vetinde and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undoubtedly one of Africa’s most influential first generation of writers and filmmakers, Ousmane Sembene's creative works of fiction as well as his films have been the subject of a considerable number of scholarly articles. The schemas of reading applied to Sembene's oeuvre (novels, short stories and films) have, in the main, focused either on his militant posture against colonialism, his disenchantment with African leadership, or his infatuation with documenting the past in an attempt to present a balanced and nuanced view of African history. While these studies, unquestionably contribute to a better understanding of his works, they collectively ignore Sembene’s relentless preoccupation with culture in his entire career as a writer and filmmaker. The collection of essays in Sembene and the Politics of Culture sets out to fill that gap as the contributors at once foreground Sembene’s fixation on the centrality of culture in the articulation of the discourse of national consciousness and reevaluate his intellectual and artistic legacy within an overarching framework of African liberation. The contributors critically reassess the ideological underpinnings of Sembene’s thoughts, his role as one of the foundational pillars of African cultural production, and his relevance in current discourses of nationhood. They do so through a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches that draw on linguistics, feminist theory, film theory, historiography, Marxist criticism, psychoanalysis and a host of other approaches that give novel insights in the critical analysis of the works under study. In the part entitled “Testimonies," a collection of conversations with people who worked closely with Sembene, each of the interlocutors provide illuminating insights into the man's life and work. The variety of themes and critical approaches in this critical anthology will certainly be of interest not only to students and scholars of African literature and cinema at various levels of intellectual and cultural sophistication but also anyone interested in the analysis of the nexus between power, culture, and the discourse of liberation.
Download or read book Street of Riches written by Gabrielle Roy and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semiautobiographical and universal in appeal, Street of Riches is about a young girl's growing up in a suburb of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Here is Christine, the perceptive narrator of The Road Past Altamont (also a Bison Book), awakening to natural and sometimes terrifying beauty, to family history, to the nuances of social life, to sexuality, to selfhood. A mother's romantic yearning for freedom, a father's roving career as an immigration officer, a beautiful sister's early demise, a host of others in very human situations - all contribute to the way Christine will view the world as a writer. Gabrielle Roy has been called the Canadian Willa Cather because of their affinity in style and theme. Street of Riches won both the Governor-General's Award for Fiction and the French Prix Duvernay.
Download or read book Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God written by Joe Coomer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-05-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nine weeks after losing her husband, Charlotte escapes to a wooden motor yacht in New Hampshire, where her shipmates are an aging blue-haired widow, an emotional seventeen-year-old, and the ugliest dog in literature. A genuine bond develops among the three women, as their distinct personalities and paths cross and converge against the backdrop of emotional secrets, abuse, and the wages of old age. Off the boat, Charlotte, an archaeologist, joins a local excavation to uncover an ancient graveyard. Here she can indulge her passion for reconstructing the past, even as she tries to bury her own recent history. She comes to realize, however, that the currents of time are as fluid and persistent as the water that drifts beneath her comforting new home.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book God Is Great God Is Good written by William Lane Craig and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this magisterial collection, the contemporary complaints against belief in God are addressed with intellectual passion and rigor by some of the most astute theological and philosophical minds of the day. Including an interview by Gary Habermas with noted convert to theism Antony Flew, and a direct critical response to Richard Dawkins's God Delusion by Alvin Plantinga, God Is Great, God Is Good offers convincing and compelling reassurance that though the world has changed, God has not.
Download or read book A God in Every Stone written by Kamila Shamsie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-06-11 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1914 a young Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer, joins an archaeological dig in Turkey, fulfilling a long-held dream. Working alongside Germans and Turks, she falls in love with archaeologist Tahsin Bey and joins him in his quest to find an ancient silver circlet. But the outbreak of war in Europe brings her idyllic summer to a sudden end, and her new friends become her nation's enemies. Thousands of miles away, twenty-year-old Pathan Qayyum Gul is learning about brotherhood and loyalty in the British Indian army. When he loses an eye in battle and is sent to England to recuperate, his allegiances falter. Returning home at last, Qayyum shares a train carriage with Vivian Rose, whose continued search for the circlet has led her to Peshawar in the heart of the British Raj. Many years later, the two cross paths again, and their loyalties will be tested once more amidst massacres, cover-ups, and the disappearance of a young man they both love.
Download or read book I Know This Much Is True written by Wally Lamb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-03 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
Download or read book The God Cookie written by Geoffrey Wood and published by Waterbrook Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Would you know if he did, if God really spoke to you– would it be booming from the heavens or just in your head? If it was in your head, how would you know if it was God or wasn’t? Is God speaking right now but we’re just not listening? And if God does tell you something…what would you do about it? Meet Parrish. He’s a regular guy, owns a coffee shop. He happens to be shooting the breeze with his buddies at the neighborhood Chinese buffet, talking about the dents in golf balls and such, when the discussion develops into a debate on whether or not God still speaks to people. When his friends skip out and he is left alone, Parrish tells God he's “all in.” Ready to listen, do what he’s told, and see what happens. Only moments later, back at his table, he opens his fortune cookie to find a surprise -- instead of a proverbial statement, he reads a directive from God. “Take the corner.” God, via cookie, sends him on this first step of a seemingly absurd adventure. His quest sends him to the corner bus stop, where he finds a dropped and forgotten letter, written in a desperate tone, to help those God brings across his path. There, Parrish befriends Audra, a nursing student who rides the bus home. And together they begin to follow the god cookie message, pursuing the random threads of the experiment, tying them together and discovering more about themselves than either ever imagined possible.
Download or read book American Gods written by Neil Gaiman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2002-04-30 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she's been killed in a terrible accident. Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible. He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever he the same...
