Download or read book Night of a Thousand Blossoms written by Frank X. Gaspar and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these poems, the poet restlessly inhabits the night, finding it terrifying and beautiful, searching for meaning in the yard, the neighborhood, the heavens and every wise book he owns. These urban pastoral meditations employ ritual and repetition to create a kind of mantra, seeking surrender to that state of meditation leading to enlightenment—yet arguing with the idea of surrendering any attachments at all to this world we’ve been given to learn and love: a city garden cohabitated by ancient Romans and tattooed kids, automobiles and hollyhock, maurauding cats and the Buddha. “I should be satisfied with the household gods,” he mourns, but is satisfied with nothing, determined to fit the whole world into his poems lest the one essential thing slip by. From “The One God is Mysterious” The king and his queen are feasting. . They recline, sumptuously, on long divans. and are attended by naked servants. They. can have anything they want, this much is. clear, and I believe they have been having. sex with one another and with the servants. Why wouldn’t they? Who among the servants. . would not be honored to help? And it’s Babylon. after all, and doesn’t Babylon exist in your. memory? Isn’t Babylon the clear rumbling. of your heart at ease with its every craving—. not the way it is now, fenced off with spiked wire. and old pipes, with signs telling the pedestrians. to beware: the litter, the old cans rusting. No, . this is my own memory of excess and extravagance, . of abandonment to the weight of everything. that pulls me down to ruin, those same ticks. and voices that lift me up and fill me with breath. “Frank Gaspar’s poems are agile and forceful, their narratives clear and absorbing. In them, he is speaking to the reader—but also to himself, or perhaps to some hazy divinity or to the blue sky. I felt in his voice no attempt to persuade me of anything. I felt only the abiding imperative to get it right. Which is, of course, what real writing is all about.”—Mary Oliver

Download or read book The Street of a Thousand Blossoms written by Gail Tsukiyama and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gail Tsukiyama's The Street of a Thousand Blossoms is a powerfully moving masterpiece about tradition and change, loss and renewal, and love and family from a glorious storyteller at the height of her powers. It is Tokyo in 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms, two orphaned brothers dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows early signs of promise at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of Noh theater masks. But as the ripples of war spread to their quiet neighborhood, the brothers must put their dreams on hold—and forge their own paths in a new Japan. Meanwhile, the two young daughters of a renowned sumo master find their lives increasingly intertwined with the fortunes of their father's star pupil, Hiroshi.

Download or read book A Hundred Flowers written by Gail Tsukiyama and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is Tokyo in 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms, two orphaned brothers are growing up with their loving grandparents, who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows unusual skill at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of creating hand-carved masks for actors in the Noh theater." "Across town, a renowned sumo master, Sho Tanaka, lives with his wife and their two young daughters: the delicate, daydreaming Aki and her independent sister, Haru. Life seems full of promise as Kenji begins an informal apprenticeship with the most famous maskmaker in Japan and Hiroshi receives a coveted invitation to train with Tanaka. But then Pearl Harbor changes everything. As the ripples of war spread to both families' quiet neighborhoods, all of the generations must put their dreams on hold - and then find their way in a new Japan."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book A Thousand Glass Flowers written by Evan Turk and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This gorgeous and empowering picture book from award-winning author-illustrator Evan Turk paints the portrait of Marietta Barovier, the groundbreaking Renaissance artisan who helped shape the future of Venetian glassmaking. Marietta and her family lived on the island of Murano, near Venice, as all glassmakers did in the early Renaissance. Her father, Angelo Barovier, was a true maestro, a master of glass. Marietta longed to create gorgeous glass too, but glass was men’s work. One day her father showed her how to shape the scalding-hot material into a work of art, and Marietta was mesmerized. Her skills grew and grew. Marietta worked until she created her own unique glass bead: the rosetta. Small but precious, the beautiful beads grew popular around the world and became as valuable as gold. The young girl who was once told she could not create art was now the woman who would leave her mark on glasswork for centuries to come.

Download or read book Thousandth Night written by Alastair Reynolds and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many of us, the Ace Double Novels of the '50s and '60s have long been a source both of pleasure and nostalgia. This new double volume from Subterranean Press stands squarely in that distinguished tradition, offering a pair of colorful, fast-paced stories from the reigning master of the intergalactic space opera: Alastair Reynolds. Thousandth Night, the genesis for the epic novel House of Suns, is quintessential Reynolds. A visionary account of intrigue, ambition, and technological marvels set within a beautifully realized far-future milieu, it combines world-class storytelling with a provocative meditation on the mystery, grandeur, and inconceivable immensity of the universe. The masterful novella Minla's Flowers features Merlin, a familiar figure to Reynolds's readers. Diverted by technical difficulties to a planet known as Lecythus, Merlin finds himself forced to play a part in the moral and military dilemmas of a world on the verge of extinction.

Download or read book Miss One thousand spring blossoms written by John Dudley Ball and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Thousand Nights written by E. K. Johnston and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lo-Melkhiin killed three hundred girls before he came to her village, looking for a wife. When she sees the dust cloud on the horizon she knows he has arrived. She knows he will want the loveliest girl: her sister. She vows she will not let her be next. And so she is taken in her sister's place, and she believes death will soon follow. But back in their village her sister is mourning. Through her pain, she calls upon the desert winds, conjuring a subtle unseen magic, and something besides death stirs the air in it's place. Lo-Melkhiin's court is a dangerous palace filled with pretty things: intricate statues with wretched eyes, exquisite threads to weave the most beautiful garments. She sees everything as if for the last time. But the first sun sets and rises, and she is not dead. Night after night Lo-Melkhiin comes to her, and listens to the stories she tells and day after day she is awoken by the sunrise. Exploring the palace, she begins to unlock years of fear that have tormented and silenced a kingdom. Lo-Melkhiin was not always a cruel ruler. Something went wrong. The words she speaks to him every night are given strange life of their own. She makes things appear. Little things, at first: a dress from home, a vision of her sister. With each tale she spins, her power grows. Soon she dreams of bigger, more terrible magic: power enough to save a king, if she can put an end to rule of a monster.

Download or read book The Samurai s Garden written by Gail Tsukiyama and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2008-06-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama's The Samurai's Garden uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for this extraordinary story. A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soulmate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.

Download or read book Dreaming Water written by Gail Tsukiyama and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Gail Tsukiyama is known for her poignant, subtle insights into the most complicated of relationships. Dreaming Water is an exploration of two of the richest and most layered human connections that exist: mother and daughter and lifelong friends. Hana is suffering from Werner's syndrome, a disease that makes a person age at twice the rate of a healthy individual: at thirty-eight Hana has the appearance of an eighty-year-old. Cate, her mother, is caring for her while struggling with her grief at losing her husband, Max, and with the knowledge that Hana's disease is getting worse by the day. Hana and Cate's days are quiet and ordered. Cate escapes to her beloved garden and Hana reads and writes letters. Each find themselves drawn into their pasts, remembering the joyous and challenging events that have shaped them: spending the day at Max's favorite beach, overcoming their neighbors' prejudices that Max is Japanese-American and Cate is Italian-American, and coping with the heartbreak of discovering Hana's disease. One of the great joys of Hana's life has been her relationship with her beautiful, successful best friend Laura. Laura has moved to New York from their hometown in California and has two daughters, Josephine and Camille. She has not been home in years and begs Hana to let her bring her daughters to meet her, feeling that Josephine, in particular, needs to have Hana in her life. Despite Hana's latest refusal, Laura decides to come anyway. When Laura's loud, energetic, and troubled world collides with Hana and Cate's daily routine, the story really begins. Dreaming Water is about a mother's courage, a daughter's strength, and a friend's love. It is about the importance of human dignity and the importance of all the small moments that create a life worth living.

Download or read book Lightning Flowers written by Katherine E. Standefer and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

Download or read book Night of Many Dreams written by Gail Tsukiyama and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As World War II threatens their comfortable life in Hong Kong, young Joan and Emma Lew escape with their family to spend the war years in Macao. When they return home, Emma develops a deep interest in travel and sets her sights on an artistic life in San Francisco, while Joan turns to movies and thoughts of romance to escape the pressures of her real life. As the girls become women, each follows a path different from what her family expects. But through periods of great happiness and sorrow, the sisters learn that their complicated ties to each other--and to the other members of their close-knit family—are a source of strength as they pursue their separate dreams.

Download or read book Night of a Thousand Stars written by Deanna Raybourn and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Deanna Raybourn returns with a Jazz Age tale of grand adventure On the verge of a stilted life as an aristocrat's wife, Poppy Hammond does the only sensible thing—she flees the chapel in her wedding gown. Assisted by the handsome curate who calls himself Sebastian Cantrip, she spirits away to her estranged father's quiet country village, pursued by the family she left in uproar. But when the dust of her broken engagement settles and Sebastian disappears under mysterious circumstances, Poppy discovers there is more to her hero than it seems. With only her feisty lady's maid for company, Poppy secures employment and travels incognita—east across the seas, chasing a hunch and the whisper of clues. Danger abounds beneath the canopies of the silken city, and Poppy finds herself in the perilous sights of those who will stop at nothing to recover a fabled ancient treasure. Torn between allegiance to her kindly employer and a dashing, shadowy figure, Poppy will risk it all as she attempts to unravel a much larger plan—one that stretches to the very heart of the British government, and one that could endanger everything, and everyone, that she holds dear. "Raybourn skillfully balances humor and earnest, deadly drama, creating well-drawn characters and a rich setting." —Publishers Weekly on Dark Road to Darjeeling

Download or read book Women of the Silk written by Gail Tsukiyama and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Women of the Silk Gail Tsukiyama takes her readers back to rural China in 1926, where a group of women forge a sisterhood amidst the reeling machines that reverberate and clamor in a vast silk factory from dawn to dusk. Leading the first strike the village has ever seen, the young women use the strength of their ambition, dreams, and friendship to achieve the freedom they could never have hoped for on their own. Tsukiyama's graceful prose weaves the details of "the silk work" and Chinese village life into a story of courage and strength.

Download or read book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan written by Lisa See and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lily is the daughter of a humble farmer, and to her family she is just another expensive mouth to feed. Then the local matchmaker delivers startling news: if Lily's feet are bound properly, they will be flawless. In nineteenth-century China, where a woman's eligibility is judged by the shape and size of her feet, this is extraordinary good luck. Lily now has the power to make a good marriage and change the fortunes of her family. To prepare for her new life, she must undergo the agonies of footbinding, learn nu shu, the famed secret women's writing, and make a very special friend, Snow Flower. But a bitter reversal of fortune is about to change everything.

Download or read book Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom written by Jicai Feng and published by Viking Juvenile. This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hua, a talented young Chinese artist, falls victim to the Cultural Revolution in 1960's Communist China, when his talents lead him to be sent to an isolated factory, humiliated, deprived, tortured, and finally exiled.

Download or read book The Last Cherry Blossom written by Kathleen Burkinshaw and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, this is a new, very personal story to join Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Yuriko was happy growing up in Hiroshima when it was just her and Papa. But her aunt Kimiko and her cousin Genji are living with them now, and the family is only getting bigger with talk of a double marriage! And while things are changing at home, the world beyond their doors is even more unpredictable. World War II is coming to an end, and since the Japanese newspapers don’t report lost battles, the Japanese people are not entirely certain of where Japan stands. Yuriko is used to the sirens and the air-raid drills, but things start to feel more real when the neighbors who have left to fight stop coming home. When the bombs hit Hiroshima, it’s through Yuriko’s twelve-year-old eyes that we witness the devastation and horror. This is a story that offers young readers insight into how children lived during the war, while also introducing them to Japanese culture. Based loosely on author Kathleen Burkinshaw’s mother’s firsthand experience surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, The Last Cherry Blossom hopes to warn readers of the immense damage nuclear war can bring, while reminding them that the “enemy” in any war is often not so different from ourselves.

Download or read book Night Flowers Shirking from the Light of the Sun written by Lí Xīng and published by . This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultivator insists on repaying her life debt to a demoness. No one is happy with this development.