Download or read book Omar El Akkad s American War A Child s Perspective on War written by Matthias Dickert and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific Essay from the year 2018 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: The incorporation of war into English speaking literature has a long tradition since wars as such form ideal literacy backgrounds for plot, character development or political criticism. In times of civil uproar, political insecurity, outer enemies or ongoing wars this use of war as a literary means has always increased. This is recently perhaps best shown by the events of 9/11. They have not only taken American literature out from its long involvement in local matters such as family, village or town but pushed it into new directions which formed completely new types of novels such as the 9/11 novel, the post-9/11 novel or Ground Zero Fiction where war gained a new dimension which was so different from war literature of the First World War, the Second World War or the Vietnam War. In most cases this literary coverage of 9/11 has mostly remained in American families or matters of 'home' and it lacked an appropriate coverage of the Muslim side and it is here where the novel analyzed here steps in. Omar EI Akkad's novel American War (2017) exactly fits in this background not only because it is written by an author originating from a Muslim background it also brings the topic war back to America to discuss it here. This is new and radical in the sense that readers suddenly are confronted with problems such as war, terrorism, suicide bombers or chemical warfare which so far have been placed on foreign battlegrounds. It is now the USA which is used to discuss matters which were formerly used under American Presidents with slogans such as 'Crusade' or 'Holy War'. Omar El Akkad thus combines two main trends of Muslim writing which are characterized by bringing the narration into the West or by taking it back into the former colonies. By choosing a civil war as the background for his novel El Akkad mixes both trends while importing terror back to the USA which is to blame for it. American War is a novel which contains several elements thus being an important representative of contemporary English speaking literature.
Download or read book American War written by Omar El Akkad and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle—this gripping debut novel asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself. From the author of What Strange Paradise "Powerful ... as haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in The Road." —The New York Times Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.
Download or read book What Strange Paradise written by Omar El Akkad and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the widely acclaimed, bestselling author of American War—a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving novel that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child. "Told from the point of view of two children, on the ground and at sea, the story so astutely unpacks the us-versus-them dynamics of our divided world that it deserves to be an instant classic." —The New York Times Book Review More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vänna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vänna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy. In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair—and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.
Download or read book Though I Get Home written by YZ Chin and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A welcome read in American contemporary literature. Though I Get Home is an intimate and complex look into Malaysian culture and politics, and a reminder of the importance of art in the struggle for social justice.” —Ana Castillo, author of So Far from God and prize judge In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: A grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains; a consort finds herself a new assignment; a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a small-town girl—and frustrated writer—transformed into a prisoner of conscience in Malaysia’s most notorious detention camp. Winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, YZ Chin’s debut reexamines the relationship between the global and the intimate. Against a backdrop of globalization, individuals buck at what seems inevitable—seeking to stake out space for the inner motivations that shift, but still persist, in the face of changing and challenging circumstances. YZ Chin was born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia. She now lives in New York, working as a software engineer by day and a writer by night.
Download or read book Song for Night written by Chris Abani and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Luck, a West African boy solider who has not spoken for three years, fights in a senseless war and embarks on a terrifying yet beautiful journey to find his lost platoon.
Download or read book Wounds and Words written by Christa Schönfelder and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trauma has become a hotly contested topic in literary studies. But interest in trauma is not new; its roots extend to the Romantic period, when novelists and the first psychiatrists influenced each others' investigations of the »wounded mind«. This book looks back to these early attempts to understand trauma, reading a selection of Romantic novels in dialogue with Romantic and contemporary psychiatry. It then carries that dialogue forward to postmodern fiction, examining further how empirical approaches can deepen our theorizations of trauma. Within an interdisciplinary framework, this study reveals fresh insights into the poetics, politics, and ethics of trauma fiction.
Download or read book Rabbit Cake written by Annie Hartnett and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People Magazine Book of the Week A Best Book of the Year at Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, The Chicago Review of Books, Minnesota Public Radio, and more An Indies Introduce and Indie Next Pick Fans of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette and and Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang will delight in Annie Hartnett's debut, a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother. Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother's death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss.
Download or read book Goliath written by Tochi Onyebuchi and published by Tordotcom. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick! A Best Book of the Year for Time | NPR | The Guardian | Gizmodo| Portalist | New York Public Library A Most Anticipated Pick for USA Today | Bustle | Buzzfeed | Goodreads | Nerdist | io9 | WBUR | Polygon | The New Scientist Locus Award Finalist! Connecticut Book Award for Fiction winner! Dragon Award Finalist! Legacy Award Finalist! "In this ambitious novel, dense with perspectives and social commentary, Onyebuchi dreams up disparate lives in a crumbling future America—with gentrifiers returning to Earth from space colonies and laborers trying to make a precarious living—while leaving room for moments of beauty and humor."—The New York Times, Editors' Choice In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven. In the 2050s, Earth has begun to empty. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked. A primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives—a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets; a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping—into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Mercy Journals written by Claudia Casper and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of a new world war, a former soldier confronts his own morality and its impact on others.
Download or read book The Boat People written by Sharon Bala and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globe and Mail bestseller, The Boat People is an extraordinary novel about a group of refugees who survive a perilous ocean voyage only to face the threat of deportation amid accusations of terrorism When a rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees from Sri Lanka's bloody civil war reaches Vancouver's shores, the young father thinks he and his six-year-old son can finally start a new life. Instead, the group is thrown into a detention processing center, with government officials and news headlines speculating that among the "boat people" are members of a separatist militant organization responsible for countless suicide attacks—and that these terrorists now pose a threat to Canada's national security. As the refugees become subject to heavy interrogation, Mahindan begins to fear that a desperate act taken in Sri Lanka to fund their escape may now jeopardize his and his son's chance for asylum. Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer, Priya, a second-generation Sri Lankan Canadian who reluctantly represents the refugees; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan's fate as evidence mounts against him, The Boat People is a spellbinding and timely novel that provokes a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis.
Download or read book The Far Away Brothers written by Lauren Markham and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California—fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong. Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores—until, at age seventeen, a deadly threat from the region’s brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they’ve ever known. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of teenage life with only each other for support. With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | WINNER OF THE RIDENHOUR BOOK PRIZE | SILVER WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD | FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE | SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/BOGRAD WELD PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY
Download or read book These Vengeful Hearts written by Katherine Laurin and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling novel about a secret society and the dangers that lie in wait for anyone brave enough to join—perfect for fans of Karen M. McManus, Kara Thomas, and Maureen Johnson. Whenever something scandalous happens at Heller High, the Red Court is the name on everyone’s lips. Its members deal out social ruin and favors in equal measure, their true identities known only by their leader: the Queen of Hearts. Ember Williams has seen firsthand the damage the Red Court can do. Now, she’s determined to hold the organization accountable by taking it down from the inside. But will the cost of revenge be more than she’s willing to sacrifice?
Download or read book Death Is Hard Work written by Khaled Khalifa and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria’s ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination. Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone. With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.
Download or read book How Beautiful We Were written by Imbolo Mbue and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fearless young woman from a small African village starts a revolution against an American oil company in this sweeping, inspiring novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, People • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, The Christian Science Monitor, Marie Claire, Ms. magazine, BookPage, Kirkus Reviews “Mbue reaches for the moon and, by the novel’s end, has it firmly held in her hand.”—NPR We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
Download or read book Loaners written by Ben Hodgson and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Far North written by Marcel Theroux and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2009-06-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far North is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction. My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He'd say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn. Out on the frontier of a failed state, Makepeace—sheriff and perhaps last citizen—patrols a city's ruins, salvaging books but keeping the guns in good repair. Into this cold land comes shocking evidence that life might be flourishing elsewhere: a refugee emerges from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to reconnect with human society and take to the road, armed with rough humor and an unlikely ration of optimism. What Makepeace finds is a world unraveling: stockaded villages enforcing an uncertain justice and hidden work camps laboring to harness the little-understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace's journey—rife with danger—also leads to an unexpected redemption. Far North takes the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity's origins to its possible end. Haunting, spare, yet stubbornly hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world's fragility and beauty, and its ability to recover from our worst trespasses.
Download or read book Hella written by David Gerrold and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A master of science fiction introduces a world where everything is large and the problems of survival even larger in this exciting new novel. Hella is a planet where everything is oversized—especially the ambitions of the colonists. The trees are mile-high, the dinosaur herds are huge, and the weather is extreme—so extreme, the colonists have to migrate twice a year to escape the blistering heat of summer and the atmosphere-freezing cold of winter. Kyle is a neuro-atypical young man, emotionally challenged, but with an implant that gives him real-time access to the colony's computer network, making him a very misunderstood savant. When an overburdened starship arrives, he becomes the link between the established colonists and the refugees from a ravaged Earth. The Hella colony is barely self-sufficient. Can it stand the strain of a thousand new arrivals, bringing with them the same kinds of problems they thought they were fleeing? Despite the dangers to himself and his family, Kyle is in the middle of everything—in possession of the most dangerous secret of all. Will he be caught in a growing political conspiracy? Will his reawakened emotions overwhelm his rationality? Or will he be able to use his unique ability to prevent disaster?
