Download or read book Silence and Rage in Miriam Toews s Mennonite Novels written by Rita Dirks and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-04-17 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on six of Miriam Toews’s Mennonite novels—Swing Low: A Life (2000), A Complicated Kindness (2004), Irma Voth (2011), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), Women Talking (2018), and Fight Night (2021)—, so called because they portray fictional and autobiographical events, set in Mennonite communities in Canada, Mexico, and Bolivia. Rita Dirks argues that through the exploration of difficult subjects such as the physical and emotional abuse of teenaged girls, women, and children , Toews gives a voice to victims and survivors who are otherwise silenced in that sequestered culture. In addition, Dirks shows that in the Mennonite novels, Toews’s rage at the injustices experienced by her protagonists becomes a transformative art that gives a voice to all stories, especially those of women within authoritative patriarchal communities that openly proclaim pacifism.
Download or read book Women Talking written by Miriam Toews and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.” -Margaret Atwood, on Twitter "Scorching . . . a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women-all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.
Download or read book Peace Shall Destroy Many text large Print written by Rudy Wiebe and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflicts between the disciplined, non-violent dedication of the thriving Mennonite community and the threats and challenges from the war-torn world they left behind reveal a lurking violence beneath the peaceful surface of settlement life.
Download or read book A Complicated Kindness written by Miriam Toews and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award In this stunning coming-of-age novel, the award-winning author of Women Talking balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity "Half of our family, the better–looking half, is missing," Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen–year–old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart. “Brilliant.” —New York Times Book Review “A darkly funny and provocative novel.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
Download or read book All My Puny Sorrows written by Miriam Toews and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Women Talking, a "wrenchingly honest, darkly funny novel" (Entertainment Weekly). Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close-raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life. After Elf's latest attempt, Yoli must quickly determine how to keep her family from falling apart while facing a profound question: what do you do for a loved one who truly wants to die? All My Puny Sorrows is a deeply personal story that is as much comedy as it is tragedy, a goodbye grin from the friend who taught you how to live.
Download or read book Maternity in the Post Apocalypse written by Renae L. Mitchell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maternity in the Post-Apocalypse: Novelistic Revisions of Dystopian Motherhood deconstructs the ways in which women novelists have reconceived the post-apocalyptic genre in recent decades through narratives centered on heroic maternal characters. These writers have placed midwives, pregnant women, and mothers at the forefront of their novels, transforming them from the hapless victims of male oppressors to protagonists who are instrumental in transforming the post-apocalyptic social landscape from one that attempts to reconstruct a patriarchal past to one that safeguards, validates, and even lauds maternity as a form of empowerment. In a novelistic future devastated landscape in which human civilizations are shattered and waver at the brink of extinction, women who embody facets of maternity are taking the reins of rebuilding human societies by overturning patriarchal assumptions of femininity, reclaiming intersectional autonomy, and (re)visioning the possibilities for a declining anthropocene.
Download or read book Swing Low written by Miriam Toews and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular school teacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. Now his daughter Miriam, an award-winning writer, has given her father a voice for his whole story. In Swing Low, Miriam recounts Mel's life as she imagines he would have told it, right up to the day he took his final walk. Toews takes us deep inside the experience of depression, but she also gives us winsome and hilarious tales of country life: growing up on a farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a strong, happy family in the midst of private torment." --
Download or read book Fight Night written by Miriam Toews and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Move over, Scout Finch! There's a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." -USA Today, "Best Books of the Year" "Toews is a master of dialogue." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "A revelation." -Richard Russo NPR Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize * Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist * Indie Next Pick * Amazon Editors' Pick * Apple Book of the Month From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women. “You're a small thing,” Grandma writes, “and you must learn to fight.” Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send. Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting-painfully, ferociously- for a way to live on their own terms.
Download or read book Violet Oakley written by Bailey Van Hook and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Violet Oakley: An Artist's Life is the first full-length biography of Violet Oakley (1874–1961), the only major female artist of the beaux-arts mural movement in the United States, as well as an illustrator, stained glass artist, portraitist and author. There is much human interest here: a pampered and spoiled young woman who suddenly finds herself in near poverty, forced to make a living in illustration to support her parents; a sensitive and idealistic young woman who, in a desperate attempt to save her neurasthenic father, embraces Christian Science, a religion derided by her family and friends; a 28 year old woman who receives one of the plum commissions of the era, a mural cycle in the Pennsylvania State Capitol, in a field dominated by much older and predominantly male artists; a woman in her forties who although professionally successful finds herself very much alone and bonds with her student, Edith Emerson; a friend of artists like dancer Ruth St. Denis and violinist Albert Spalding who nevertheless was supremely conscious of social mores, the “Miss Oakley” of the Social Register who preferred the company of upper class to bohemian society; the tireless self-promoter who traveled abroad to become the unofficial visual historian of the League of Nations yet who ironically was increasingly regarded as a local artist.
Download or read book Mennonite in a Little Black Dress written by Rhoda Janzen and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spirit of Anne Lamott and Nora Ephron comes Janze's hilarious and moving memoir about a woman who returns home to her close-knit Mennonite family after a personal crisis.
Download or read book Righting America at the Creation Museum written by Susan L. Trollinger and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the popularity of the Creation Museum tell us about the appeal of the Christian right? On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting zoo with camel rides, the site conjures up images of a religious Disneyland. Inside, visitors are met by dinosaurs at every turn and by a replica of the Garden of Eden that features the Tree of Life, the serpent, and Adam and Eve. In Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., take readers on a fascinating tour of the museum. The Trollingers vividly describe and analyze its vast array of exhibits, placards, dioramas, and videos, from the Culture in Crisis Room, where videos depict sinful characters watching pornography or considering abortion, to the Natural Selection Room, where placards argue that natural selection doesn’t lead to evolution. The book also traces the rise of creationism and the history of fundamentalism in America. This compelling book reveals that the Creation Museum is a remarkably complex phenomenon, at once a “natural history” museum at odds with contemporary science, an extended brief for the Bible as the literally true and errorless word of God, and a powerful and unflinching argument on behalf of the Christian right.
Download or read book The Indian Ladies Magazine 1901 1938 written by Deborah Anna Logan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the varied influences and accomplishments of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine, the first Indian magazine established and edited by an Indian woman—Kamala Satthianadhan—in English, written by women, for women. Influences include Victorian, Edwardian, and Modern literature and culture as well as traditional Indian literature and culture during the late colonial, pre-independence period. More than a literary journal, this publication also addressed social reforms, from “ladies’ philanthropy” to “women’s mission to women”; the emergence of Indian “identity politics” in response to the nationalist and independence movements; the Indian Woman Question in the context of female education debates and shifting concepts of “womanliness”; cultural exchanges recorded by Indian travelers to America; and the emergence of Indian nationalism, between World Wars I and II, leading to independence. This publication recorded and participated in the most pivotal moment in modern Indian history and did so by appealing to both the conservative and progressive socio-political urges marking the era.
Download or read book Working Women in American Literature 1865 1950 written by Miriam S Gogol and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines working women in realistic and naturalistic literature. By addressing intersecting issues of race and class and including a study of domestic work, it contributes to the fields of multiculturalism, feminism, and working-class studies and to the increasing research interests in these areas.
Download or read book Women Talking written by Miriam Toews and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD: A transformative and necessary work--as completely unexpected as it is inspired--by the award-winning author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness. The sun rises on a quiet June morning in 2009. August Epp sits alone in the hayloft of a barn, anxiously bent over his notebook. He writes quickly, aware that his solitude will soon be broken. Eight women--ordinary grandmothers, mothers and teenagers; yet to August, each one extraordinary-- will climb the ladder into the loft, and the day's true task will begin. This task will be both simple and subversive: August, like the women, is a traditional Mennonite, and he has been asked to record a secret conversation. Thus begins Miriam Toews' spellbinding novel. Gradually, as we hear the women's vivid voices console, tease, admonish, regale and debate each other, we piece together the reason for the gathering: they have forty-eight hours to make a life-altering choice on behalf of all the women and children in the colony. And like a vast night sky coming into view behind the bright sparks of their voices, we learn of the devastating events that have led to this moment. Acerbic, funny, tender, sorrowful and wise, Women Talking is composed of equal parts humane love and deep anger. It is award-winning writer Miriam Toews' most astonishing novel to date, containing within its two short days and hayloft setting an expansive, timeless universe of thinking and feeling about women--and men--in our contemporary world.
Download or read book Summer of My Amazing Luck written by Miriam Toews and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-01-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Novel by the Governor General’s Literary Award—winning author of A Complicated Kindness Lucy Van Alstyne always thought she’d grow up to become a forest ranger. Instead, at the age of eighteen, she’s found herself with quite a different job title: Single Mother on the Dole. As for the father of her nine-month-old son, Dillinger, well…it could be any of number of guys. At the Have-a-Life housing project–aptly nicknamed Half-a-Life by those who call it home–Lucy meets Lish, a zany and exuberant woman whose idea of fashion is a black beret with a big silver spider brooch stuck on it. Lish is the mother of four daughters, two by a man on welfare himself and twins from a one-week stand with a fire-eating busker who stole her heart–and her wallet. Living on the dole isn’t a walk in the park for Lucy and Lish. Dinner almost always consists of noodles. Transportation means pushing a crappy stroller through the rain. Then there are the condescending welfare agents with their dreaded surprise inspections. And just across the street is Serenity Place, another housing project with which Half-a-Life is engaged in a full-on feud. When the women aren’t busy snitching on each other, they’re spreading rumours–or plotting elaborate acts of revenge. In the middle of a mosquito-infested rainy season, Lish and Lucy decide to escape the craziness of Half-A-Life by taking to the road. In a van held together with coat-hangers and electrical tape and crammed to the hilt with kids and toys, they set off to Colorado in search Lish’s lost love and the father of her twins. Whether they’ll find him is questionable, but the down-and-out adventure helps Lucy realize that this just may be the summer of her amazing luck. Miriam Toews’s debut novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck opens our eyes to a social class rarely captured in fiction. At once hilarious and heartbreaking, it is inhabited by an unforgettable and poignant group of characters. Shortlisted for both the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, it also earned Miriam the John Hirsch Award for the Most Promising Manitoba Writer.
Download or read book Little Fish written by Casey Plett and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER, Lambda Literary Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction; $60,000 Amazon Canada First Novel Award When thirty-year-old trans woman Wendy Reimer comes across evidence that her late grandfather—a devout Mennonite farmer—might have been transgender himself, she dismisses this revelation, having other problems at hand. But as she and her friends struggle to cope with their increasingly volatile lives—which range from alcoholism, to sex work, to suicide—Wendy grows increasingly drawn to the lost pieces of her grandfather’s life, becoming determined to unravel the mystery of his truth. Alternately warm-hearted and dark-spirited, desperate and mirthful, Little Fish explores the winter of discontent in the life of one transgender woman as her past and future become irrevocably entwined. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
Download or read book A Complicated Kindness written by Miriam Toews and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews is a novel of fierce originality and brilliance from the celebrated Canadian novelist, author of The Flying Troutmans and All My Puny Sorrows.
