Download or read book The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel written by Magdalena Zyzak and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of love and adventure in an imaginary Slavic nation on the brink of historic change—the debut of a ribald and raucous new literary voice Set in the quaint (though admittedly backward) fictional nation of Scalvusia in 1939, The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel follows the exploits of a young swineherd with romantic delusions of grandeur. Desperate to attract the voluptuous Roosha, the Gypsy concubine of the local boot-and-shoe magnate, Barnabas and his short-legged steed Wilhelm get embroiled in a series of scandals and misadventures, as every attempt at wooing ends in catastrophe. After the mysterious death of an important figure in the community, a witch-hunt ensues, and a stranger falls from the sky. Barnabas begins to see the terrible tide of history turning in his beloved hometown. The wonderfully eccentric supporting cast includes a priest driven mad by a fig tree, a gang of louts who taunt our reluctant hero at every turn, and a dim-witted vagabond with a goat for a wife. Even as her characters brush up against one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century, Magdalena Zyzak's humor and prose delight in the absurdities of the human animal.
Download or read book The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel written by Magdalena Zyzak and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possessing romantic delusions of grandeur and desperate to attract a voluptuous Gypsy concubine, a smitten young swineherd from a fictional backward country rides his short-legged steed through a series of scandals and misadventures marked by an eccentric cast of characters.
Download or read book Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction written by Grażyna J. Kozaczka and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though often unnoticed by scholars of literature and history, Polish American women have for decades been fighting back against the patriarchy they encountered in America and the patriarchy that followed them from Poland. Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction traces the evolution of this struggle and women’s efforts to construct gendered and classed ethnicity. Focusing predominantly on work by North American born and immigrant authors that represents the Polish American Catholic tradition, Grażyna J. Kozaczka puts texts in conversation with other American ethnic literatures. She positions ethnic gender construction and performance at an intersection of social class, race, and sex. She explores the marginalization of ethnic female characters in terms of migration studies, theories of whiteness, and the history of feminist discourse. Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction tells the complex story of how Polish American women writers have shown a strong awareness of their oppression and sought empowerment through resistive and transgressive behaviors.
Download or read book Sleights of Hand written by Bradford Morrow and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays, fiction, and poetry reflecting on truth and illusion in a world filled with deceptions both treacherous and benign. Children deceive, as do grownups, and many are the moments when all of us even deceive ourselves. People of every age and stripe, whether rarely or often, dissimulate, bluff, and beguile. The writer who fabricates and populates worlds is a deceiver, as is the artist whose triumph is to trick the eye, to alter perception. The honest magician's livelihood is based on deception; so is the dishonest thief's. And consider the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva who wrote, "A deception that elevates us is dearer than a legion of low truths," thus complicating the subject entirely. This special issue of Conjunctions gathers a wide spectrum of essays, fiction, and poetry on the classic subject of deception, exploring in original and thought-provoking ways a world in which truth is a most fragile, elaborate, and mercurial thing. Contributors include Edie Meidav, Terese Svoboda, Yannick Murphy, Paul Hoover, Bim Ramke, Eleni Sikelianos, Magdalena Zyzak, and many others.
Download or read book The Last Days of California A Novel written by Mary Miller and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-01-20 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection Longlisted for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Prize “[A] terrific first novel. . . . Why worry about labeling a book this good? Just read it.” —Laurie Muchnick, New York Times Book Review Jess is fifteen years old and waiting for the world to end. Her evangelical father has packed up the family to drive west to California, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the Second Coming. With her long-suffering mother and rebellious (and secretly pregnant) sister, Jess hands out tracts to nonbelievers at every rest stop, Waffle House, and gas station along the way. As Jess’s belief frays, her teenage myopia evolves into awareness about her fracturing family. Selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and an Indie Next pick, Mary Miller’s radiant debut novel reinvigorates the literary road-trip story with wry vulnerability and savage charm.
Download or read book The De Textbook written by Cracked.com, and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You are an idiot. Don't get defensive! It's not your fault. For decades your teachers, authority figures and textbooks have been lying to you. You do not have five senses. Your tongue doesn't have neatly segregated taste-bud zones. You don't know what the pyramids really looked like. You're even pooping wrong - Jesus, you're a wreck! But it's going to be okay. Because we're here to help. Packed with more sexy facts than the Encyclopedia Pornographica, the Cracked De-Textbook will teach you about the true stars of history, why you picture everything from Velociraptors to Ancient Rome incorrectly, and finally, at long last - how to pop a proper squat. This book was built from the ground up to systematically seek out, dismantle and destroy the many untruths that years of misguided education have left festering inside of you, and leave you a smarter person...whether you like it or not. The De-Textbook is a merciless, brutal learning machine. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are informed.
Download or read book Waking from the Dream written by David L. Chappell and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of the years after Martin Luther King’s assassination—and the struggle to keep the civil rights movement alive and realize King’s vision of an equal society “The previously untold story of continuing struggle and posthumous inspiration that dominates this compelling and groundbreaking book will forever change the way civil rights historians view this era.”—Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders In this arresting and groundbreaking account, David L. Chappell reveals that, far from coming to an abrupt end with King’s murder, the civil rights movement entered a new phase. It both grew and splintered. These were years when decisive, historic victories were no longer within reach—the movement’s achievements were instead hard-won, and their meanings unsettled. From the fight to pass the Fair Housing Act in 1968, to debates over unity and leadership at the National Black Political Conventions, to the campaign for full-employment legislation, to the surprising enactment of the Martin Luther King holiday, to Jesse Jackson’s quixotic presidential campaigns, veterans of the movement struggled to rally around common goals. Waking from the Dream documents this struggle, including moments when the movement seemed on the verge of dissolution, and the monumental efforts of its members to persevere. For this watershed study of a much-neglected period, Chappell spent ten years sifting through a voluminous public record: congressional hearings and government documents; the archives of pro– and anti–civil rights activists, oral and written remembrances of King’s successors and rivals, documentary film footage, and long-forgotten coverage of events from African American newspapers and journals. The result is a story rich with period detail, as Chappell chronicles the difficulties the movement encountered while working to build coalitions, pass legislation, and mobilize citizens in the absence of King’s galvanizing leadership. Could the civil rights coalition stay together as its focus shifted from public protests to congressional politics? Did the movement need a single, charismatic leader to succeed King, and who would that be? As the movement’s leaders pushed forward, they continually looked back, struggling to define King’s legacy and harness his symbolic power. Waking from the Dream is a revealing and resonant look at civil rights after King as well as King’s place in American memory. It illuminates a time, explores a cause, and explains how a movement labored to overcome the loss of its leader.
Download or read book The Victorious Attitude written by Orison Swett Marden and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wake Up Life is Calling written by Preeti Shenoy, and published by Sristhi Publishers & Distributors. This book was released on 2019-04-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if your mind is your greatest enemy? What if you were living your worst nightmare? How would you cope? Ankita has fought a mental disorder, been through hell, and survived two suicide attempts. Now in Mumbai, surrounded by her loving and supportive parents, everything seems idyllic. She is not on medication. She is in a college she loves, studying her dream subject: Creative Writing. She has made friends with the bubbly Parul and the glamourous Janki. At last leading a ‘normal life’, she immerses herself in every bit of it – the classes, her friends, her course and all the carefree fun of college. Underneath the surface, however, there is trouble brewing. A book she discovers in her college library draws her in, consumes her and sends her into a terrifying darkness that twists and tears her apart. To make matters worse, a past boyfriend resurfaces, throwing her into further turmoil. Armed with only a pen and a journal, she desperately fights with every ounce of strength she has. But can she escape her thoughts? Will Ankita survive the ordeal a second time around? What does life have in store for her? Preeti Shenoy's compelling sequel to the iconic bestseller Life is What You Make It chronicles the resilience of the human mind and the immense power of positive thinking. The gripping narrative demonstrates with gentle wisdom how by changing our thoughts, we can change our life itself.
Download or read book Ghost at the Loom written by T. Zachary Cotler and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this searing and beautiful novel, Rider Sonnenreich, a young poet, retrieves memories of wild acts of imagination that once bound his sister Leya and him together. Retracing the travels of long-dead poets in Europe, Rider looks for Leya, but can't be sure who or what he will find in the end. Among restless cosmopolitans and enigmatic wanderers, he tries to sort the real from the illusory and to protect the latter from the former.Cotler takes the reader on an American odyssey of innocence abroad, through beauty, truth, and the danger our imaginations face in a culture of high-speed popular media.
Download or read book A Poet of the Invisible World written by Michael Golding and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of SIDDHARTHA by Hermann Hesse comes a new spiritual novel that is a stunning feat of storytelling and imagination. A Poet of the Invisible World follows a boy named Nouri, born in thirteenth-century Persia, with four ears instead of two. Orphaned as an infant, he's taken into a Sufi order, where he meets an assortment of dervishes and is placed upon a path toward spiritual awakening. As he stumbles from one painful experience to the next, he grows into manhood. Each trial he endures shatters another obstacle within--and leads Nouri on toward transcendence.
Download or read book Big World written by Mary Miller and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Mary Miller's BIG WORLD is the second book and first work of fiction to come out of Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a publishing arm of the independent literary journal Hobart. The characters in Mary Miller's debut short story collection BIG WORLD are at once autonomous and lonesome, possessing both a longing to connect with those around them and a cynicism regarding their ability to do so, whether they're holed up in a motel room in Pigeon Forge with an air gun shooting boyfriend as in "Fast Trains" or navigating the rooms of their house with their dad after their mother's death as in "Leak." Mary Miller's writing is unapologetically honest and efficient and the gut-wrenching directness of her prose is reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Courtney Eldridge, if Gaitskill's and Eldridge's stories were set in the south and reeked of spilt beer and cigarette smoke.
Download or read book The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp written by Kathi Appelt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Librarians often say that every book is not for every child, but The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp is” (The New York Times). Meet Bingo and J’miah, raccoon brothers on a mission to save Sugar Man Swamp in this rollicking tale and National Book Award Finalist from Newbery Honoree Kathi Appelt. Raccoon brothers Bingo and J’miah are the newest recruits of the Official Sugar Man Swamp Scouts. The opportunity to serve the Sugar Man—the massive creature who delights in delicious sugar cane and magnanimously rules over the swamp—is an honor, and also a big responsibility, since the rest of the swamp critters rely heavily on the intel of these hardworking Scouts. Twelve-year-old Chap Brayburn is not a member of any such organization. But he loves the swamp something fierce, and he’ll do anything to help protect it. And help is surely needed, because world-class alligator wrestler Jaeger Stitch wants to turn Sugar Man swamp into an Alligator World Wrestling Arena and Theme Park, and the troubles don’t end there. There is also a gang of wild feral hogs on the march, headed straight toward them all. The Scouts are ready. All they have to do is wake up the Sugar Man. Problem is, no one’s been able to wake that fellow up in a decade or four… Newbery Honoree and Kathi Appelt’s story of care and conservation has received five starred reviews, was selected as a National Book Award finalist, and is funny as all get out and ripe for reading aloud.
Download or read book Ghost at the Loom written by T. Zachary Cotler and published by MP Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this searing and beautiful novel, Rider Sonnenreich, a young poet, retrieves memories of wild acts of imagination that once bound his sister Leya and him together. Retracing the travels of long-dead poets in Europe, Rider looks for Leya, but can’t be sure who or what he will find in the end. Among the restless cosmopolitans and enigmatic wanderers, he tries to sort the real from the illusory and to protect the latter from the former. Cotler takes the reader on an American odyssey of innocence abroad, through beauty, truth, and the danger of our imaginations face in a culture of high-speed popular media.
Download or read book The Book of Daniel written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel.
Download or read book SHAPE YOUR THINKING A Guide for Survival Success in 21st Century written by Shashank Mutneja and published by BFC Publications. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shape Your Thinking - A guide for survival & success in the 21st Century provides the reader with key principles & processes, best practices & experiences of successful people on how to balance your personal & professional life to achieve consistent success. It tells us about how to take on the problems of the 21st Century. Shashank Mutneja takes us on a thrilling journey through today’s most urgent issues and their solutions. The golden thread running through his exhilarating new book is the challenge of maintaining our collective and individual focus in the face of constant and disorienting change. Shashank Mutneja explores what it means to be a good human in an age of bewilderment. This book provides the reader with real-life examples and straight to the point principles, processes, and best practices that made all the difference in the world. This book not only tells the reader what to do but also explains how to do it.
Download or read book Elegies for Humanism written by T. Zachary Cotler and published by . This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unsettling anti-manifesto--or, as Cotler names his genre, "elegy for the manifesto"--calling for a radical reconsideration of the 21st century's position in the history of art and literature in light of developments in the field of cryopreservation, that is, suspended animation of animals and, theoretically, humans. An argument all the more alarming due to the rigor and sobriety with which it unfurls.
