Download or read book The Guardian of Amsterdam Street written by Sergio Schmucler and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roma meets A Gentleman in Moscow in this vivid portrait of the twentieth century, witnessed by one boy from his self-imposed refuge in Mexico City. Galo has not left his home on Amsterdam Street, not since the day in 1938 when a shocking act of violence split his family apart. His hermitage is made easier by the peculiar design of the street. It is shaped like an ellipse — if you walk it, you will find yourself returning to the same place again and again. Playing host to Jewish refugees, Spanish exiles, and Latin American revolutionaries, his home becomes the school at which Galo learns about a world he never sees, and the ideals and terrors that shape history. He begins to realize that Amsterdam Street, the site of endless returns, may be the true centre of the world. Appointing himself the street’s guardian, Galo witnesses the decades pass, knowing that everyone who walks away must one day come back. A novel of rare humanity and grace, The Guardian of Amsterdam Street is a stunning portrait of a neighbourhood where the whole of the twentieth century comes alive and a moving inquiry into how we shape the world, and how it transforms us in turn.
Download or read book Things We Didn t See Coming written by Steven Amsterdam and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Williams, in Melbourne’s The Age, wrote of this award-winning, dazzling debut collection, “By turns horrific and beautiful . . . Humanity at its most fractured and desolate . . . Often moving, frequently surprising, even blackly funny . . . Things We Didn’t See Coming is terrific.” This is just one of the many rave reviews that appeared on the Australian publication of these nine connected stories set in a not-too-distant dystopian future in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar. Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, the stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming increasingly savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In the first story, “What We Know Now”—set in the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognizable—we meet the then-nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown. The remaining stories capture the strange—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes funny—circumstances he encounters in the no-longer-simple act of survival; trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rain never stops, being harassed (and possibly infected) by a man sick with a virulent flu, enduring a job interview with an unstable assessor who has access to all his thoughts, taking the gravely ill on adventure tours. But we see in each story that, despite the violence and brutality of his days, the narrator retains a hold on his essential humanity—and humor. Things We Didn’t See Coming is haunting, restrained, and beautifully crafted—a stunning debut.
Download or read book Espedair Street written by Iain Banks and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Weir used to be a famous - not to say infamous - rock star. Maybe still is. At thirty-one he has been both a brilliant failure and a dull success. He's made a lot of mistakes that have paid off and a lot of smart moves he'll regret forever (however long that turns out to be). Daniel Weir has gone from rags to riches and back, and managed to hold onto them both, though not much else. His friends all seem to be dead, fed up with him or just disgusted - and who can blame them? And now Daniel Weir is all alone. As he contemplates his life, Daniel realises he only has two problems: the past and the future. He knows how bad the past has been. But the future - well, the future is something else.
Download or read book The Street written by Ann Petry and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR TAYARI JONES “How can a novel’s social criticism be so unflinching and clear, yet its plot moves like a house on fire? I am tempted to describe Petry as a magician for the many ways that The Street amazes, but this description cheapens her talent . . . Petry is a gifted artist.” — Tayari Jones, from the Introduction The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.
Download or read book The Island at the Center of the World written by Russell Shorto and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-04-12 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual rights that shaped American history. "Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Russell Shorto draws on this remarkable archive in The Island at the Center of the World, which has been hailed by The New York Times as “a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past.” The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.
Download or read book The Famished Road written by Ben Okri and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE ‘So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use’ The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story. ‘In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child’ Michael Palin
Download or read book The House on Paradise Street written by Sofka Zinovieff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2008 Antigone Perifanis returns to her old family home in Athens after 60 years in exile. She has come to attend the funeral of her only son, Nikitas, who was born in prison, and whom she has not seen since she left him as a baby. At the same time, Nikitas’s English widow Maud – disturbed by her husband’s strange behaviour in the days before his death – starts to investigate his complicated past. She soon finds herself reigniting a bitter family feud, and discovers a heartbreaking story of a young mother caught up in the political tides of the Greek Civil War, forced to make a terrible decision that will blight not only her life but that of future generations...
Download or read book The Road to Wigan Pier written by George Orwell and published by Modernista. This book was released on 2024-04-26 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell provides a vivid and unflinching portrayal of working-class life in Northern England during the 1930s. Through his own experiences and meticulous investigative reporting, Orwell exposes the harsh living conditions, poverty, and social injustices faced by coal miners and other industrial workers in the region. He documents their struggles with unemployment, poor housing, and inadequate healthcare, as well as the pervasive sense of hopelessness and despair that permeates their lives. In the second half of the The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell delves into the complexities of political ideology, as he grapples with the shortcomings of both socialism and capitalism in addressing the needs of the working class. GEORGE ORWELL was born in India in 1903 and passed away in London in 1950. As a journalist, critic, and author, he was a sharp commentator on his era and its political conditions and consequences.
Download or read book Charlotte Gray written by Sebastian Faulks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faulks's first novel since the extraordinary success of Birdsong is written with the same passion, power and breadth of vision. Set in England and France during the darkest days of World War II, Charlotte Gray, like Birdsong, depicts a complex love affair that is both shaped and thwarted by war. It is 1942. London is blacked out, but France is under a greater darkness, as the occupying Nazi forces encroach ever closer in a tense waiting game. Charlotte Gray, a volatile but determined young woman, travels south from Edinburgh. Working in London, she has a brief but intense love affair with an RAF pilot. When his plane is lost over France, she contrives to go there herself to work in the Resistance and to search for him--but then is unwilling to leave as she finds that the struggle for the country's fate is intimately linked to her own battle to take control of her life. Faulks's novel is an examination of lost paradises, politics without belief, the limits of memory, the redemptive power of art and the existence of hope beyond reason. It is also a brilliant evocation of life in Occupied France and, more significantly, a revelation of the appalling price many Frenchmen paid to survive in unoccupied, so-called Free France. As the men, women and children of Charlotte's small town prepare to meet their terrible destiny, the truth of what took place in wartime France is finally exposed. When private lives and public events fatally collide, the roots of the characters' lives are torn up and exposed. These harrowing scenes are presented with the passion and narrative force that readers will recall from Birdsong. Charlotte Gray will attract even more readers to Faulks's remarkable fiction.
Download or read book Berta Isla written by Javier Marías and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning, internationally best-selling Spanish writer, author of The Infatuations, comes a gripping new novel of intrigue and missed chances--at once a spy story and a profound examination of a marriage founded on secrets and lies. When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson--the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. But when Tomás returns to Madrid from his studies at Oxford, he is a changed man. Unbeknownst to her, he has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services, and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned. With peerless insight into the most shadowed corners of the human soul, Marías plunges the reader into the growing chasm between Berta and Tomás and the decisions that irreversibly change the course of the couple's fate. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves.
Download or read book Tattoo Street Style written by Alice Snape and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate your uniqueness. Inspiring and captivating, Tattoo Street Style is a tribute to creativity and self-expression, a celebration of body, beauty and style, a manifesto for redefining the rules. Over four hundred original portraits capture extraordinary tattooed people from around the world, in New York, LA, Melbourne, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, London and Brighton. A curated and eclectic snapshot of today’s modern tattoo culture. Features profiles and interviews with some of the world’s most creative and exciting artists and studios. Also includes comprehensive infographic-style directories; perfect if you’re looking for inspiration.
Download or read book Us written by David Nicholls and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Nicholls brings the wit and intelligence that graced his international bestseller One Day to a compellingly human, deftly humorous new novel about what holds marriages and families together—and what happens when everything threatens to fall apart. Douglas Petersen may be mild mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humour that, against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into a second date . . . and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades after their relationship first blossomed in London, they live more or less happily in the suburbs with their moody seventeen-year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells Douglas she thinks she wants a divorce. The timing couldn’t be worse. Hoping to encourage her son’s artistic interests, Connie has planned a month-long tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world’s greatest works of art as a family, and she can’t bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead with the original plan is for the best anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and may even help him to bond with Albie. Narrated from Douglas’s endearingly honest, slyly witty, and at times achingly optimistic point of view, Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves and learning how to get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger. Us is a moving meditation on the demands of marriage and parenthood as well as the intricate relationship between the heart and the head. In David Nicholls’s gifted hands, Douglas’s odyssey brings Europe—from the streets of Amsterdam to the famed museums of Paris, from the cafes of Venice to the beaches of Barcelona—to vivid life just as he experiences a powerful awakening of his own. Will this summer be his last as a husband, or the moment when he turns his marriage, and maybe even his whole life, around?
Download or read book Zone of the Interior written by Clancy Sigal and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVA riotously funny saga of institutional insanity, based on the author’s association with the notorious psychiatrist R. D. Laing/divDIV Despite massive literary success, Sidney Bell feels perpetually unsatisfied and suffers unexplained physical ailments. Desperate to straighten out his twisted life, anxiety-ridden Sid seeks help from experimental psychiatrist Dr. Willie Last, whose therapeutic methods involve hallucinatory drugs such as LSD and trading places with his patients. After a tumultuous first trip, Sid ends up at Conolly House, a radical hospital for young schizophrenics where he serves as a “barefoot doctor.” From there, Sigal launches readers on a sardonic, rambling journey through a fantastic breed of insanity./divDIV With his freewheeling, ecstatic prose, Sigal spins a manic psychological quest into a telling portrait of a society in the grips of a turbulent decade. Zone of the Interior is a subversive and uproarious search for clarity and comfort in an increasingly mad world, grounded by an unforgettable narrator./divDIV/div/div
Download or read book Four Feet Under written by Tamsen Courtenay and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Touching, insightful and human – this book demands a social and, above all, a political response’ Jon Snow Tamsen Courtenay spent two months speaking to people who live on London’s streets, the homeless and the destitute – people who feel they are invisible. With a camera and a cheap audio recorder, she listened as they chronicled their extraordinary lives, now being lived four feet below most Londoners, and she set about documenting their stories, which are transcribed in this book along with intimate photographic portraits. A builder, a soldier, a transgender woman, a child and an elderly couple are among those who describe the events that brought them to the lives they lead now. They speak of childhoods, careers and relationships; their strengths and weaknesses, dreams and regrets; all with humour and a startling honesty. Tamsen’s observations and remarkable experiences are threaded throughout. The astonishing people she met changed her for ever, as they became her heroes, people she grew to respect. You don’t have to go far to find these homegrown exiles: they’re at the bottom of your road. Have you ever wondered how they got there?
Download or read book Submarine written by Joe Dunthorne and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • “[Dunthorne’s] precocious talent and cheerful fondness for the teenage male are showcased in Submarine. . . . Oliver’s voice is funny and dead-on.”—The New York Times Book Review(Editors’ Choice) At once a self-styled social scientist, a spy in the baffling adult world, and a budding, hormone-driven emotional explorer, Oliver Tate is stealthily nosing his way forward through the murky and uniquely perilous waters of adolescence. His objectives? Uncovering the secrets behind his parents’ teetering marriage, unraveling the mystery that is his alluring and equally quirky classmate Jordana Bevan, and understanding where he fits in among the mystifying beings in his orbit. Struggling to buoy his parents’ wedded bliss, deep-six his own virginity, and sound the depths of heartache, happiness, and the business of being human, what’s a lad to do? Poised precariously on the cusp of innocence and experience, Oliver Tate aims to damn the torpedoes and take the plunge. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Joe Dunthorne's Wild Abandon. Praise for Submarine “[Joe Dunthorne is] probably destined to be compared with Mark Haddon and Roddy Doyle.”—The Miami Herald “This absolutely winning debut novel isn’t so much a coming-of-age tale as it is a reflection on what it means to be a certain age and of an uncertain mind.”—Los Angeles Times “A brilliant first novel by a young man of ferocious comic talent.”—The Times (London) “Preternaturally wise, slightly devious and highly entertaining.”—USA Today
Download or read book Intimations written by Zadie Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 “While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential . . .’” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020 “Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air A New York Times Bestseller Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it? Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next. The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.
Download or read book Academy Street written by Mary Costello and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City. Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right . . . Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian). Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.
