Download or read book The Little Communist Who Never Smiled written by Lola Lafon and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning novel powerfully re-imagines a childhood in the spotlight of history, politics, and destiny. Montreal 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history. Twenty seconds on uneven bars is all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The electronic scoreboard, astonishing spectators with what has happened, shows 1.0. The judges have awarded an unprecedented perfect ten, the first in Olympic gymnastics, though the scoreboard is unable to register anything higher than 9.9. In The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, Lola Lafon tells the story of Comaneci's journey from growing up in rural Romania to her eventual defection to the United States in 1989. Adored by young girls in the west and appropriated as a political emblem by the Ceausescu regime, Comaneci's life was scrutinized wherever she went. Lafon's fictionalized account shows how a single athletic event mesmerizes the world and reverberates across nations.
Download or read book The King Never Smiles written by Paul M. Handley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej, the only king ever born in the United States, came to the throne of his country in 1946 and is now the world's longest-serving monarch. This book tells the unexpected story of his life and 60-year rule: how a Western-raised boy came to be seen by his people as a living Buddha; and how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical could in fact be so deeply political, autocratic, and even brutal. Paul Handley provides an extensively researched, factual account of the king's youth and personal development, ascent to the throne, skilful political maneuverings, and attempt to shape Thailand as a Buddhist kingdom. Blasting apart the widely accepted image of the king as egalitarian and virtuous, Handley convincingly portrays an anti-democratic monarch who, together with allies in big business and the corrupt Thai military, has protected a centuries-old, barely-modified feudal dynasty. When at nineteen Bhumibol assumed the throne after the still-unsolved shooting of his brother, the Thai monarchy had been stripped of power and prestige. Over the ensuing decades, Bhumibol became the paramount political actor in the kingdom, crushing critics while attaining high status among his people. The book details this process and depicts Thailand's unique constitutional monarch in the full light of the facts.
Download or read book Reeling written by Lola Lafon and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The deep relevance and the nuanced portrayal of the myriad effects of abuse on [the characters] lives are skillfully done. Layered and disquieting.” —Kirkus Reviews Award-winning author Lola Lafon continues her exploration of the psyches of young girls–their fragility, their resilience. Fontenay, a Parisian suburb, 1984. Cléo is twelve when her parents prod her into taking ballet classes. She drops out after a long year of feeling lost, not classy nor graceful enough, and undoubtedly not as rich as the other kids. By chance, she signs up for Modern Jazz class at a MJC–a state funded organization whose mission is to provide access to art and culture to all children. Modern Jazz is her calling, and soon Cléo is transformed, working out constantly, dreaming of becoming a professional dancer. That’s when she catches the attention of Cathy, an elegant middle-aged woman, who is a talent scout for Galatée–a foundation that gives fellowships to exceptionally gifted teenagers. Fascinated by Cathy and the many gifts with which this providential “godmother” is showering her, Cléo introduces her to her parents, receiving their blessing to spend more time with her, ultimately falling prey to Galatée’s trap. “The great strength of Reeling is the way Lafon weaves together social failures that, on the surface, seem quite disparate.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “An immersive, captivating story.” —Buzz magazine, UK “An impassioned novel on the consequences of sexual exploitation and the dead ends of forgiveness.” —Pages of Hackney, London “Lola Lafon writes for all those who have stayed in the shadows, all those whose voices cannot be heard, shaking off the contemporary mythology of powerful women.” —France-Amerique
Download or read book How We Survived Communism Even Laughed written by Slavenka Drakulic and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1993-05-12 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by feminists as one of the most important contributions to women's studies in the last decade, this gripping, beautifully written account describes the daily struggles of women under the Marxist regime in the former republic of Yugoslavia.
Download or read book Epimodernism written by Emmanuel Bouju and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-30 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postmodernism has had its day. Are we now in the era of epimodernism? Reinterpreting the six “memos” that Italo Calvino suggested more than thirty years ago for “the new Millennium”, in this acclaimed book Emmanuel Bouju identifies six new values for literature in the twenty-first century: Superficiality, Secrecy, Energy, Acceleration, Credit, and Follow Through. Based on the principal meanings of the Ancient Greek prefix epi – surface, contact, origin, extension, duration, authority, and finality – these values represent six different ways of relating to the legacy of modernist utopias, reorienting postmodern critique and rebooting, with all due irony, its various forms of engagement and empowerment. Equal parts cultural criticism and literary creation, this highly original essay both enacts and explores the epimodern turn in contemporary European literature. Rigorous and humorous, provocative and playful, Epimodernism helps us to understand what literature can describe, imagine, and invent in our challenging times.
Download or read book Fortune Smiles written by Adam Johnson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award–winning story collection from the author of The Orphan Master’s Son offers something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world. “MASTERFUL.”—The Washington Post “ENTRANCING.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “PERCEPTIVE AND BRAVE.”—The New York Times Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear. In “Nirvana,” a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In “Hurricanes Anonymous,” a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind. WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • USA Today AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Marie Claire • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • BuzzFeed • The Daily Beast • Los Angeles Magazine • The Independent • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews “Remarkable . . . Adam Johnson is one of America’s greatest living writers.”—The Huffington Post “Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnson’s writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring.”—USA Today “Fortune Smiles [blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment.”—The Boston Globe “Johnson’s boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Little Failure written by Gary Shteyngart and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The New Yorker • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • The Atlantic • Newsday • Salon • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • Esquire (UK) • GQ (UK) After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own. Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor wrote his first novel, Lenin and His Magical Goose, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page. In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor’s life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a “conscientious toiler” on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka—Little Failure—which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly. As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being. Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald’s hamburger. Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart’s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world. Praise for Little Failure “Hilarious and moving . . . The army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.”—The New York Times Book Review “A memoir for the ages . . . brilliant and unflinching.”—Mary Karr “Dazzling . . . a rich, nuanced memoir . . . It’s an immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story, and a becoming-a-mensch story, and in all these ways it is, unambivalently, a success.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR “Literary gold . . . bruisingly funny.”—Vogue “A giant success.”—Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." —Newsweek "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." —New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
Download or read book The Things They Carried written by Tim O'Brien and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Download or read book Yale French Studies Number 142 written by Morgane Cadieu and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yale French Studies 142 explores the contemporary relevance of an alternative strand of feminism as theorized by Monique Wittig This volume of Yale French Studies foregrounds Monique Wittig (1935-2003), a writer who left France to live and teach in the United States, in a diverse range of multidisciplinary conversations--in literary studies, history, and gender and sexuality studies--to demonstrate how Wittig's theoretical and literary work remains an indispensable resource for thinking and creating in the twenty-first century. Editors Morgane Cadieu and Annabel L. Kim flip the "materialist lesbianism" that Wittig's collection of essays, The Straight Mind, centers and describes as being the core of Wittig's work to deal instead with "lesbian materialism," thereby making "lesbian" the method and "materialism" the object and allowing Wittig's work to realize its full range. The volume reinterrogates the official historiography of French materialist feminism; expands the intellectual framework within which Wittig's work is usually considered; insists on the language-centric materialism that emerges from Wittig's writing as a way of joining the political with the literary; and attends to the way this literary material inspires material responses and creations within the plastic arts. Underlying the entire volume is a keen sense of the materiality of Wittig's archives, housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as a site of lesbian thought in Wittig's radical sense of the term: a fugitive positionality.
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book Are You There God It s Me Margaret written by Judy Blume and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Simon has a lot of things to think about--making friends in a new school, boys and dances and parties, growing physically "normal" and choosing a religion. "With sensitivity and humor, Judy Blume has captured the joys, fears, and uncertainties that surround a girl approaching adolescence."--"Publishers Weekly." Great Stone Face Award winner. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book School For Patriots written by Martin Kohan and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2012-06-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A school assistant in Buenos Aires' most prestigious state school, Maria Teresa Cornejo's job is to keep the students in line. Suspecting that some of them are smoking in the school toilets, Maria Teresa takes to spying on them urinate - an activity she gets pleasure from listening to. Found out by her supervisor Senor Biasutto, she is not fired but forced into sexual collusion with him. In this society all appears fair and liberal but within there is brutal repression and the teachers including Señor Biasutto draw up black-lists of candidates for torture. As tense and uncompromising as a novel by Elfriede Jelinek, School for Patriots powerfully shows how in a dictatorship the political and the sexual interact.
Download or read book We are the Birds of the Coming Storm written by Lola Lafon and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soulmate Emile, a young woman recovering from unexpected cardiac arrest.... Later, at the cinematheque, Voltairine and Emile meet a young girl whom they call "the little girl at the end of the lane," who is obsessed by the Haymarket Affair of 1886.... We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm explores repression, revolt, and madness, telling a story that is not only revolutionary but also cautionary--of three women who let their spirits fly like birds as the daunting storm ascends."--online abstract
Download or read book War Trash written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, War Trash is Ha Jin’s most ambitious book to date.
Download or read book The Unbearable Lightness of Being written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
Download or read book The Children s Story written by James Clavell and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What does ‘allegiance’ mean?” the New Teacher asked, hand over her heart. In this classic and chilling tale about an elementary school classroom in post-war occupied America, James Clavell brings to light the vulnerability of children and the power educators have to shape and change young minds. Originally written in the Cold War era, Clavell’s extraordinary and enduringly relevant allegory on the impressionability of the human mind is still read in schools around the globe today, and is a call to every person to keep questioning and keep learning.
