Download or read book Back to Moscow written by Guillermo Erades and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Martin came to Moscow at the turn of the millennium hoping to discover the country of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and his beloved Chekhov. Instead he found a city turned on its head, where the grimmest vestiges of Soviet life exist side by side with the nonstop hedonism of the newly rich. Along with his hard-living expat friends, Martin spends less and less time on his studies, choosing to learn about the Mysterious Russian Soul from the city's unhinged nightlife scene"--

Download or read book The Man Who Walked Away written by Maud Casey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a trance-like state, Albert walks-from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia-all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images. Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. André in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain. In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life. Through Albert she gives us a portrait of a man untethered from place and time who, in spite of himself, kept setting out, again and again, in search of wonder and astonishment.

Download or read book The Seven Basic Plots written by Christopher Booker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-11-11 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years. This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

Download or read book Telling True Stories written by Mark Kramer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-01-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interested in journalism and creative writing and want to write a book? Read inspiring stories and practical advice from America’s most respected journalists. The country’s most prominent journalists and nonfiction authors gather each year at Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Telling True Stories presents their best advice—covering everything from finding a good topic, to structuring narrative stories, to writing and selling your first book. More than fifty well-known writers offer their most powerful tips, including: • Tom Wolfe on the emotional core of the story • Gay Talese on writing about private lives • Malcolm Gladwell on the limits of profiles • Nora Ephron on narrative writing and screenwriters • Alma Guillermoprieto on telling the story and telling the truth • Dozens of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists from the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and more . . . The essays contain important counsel for new and career journalists, as well as for freelance writers, radio producers, and memoirists. Packed with refreshingly candid and insightful recommendations, Telling True Stories will show anyone fascinated by the art of writing nonfiction how to bring people, scenes, and ideas to life on the page.

Download or read book The Countess written by Gregory Murphy and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2000 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Based on one of the most notorious scandals of the Victorian Age, THE COUNTESS is a true account of madness, cruelty and obsession, and perhaps one of the greatest love stories of its time. In 1853, preeminent art critic John Ruskin, his

Download or read book The Sport of Kings written by C. E. Morgan and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction • A Recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence • One of New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Book Named a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly • GQ • The New York Times (Selected by Dwight Garner) • NPR • The Wall Street Journal • San Francisco Chronicle • Refinery29 • Booklist • Kirkus Reviews • Commonweal Magazine "In its poetic splendor and moral seriousness, The Sport of Kings bears the traces of Faulkner, Morrison, and McCarthy. . . . It is a contemporary masterpiece."—San Francisco Chronicle Hailed by The New Yorker for its “remarkable achievements,” The Sport of Kings is an American tale centered on a horse and two families: one white, a Southern dynasty whose forefathers were among the founders of Kentucky; the other African-American, the descendants of their slaves. It is a dauntless narrative that stretches from the fields of the Virginia piedmont to the abundant pastures of the Bluegrass, and across the dark waters of the Ohio River; from the final shots of the Revolutionary War to the resounding clang of the starting bell at Churchill Downs. As C. E. Morgan unspools a fabric of shared histories, past and present converge in a Thoroughbred named Hellsmouth, heir to Secretariat and a contender for the Triple Crown. Newly confronted with one another in the quest for victory, the two families must face the consequences of their ambitions, as each is driven---and haunted---by the same, enduring question: How far away from your father can you run? A sweeping narrative of wealth and poverty, racism and rage, The Sport of Kings is an unflinching portrait of lives cast in the shadow of slavery and a moral epic for our time.

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 True Letters from a Fictional Life written by Kenneth Logan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A funny and realistic coming-out tale... The rounded characters deal with betrayal and honesty and love and near tragedy in ways teen readers, gay or straight, will recognize. Just the right touch of humor, mystery, drama, and romance should earn this a place on every teen bookshelf.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “We need stories that give courage to kids struggling to be honest with themselves and others about who they are. Logan tells one that will give you hope and make you laugh.” — Robbie Rogers, LA Galaxy midfielder, former midfielder for the US National Soccer Team “James and his friends have deep, meaningful, complex bonds... Logan’s look at a boy reconciling his private and public selves is well written and affecting.” — School Library Journal “Logan handles his material exceptionally well, building suspense as he dramatizes both the downside of being in the closet and the realistic complications of coming out, while creating, in James, an unusually thoughtful and sympathetic character... [a] satisfying debut.” — Booklist “A wonderful book that will encourage young readers to seek authenticity and stand up for their true selves... LGBT teens, as well as straight, will recognize much of their lives in this story. Highly recommended.” — Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA) “Logan tackles the complexities of coming out thoughtfully, presenting realistic (and not always fully supportive) responses to James’s revelation.” — Publishers Weekly “[James’] painful, funny experiences with family, love, and friends will resonate with many teens.” — Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

Download or read book Where Madness Lies written by Sylvia True and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germany, 1934. Rigmor, a young Jewish woman is a patient at Sonnenstein, a premier psychiatric institution known for their curative treatments. But with the tide of eugenics and the Nazis’ rise to power, Rigmor is swept up in a campaign to rid Germany of the mentally ill. USA, 1984. Sabine, battling crippling panic and depression commits herself to McLean Hospital, but in doing so she has unwittingly agreed to give up her baby. Linking these two generations of women is Inga, who did everything in her power to help her sister, Rigmor. Now with her granddaughter, Sabine, Inga is given a second chance to free someone she loves from oppressive forces, both within and without. This is a story about hope and redemption, about what we pass on, both genetically and culturally. It is about the high price of repression, and how one woman, who lost nearly everything, must be willing to reveal the failures of the past in order to save future generations. With chilling echoes of our time, Where Madness Lies is based on a true story of the author’s own family.

Download or read book Stories written by Helen Garner and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Garner is a natural storyteller.’ James Wood, New Yorker This handsome edition of Helen Garner’s collected short fiction celebrates the seventy-fifth birthday of one of Australia’s most loved authors. These stories—that delve into the complexities of love and longing, of the pain, darkness and joy of life—are all told with her characteristic sharpness of observation, honesty and humour. Each one a perfect piece, together they showcase Garner’s mastery of the form. Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction. Garner won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction for Postcards from Surfers, and the Victorian and Queensland Premiers’ Awards, as well as the Barbara Jefferis Award, for her novel The Spare Room. Everywhere I Look won the 2017 Indie Book Award for Non Fiction. ‘Garner’s stories share characteristics of the postcard: they flash before us carefully recorded images that remind us of harsher realities not pictured. And like postcards they are economically written, a bit of conversation is transcribed, a memory recalled, an event noted, scenes pass as if viewed from a train—momentarily, distinct and tantalising in their beauty.’ New York Times ‘A perfect introduction for first-timers who have not yet experienced the pleasures of Garner’s writing.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘Stories and True Stories are handsome companion volumes deservedly celebrating Helen Garner, our greatest contemporary practitioner of observation, self-interrogation and compassion. Everything she writes, in her candid, graceful prose, rings true, enlightens, stays.’ Joan London, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading ‘Published in beautiful editions to celebrate life given shape in words.’ Drusilla Modjeska, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading ‘Both of these books are concerned with moments of heartbreak and of hope, with loneliness and love, and with great cruelties, and the things that drive people to them. They are animated by a desire to understand what seems unfathomable, and to pay attention to the small pleasures of the everyday. Garner's precise descriptions, her interest in minute shifts of emotion, and the ways in which we reveal ourselves to others are always at work in these books, and make them a real joy to read.’ Age ‘As I leaf through the volumes, having just re-read both of them, I am still brought up short by another revelatory insight of the everyday...I could go on and on, but I am out of words. Many happy returns Helen Garner!’ Adelaide Advertiser ‘Her prose is wiry, stark, precise, but to find her equal for the tone of generous humanity one has to call up writers like Isaac Babel and Anton Chekhov.’ Wall Street Journal

Download or read book Stranger Than Fiction written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2005-05-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. In his first collection of nonfiction, Chuck Palahniuk brings us into this world, and gives us a glimpse of what inspires his fiction. At the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Missoula, Montana, average people perform public sex acts on an outdoor stage. In a mansion once occupied by The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson reads his own Tarot cards and talks sweetly to his beautiful actress girlfriend. Across the country, men build their own full-size castles and rocketships that will send them into space. Palahniuk himself experiments with steroids, works on an assembly line by day and as a hospice volunteer by night, and experiences the brutal murder of his father by a white supremacist. With this new direction, Chuck Palahniuk has proven he can do anything. BONUS: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Chuck Palahniuk's Doomed.

Download or read book Reading Fiction with Lucian written by Karen ní Mheallaigh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a captivating new interpretation of Lucian as a fictional theorist and writer to stand alongside the novelists of the day, bringing to bear on his works a whole new set of reading strategies. It argues that the aesthetic and cultural issues Lucian faced, in a world of mimesis and replication, were akin to those found in postmodern contexts: the ubiquity of the fake, the erasure of origins, the focus on the freakish and weird at the expense of the traditional. In addition to exploring the texture of Lucian's own writing, Dr ní Mheallaigh uses Lucian as a focal point through which to examine other fictional texts of the period, including Antonius Diogenes' The Incredible Things Beyond Thule, Dictys' Journal of the Trojan War and Ptolemy Chennus' Novel History, and reveals the importance of fiction's engagement with its contemporary culture of writing, entertainment and wonder.

Download or read book Making It Up written by Penelope Lively and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-09-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nobody writes more astutely or affectingly about [love]... than Penelope Lively." -- The Washington Post An intelligent examination of alternative destinies, choices and the moments in our lives when we could have chosen a different path, from Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively In this fascinating piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks 'what if' she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18? If she had married someone else? If she taken a different job? If she had lived her life abroad? These stories offer a sublime dance between realityand imaganation, inviting the reader to ask similar questions.

Download or read book In the Heart of the Sea written by Nathaniel Philbrick and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2007 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Number One best-selling, epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the 19th century, beautifully reissued.

Download or read book Sybil written by Flora Rheta Schreiber and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the true story of a woman with sixteen personalities - two of whom were men - and her struggle, against overwhelming odds, for health and happiness.

Download or read book True Stories written by Helen Garner and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2008-09-29 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helen Garner visits the morgue, and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She sees women giving birth, and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning fifty, and the storm caused by The First Stone. Her story on the murder of the two-year-old Daniel Valerio wins her a Walkley Award. Garner looks at the world with a shrewd and sympathetic eye. Her non-fiction, with its many voices, is always passionate and compelling. True Stories is an extraordinary book, spanning twenty-five years of work, by one of Australia’s great writers.

Download or read book Once Upon a Road Trip written by Angela N. Blount and published by . This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteen-year-old Angeli doesn't "fit in." She's never been on a single date, and she lives vicariously through an online world of storytelling. With the pressures of choosing a practical future path bearing down, she needs a drastic change. Too old to run away from home, she opts instead to embark on a solo 2-month road trip. But her freedom is tempered by loneliness - and anxiety tests her resolve as she comes face-to-face with her quirky internet friends. Aside from contracting mono and repeatedly getting herself lost, Angeli's adventure is mired by more unforeseen glitches - like being detained by Canadian authorities, and a near-death experience at the hands of an overzealous amateur wrestler. Her odyssey is complicated further when she unwittingly earns the affections of two young men. One a privileged martial artist; the other a talented techie with a colorful past. Bewildered by the emotions they stir, Angeli spurns the idea of a doomed long-distance relationship. But she is unprepared for the determination of her hopeful suitors. In the wake of her refusal, one man will betray her, and the other will prove himself worthy of a place in her future. Angeli sets off in search of a better understanding of herself, the world, and her place in it. What she finds is an impractical love, with the potential to restore her faith in happy endings. A true story with an unapologetically honest outlook on life, love, faith, and adventure - Once Upon A Road Trip is a coming-of-age memoir.