"There is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature," raves the Washington Post Book World, and it is right. She has been nominated three times for the ABBY award, and her critically acclaimed writings consistently enjoy spectacular commercial success as they entertain and touch her legions of loyal fans. In High Tide in Tucson, she returnsto her familiar themes of family, community, the common good and the natural world. The title essay considers Buster, a hermit crab that accidentally stows away on Kingsolver's return trip from the Bahamas to her desert home, and turns out to have manic-depressive tendencies. Buster is running around for all he's worth -- one can only presume it's high tide in Tucson. Kingsolver brings a moral vision and refreshing sense of humor to subjects ranging from modern motherhood to the history of private property to the suspended citizenship of human beings in the Animal Kingdom. Beautifully packaged, with... Views: 1 076
Two gentlemen standing outside a church in Rio de Janeiro see a respectable lady emerge - one of them has an unexpected, and to him inexplicable story to tell about her past life as a prostitute; a popular composer of polkas burns the midnight oil in a desperate attempt to create great classical music; a teenager finds himself caught up by the sight of the bare arms of an older woman who lives with his employer; an impoverished, lazy young man turns to the lucrative trade of catching runaway slaves; dull, monotonous Mariana has a tiff with her husband about the hat he wears to town, and decides to sing "the Marseillaise of matrimony" by going off on a trip to town herself with her more daring, flirtatious friend Sophia.These are some of the situations developed in these stories, some of the most brilliant to have been written in the nineteenth century. They echo Poe and Gogol, they anticipate Joyce, they have been compared to contemporary works by Chekhov, Maupassant, and Henry James, yet they are not quite like any of these. Anyone who has read Epitaph of a Small Winner or Dom Casmurro, his most famous novels, will want to savour these stories - those who haven't, will find them a varied and enjoyable introduction to Machado's work. Views: 1 074
People on Clare Island say that the Big Hill is haunted by fearsome pirates who once terrorized Ireland's coasts. Jessie senses that the Hill possess a magic special enough to give her the strength to deal with a crippling disease. That magic takes physical shape when the ghost of pirate queen Grania O'Malley appears to Jessie with a mission--to save the Hill from a greedy prospector. Views: 1 074
A celebrated winner of fiction's Orange Prize, Helen Dunmore is as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her novels. 'Glad Of These Times' is full of haunting, joyous and wry narratives. Views: 1 074
A satire portraying a literal battle between books in the St. James library, together with fifteen other pieces Views: 1 072
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression. Views: 1 071
Following the world war that crippled the United States, inhabitants of the state of Deseret, formed from Utah, Colorado, and Idaho and dominated by the Mormon Church, struggle to rebuild civilization. Views: 1 070
A richly entertaining and informative collection of Hans Christian Andersen's stories, annotated by one of America's leading folklore scholars.
In her most ambitious annotated work to date, Maria Tatar celebrates the stories told by Denmark's "perfect wizard" and re-envisions Hans Christian Andersen as a writer who casts his spell on both children and adults. Andersen's most beloved tales, such as "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Ugly Duckling," and "The Little Mermaid," are now joined by "The Shadow" and "Story of a Mother," mature stories that reveal his literary range and depth. Tatar captures the tales' unrivaled dramatic and visual power, showing exactly how Andersen became one of the world's ten most translated authors, along with Shakespeare, Dickens, and Marx. Lushly illustrated with more than one hundred fifty rare images, many in full color, by artists such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen will captivate readers with annotations that explore the rich social and cultural dimensions of the nineteenth century and construct a compelling portrait of a writer whose stories still fascinate us today. . Views: 1 067
Chapter 1
FIRST CONVERSATION SAN FRANCISCO
In the spring of 2000, Walter Murch, at the suggestion of Francis Ford Coppola, began to re-edit "Apocalypse Now, "afilm he had worked on back in 1977-1979 both as sound designer and as one of the four picture editors. Twenty-two years later, all the takes and discards and "lost" scenes and sound elements(carefully preserved in climate-controlled limestone caves in Pennsylvania) were brought out of vaults to be reconsidered. "Apocalypse Now "is a part of the American subconscious. And in some way this wasthe problem.Having dinner with the novelist Alfredo Veeacute;a in San Francisco, after spending my first day with Walter at Zoetrope, I mentioned what was happening with the re-editing of "Apocalypse Now, "and Veeacute;a immediately launched into Marlon Brando's monologue about the snail on a razor blade. This was followed, during dinner, by Vea's precise imitation of DennisHopper's whine: "What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a "wise "man? . . ." For Veeacute;a, who fought in Vietnam, "Apocalypse Now "was "the "movie about the war. It was the work of art that caught it for him, that gave him a mythological structure he could refer to, that showed him what he had gonethrough and would later write about himself in books such as "Gods Go Begging." So those working on the new "Apocalypse Now "were aware that there would be problems connected with theirdismantling and restructuring a "classic." It was now public property.
"It "has "become part of the culture," said Murch. "Andthat's not a one-way street, as you know from your writing. As much as a work affects the culture, the culture mysteriously affects the work. "Apocalypse Now "in the year 2000 is a very differentthing from the physically exact-same "Apocalypse Now "in the second before it was released in 1979."
The idea for a new version grew out of Coppola's desire toproduce a DVD of "Apocalypse Now "with a number of major scenes that were-for reasons of length-eliminated from the 1979 version. Also, 2000 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fallof Saigon, so it seemed appropriate to re-evaluate editorial decisions that had originally been made while the war was still a vividly painful bruise on the nation's psyche. But rather than have the restoredscenes appear in isolation, appended in their own chapter, why not integrate them into the body of the film as originally intended? The problem was that the editing and sound work on the excised material had never beenfinished, and one scene in particular was eliminated before it was completely shot. Fortunately, the negative and original sound for all this material were perfectly preserved in original laboratory rolls, and could beretrieved, two decades later, as if the film had been shot a few weeks earlier.
And so Walter Murch was now working in San Francisco, in the old Zoetrope building. Mostly he had to collect andreconsider the material for three large sequences that were cut from the film in 1978-a medevac scene involving Playboy Bunnies; further scenes with Brando in the Kurtz compound; and a ghostly, funereal dinnerand love scene at a French rubber plantation. In Eleanor Coppola's book about the making of the film, she Views: 1 066
*'I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!"
And thumped him on the head.'*
Conjuring wily walruses, dancing lobsters, a Jabberwock and a Bandersnatch, Carroll's fantastical verse gave new words to the English language. Views: 1 066
Iris Vegan, a young, impoverished graduate student from the Midwest, finds herself entangled with four powerful but threatening characters as she tries to adjust to life in New York City. Mr. Morning, an inscrutable urban recluse, employs Iris to tape-record verbal descriptions of objects that belonged to a murder victim. George, a photographer, takes an eerie portrait of Iris, which then acquires a strange life of its own, appearing and disappearing without warning around the city. After a series of blinding migraines, Iris ends up in a hospital room with Mrs. O., a woman who has lost her mind and memory to a stroke, but who nevertheless retains both the strength and energy to torment her fellow patient. And finally, there is Professor Rose, Iris’s teacher and eventually her lover. While working with him on the translation of a German novella called The Brutal Boy, she discovers in its protagonist, Klaus, a vehicle for her own transformation and ventures out into the city again--this time dressed as a man. Views: 1 066
This invaluable volume, which has been republished to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Faulkner's birth, contains some of the greatest short fiction by a writer who defined the course of American literature. Its forty-five stories fall into three categories: those not included in Faulkner's earlier collections; previously unpublished short fiction; and stories that were later expanded into such novels as The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. With its Introduction and extensive notes by the biographer Joseph Blotner, Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner is an essential addition to its author's canon--as well as a book of some of the most haunting, harrowing, and atmospheric short fiction written in the twentieth century. Views: 1 064
A dark and powerful fantasy from the bestselling author of *Ender's Shadow.*
Enter the city of Hart's Hope, ruled by gods both powerful and indifferent, riddled with sorcery and revenge. The city was captured by a rebellious lord, Palicrovol, who overthrew the cruel king, Nasilee, hated by his people.
Palicrovol, too, was cruel, as befitted a king. He took the true mantle of kinghood by forcing Asineth, now Queen by her father's death, to marry him, raping her to consummate the marriage. [But he was not cruel enough to rule.] He let her live after her humiliation; live to bear a daughter; live to return from exile and retake the throne of Hart's Hope.
But she, in turn, sent Palicrovol into exile to breed a son who would, in the name of the God, take back the kingdom from its cruel Queen. Views: 1 063
From spoonriveranthology.net: "Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology was an immediate commercial success when it was published in 1915. Unconventional in both style and content, it shattered the myths of small town American life. A collection of epitaphs of residents of a small town, a full understanding of Spoon River requires the reader to piece together narratives from fragments contained in individual poems." Views: 1 060
The grotesquely grinning corpse in the Devonshire shack was a man who died horribly -- with a dish of mushrooms at his side. His body contained enough death-dealing muscarine to kill 30 people. Why would an expert on fungi feast on a large quantity of this particularly poisonous species. A clue to the brilliant murderer, who had baffled the best minds in London, was hidden in a series of letters and documents that no one seemed to care about, except the dead man's son. Views: 1 059
