In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.
Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico—from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City—Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence.
Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach—the lacuna—between truth and public presumption.
With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Barbara Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist—and of art itself. The Lacuna is a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time. Views: 818
A selection of humorous poems for you to read while in the toilet.After reading a few quotes from famous people posted on Twitter, I decided to create and post some of my own.Unlike the other quotes, which were mainly serious or witty, my quotes tended to be silly and humorous, and were posted as #Twittclass items.Reading through these posts sparked some ideas for nonsense verse and so this book was born.As the poems are short, Twittclass makes the ideal companion for those moments on the toilet when you have little else to do but stare at the wall opposite and dream what you'll do when you win the lottery.Good readingPeter Barns. Views: 817
Winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, The Game of Silence is the second novel in the critically acclaimed Birchbark House series by New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich.
Her name is Omakayas, or Little Frog, because her first step was a hop, and she lives on an island in Lake Superior. One day in 1850, Omakayas’s island is visited by a group of mysterious people. From them, she learns that the chimookomanag, or white people, want Omakayas and her people to leave their island and move farther west.
That day, Omakayas realizes that something so valuable, so important that she never knew she had it in the first place, could be in danger: Her way of life. Her home.
The Birchbark House Series is the story of one Ojibwe family’s journey through one hundred years in America. The New York Times Book Review raved about The Game of Silence: “Erdrich has created a world, fictional but real: absorbing, funny, serious and convincingly human.” Views: 817
Young Lions and Southern Pirates is a collection of story poems about life, death, love, war and all aspects of mortal drama.Young Lions and Southern Pirates is a collection of story poems about life, death, love, war and all aspects of mortal drama. Hopefully one or more may touch the heart of the reader or cause them to look at things in a different way. They are easy to read without the flowery language often used that's difficult to understand. Views: 815
Religion and business never mix, especially when religion IS your business.An enemy vanquished over fifty years ago crafted the balloon bomb from streamers and paper. The weapon’s creators simply set the balloon adrift in the wind before praying fortune delivered destruction to their enemy’s homeland. Rural villagers decades later find one such balloon entangled in the swamp bordering their community. The bombs fastened to the balloon threaten peril, but no one wishes to contact the outside world for help, and thus remind the larger world of their aging community hoping to be forgotten. With new paper and paint, with new stitches and hydrogen, that rural community brings the balloon bomb back to life, never stopping their work to wonder if it might be best to let one weapon of a lost age simply fade into ruin. Views: 815
If you are hungry to discover Father's will in your life, here is an opportunity to understand how you can - not omitting the reality that we need to know God's will in everything concerning our lives, including our marriage, educational and spiritual issues. Hungrily go through this account of Bill's and finally find yourself taking Jack's words to heart.This story captures the marriage, educational and spiritual life of a young university student who was caught in a deep longing to find God's will for him. In his school days, it became important as life, especially when his fiancee, Catherina Bordeaux seemed to see him as a jinx. Suddenly he meets Jack who equips him on the reality of God's will beyond the self-will if the fallen man. In the process of this gradual change, what would Bill's ideas about life lead him into? And would God's will really be his fiancee, Catherina, or his very close friend, Donna? Quickly find out! Views: 814
There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.
A calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up hound deep in the backwaters of the bayou. She dares to find him in the forest, and the hound dares to befriend this cat, this feline, this creature he is supposed to hate. They are an unlikely pair, about to become an unlikely family. Ranger urges the cat to hide underneath the porch, to raise her kittens there because Gar-Face, the man living inside the house, will surely use them as alligator bait should he find them. But they are safe in the Underneath...as long as they stay in the Underneath.
Kittens, however, are notoriously curious creatures. And one kitten's one moment of curiosity sets off a chain of events that is astonishing, remarkable, and enormous in its meaning. For everyone who loves Sounder, Shiloh, and The Yearling, for everyone who loves the haunting beauty of writers such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers, Kathi Appelt spins a harrowing yet keenly sweet tale about the power of love and its opposite, hate the fragility of happiness and the importance of making good on your promises. Views: 814
One of the last plays Shakespeare penned on his own, **The Winter’s Tale **is a transcendent work of death and rebirth, exploring irrational sexual jealousy, the redemptive world of nature, and the magical power of art.
Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts and authoritative notes from **William Shakespeare: Complete Works**. Each play includes an Introduction as well as an overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; a chronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-white illustrations.
Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers, these modern and accessible editions from the Royal Shakespeare Company set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century. Views: 814
Two plays—hilarious and searing in equal measure—by one of our most essential and original authors
In his poetry, short stories, novels, and plays, Denis Johnson has explored the story of America—especially of the West, land of self-made men and self-perpetuating myths—with a searing honesty and genuine sympathy. In these two plays, written in verse both hypnotic and clear, he confirms his position as one of our great verbal stylists, and a literary conscience for our times.
Purvis’s seven reverse-chronological scenes catalog the fall and rise of Melvin Purvis, the G-man who brought down John Dillinger and Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Johnson takes us from Washington’s backrooms to a Midwestern cornfield, dramatizing the seductive allure of power and our own human capacity for both pettiness and grace. In Soul of A Whore, a lively cast of characters—faith healers, pimps, strippers, actual demons—converges, with unexpected hilarity, as Bess Cassandra awaits execution for the murder of her infant daughter.
In these furiously entertaining, occasionally terrifying works, Denis Johnson chronicles and questions America’s myths, heroes, and everyday realities with verve and elegance, proving once again that he is at the height of his linguistic and insightful powers. Views: 813
A very precise, very orderly author has the worst case of writer's block. He is working on book five in his series and the submission date is fast approaching but the words are just not there when he needs them. He attempts to fix it using every possible method he knows.The Kingdom of Heaven has been downsized to a single city. And to save overcrowding, God has a new chosen race and set of entry qualifications. In the modern hereafter only good Americans go to Paris when they die. But not even a divinely ordered bureaucracy is infallible and five not-so-good Americans find themselves thrown together and trapped in a surreal limbo while awaiting official ruling on their fate: return to the void of death or return outside to the Paris of their twenty-fifth year.They are an ill-assorted lot: randy 1900s marine Louis Forster; Maggie Thompson, an over-sexed 1930s fan dancer; neurotic 1940s New York intellectual Seymour Stein;modern-day foul-mouthed truck-driver, Max Pilsudski; Helen Ricchi, the mysterious and bookish wallflower suspected of murder after her husband's disappearance in the Paris of the 1950s. And these desperate departed will stop at nothing to return to the land of the living and repair flawed lives and fractured loves. Views: 811
Of all the writers in the 19th century, the preeminent one was Sir Walter Scott, whose works were so beloved that he had an international fan base well before he died. The Scotsman is still considered one of the greatest writers of the English language, and his most famous and popular title is Ivanhoe, but he is also remembered for other works like The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, and The Bride of Lammermoor. Views: 810
A collection of short stories and excerpts from Michael Morpurgo's most famous children's novels. Views: 810
A stunning new translation—the first in more than forty years—of a major novel by the father of modern Japanese fiction
Natsume Sōseki's Kusamakura follows its nameless young artist-narrator on a meandering walking tour of the mountains. At the inn at a hot spring resort, he has a series of mysterious encounters with Nami, the lovely young daughter of the establishment. Nami, or "beauty," is the center of this elegant novel, the still point around which the artist moves and the enigmatic subject of Sōseki's word painting. In the author's words, Kusamakura is "a haiku-style novel, that lives through beauty." Written at a time when Japan was opening its doors to the rest of the world, Kusamakura turns inward, to the pristine mountain idyll and the taciturn lyricism of its courtship scenes, enshrining the essence of old Japan in a work of enchanting literary nostalgia. Views: 810
"Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland... As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride... Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past... The several strands of dream, memory, and time [are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, more centrally, against the world of observable objects." Martin Amis Views: 810
Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, THE UNVANQUISHED focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old South's traditions.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 808
