"A delightfully entertaining story of family and culture from acclaimed author Julia Alvarez."
Moving to Vermont after his parents split, Miguel has plenty toworry about Tiiacute;a Lola, his quirky, "carismaaacute;tica," and maybe magical aunt makes his life even more unpredictable when she arrives from the Dominican Republic to help out his Mami. Like herstories for adults, Julia Alvarez's first middle-grade book sparkles with magic as it illuminates a child's experiences living in two cultures. "From the TradePaperback edition." Views: 417
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. Views: 417
"His life...ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying words because they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encouragement than it was his turn to speak...."
Unique among Jack Kerouac's novels, Visions of Gerard focuses on the scenes and sensations of childhood—the wisdom, anguish, intensity, innocence, evil, insight, suffering, delight, and shock—as they were revealed in the short tragic-happy life of his saintly brother, Gerard. Set in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, it is an unsettling, beautiful, and sad exploration of the meaning and precariousness of existence. Views: 416
"The Queen of Spades" is one of the most famous tales in Russian literature, and inspired the eponymous opera by Tchaikovsky; in "The Stationmaster", from The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, Pushkin reworks the parable of the Prodigal Son; "Tsar Nikita and his Forty Daughters" is one of Pushkin’s bawdier early poems; and the narrative poem "The Bronze Horseman", inspired by a St Petersburg statue of Peter the Great, is one of Pushkin’s best-known and most influential works. The volume also includes a selection of Pushkin’s best lyric poetry.
Contents:
• Short Stories: The Queen of Spades; The Stationmaster
• Drama: Extracts from Boris Godunov and Mozart and Salieri
• The Bronze Horseman (narrative poem), Tsar Nikita and His Forty
Daughters (folk poem) and 14 lyric poems
• Novel in Verse: Extract from Yevgeny Onegin (novel in verse) Views: 414
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Collateral comes a gripping novel about a woman caught in a love affair that could be her salvation ... or her undoing.
Tara is gorgeous, affluent, and forty. She lives in an impeccably restored Russian Hill mansion in San Francisco. Once a widow, twice divorced, she's a woman with a past she prefers keeping to herself.
Enter Cavin Lattimore. He's handsome, kind, charming, and the surgeon assigned to Tara following a ski accident in Lake Tahoe. In the weeks it takes her to recover, Cavin sweeps her off her feet and their relationship blossoms into something Tara had never imagined possible. But then she begins to notice some strange things: a van parked outside her home at odd times, a break-in, threatening text messages and emails. She also starts to notice cracks in Cavin's seemingly perfect personality, like the suppressed rage his conniving teenage son brings out in him, and the discovery that Cavin hired a detective to investigate her immediately after they met.
Now on crutches and housebound, Tara finds herself dependent on the new man in her life—perhaps too much so. She's handling rocky relationships with her sister and best friend, who are envious of her glamour and freedom; her prickly brother-in-law, who is intimidated by her wealth and power; and her estranged mother. However perfect Tara's life appears, things are beginning to get messy.
Writing in beautiful prose, Ellen Hopkins unveils a new style while evoking her signature poetic form that readers fell in love with in Collateral and Triangles. Views: 413
In late December 1864, Sherman's troops occupy Savannah which is full of Confederate spies. Luke, Chester and Julia collide once again. Luke is a Union spy with a mission: He must spread the dis-information that Sherman intends to move next on Augusta and Charleston, when actually Sherman's next target is Columbia, the capitol of South Carolina.In late December 1864, Sherman's troops occupy Savannah which is full of Confederate spies. Luke, Chester and Julia collide once again. Luke is a Union spy with a simple mission: Spread the mis-information that Sherman's will next move on Augusta and Charleston. This will have the effect of consolidating Confederate militias in those two cities and leaving the center of South Carolina open for a rapid move to Sherman's actual target; Columbia.Luke discovers Chester and Julia attempting to spy on a Union strategy meeting. He has a decision to make. Views: 412
**The only play by famed Scottish author Muriel Spark takes on the dilemmas of two intellectually ambitious women in 1960s England
**
In a home overlooking London’s Regent’s Canal in the 1960s, two scholars debate the choices they have made with their lives. Catherine Delfont was one of the most promising minds of her generation, but after earning her PhD she gave up her research to marry a well-regarded economist and raise a family. Her cousin Leonora stayed in academia and became a successful classicist, able to observe both the breadth of history and the lives of others with brilliant, cool detachment. Together, they face the sacrifices they have made as women and intellectuals.
First performed in London in 1962 and later in Scandinavia, where it was produced by Ingmar Bergman, Doctors of Philosophy is a fascinating artifact of early second-wave feminism.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland. Views: 412
Wade was a lonely grocery store clerk in a small town, a young man stuck in a world of numbered aisles and checkout lanes, parking lot wastelands and movies repeating in a theater below his apartment. Then, a stranger appeared in the cereal aisle, his eyes the color of the night sky, changing everything.“Turn around,” he said. “Please.” When I turned to look at him, his eyes were the color of the night sky again and full of constellations. “I have come back for you.”“I live here, now,” I told him.He smiled, his eyes deepening into black holes in his face, an inescapable force. I felt myself pulled toward him, stumbling forward.“No one lives here,” he whispered, “Come here,” and I took a step toward him, and then another, until finally I was pressed against him, our body heat combining, a single radioactive mass. Somewhere, in the theater, credits were beginning to roll. His breath was warm against my neck, and my eyes spilled over, wet and hot and lonely. Somewhere inside me, something dark and cold thawed and beat again for the first time in years, a single, burning thump inside my chest. I remembered every star, every constellation inside him, because they were our constellations. Views: 411
My dad is a ghost. My life is in ruins. There's nothing more to tell.He comes back to stand in my closet sometimes, a shadow in the open door. He tells me stories. There was a boy. He lived at the lake, and he was Dad's friend."What was his name?" I ask him.Dad doesn't look at me. He looks anywhere else, and finally he says, "Franklin.""What happened to him?"Dad looks down at me and smiles, his eyes the color of the lake at night, dark and bottomless. "I don’t know.""Come on, Dad. I want to know.""No you don't," he tells me, and he tucks me in. But this time, he doesn’t go away."Dad, why did you go away?""You're tired," he says, and I can't stay awake anymore. I wake up a couple times, and he's still sitting there, holding down the corner of my mattress. Views: 411
The long-awaited volume of Brecht's classic plays from the 1930's
Volume 4 of Brecht's Collected Plays contains works from the 1930's, straddling fateful years in German political and cultural history - as well as in Brecht's own life. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is a powerful political allegory on Nazi racial policy and conditions in the Germany Brecht had to leave in 1933. The Trial of Lucullus, a starkly pacifist text originally written in response to a commission from Swedish radio, portrays the Roman general tried by the Underworld for his military triumphs. Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, unique in Brecht's work, consists of some thirty short scenes of life under the Nazis between 1933 and 1938, designed for use by groups in exile. Señora Carrara's Rifles is based on J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea, but relocated by Brecht in the Spanish Civil War. Also included are two one-act plays, Dansen and How Much is Your Iron?, minor works designed for amateurs in Scandinavia, where the Brechts lived till spring 1941.
The volume includes an introduction and notes by Tom Kuhn and John Willett, as well as Brecht's own notes on the texts. Views: 411
> *Millie McDeevit screamed a scream
So loud it made her eyebrows steam.
She screamed so loud
Her jawbone broke,
Her tongue caught fire,
Her nostrils smoked...*
Poor Screamin' Millie is just one of the unforgettable characters in this wondrous new book of poems and drawings by the creator of *Where the Sidewalk Ends* and *A Light in the Attic.* Here you will also meet Allison Beals and her twenty-five eels; Danny O'Dare, the dancin' bear; the Human Balloon; and Headphone Harold.
So come, wander through the Nose Garden, ride the Little Hoarse, eat in the Strange Restaurant, and let the magic of Shel Silverstein open your eyes and tickle your mind. Views: 411
'Perhaps that moment had been exceptional, but still, I felt alive. That pressure on my chest means being alive.' Forty-nine, with a kind face, no serious ailments (apart from varicose veins on his ankles), a good salary and three moody children, widowed accountant Martín Santomé is about to retire. He assumes he'll take up gardening, or the guitar, or whatever retired people generally do. What he least expects is to fall passionately in love with his shy young employee Laura Avellaneda. As they embark upon an affair, happy and irresponsible, Martín begins to feel the weight of his quiet existence lift - until, out of nowhere, their joy is cut short. The intimate, heartbreaking diary of an ordinary man who is reborn when he falls in love one final time, this beloved Latin American novel has been translated into twenty languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, and is now published in Penguin Classics for the first time. Views: 410
'Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment! --do you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror.'
The melancholy, brilliance, passionate lyricism and torment of Edgar Allen Poe are all well represented in this timeless collection. Here, in one volume, are his masterpieces of mystery, terror, humour and adventure, including stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Pit and the Pendulum, and his finest lyric and narrative poetry -The Ravenand Annabel Lee, to name just a few - that defined American romanticism and secured Poe as one of the most enduring literary voices of the nineteenth century. Views: 410
Of all the literary genres, humor has the shortest shelf life—except for Archy and Mehitabel, that is. First published in 1916, it is a classic of American literature. Archy is a cockroach, inside whom resides the soul of a free-verse poet; he communicates with Don Marquis by leaping upon the keys of the columnist's typewriter. In poems of varying length, Archy pithily describes his wee world, the main fixture of which is Mehitabel, a devil-may-care alley cat. Views: 409
