Granta 157: Should We Have Stayed at Home?

Author: William Atkins
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 190988944X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
From Antarctica and the deserts of the US-Mexico border, to a Siberian whale-killing station and the alleyways of Taipei, these dispatches describe a world in perpetual motion (even when it is 'locked-down'). To travel, we are reminded, is to embrace the experience of being a stranger - to acknowledge that one person''s frontier is another's home. Granta 157 is guest-edited by award-winning travel writer William Atkins. It features: Jason Allen-Paisant remembers the trees of his childhood Jamaica from his home in Leeds Carlos Manuel lvarez navigates Cuba's customs system, translated by Frank Wynne Eliane Brum travels from her home in the Brazilian Amazon to Antarctica in the era of climate crisis, translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty Francisco Cant and Javier Zamora: a former border guard travels to the US-Mexico border with a former undocumented migrant who crossed the border as a child Jennifer Croft's richly illustrated essay on postcards and graffiti, inspired by Los Angeles Bathsheba Demuth visits a whale-hunting station on the Bering Strait, Russia Sinad Gleeson visits Brazil with Clarice Lispector Kate Harris with the Tlingit people of the Taku River basin, on the border of British Columbia and Alaska Artist Roni Horn on Iceland Emmanuel Iduma returns to Lagos in his late father's footsteps, Nigeria Kapka Kassabova among the gatherers of the ancient Mesta River, Bulgaria Taran Khan with Afghan migrants in Germany and Kabul Jessica J. Lee in the alleyways of Taipei, Taiwan, in search of her mother's home Ben Mauk among the volcanoes of Duterte's Philippines Pascale Petit tracks tigers in Paris and India Photographer James Tylor on the legacy of whaling in Indigenous South Australia, introduced by Dominic Guerrera

Re-thinking Travel Writing

Author: Ben Stubbs
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031561880
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description

Unaccompanied

Author: Javier Zamora
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321777
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Book Description
New York Times Bestselling Author of Solito "Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans."—Jamaal May "Zamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." —Glappitnova Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind. Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun." From "Let Me Try Again": He knew we weren't Mexican. He must've remembered his family coming over the border, or the border coming over them, because he drove us to the border and told us next time, rest at least five days, don't trust anyone calling themselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines, Alhambra. He knew we would try again. And again—like everyone does. Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

The Song Poet

Author: Kao Kalia Yang
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1627794956
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
From the author of The Latehomecomer, a powerful memoir of her father, a Hmong song poet who sacrificed his gift for his children's future in America In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine. Written with the exquisite beauty for which Kao Kalia Yang is renowned, The Song Poet is a love story -- of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all that they have lost.

Global Woman

Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805075090
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Two social scientists chart the consequences of the global economy on women across the world, revealing the underground economy that has turned many poor women into virtual slaves.

Super Sad True Love Story

Author: Gary Shteyngart
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 067960359X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • The Seattle Times • O: The Oprah Magazine • Maureen Corrigan, NPR • Salon • Slate • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Charlotte Observer • The Globe and Mail • Vancouver Sun • Montreal Gazette • Kirkus Reviews In the near future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Then Lenny Abramov, son of an Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of “printed, bound media artifacts” (aka books), meets Eunice Park, an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart?

Transmission

Author: Hari Kunzru
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101656190
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
The award-winning writer of White Tears and Blue Ruin takes an ultra-contemporary turn with the story of an Indian computer programmer whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer. Lonely and naïve, Arjun spends his days as a lowly assistant virus-tester, pining away for his free-spirited colleague, Christine. Arjun gets laid off like so many of his Silicon Valley peers, and in an act of desperation to keep his job, he releases a mischievous but destructive virus around the globe that has major unintended consequences. As world order unravels, so does Arjun’s sanity, in a rollicking cataclysm that reaches Bollywood and, not so coincidentally, the glamorous star of Arjun’s favorite Indian movie.

Journey Into Space

Author: Toby Litt
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Humankind has taken a fateful journey into space . . . A vast generation ship hurtles away from a violent, troubled Earth to settle a distant planet orbiting an alien star. Those who set out on this journey are long-since dead. Those who will arrive at their destination have yet to be born. For those who must live and die in the cold emptiness between the stars, there is only the claustrophobic permanence of non-being. Life lived in unending stasis. Then the unthinkable happens: two souls €" August and Celeste €" rebel. And from the fruit of their rebellion comes a new and powerful force which will take charge of the ship's destiny. Journey into Space is science fiction at its most classic and beguiling: timeless, vast in scope and daring in execution. €~One of the most inventive and original writers around' Sunday Mirror €~Litt is equally adept at building tension and coming up with a haunting phrase. Perhaps most impressive of all, though, is the richness of his imagination. He doesn't quail at taking big risks and possesses the talent to bring them off' Daily Telegraph

Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America

Author: Jeremy Jennings
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674275608
Category : Travel writers
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Book Description
Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about democracy in America, but he also lauded Catholic society in Quebec, feared the nationalism he saw in Germany, and controversially defended French colonization of Algeria. Jeremy Jennings traces Tocqueville's lesser-known travels, recovering the wider insights of one of history's great political thinkers.

The Inland Sea

Author: Madeleine Watts
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646220188
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
In this "eloquent debut," a young Australian woman unable to find her footing in the world begins to break down when the emergencies she hears working as a 911 operator and the troubles within her own life gradually blur together, forcing her to grapple with how the past has shaped her present (Publishers Weekly). Drifting after her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. Callers report car accidents and violent spouses and homes caught up in flame. The work becomes monotonous: answer, transfer, repeat. And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins walking home with keys in hand, ready to fight off men disappointed by what they find in neighboring bars. During her free time, she gets black-out drunk, hooks up with strangers, and navigates an affair with an ex-lover whose girlfriend is in their circle of friends. Two centuries earlier, her great-great-great-great-grandfather--the British explorer John Oxley--traversed the wilderness of Australia in search of water. Oxley never found the inland sea, but the myth was taken up by other men, and over the years, search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it. Interweaving a woman's self-destructive unraveling with the gradual worsening of the climate crisis, The Inland Sea is charged with unflinching insight into our age of anxiety. At a time when wildfires have swept an entire continent, this novel asks what refuge and comfort looks like in a constant state of emergency.