Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Author: Vítězslav Nezval
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
"Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood. Drawing on Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, and Murnau's Nosferatu as well as the form and language of the pulp serial novel, Nezval has constructed a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with a taste for chicken blood, changelings, a lecherous priest, a malicious grandmother desiring her lost youth, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister. Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, the novel is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death - an exploration of the grotesque that juxtaposes high and low genres with shifting registers of language and moods, thus placing it squarely in the tradition of the Czech avant-garde."--BOOK JACKET.

We Don't Go Back

Author: Howard David Ingham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781722748814
Category : Horror films
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Book Description
Secret, strange, dark, impure and dissonant...Enter the haunted landscapes of folk horror, a world of pagan village conspiracies, witch finders, and teenagers awakening to evil; of dark fairy tales, backwoods cults and obsolete technologies. Beginning with the classics Night of the Demon, Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan's Claw, We Don't Go Back surveys the genre of screen folk horror from across the world. Travelling from Watership Down to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with every stop inbetween, We Don't Go Back is a thoughtful, funny and essential overview of folk horror in TV and cinema."A beautiful rumination on the dark films and television that shaped me and a generation of odd children, for good or ill, worth a year of your time, because you won't just read the book, you'll feel a burning desire to watch everything mentioned within." - Robin Ince"A comprehensive, accessible and often riotously funny tome weaving together folk horror in all its forms, from British television to the American backwoods, from Eastern European fairytales to the vengeful ghosts of East Asia. Ingham explores uncanny landscapes haunted by things buried, old cultures converging with the reluctance of contemporary reason, that very tension that gives his book its name. He attempts to both define folk horror and free it from definition, creating the ultimate guide to the genre's manifestations on film and offering a convincing argument as to why the genre resonates so compellingly with people today." - Kier-La Janisse, author of House of Psychotic Women

The Czechoslovak New Wave

Author: Peter Hames
Publisher: Wallflower Press
ISBN: 9781904764427
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This study of the most significant movement in post-war Central and East European cinema examines the origins and development of Czechoslovakian film during this time, as well as the political and cultural changes which influenced some of the most important works.

Let's Dance!

Author: Valerie Bolling
Publisher: Thinkingdom
ISBN: 1635923638
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
This rhythmic showcase of dances from all over the world features children of diverse backgrounds and abilities tapping, spinning, and boogying away! Tap, twirl, twist, spin! With musical, rhyming text, author Valerie Bolling shines a spotlight on dances from across the globe, while energetic art from Maine Diaz shows off all the moves and the diverse people who do them. From the cha cha of Cuba to the stepping of Ireland, kids will want to leap, dip, and zip along with the dances on the page!

101 Sci-Fi Movies You Must See Before You Die

Author: Steven Jay Schneider
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780733324956
Category : Science fiction films
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
Can you tell your Dagobah from your Delos and your Ming from your Morlock? Do you need help understanding 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY? From the classic low-budget Flash Gordon tales to the slick CGI-realised world of THE MATRIX, science-fiction films have long pushed the boundaries of the visually and dramatically fantastic. 101 SCI-FI MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE is your perfect one-stop guide to them all. Science fiction allows every other movie genre to leap - quite literally - into another dimension. Take a classic police chase and set it on Mars. Create a haunted house story, then add the robots. Take the classic boy-meets-girl story, then make them mutants. Great sci-fi movies turn the known world onto its head, play with the laws of physics and all the while hold the viewer spellbound with a gripping vision of future worlds. With insight from critics, film historians, and academics, 101 SCI-FI MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE, applies knowledge and passion to a century of close encounters, distant planets, time travel, black holes, strange outfits, futuristic technology, inexplicable forces, fantastic spaceships, fluorescent drinks and subterranean societies. Strap yourself in: you′re set for a rocket ride to sci-fi heaven.

Woman in the Plural

Author: VITEZSLAV. NEZVAL
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788086264561
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
In the summer of 1935, Vít?zslav Nezval, already one of the most celebrated Czech poets of his generation, embarked on a period of manic creativity that would result in three volumes of poetry written and published in a two-year span (1935-37), mirrored by three volumes of memoir-like poetic prose. These collections would not only reshape Czech poetry, blending approaches developed by the French Surrealists with national cultural sensibilities and political concerns, taken together they are among the highest achievements of the interwar avant-garde. Each of the three volumes adopted a different principle of Surrealism as its general modus operandi. For Woman in the Plural (1936), the first volume in this loose trilogy, it was objective chance (while the third and final volume, The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), adopted the paranoiac-critical method).As the title suggests, the collection is an extended meditation on the female form, the images of which Nezval spins zoetrope-like to convey novel and hallucinatory ways to conceive Woman's mythical, divine, and creative power. Aligned with the international modernism of the era, Woman in the Plural addresses the social and political instability of the 1930s while also serving to display Nezval's prodigious talents in a variety of forms, styles, and genres. Alongside the madcap, entertainingly profound poetry in couplets, litanies, and stanzas of varying lengths, the collection also includes pages from Nezval's dream journal, a set of exuberant Surrealist exercises, and a full-length play of chance encounters with "a woman like any other." Never before translated into English, this is a vibrant, volatile collection, a true tour de force from one of the greatest poets of the European avant-garde.

The Liar's Wife

Author: Mary Gordon
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307390330
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
In the short novels that make up this beautiful collection, Mary Gordon presents a quartet of finely rendered, emotionally resonant stories. Here we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her last days as a transplant in New York City; a vulnerable American graduate student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title, who gets more out of life than most; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high schooler in the Midwest. At every turn, Gordon revels in the interactions and crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. Entrancing reading, The Liar’s Wife is a wonderful demonstration of Gordon’s literary mastery and human sympathy.

Bringing Columbia Home

Author: Michael D. Leinbach
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1628728523
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

Book Description
Voted the Best Space Book of 2018 by the Space Hipsters The dramatic inside story of the epic search and recovery operation after the Columbia space shuttle disaster. On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation’s eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach, Launch Director of the space shuttle program at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history. This comprehensive account is told in four parts: Parallel Confusion Courage, Compassion, and Commitment Picking Up the Pieces A Bittersweet Victory For the first time, here is the definitive inside story of the Columbia disaster and recovery and the inspiring message it ultimately holds. In the aftermath of tragedy, people and communities came together to help bring home the remains of the crew and nearly 40 percent of shuttle, an effort that was instrumental in piecing together what happened so the shuttle program could return to flight and complete the International Space Station. Bringing Columbia Home shares the deeply personal stories that emerged as NASA employees looked for lost colleagues and searchers overcame immense physical, logistical, and emotional challenges and worked together to accomplish the impossible. Featuring a foreword and epilogue by astronauts Robert Crippen and Eileen Collins, and dedicated to the astronauts and recovery search persons who lost their lives, this is an incredible, compelling narrative about the best of humanity in the darkest of times and about how a failure at the pinnacle of human achievement became a story of cooperation and hope.

All the Light We Cannot See

Author: Anthony Doerr
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476746605
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Book Description
*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Prague with Fingers of Rain

Author: Vítězslav Nezval
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Limited
ISBN: 9781852248161
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 62

Book Description
Czech writer Vitezslav Nezval (1900-58) was one of the leading Surrealist poets of the 20th century. "Prague with Fingers of Rain" is his classic 1936 collection in which Prague's many-sided life - its glamorous history, various weathers, different kinds of people - becomes symbolic of what is contradictory and paradoxical in life itself. Mixing real and surreal, Nezval evokes life's contradictoriness in a series of psalm-like poems of puzzled love and generous humanity. Nezval was perhaps the most prolific writer in Prague during the 1920s and 30s. An original member of the avant-garde group of artists Devetsil ("Butterbur", literally: "Nine Forces"), he was a founding figure of the Poetist movement. His numerous books included poetry collections, experimental plays and novels, memoirs, essays and translations. His best work is from the interwar period. Along with Karel Teige, Jindrich Aetyrsku, and Toyen, Nezval frequently travelled to Paris, engaging with the French surrealists. Forging a friendship with Andre Breton and Paul Aeluard, he was instrumental in founding The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934 (the first such group outside of France), serving as editor of the group's journal Surrealismus. His mastery of language and prosody was unparalleled - contemporaries referred to it as wizardry. Alongside with surrealist poetry, he wrote poems that sounded like genuine folksongs and for some time he teased the Czech literary public by the anonymous publication of three books attributed to a fictitious Robert David - one of 52 Villonesque ballades, another of 100 sonnets, all in strict classical form. His identity was guessed by the critics only because 'no one else would be able to do that'. This selection from his seminal collection has a specially commissioned foreword by Ivan Klima.