A Month in Siena

Author: Hisham Matar
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 059312913X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND EVENING STANDARD After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us. Praise for A Month in Siena “As exquisitely structured as The Return, driven by desire, yearning, loss, illuminated by the kindness of strangers. A Month in Siena is a triumph.”—Peter Carey

A month in the country

Author: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573612442
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
A bored wife living in the Russian countryside falls in love with her little boy's handsome new tutor, just like all of the women in the household. The wife's chief rival turns out to be her 17 year old ward; they make a wonderful portrait of two different women in love.

How to Live in the Country

Author: Tom Hodgkinson
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1800180993
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
'One of those enthusiasts whose enthusiasm is hard to resist . . . Always beguiling' Daily Mail 'Hugely inspiring even when it is most bonkers' Sarah Bakewell, New Statesman 'A combination of almanac, commonplace book and diary, this is a tasty oddity . . . Richly entertaining' Independent As the pandemic has caused us all to re-evaluate our lives, becoming more self-reliant and dwelling in closer harmony with nature have emerged as important priorities. Many of us have decided to up sticks and leave the city behind for a less frenetic existence in the country. Whether you've already made your move, or are dreaming of doing so one day, this is the book for you. Covering beekeeping, poultry rearing, pig farming, bread-making, wood-chopping, fire-laying, bartering and much more, How to Live in the Country is the perfect source of inspiration for old hand and beginners alike: useful, informative but also refreshingly honest and realistic. Tom Hodgkinson draws on the wisdom of an eclectic range of thinkers and writers as he guides us through each month of the year, giving lists of tasks for both garden and animal husbandry, offering tips and shortcuts, and weaving in stories about his own experience of raising a young family in rural Devon.

How Long 'til Black Future Month?

Author: N. K. Jemisin
Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 0316491357
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories. "Marvelous and wide-ranging." -- Los Angeles Times"Gorgeous" -- NPR Books"Breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold." -- Entertainment Weekly Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

Three Days in the Country

Author: Patrick Marber
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 082224103X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description
In rural nineteenth-century Russia, a tangle of hopeless romances brings chaos to a country estate. Natalya, the wife of the wealthy estate-owner, is in love with her son’s tutor; a neighbor has taken a liking to Natalya’s ward, who has her eyes set elsewhere; and Natalya’s long-time friend Rakitin may crave more from their platonic relationship. A tale of young love, old love, and everything in between, THREE DAYS IN THE COUNTRY is a riveting update on Turgenev’s heartbreaking classic.

Home Sweet Anywhere

Author: Lynne Martin
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 140229154X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
"Nearly every page has some crack piece of travel wisdom ... an accessible, inspiring journey." —Kirkus The Sell-Your-House, See-the-World Life! Reunited after thirty-five years and wrestling a serious case of wanderlust, Lynne and Tim Martin decided to sell their house and possessions and live abroad full-time. They've never looked back. With just two suitcases, two computers, and each other, the Martins embark on a global adventure, taking readers from sky-high pyramids in Mexico to Turkish bazaars to learning the contact sport of Italian grocery shopping. But even as they embrace their new home-free lifestyle, the Martins grapple with its challenges, including hilarious language barriers, finding financial stability, and missing the family they left behind. Together, they learn how to live a life—and love—without borders. Recently featured on NPR's Here and Now and in the New York Times, Home Sweet Anywhere is a road map for anyone who dreams of turning the idea of life abroad into a reality.

The Book of Ebenezer le Page

Author: G.B. Edwards
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176111
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Book Description
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island. G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.

Beautiful Country

Author: Qian Julie Wang
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593313003
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world—an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent • A TODAY SHOW #READWITHJENNA PICK In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly “shopping days,” when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all. But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

Indian Summer

Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849657442
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
Mr. Howells is giving us in ' Indian Summer' some of the very best work he has ever done; full of the same dainty piquantness, but alive with deeper sympathies and meanings. This is full, not merely of what average people say and do, but of what average people think and feel behind what they say and do. The difference between 'Silas Lapham' and 'Indian Summer' is like the difference between a pearl and an opal : the opal has a soul. Nothing could be more entertaining than the letter of Mrs. Bowen as a perfect illustration of a poor woman trying to be just, but unconsciously adding a touch to make it seem that the other woman has not won so much after all; while Colville's bright talk, Mr. Howells's allusion to his own work, and bits of description of the beautiful old garden, are as amusing as anything Mr. Howells has ever given; and to all this there is added a depth of significance lending dignity to the funniness.

The Book of Disappearance

Author: Ibtisam Azem
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815654839
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon’s translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.