A Luminous History of the Palm

A Luminous History of the Palm PDF Author: Jessica Sequeira
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578641164
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 70

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fiction. Short Stories. "This little book can be read as a series of small portraits through time, all of which include a palm tree. Or it can be read as a revolutionary tract. The palm is a symbol traced through history, a hidden portal to intimate moments that bring geographies and situations to life. A vital presence, it coaxes out vitality. It's everywhere once you start to look, a secret joyful emblem. A LUMINOUS HISTORY OF THE PALM would have been very easy to have spent a lifetime writing. Why the palm? Why not? Are abstract categories any better? Run your fingers over the leaves, help the plant to take root, sprinkle the water of your attention on the first story so it grows. Repeat the exercise a couple of dozen times. If you like, go on to create your own history on the basis of other trees, other flowers, other animals. Infinite stories proliferate, yet sprout from the same soil."--Jessica Sequeira

A Luminous History of the Palm

A Luminous History of the Palm PDF Author: Jessica Sequeira
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578641164
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 70

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fiction. Short Stories. "This little book can be read as a series of small portraits through time, all of which include a palm tree. Or it can be read as a revolutionary tract. The palm is a symbol traced through history, a hidden portal to intimate moments that bring geographies and situations to life. A vital presence, it coaxes out vitality. It's everywhere once you start to look, a secret joyful emblem. A LUMINOUS HISTORY OF THE PALM would have been very easy to have spent a lifetime writing. Why the palm? Why not? Are abstract categories any better? Run your fingers over the leaves, help the plant to take root, sprinkle the water of your attention on the first story so it grows. Repeat the exercise a couple of dozen times. If you like, go on to create your own history on the basis of other trees, other flowers, other animals. Infinite stories proliferate, yet sprout from the same soil."--Jessica Sequeira

Palm Oil Diaspora

Palm Oil Diaspora PDF Author: Case Watkins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108478824
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
An environmental history and political ecology of palm oil in colonial Brazil, the African diaspora, and the Atlantic World.

A Furious Oyster

A Furious Oyster PDF Author: Jessica Sequeira
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781723017520
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Get Book Here

Book Description
On a street of jacarandas in Santiago de Chile, a scientist in her laboratory analyses an intriguing set of data. Storms in the city are not only meteorological events, but generate a certain force that permits the dead to intervene in human lives before definitively passing on. Now the poet Neruda has appeared on the machine's radar, and the scientist is compiling a dossier dedicated to the writer. Her documentation includes Neruda's visits to Santiago as well as other fragments of his consciousness produced by the storm - lost memoirs, an erotic dream, impressions of the poet from the afterlife.From beyond the grave Neruda helps his followers, observes a budding romance, comforts a grieving hotel owner and sends literary enemies on a wild goose chase to the south of the country. The title A Furious Oyster comes from a line in Neruda's poem 'El desenterrado' [The unburied], in which the poet imagines the Spanish Count of Villamediana rising from his tomb to visit the earth, the 'furious oyster' of his ear once more able to hear the living.

Land of Smoke

Land of Smoke PDF Author: Sara Gallardo
Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
ISBN: 180533090X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Land of Smoke is one of my favourite books by one of my favourite Argentinian authors." – Samanta Schweblin, author of Seven Empty Houses Dazzling, hallucinatory short stories by a rediscovered Argentinian contemporary of García Márquez, whose groundbreaking novel January is being published in English for the first time Resplendent with otherworldly imagery and beguiling prose, Land of Smoke presents a uniquely compelling voice in Latin American literature. An old man wakes up one morning to find that his beloved garden, the envy of all his neighbours, is floating away with him on board. A young woman moves to Buenos Aires, bringing with her a replacement head. A meek German missionary leaves Paraguay for the Pampas, completely unprepared for what he will encounter there. Dazzling and hallucinatory, the stories collected here recall the masters of magical realism ­– but with Gallardo’s distinctive, idiosyncratic slant.

The Mad Fiddler

The Mad Fiddler PDF Author: Fernando Pessoa
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781955190183
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Absolute

The Absolute PDF Author: Daniel Guebel
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1644211610
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner.... Premio Municipal de la Novela 2021 Premio Nacional de Literatura Argentina 2018 Premio Literario de la Academia Argentina de Letras 2017 Best Novel Award by La Nación 2016 A provocative multigenerational exploration of creative genius, madness, and family relationships. With the ambition and density of style of Vladimir Nabokov or Olga Tokarczuk, this is a story both profound and handled with a light touch. The Absolute is a sprawling historical novel about the Deliuskin-Scriabin family, made up of six generations of geniuses and madmen. Beginning in the mid-18th century in Russia, across Europe and ending in late 20th-century Argentina, the characters’ lives play out in different branches of art, politics and science in such radical ways that they transform the world and its reality. The narrator’s ancestor, Frantisek Deliuskin, invents a new form of music in the 18th century; his son, Andrei Deliuskin, makes some marginal annotations to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola that are later interpreted by Lenin as an instruction manual to carry out the Russian Revolution of 1917; Esau Deliuskin, following the course of his father, creates a socialist utopian society; and down through the generations to the narrator, whose creation takes him back in time and space to the moment of the Big Bang. The Absolute is a monumental work about the creation of art and about family, about spiritual traditions and about throwing oneself into the world not to capture life but to create it, in and through words. “This is a masterpiece at a time when masterpieces seem impossible and at the same time challenges the very idea of a masterpiece. … It’s the novel one should read if they want to know what an artist is.” —La Nación

Other Paradises

Other Paradises PDF Author: Jessica Sequeira
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1785355864
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do people choose to play with ideas considered antiquated? Why do they elect to act in non-productive ways? Perhaps the question can be asked in reverse: What comes to mind when we think of technology? That which is practical, efficient, invisible, fast, optimistic, constantly updated. So how can one explain the search for the opposite, that which is useless, inefficient, physically present, slow, dystopian, obsolete and governed by chance? The matter of what motivates the search for ‘antiquated’ forms strikes deep into the heart of value. Are people simply following trends? Are they idiots? Are they sentimental? Are they artists? Are they interested in kitsch? Are they uninformed? Are they poets? Other Paradises is a collection of essays exploring imaginative responses to science and technology, and is about people who choose to build ‘other paradises’, fully conscious of the alternative they offer to the dominant paradigm of technological progress.

Trees of Life

Trees of Life PDF Author: Theodore W. Pietsch
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421411857
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Get Book Here

Book Description
Evolution.

Luminous Traitor

Luminous Traitor PDF Author: Martin Duberman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520970853
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Martin Duberman is a national treasure." —Masha Gessen, The New Yorker Roger Casement was an internationally renowned figure at the beginning of the 20th century, famous for exposing the widespread atrocities against the indigenous people in King Leopold's Congo and his subsequent exposure—for which he was knighted in 1911—of the brutal conditions of enslaved labor in Peru. An Irish nationalist of profound conviction, he attempted, at the outbreak of World War I, to obtain German support and weapons for an armed rebellion against British rule. Apprehended and convicted of treason in a notorious trial that captured worldwide attention, Casement was sentenced to die on the gallows. A powerful petition drive for the commutation of his sentence was inaugurated by George Bernard Shaw and a host of other influential figures. A gay man, Casement kept detailed diaries of his sexual escapades, and the British government, upon discovering the diaries, circulated its pages to public figures, thereby crippling what had been a mounting petition for clemency. In 1916, he was hanged. In this gripping reimagining, acclaimed historian Martin Duberman paints a full portrait of the man for the first time. Tracing his evolution from servant of the empire to his work as a humanitarian activist and anti-imperialist, Duberman resurrects and recognizes all facets—from the professional to the personal—of the fantastic life of this pioneer for human rights.

A Student of History

A Student of History PDF Author: Nina Revoyr
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1617756989
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Revoyr is gifted in her ability to deal with complex ideas like racism, class conflict, and sexuality without sacrificing the truth of her narrative. Furthermore, like the most adroit novelists, Revoyr specializes in reversal. All of her books are filled with suspense and sudden surprises that take the stories in unexpected directions...As much as Nina Revoyr herself is a student of history, she's also one of our best teachers." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Revoyr's latest noir tells a story that's somewhere between Sunset Boulevard and the darker regions of The Great Gatsby...Revoyr is a subtle observer of human foibles and social structures, and the result is one of the most insightful, and the most entertaining books of the year." --Literary Hub, one of Lit Hub's 50 Favorite Books of 2019 "A Student of History is full of research, detail, lush descriptions, and visual place-setting. [Revoyr's] a fiction writer with an eye for reality set in a dream-like world, often in her home city of Los Angeles." --The Rumpus "Any Nina Revoyr novel is a cause for celebration, and her latest, A Student of History, is assured and marvelous, an absorbing rags among riches tale about a broke USC grad student who finds himself swept off his feet by Los Angeles's insular, powerful .01% class. It's a contemporary novel that feels like an instant classic, with the wry tragedy of The House of Mirth, the sinister glamour of Sunset Boulevard, and a fresh, original point of view." --CrimeReads "With a nod to Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby, Rick Nagano is Nick Carraway and young Pip rolled into one...Lambda Award–winner Revoyr focuses on the impact of race in the construct of class and society, and how there are some doors that will always remain closed." --The Advocate "Nina Revyor's new novel, A Student of History, continues the tradition of the Los Angeles oil novel, but steers it in a new direction." --Rain Taxi Review of Books "With her two Walter Mosley-like gifts--impeccable narrative pacing and masterful command of Los Angeles' intricate, evolving dynamics of race and class--Nina Revoyr's LA novels convincingly capture the lifespan of Los Angeles as a major city, none more gracefully than A Student of History." --New York Journal of Books Rick Nagano is a graduate student in the history department at USC, struggling to make rent on his South Los Angeles apartment near the neighborhood where his family once lived. When he lands a job as a research assistant for the elderly Mrs. W--, the heir to an oil fortune, he sees it at first simply as a source of extra cash. But as he grows closer to the iconoclastic, charming, and feisty Mrs. W--, he gets drawn into a world of privilege and wealth far different from his racially mixed, blue-collar beginnings. Putting aside his half-finished dissertation, Rick sets up office in Mrs. W--'s grand Bel Air mansion and begins to transcribe her journals--which document an old Los Angeles not described in his history books. He also accompanies Mrs. W-- to venues frequented by the descendants of the land and oil barons who built the city. One evening, at an event, he meets Fiona Morgan--the elegant scion of an old steel family--who takes an interest in his studies. Irresistibly drawn to Fiona, he agrees to help her with a project of questionable merit in the hopes he'll win her favor. A Student of History explores both the beginnings of Los Angeles and the present-day dynamics of race and class. It offers a window into the usually hidden world of high society, and the influence of historic families on current events. Like Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby, it features, in Rick Nagano, a young man of modest means who is navigating a world where he doesn't belong.