City Fictions

City Fictions PDF Author: Amanda Holmes
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Using concepts from urban and cultural studies, City Fictions examines the representation of the city in the works of five important late-twentieth-century Spanish American authors, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Christina Peri Rossi, Diamela Eltit, and Carlos Monsavais. While each of these authors is influenced at least partially by a specific Spanish American city, be it Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Santiago, the element that brings them together is the way in which the city is fictionalized in their work: they all equate both language and the body with urban space. In these metaphors, language breaks down and the body disintegrates, creating a disturbing picture of violent decline. The poetry of Paz associates the urban surroundings with dissolving sentences and desensitized, fingertips; for Cortazar, characters walking through cities are seen as both creating and unraveling written texts;

City Fictions

City Fictions PDF Author: Amanda Holmes
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
Using concepts from urban and cultural studies, City Fictions examines the representation of the city in the works of five important late-twentieth-century Spanish American authors, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Christina Peri Rossi, Diamela Eltit, and Carlos Monsavais. While each of these authors is influenced at least partially by a specific Spanish American city, be it Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Santiago, the element that brings them together is the way in which the city is fictionalized in their work: they all equate both language and the body with urban space. In these metaphors, language breaks down and the body disintegrates, creating a disturbing picture of violent decline. The poetry of Paz associates the urban surroundings with dissolving sentences and desensitized, fingertips; for Cortazar, characters walking through cities are seen as both creating and unraveling written texts;

Land Fictions

Land Fictions PDF Author: D. Asher Ghertner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753746
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

The Book of Tokyo

The Book of Tokyo PDF Author: Hideo Furukawa
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’

Premonition

Premonition PDF Author: Randall Scott Ingermanson
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 9780310247050
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
An extraordinary stone box was recently discovered in Jerusalem---the bone-box of 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.' This is his story . . . It's the year A.D. 57 and Jerusalem teeters on the brink of revolt against Rome. James, leader of the Jewish Christian community, has an enemy in high places. And two very strange friends . . . Rivka Meyers is a Messianic Jewish archaeologist from California, trapped in first-century Jerusalem by a physics experiment gone horribly wrong. Ari Kazan is her husband, an Israeli physicist slowly coming to grips with his Jewish heritage---and with a man named Jesus he was raised to hate. With no way back to their own century, Rivka and Ari seek their niche in this doomed city of God. Ari applies his knowledge of physics to become an engineer, a man of honor. Rivka feels increasingly isolated in a patriarchal culture that treats women like children. She knows what's coming---siege, famine, fire. At first, her warnings earn her grudging respect as a 'seer woman.' But when one of her predictions misses, the city scorns her as a false prophet. Rivka knows that an illegal trial and execution awaits James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. Can she prevent this disaster? Will James believe her 'premonition'? Or is Ari right that Rivka's meddling in history will only . . . make matters worse?

The Book of Havana

The Book of Havana PDF Author: Daniel Chavarria
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN: 1912697041
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
When a history teacher decides to throw out an old, threadbare Cuban flag, he doesn’t plan for the air of suspicion that quickly descends on him… A woman’s attempt to register ownership of her family home draws her into a bureaucratic labyrinth that requires a grasp of higher mathematics to fully comprehend… On the day of their graduation, a group of students spend the night drinking around the ‘Fountain of Youth’, ironically celebrating the bright future that doesn’t await them… The stories gathered in this anthology reflect the many complex challenges Havana’s citizens have had to endure as a result of their country’s political isolation – from the hardships of the ‘Special Period’, to the pitfalls of Cuba’s schizophrenic currency system, to the indignities of becoming a cheap tourist destination for well-heeled Westerners. Moving through various moments in its recent history, as well as through different neighbourhoods – from the prefab, Soviet-era maze of Alamar, to the bars and nightclubs of the Malecón and Vedado – these stories also demonstrate the defiance of Havana: surviving decades of economic disappointment with a flair for the comic, the surreal and the fantastical that remains as fresh as the first dreams of revolution. Translated from the Spanish by Orsola Casagrande and Séamas Carraher.

The Book of Jakarta

The Book of Jakarta PDF Author: utiuts
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN: 1912697505
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
A young woman takes a driverless taxi through the streets of Jakarta, only to discover that the destination she is hurtling towards is now entirely submerged... A group of elderly women visit a famous amusement park for one last ride, but things don’t go quite according to plan... The day before her wedding, a bride risks everything to meet her former lover at their favourite seafood restaurant on the other side of the tracks... Despite being the world’s fourth largest nation – made up of over 17,000 islands – very little of Indonesian history and contemporary politics are known to outsiders. From feudal states and sultanates to a Cold War killing field and a now struggling, flawed democracy – the country’s political history, as well as its literature, defies easy explanation. Like Indonesia itself, the capital city Jakarta is a multiplicity; irreducible, unpredictable and full of surprises. Traversing the different neighbourhoods and districts, the stories gathered here attempt to capture the essence of contemporary Jakarta and its writing, as well as the ever-changing landscape of the fastest-sinking city in the world. Translated by Mikael Johani, Zoe McLaughlin, Shaffira Gayatri, Khairani Barokka, Daniel Owen, Paul Agusta, Eliza Vitri Handayani, Syarafina Vidyadhana, Rara Rizal and Annie Tucker.

Postcolonial Paris

Postcolonial Paris PDF Author: Laila Amine
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299315800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Expanding the narrow script of what it means to be Parisian, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art made by Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens PDF Author: John O. Jordan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107494192
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens contains fourteen specially-commissioned chapters by leading international scholars, who together provide diverse but complementary approaches to the full span of Dickens's work, with particular focus on his major fiction. The essays cover the whole range of Dickens's writing, from Sketches by Boz through The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Separate chapters address important thematic topics: childhood, the city, and domestic ideology. Others consider formal features of the novels, including their serial publication and Dickens's distinctive use of language. Three final chapters examine Dickens in relation to work in other media: illustration, theatre, and film. Each essay provides guidance to further reading. The volume as a whole offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers, as well as fresh insights, informed by recent critical theory, that will be of interest to scholars and teachers of the novels.

The Cubical City

The Cubical City PDF Author: Janet Flanner
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504073258
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The New Yorker’s legendary Paris correspondent explores life and love in the Jazz Age in this novel inspired by her days in Greenwich Village. From the 1920s to the 1970s, Janet Flanner kept Americans abreast of the goings-on in Paris with a biweekly New Yorker column written under the name Genêt. But before she became one of the country’s most famous expats, she lived among the artists and writers of the Algonquin Round Table. Flanner shares a vivid depiction of the New York she knew in this tale of a young woman’s self-discovery. Having left Ohio in search of liberation, Delia Poole struggles to find her place in the big city. After getting work as a costume designer for musical revues, she and her dear friend Nancy are finally finding happiness on their own terms. But nothing is simple. From her adoring suitor, Paul, to her widowed mother’s decision to move to New York, Delia must grapple with expectations, responsibilities, and her own uncertainty. The Cubical City is Janet Flanner’s only published novel. Though homosexuality is never overtly expressed, it is considered by literary scholars to be one of the first examples of modernist lesbian literature.

The Book of Tbilisi

The Book of Tbilisi PDF Author: Gela Chkvanava
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN: 1910974315
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
A rookie reporter, searching for his first big story, re-opens a murder case that once saw crowds of protestors surround Tbilisi's central police station... A piece of romantic graffiti chalked outside a new apartment block sends its residents into a social media frenzy, trying to identify the two lovers implicated by it.... A war-orphaned teenager looks after his dying sister in an abandoned railway carriage on the edge of town, hoping that someday soon the state will take care of them... In the 26 years since Georgia declared independence from the Soviet Union, the country and its capital, Tbilisi, have endured unimaginable hardships: one coup d'état, two wars with Russia, the cancer of organised crime, and prolonged periods of brutalising, economic depression. Now, as the city begins to flourish again – drawing hordes of tourists with its eclectic architecture and famous, welcoming spirit – it's difficult to reconcile the recent past with this glamorous and exotic present. With wit, warmth, heartbreaking realism, and a distinctly Georgian sense of neighbourliness, these ten stories do just that. 'Acts as an introduction to a literature quite neglected by the Anglophone world... the language consistently has the direct, clean and unadorned quality of great fiction.' – Luke Kennard. ‘A soaring, searing collection – important new stories that are sure to live long in the memory.’ – Eley Williams, author of Attrib. Published with the support of the Georgian National Book Center and the Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia.