Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811220524
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolano's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolano's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.") Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolano."
Author: Mary McGarry Morris
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307451887
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Light from a Distant Star is a gripping coming-of-age story with a brutal murder at its heart and a heroine as unforgettable as Harper Lee’s "Scout." It is early summer and Nellie Peck is on the cusp of adolescence--gangly, awkward, full of questions, but keenly observant and wiser than many of the adults in her life. The person she most admires is her father, Benjamin, a man of great integrity. His family’s century old hardware store is failing and Nellie’s mother has had to go back to work. Nellie’s older half-sister has launched a disturbing search for her birth father. Often saddled through the long, hot days with her timid younger brother, Henry, Nellie is determined to toughen him up. And herself as well. Three strangers enter Nellie’s protected life. Brooding Max Devaney is an ex-con who works in her surly grandfather’s junkyard. Reckless Bucky Saltonstall has just arrived from New York City to live with his elderly grandparents. And pretty Dolly Bedelia is a young stripper who rents the family’s small, rear apartment and becomes the titillating focus of Nellie’s eavesdropping. When violence erupts in the lovely Peck house, the prime suspect seems obvious. Nellie knows who the real murderer is, but is soon silenced by fear and the threat of scandal. The truth, as she sees it, is shocking and unthinkable, and with everyone’s eyes riveted on her in the courtroom, Nellie finds herself seized with doubt. No one will listen. No one believes her, and a man’s life hangs in the balance. A stunning evocation of innocence lost, Light from a Distant Star stands as an incredibly moving and powerful novel from one of America's finest writers.
Author: Samuel R. Delany
Publisher: iBooks
ISBN: 9781596874886
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
"Delany has a grasp of the evolutionary nature of mythology, a subtle comic touch, and a lyric sense of the outsider making his unorthodox way in the world--or worlds--that give his work a dimension unusual..."
Author: Shawn Smucker
Publisher: Revell
ISBN: 1493417738
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
When Cohen Marah steps over his father's body in the basement embalming room of the family's funeral home, he has no idea that he is stepping into a labyrinth of memory. As the last one to see his father, Cohen is the primary suspect. Over the next week, Cohen's childhood memories come back in living color. The dramatic events that led to his father being asked to leave his pastoral position. The game of baseball that somehow kept them together. And the two children in the forest who became his friends--and enlisted him in a dark and dangerous undertaking. As the lines blur between what was real and what was imaginary, Cohen is faced with the question he's been avoiding: Did he kill his father? In Light from Distant Stars, master story weaver Shawn Smucker relays a tale both eerie and enchanting, one that will have you questioning reality and reaching out for what is true, good, and genuine.
Author: Karen McQuestion
Publisher: Skyscape
ISBN: 9781477830161
Category : Audiobooks
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Seventeen-year-old Emma was the only one who hadn't given up on her boyfriend, Lucas. Everyone else--his family, his friends, his doctors--was convinced that any moment could be his last. So when Lucas miraculously returns from the brink of death, Emma thinks her prayers have been answered. As the surprised town rejoices, Emma begins to question whether Lucas is the same boy she's always known. When she finds an unidentifiable object on his family's farm--and government agents come to claim it--she begins to suspect that nothing is what it seems. Emma's out-of-this-world discovery may be the key to setting things right, but only if she and Lucas can evade the agents who are after what they have. With all her hopes and dreams on the line, Emma sets out to save the boy she loves. And with a little help from a distant star, she might just have a chance at making those dreams come true.
Author: Carolyn Williford
Publisher: David C Cook
ISBN: 0781406250
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
It All Comes Tumbling Down As a storm rages in the night, unwary drivers venture onto Tampa Bay’s most renowned bridge. No one sees the danger ahead. No one notices the jagged gap hidden by the darkness and rain. Yet when the bridge collapses vehicles careen into the churning waters of the bay below. In that one catastrophic moment, three powerful stories converge: a family ravaged by their child’s heartbreaking news, a marriage threatened by its own facade, and a college student burdened by self doubt. As each story unfolds, the characters move steadily closer to that fateful moment on the bridge. And while each character searches for grace, the storms in their lives loom as large as the storm that awaits them above the bay. When these characters intersect in Carolyn Williford’s gripping and moving volume of three novellas, they also collide with the transforming truth of Christ: Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.
Author: Franco Moretti
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781684812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of "Modern European Literature," through the geo-cultural insights of "Conjectures of World Literature" and "Planet Hollywood," to the quantitative findings of "Style, inc." and the abstract patterns of "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of "distant reading," that has come to define-well beyond the wildest expectations of its author-a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.
Author: Maurizio Salaris
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000392562
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
2022 Winner - CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The determination of stellar ages has been - and still is - crucial for the development of our understanding of the universe, and to constrain theoretical models for the formation of galaxies and the evolution of planetary systems. Stellar ages provide scientists with timescales, and these timescales allow us to identify the relevant physical processes responsible for the development of cosmic structures. This book describes in a simple, yet rigorous, manner the vast array of techniques that have been developed and are currently being used to determine the ages of stars. It also explores how stellar ages inform our knowledge about planets, star clusters, galaxies, even distant galaxies that we cannot resolve into individual stars. Up-to-date with the latest research and technologies in the field, it includes the cutting-edge methods being used based on asteroseismology and discusses open problems that remain to be pondered in future research. It will be of interest to advanced undergraduates and graduate students studying astronomy, in addition to the general public. Key Features Presents an entertaining and accessible approach whilst also providing a rigorous and comprehensive presentation of the subject Describes how to unveil the ages of stellar populations in distant galaxies that we cannot resolve into individual stars Contains historical notes about these techniques, outstanding major problems, and a discussion on future developments in the field
Author: Chris Gainor
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803222588
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
?Insightful, instructive, and definitely worth the read.??Greg Andres, Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada ?As someone who has been teaching a course on space exploration for many years and has visited most of NASA's space centers, I have found plenty of new and valuable material in To a Distant Day. . . . I recommend the book to all who wish to know more about the conditions, people, and discoveries between 1890 and 1960 that led to the space age.??Pangratios Papacosta, Physics Today Although the dream of flying is as old as the human imagination, the notion of rocketing into space may have originated with Chinese gunpowder experiments during the Middle Ages. Rockets as both weapons and entertainment are examined in this engaging history of how human beings acquired the ability to catapult themselves into space. Chris Gainor's irresistible narrative introduces us to pioneers such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth, who pointed the way to the cosmos by generating the earliest wave of international enthusiasm for space exploration. It shows us German engineer Wernher von Braun creating the V-2, the first large rocket, which, though opening the door to space, failed utterly as the ?wonder weapon? it was meant to be. From there Gainor follows the space race to the Soviet Union and the United States, giving us a close look at the competitive hysteria that led to Sputnik, satellites, space probes, and?finally?human flight into space in 1961. As much a story of cultural ambition and personal destiny as of scientific progress and technological history, To a Distant Day offers a complete and thoroughly compelling account of humanity's determined efforts?sometimes poignant, sometimes amazing, sometimes mad?to leave the earth behind.
Author: Judith Pella
Publisher: Bethany House
ISBN: 1441207120
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
The year is 1835 and Carolina Adams finds herself enchanted by an unlikely suitor...the railroad. Frustrated by society's expectations upon her gender, she longs to study more masculine subjects and is thrilled when her father grants her a tutor. James Baldwin arrives to serve as Carolina's teacher, but of more importance, he is to court Carolina's beautiful older sister, Virginia. Will expectations--and Virginia's southern charm--elicit the hoped-for proposal? Or will James and Carolina dare to acknowledge the mutual interests and feelings growing between them?
