Sweet Diamond Dust

Sweet Diamond Dust PDF Author: Rosario Ferre
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452277485
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Rosario Ferre uses family history as a metaphor for the class struggles and political evolution of Latin America and Puerto Rico in this highly provacative, profound, and delightfully readable collection of stories. Originally published in Spanish under the title Maldito Amor ("Cursed Love"), Sweet Diamond Dust introduced American readers to a voice that is by turns lyrical and wickedly satiric. In this tale the De La Valle family's secrets, ambitions, and passions, interwoven with the fate of the local sugar mill, are recounted by various relatives, friends, and servants. As the characters struggle under the burden of privilege, the story, permeated with haunting echoes of Puerto Rico's own turbulent history, becomes a splendid allegory for a nation's past. The three accompanying stories each follow the lives of the descendants of the De La Valle family, making the book a drama in four parts, raising troubling issues of race, religion, freedom, and sex, with Ferre's trademark irony and startling imagery.

Sweet Diamond Dust

Sweet Diamond Dust PDF Author: Rosario Ferre
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452277485
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rosario Ferre uses family history as a metaphor for the class struggles and political evolution of Latin America and Puerto Rico in this highly provacative, profound, and delightfully readable collection of stories. Originally published in Spanish under the title Maldito Amor ("Cursed Love"), Sweet Diamond Dust introduced American readers to a voice that is by turns lyrical and wickedly satiric. In this tale the De La Valle family's secrets, ambitions, and passions, interwoven with the fate of the local sugar mill, are recounted by various relatives, friends, and servants. As the characters struggle under the burden of privilege, the story, permeated with haunting echoes of Puerto Rico's own turbulent history, becomes a splendid allegory for a nation's past. The three accompanying stories each follow the lives of the descendants of the De La Valle family, making the book a drama in four parts, raising troubling issues of race, religion, freedom, and sex, with Ferre's trademark irony and startling imagery.

Dust and Other Stories

Dust and Other Stories PDF Author: T'aejun Yi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546343
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Yi T’aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea’s true masters of the short story—and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as “one who went north,” Yi’s work was banned until 1988. His momentous decision did not lead him to a safe haven, however: though initially welcomed into the literary establishment, North Korea sent him into internal exile in the 1950s, and little is known of his fate. Dust and Other Stories offers a selection of Yi’s stories across time and place, showcasing a superb stylist caught up in the midst of his era’s most urgent ideological and aesthetic divides. This collection unites his earlier modernist masterpieces from the colonial era with his little-known work penned during North Korea’s founding years, offering a rare glimpse into the making—and crossing—of the border between south and north. During the turbulent final years of Japanese rule, Yi’s elegant yet subdued stories championed both his native tongue and the belief in the capacity of art. In the heavily politicized environment of the North, his later works maintain a faith in the art of storytelling and a concern for the disappearance of customs in the throes of modernization. Throughout both eras, Yi focused on ordinary people: old men struggling to understand a changing world, lovers meeting up among ancient ruins, a lively widow targeted by a literacy campaign, a bourgeois couple trying to sustain themselves during the war by breeding rabbits, and more. Magnificently translated by Janet Poole, Yi’s work bears witness to global turmoil with a melancholic sense of enduring beauty.

Eyes in the Dust and Other Stories

Eyes in the Dust and Other Stories PDF Author: David Peak
Publisher: Trepidatio Publishing
ISBN: 9781950305629
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Phantom limbs, porous realities, and strange reflections shifting in black glass. The thirteen stories included in David Peak's decade-spanning collection explore how memory affects place and place affects memory, the traumas that haunt bodies like ghosts, and the desperation of needing to be seen and understood by others. Only in pulling back the bloody veil of this world may we be so blessed to see things as they really are-and not as we wish them to be. David Peak builds stories that are intricate structures, impossible monuments to human darkness. To read them is to feel something tap against a secret part of us, a hidden bone that refuses to be forgotten. -Nadia Bulkin, author of She Said Destroy David Peak writes like a black-winged emissary from the Void, and Eyes in the Dust and Other Stories is a travelogue behind the walls, beneath the surface, and through the worm-tunnels that pierce a dying world's heart. From fever dreams and haunted houses to fissures in reality and the emptiness beyond, no one else captures the aspects of the abyss like David Peak. -Gordon B. White, author of As Summer's Mask Slips and Other Disruptions

Words in the Dust

Words in the Dust PDF Author: Trent Reedy
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 054557806X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Winner of the Christopher Medal and a "heart-wrenching" Al Roker's Book Club selection on the Today Show. Zulaikha hopes. She hopes for peace, now that the Taliban have been driven from Afghanistan; a good relationship with her hard stepmother; and one day even to go to school, or to have her cleft palate fixed. Zulaikha knows all will be provided for her--"Inshallah," God willing. Then she meets Meena, who offers to teach her the Afghan poetry she taught her late mother. And the Americans come to her village, promising not just new opportunities and dangers, but surgery to fix her face. These changes could mean a whole new life for Zulaikha--but can she dare to hope they'll come true?

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory PDF Author: Caitlin Doughty
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245950
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
"Morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly)—a young mortician goes behind the scenes of her curious profession. Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life’s work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit. By turns hilarious, dark, and uplifting, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals how the fear of dying warps our society and "will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Daughters of the Dust

Daughters of the Dust PDF Author: Julie Dash
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593185560
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Drawing from the magical world of her iconic Sundance award-winning film, Julie Dash’s stand-alone novel tells another rich, historical tale of the Gullah-Geechee people: a multigenerational story about a Brooklyn College anthropology student who finds an unexpected homecoming when she heads to the South Carolina Sea Islands to study her ancestors. Set in the 1920s in the Sea Islands off the Carolina coast where the Gullah-Geechee people have preserved much of their African heritage and language, Daughters of the Dust chronicles the lives of the Peazants, a large, proud family who trace their origins to the Ibo, who were enslaved and brought to the islands more than one hundred years earlier. Native New Yorker and anthropology student Amelia Peazant has always known about her grandmother and mother’s homeland of Dawtuh Island, though she’s never understood why her family remains there, cut off from modern society. But when an opportunity arises for Amelia to head to the island to study her ancestry for her thesis, she is surprised by what she discovers. From her multigenerational clan she gathers colorful stories, learning about "the first man and woman," the slaves who walked across the water back home to Africa, the ways men and women need each other, and the intermingling of African and Native American cultures. The more she learns, the more Amelia comes to treasure her family and their traditions, discovering an especially strong kinship with her fiercely independent cousin, Elizabeth. Eyes opened to an entirely new world, Amelia must decide what’s next for her and find her role in the powerful legacy of her people. Daughters of the Dust is a vivid novel that blends folktales, history, and anthropology to tell a powerful and emotional story of homecoming, the reclamation of cultural heritage, and the enduring bonds of family.

I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust

I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust PDF Author: Valerie Gilpeer
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062984365
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A remarkable memoir by a mother and her autistic daughter who’d long been unable to communicate—until a miraculous breakthrough revealed a young woman with a rich and creative interior life, a poet, who’d been trapped inside for more than two decades. “I have been buried under years of dust and now I have so much to say.” These were the first words twenty-five-year-old Emily Grodin ever wrote. Born with nonverbal autism, Emily’s only means of communicating for a quarter of a century had been only one-word responses or physical gestures. That Emily was intelligent had never been in question—from an early age she’d shown clear signs that she understood what was going on though she could not express herself. Her parents, Valerie and Tom, sought every therapy possible in the hope that Emily would one day be able to reveal herself. When this miraculous breakthrough occurred, Emily was finally able to give insight into the life, frustrations, and joys of a person with autism. She could tell her parents what her younger years had been like and reveal all the emotions and intelligence residing within her; she became their guide into the autistic experience. Told by Valerie, with insights and stories and poetry from Emily, I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust highlights key moments of Emily’s childhood that led to her communication awakening—and how her ability rapidly accelerated after she wrote that first sentence. As Valerie tells her family’s story, she shares the knowledge she’s gained from working as a legal advocate for families affected by autism and other neurological disorders. A story of unconditional love, faith in the face of difficulty, and the grace of perseverance and acceptance, I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust is an evocative and affecting mother-daughter memoir of learning to see each other for who they are.

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Breath, Eyes, Memory PDF Author: Edwidge Danticat
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1616955023
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The 20th anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, now an established classic--revised and with a new introduction by the author, and including extensive bonus materials At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.

Dust Girl

Dust Girl PDF Author: Sarah Zettel
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 037598318X
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Fans of Libba Bray’s The Diviners will love the blend of fantasy and twentieth-century history in this stylish series. Callie LeRoux is choking on dust. Just as the biggest dust storm in history sweeps through the Midwest, Callie discovers her mother's long-kept secret. Callie’s not just mixed race—she's half fairy, too. Now, Callie's fairy kin have found where she's been hidden, and they're coming for her. While dust engulfs the prairie, magic unfolds around Callie. Buildings flicker from lush to shabby, and people aren’t what they seem. The only person Callie can trust may be Jack, the charming ex-bootlegger she helped break out of jail. From the despair of the Dust Bowl to the hot jazz of Kansas City and the dangerous beauties of the fairy realm, Sarah Zettel creates a world rooted equally in American history and in magic, where two fairy clans war over a girl marked by prophecy. A strong example of diversity in YA, the American Fairy Trilogy introduces Callie LeRoux, a half-black teen who stars in this evocative story full of American history and fairy tales. Supports the Common Core State Standards.

Diamonds and Dust: A Sheryl McCorry Memoir 1

Diamonds and Dust: A Sheryl McCorry Memoir 1 PDF Author: Sheryl McCorry
Publisher: Pan Australia
ISBN: 1741981085
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Sheryl McCorry grew up in the outback carrying crocodiles to school for show and tell. When she was 18 her family moved to Broome, and it was the first time she'd ever used a telephone or seen a television. A year later, only hours after being railroaded into marriage by a fast-talking Yank, Sheryl locked eyes with Bob McCorry, a drover and buffalo shooter. When her marriage ended after only a few months, they began a love affair that would last a lifetime and take them to the Kimberley's harshest frontiers. Sheryl became the only woman in a team of stockmen. She soon learned how to run rogue bulls and to outsmart the neighbours in the toughest game of all - mustering cattle. The playing field was a million acres of unfenced, unmarked boundaries. Sheryl went on to become the first woman in the Kimberley to run two million-acre cattle stations, but her life was not without its share of tragedy. Her story is an epic saga of life in one of the toughest and most beautiful terrains in Australia - a story of hardship, drought, joy and triumph.