Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories

Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories PDF Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803217900
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce. Packed with lyrical prose and vivid detail, acclaimed writer Katherine Vaz conjures a captivating blend of Old World heritage and New World culture to explore the links between families, friends, strangers, and their world. ø From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl?s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother?s yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours.

Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories

Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories PDF Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803217900
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book

Book Description
The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce. Packed with lyrical prose and vivid detail, acclaimed writer Katherine Vaz conjures a captivating blend of Old World heritage and New World culture to explore the links between families, friends, strangers, and their world. ø From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl?s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother?s yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours.

Fado and Other Stories

Fado and Other Stories PDF Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822978849
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
• Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden's fruit: "In the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen."Vaz's beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. "Listen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose," on character sings, "that the song might be more beautiful." Such a verse might describe Vaz's own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject's ambiguities and her characters' conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life's discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.

Mariana

Mariana PDF Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: Aliform Publishing
ISBN: 9780970765291
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description


Bliss and Other Short Stories

Bliss and Other Short Stories PDF Author: Ted Gilley
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803233566
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this daring collection of nine stories introduces readers to an edgy vision and a world in which certainties are tested and found wanting. A Cambodian refugee negotiates the icy waters of American social and sexual life. A young couple seeks "peak experiences" to escape grief, only to discover that they've brought it along with them. A teenage girl, unable to face the imminent end of her grandfather's life, risks her own life in an impulsive act. A man's fragile hold on reality becomes the key to his finding, albeit through a terrifying labyrinth, his heart's desire. The characters inBliss and Other Short Storiesmust find their way to a truth that, though less than perfect, is one they can live with. Finding bliss, it seems, is as much about pain as about pleasure, and in Ted Gilley's writing the discovery is always exquisite.

Interpreter of Maladies

Interpreter of Maladies PDF Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 039592720X
Category : East Indian Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
In nine stories imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, Lahiri charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.

Saudade

Saudade PDF Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: Saint Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 9780312144081
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The exotic Clara, born deaf on a Portuguese island steeped in legend and mystery, relocates to northern California, where her profound sense of longing drives her to create her own language to express her sensual vitality. Reprint.

In Pursuit of Their Dreams

In Pursuit of Their Dreams PDF Author: Jerry R. Williams
Publisher: Tagus
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Jerry Williams' history of Azorean immigration to the United States offers us valuable insight into the experience and culture of Portuguese immigrants and their descendents. This account fills a major gap in American immigration history and gives us a comprehensive overview of how Portuguese-Americans--now numbering close to a million people--have come to constitute a vibrant and highly visible presence within southeastern New England, the areas around San Francisco and San Diego, Hawaii, and the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area. Even though Azorean immigrants all came from similar cultural and social backgrounds, Williams shows how regionally specific opportunity structures and social hierarchies have contributed to significant differences within the Portuguese-American experience. Starting with the whaling routes that first connected the mid-Atlantic archipelago with the ports of call in New England and California in the early 1800s, Williams lays out the complex relationship between the Azores and the US that has continued into the present. We learn how particular patterns of poverty, overpopulation and social inequality in the Azores pushed large numbers of the islands' inhabitants to leave their homes in search of better opportunities for themselves and their children. He tells the story of how the early whalers who jumped ship in New Bedford, San Francisco, or Hawaii were followed by kin and fellow villagers who had heard of plentiful jobs in New England's textile mills, gold and land in California, or agricultural work on Hawaiian plantations. Williams' account allows us to understand the importance of family and community connections throughout the immigrants' arduous transition from peasant life to industrial society.

Now We Will Be Happy

Now We Will Be Happy PDF Author: Amina Gautier
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803256906
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Now We Will Be Happy is a prize-winning collection of stories about Afro-Puerto Ricans, U.S.-mainland-born Puerto Ricans, and displaced native Puerto Ricans who are living between spaces while attempting to navigate the unique culture that defines Puerto Rican identity. Amina Gautier’s characters deal with the difficulties of bicultural identities in a world that wants them to choose only one. The characters in Now We Will Be Happy are as unpredictable as they are human. A teenage boy leaves home in search of the mother he hasn’t seen since childhood; a granddaughter is sent across the ocean to broker peace between her relatives; a widow seeks to die by hurricane; a married woman takes a bathtub voyage with her lover; a proprietress who is the glue that binds her neighborhood cannot hold on to her own son; a displaced wife develops a strange addiction to candles. Crossing boundaries of comfort, culture, language, race, and tradition in unexpected ways, these characters struggle valiantly and doggedly to reconcile their fantasies of happiness with the realities of their existence.

American Grown

American Grown PDF Author: Michelle Obama
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307956024
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The former First Lady, author of Becoming, and producer and star of Waffles + Mochi tells the inspirational story of the White House Kitchen Garden and how gardens can transform our lives and the health of our communities. Early in her tenure as First Lady, despite being a novice gardener, Michelle Obama planted a kitchen garden on the White House’s South Lawn. To her delight, she watched as fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs sprouted from the ground. Soon the White House Kitchen Garden inspired a new conversation all across the country about the food we feed our families and the impact it has on the nutrition and well-being of our children. In American Grown, Mrs. Obama invites you inside the White House Kitchen Garden, from the first planting to the satisfaction of the seasonal harvest. She reveals her early worries and struggles—would the new plants even grow?—and her joy as lettuce, corn, tomatoes, collards and kale, sweet potatoes and rhubarb flourished in the freshly tilled soil. She shares the stories of other gardens that have moved and inspired her on her journey across the nation. And she offers what she learned about planting your own backyard, school, or community garden. American Grown features: • a behind-the-scenes look at every season of the garden’s growth • unique recipes created by White House chefs • striking original photographs that bring the White House garden to life • a fascinating history of community gardens in the United States From a modern-day vegetable truck that brings fresh produce to underserved communities in Chicago, to Houston office workers who make the sidewalk bloom, to a New York City school that created a scented garden for the visually impaired, to a garden in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that devotes its entire harvest to those less fortunate, American Grown isn’t just the story of a single garden. It’s a celebration of the bounty of our nation and a reminder of what we can all grow together.

Luso-American Literature

Luso-American Literature PDF Author: Robert Henry Moser
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813550572
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants have had a significant presence in North America since the nineteenth century. Recently, Brazilians have also established vibrant communities in the U.S. This anthology brings together, for the first time in English, the writings of these diverse Portuguese-speaking, or "Luso-American" voices. Historically linked by language, colonial experience, and cultural influence, yet ethnically distinct, Luso-Americans have often been labeled an "invisible minority." This collection seeks to address this lacuna, with a broad mosaic of prose, poetry, essays, memoir, and other writings by more than fifty prominent literary figures--immigrants and their descendants, as well as exiles and sojourners. It is an unprecedented gathering of published, unpublished, forgotten, and translated writings by a transnational community that both defies the stereotypes of ethnic literature, and embodies the drama of the immigrant experience.