The Broken Estate

The Broken Estate PDF Author: James Wood
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0804151903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revo- lutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is. In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.

The Broken Estate

The Broken Estate PDF Author: James Wood
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0804151903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revo- lutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is. In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.

The Broken Estate

The Broken Estate PDF Author: Mel Bunce
Publisher: Bridget Williams Books
ISBN: 0947518363
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
A lack of knowledge about the world can be a very dangerous thing. In the age of Trump, fake news and clickbait headlines, it is easy to despair about the future of journalism. The New Zealand and global media are in upheaval: the old economic models for print journalism are failing, public funding has been neglected for decades, and many major news organisations are shedding journalists. New Zealander Mel Bunce researches and teaches journalism at the acclaimed Department of Journalism at City, University of London. Drawing upon the latest international research, Bunce provides a fresh analysis that goes beyond the usual anecdote and conjecture. Insightful and impassioned, this short book provides a much-needed assessment of the future for New Zealand journalism in a troubled world.

Broken Trust

Broken Trust PDF Author: Samuel P. King
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824830144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop was the largest landowner and richest woman in the Hawaiian kingdom. Upon her death in 1884, she entrusted her property--"known as Bishop Estate--"to five trustees in order to create and maintain an institution that would benefit the children of Hawai'i: Kamehameha Schools. A century later, Bishop Estate controlled nearly one out of every nine acres in the state, a concentration of private land ownership rarely seen anywhere in the world. Then in August 1997 the unthinkable happened: Four revered kupuna (native Hawaiian elders) and a professor of trust-law publicly charged Bishop Estate trustees with gross incompetence and massive trust abuse. Entitled "Broken Trust," the statement provided devastating details of rigged appointments, violated trusts, cynical manipulation of the trust's beneficiaries, and the shameful involvement of many of Hawai'i's powerful. No one is better qualified to examine the events and personalities surrounding the scandal than two of the original "Broken Trust" authors.Their comprehensive account together with historical background, brings to light information that has never before been made public, including accounts of secret meetings and communications involving Supreme Court justices.

Broken Glass

Broken Glass PDF Author: Alex Beam
Publisher:
ISBN: 0399592717
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
"In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time--unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, whose discoveries put her in contention for the Nobel Prize, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began an intimate relationship, spending weekends together, sharing interests in transcendental philosophy, Catholic mysticism, wine-soaked picnics, and architecture. Their collaboration would produce one of the most important works of architecture of all time, a blindingly original house made up almost entirely of glass and steel. But the minimalist marvel, built in 1951, was plagued by cost over-runs and a sudden chilling of the two friends' mutual affection. Though the building became world-famous, Farnsworth found it impossible to live in the transparent house, and she began a public campaign against him, cheered on by Frank Lloyd Wright. Mies, in turn, sued her for unpaid monies. The ensuing trial covered not just the missing funds and the structural weaknesses of the home, but turned into a trial of modernist art and architecture itself. Interweaving personal drama and cultural history, Alex Beam presents a stylish, enthralling tapestry of a tale, illuminating the fascinating history behind one of the twentieth-century's most beautiful and significant architectural projects"--

The House of Broken Angels

The House of Broken Angels PDF Author: Luis Alberto Urrea
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316516252
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In this "raucous, moving, and necessary" story by a Pulitzer Prize finalist (San Francisco Chronicle), the De La Cruzes, a family on the Mexican-American border, celebrate two of their most beloved relatives during a joyous and bittersweet weekend. "All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death." In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home. Teeming with brilliance and humor, authentic at every turn, The House of Broken Angels is Luis Alberto Urrea at his best, and cements his reputation as a storyteller of the first rank. "Epic . . . Rambunctious . . . Highly entertaining." -- New York Times Book Review"Intimate and touching . . . the stuff of legend." -- San Francisco Chronicle"An immensely charming and moving tale." -- Boston GlobeNational Bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalistA New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the Year from National Public Radio, American Library Association, San Francisco Chronicle, BookPage, Newsday, BuzzFeed, Kirkus, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Literary Hub

Serious Noticing

Serious Noticing PDF Author: James Wood
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374722048
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
The definitive collection of literary essays by The New Yorker’s award-winning longtime book critic Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own. Together, Wood’s essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works, share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.

How Fiction Works

How Fiction Works PDF Author: James Wood
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374173401
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.

The Nearest Thing to Life

The Nearest Thing to Life PDF Author: James Wood
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611687438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works - among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to LifeÊis not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic - it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

The Fun Stuff

The Fun Stuff PDF Author: James Wood
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374159564
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Collects twenty-five essays critiquing the modern novel, analyzing the works of such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon.

The Broken House

The Broken House PDF Author: Horst Krüger
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473579619
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt' Sunday Times 'An unsparing, honest and insightful memoir, that shows how private failure becomes national disaster' Hilary Mantel Twenty years after the end of the war, Horst Krüger attempted to make sense of his childhood. He had grown up in a quiet Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary lives, believed in God, obeyed the law, and were gradually seduced by the promises of Nazism. He had been 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'. With tragic inevitability, this world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble. Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides a searing portrait of life under the Nazis.