Author: Margaret Mahy
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780679840008
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
A collection of nine stories in which characters encounter talking plants, a pine-tree man, a merry-go-round with flying horses, mystical midnight birds, and a cake-eating tree.
Author: Bernadette Murphy
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374716021
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
The best-known and most sensational event in Vincent van Gogh’s life is also the least understood. For more than a century, biographers and historians seeking definitive facts about what happened on a December night in Arles have unearthed more questions than answers. Why would an artist at the height of his powers commit such a brutal act? Who was the mysterious “Rachel” to whom he presented his macabre gift? Did he use a razor or a knife? Was it just a segment—or did Van Gogh really lop off his entire ear? In Van Gogh’s Ear, Bernadette Murphy reveals, for the first time, the true story of this long-misunderstood incident, sweeping away decades of myth and giving us a glimpse of a troubled but brilliant artist at his breaking point. Murphy’s detective work takes her from Europe to the United States and back, from the holdings of major museums to the moldering contents of forgotten archives. She braids together her own thrilling journey of discovery with a narrative of Van Gogh’s life in Arles, the sleepy Provençal town where he created his finest work, and vividly reconstructs the world in which he moved—the madams and prostitutes, café patrons and police inspectors, shepherds and bohemian artists. We encounter Van Gogh’s brother and benefactor Theo, his guest and fellow painter Paul Gauguin, and many local subjects of Van Gogh’s paintings, some of whom Murphy identifies for the first time. Strikingly, Murphy uncovers previously unknown information about “Rachel”—and uses it to propose a bold new hypothesis about what was occurring in Van Gogh’s heart and mind as he made a mysterious delivery to her doorstep. As it reopens one of art history’s most famous cold cases, Van Gogh’s Ear becomes a fascinating work of detection. It is also a study of a painter creating his most iconic and revolutionary work, pushing himself ever closer to greatness even as he edged toward madness—and one fateful sweep of the blade that would resonate through the ages.
Author: Alvin Schwartz
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0064440907
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 68
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Book Description
Creak... Crash... BOO! Shivering skeletons, ghostly pirates, chattering corpses, and haunted graveyards...all to chill your bones! Share these seven spine-tingling stories in a dark, dark room.
Author:
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0375810838
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
A bright and irresistible invitation to reading, You Read to Me & I’ll Read to You will inspire a love of reading—and reading aloud—in children and parents alike. Compiled by Janet Schulman, editor of the bestselling The 20th-Century Children’s Book Treasury, this anthology is full of stories from both renowned classic children’s book creators and dazzling newer voices in children’s literature. Each of the 26 selections features original illustrations and complete text from such illustrious authors and artists as Maurice Sendak, James Marshall, Judy Blume, Ursula Le Guin, William Steig, and Roald Dahl. From picture books to short novels, from the poignant to the magical to the just plain silly, these stories have been carefully chosen for broad appeal, accessibility, and high literary quality, making You Read to Me & I’ll Read to You a must-have book for all families who want to inspire their children to develop a lifelong love of reading.
Author: Elizabeth McGregor
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553586726
Category : Architects
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Hailed for her “remarkably accomplished and poignant work” (Washington Post), acclaimed author Elizabeth McGregor returns with a haunting love story about two lost souls brought together by chance—and bonded forever by a mystery that transcends madness, tragedy, and time itself.... Catherine Sergeant is adept at going through the motions. After losing her parents at an early age, she buried her grief in the study of antiquities. Now, deserted by her husband without warning or explanation, she reports to work at Pearson’s auction house, exchanging pleasantries with colleagues, never revealing her pain. Cocooned in loneliness, she couldn’t be more surprised to find herself opening up to a total stranger—a new client, no less. In widowed architect John Brigham, Catherine finds a kindred spirit. The two share a fascination with Richard Dadd, an early Victorian painter who lived most of his life incarcerated in an insane asylum. There he produced his most stunning works—works that have deeply moved Catherine and now draw her inexorably to John. Soon the two are falling in love. The reawakening of passion in a woman like Catherine is more than John ever hoped for. But when she discovers his possession of an unknown Dadd, it is just the first in a series of revelations that leave her wondering if she knows this man who has shown her life’s true beauty. For John, it may be a last chance to free himself from the priceless secrets he has been harboring too long. Secrets about a soul laid bare on canvas, and a legacy that could shatter all he holds dear in the space of a heartbeat… A compelling blend of human drama, art, and history, this intriguing tale casts a spell that lingers far beyond the final page—and celebrates the strength we all must find within our hearts. From the Hardcover edition.
Author: Elizabeth Cooke
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504006917
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
A shared obsession with a Victorian painter brings together two strangers in Elizabeth Cooke’s extraordinary novel about the timelessness of art and love Catherine Sergeant loses people. First her parents died, leaving her alone in the world. Now her husband, Robert, has just walked out without warning or explanation. Catherine conceals her pain and sticks to life’s comforting routines, reporting for work as usual at the fine-arts auction house she co-owns. Then she meets widowed architect John Brigham. Catherine and John feel an immediate connection. They are both fascinated by the paintings of Richard Dadd, a Victorian artist who murdered his father and was locked away in an insane asylum. Interweaving the present with fleeting snapshots of the past—Dadd in moments of lunacy and lucidity that culminate in the act of creation—The Girl in the Green Glass Mirror takes readers to that exalted place where reality and creativity intersect. Filled with vibrant, unforgettable characters, it is a novel of discovery, reawakened passion, and the ability of art to shape lives and transcend madness, tragedy, and even time itself.
Author: Jeanette Winter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442441216
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40
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Book Description
Renowned picture book creator Jeanette Winter tells the story of a young girl in Afghanistan who attends a secret school for girls. Young Nasreen has not spoken a word to anyone since her parents disappeared. In despair, her grandmother risks everything to enroll Nasreen in a secret school for girls. Will a devoted teacher, a new friend, and the worlds she discovers in books be enough to draw Nasreen out of her shell of sadness? Based on a true story from Afghanistan, this inspiring book will touch readers deeply as it affirms both the life-changing power of education and the healing power of love.
Author: Derek B. Miller
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1925307727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
From the author of Norwegian By Night comes a new novel about two men on a misbegotten quest to save the girl they failed to save decades before. 1991. Near Checkpoint Zulu, one hundred miles from the Kuwaiti border, Thomas Benton meets Arwood Hobbes. Benton is a British journalist who reports from war zones, in part to avoid his lacklustre marriage and a daughter he loves but cannot connect with; Hobbes is a midwestern American private who might be an insufferable ignoramus, or might be a brilliant lunatic with a death wish — it’s hard to tell. Operation Desert Storm is over, peace has been declared, but as they argue about whether it makes sense to cross the nearest border in search of an ice cream, they become embroiled in a horrific attack in which a young local girl in a green dress is shot in the back and dies in Hobbes’s arms. The two men walk away into their respective lives. But something has cracked for them both. Twenty-two years later, in another place, in another war, the two men meet again. Benton and relief worker Märta Ström are persuaded by a much-changed Hobbes to embark on what may be a fool’s errand in a last-chance effort to redeem themselves when the girl in green is found alive and in need of salvation. Or is she? Set against the war-torn landscape of a shattered Iraq, The Girl in Green is an adventure story told with all the wit, humanity, and insight of Miller’s acclaimed debut. PRAISE FOR DEREK B. MILLER ‘A suspenseful, character-driven, eerily prescient moral thriller.’ The Saturday Age ‘Miller brilliantly blends offbeat reflection and dark emotion ... A penetrating, poetic, and unexpectedly disarming book about the ageless conflict in the Middle East.’ Kirkus
Author: Aleksandr Jarid
Publisher: The Blue Print Works Limited
ISBN: 1739763386
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Have you ever wondered why you make certain choices in life and not others? How certain are you that the choices you make are indeed made by you and not some other force outside your conscious control? What may seem like an unimportant event at a moment in your day, may actually have profound consequences from there onwards which you will not understand for many years yet. It took 92 years for him to find the true meaning of 23 minutes of his life that altered his world. A world that involved the globe, power, death but ultimately 23 minutes of pure love and lemons.
Author: Randolph Stow
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 192225309X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
He thought of his dream, of how he had looked up out of his hole, his pit, his wolf-pit, and seen the foreign leaves, which had formed themselves into a face... Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare’s present. Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished. He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite. For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’. Praise for The Girl Green as Elderflower ‘As eccentric as it is magnificently achieved.’ Geordie Williamson ‘His novels and poetry embody a uniquely rich and strange account of the land and people of Australia that we can ill afford to lose.’ Australian Book Review
