The God Who Begat a Jackal

The God Who Begat a Jackal PDF Author: Nega Mezlekia
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1466893257
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A Library Journal Best Book Nega Mezlekia's memoir Notes from the Hyena's Belly was described in the New York Times Book Review as "the most riveting book about Ethiopia since Ryszard Kapuscinski's literary allegory The Emperor and the most distinguished African literary memoir since Soyinka's Aké appeared 20 years ago." Mezlekia now offers a first novel steeped in African folklore and teeming with the class, ethnic and religious struggles of pre-colonial Africa. In The God Who Begat a Jackal, the 17th-century feudal system, vassal uprisings, religious mythology, and the Crusades are intertwined with the love between Aster, the daughter of a feudal lord, and Gudu, the court jester and family slave. Aster and Gudu's relationship is the ultimate taboo, but supernatural elements presage a destiny more powerful than the rule of man. With Mezlekia's enchanting storytelling and ironic humor, readers glimpse African deities that have long since weathered away and the social cleavages that have endured through time.

The God Who Begat a Jackal

The God Who Begat a Jackal PDF Author: Nega Mezlekia
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1466893257
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A Library Journal Best Book Nega Mezlekia's memoir Notes from the Hyena's Belly was described in the New York Times Book Review as "the most riveting book about Ethiopia since Ryszard Kapuscinski's literary allegory The Emperor and the most distinguished African literary memoir since Soyinka's Aké appeared 20 years ago." Mezlekia now offers a first novel steeped in African folklore and teeming with the class, ethnic and religious struggles of pre-colonial Africa. In The God Who Begat a Jackal, the 17th-century feudal system, vassal uprisings, religious mythology, and the Crusades are intertwined with the love between Aster, the daughter of a feudal lord, and Gudu, the court jester and family slave. Aster and Gudu's relationship is the ultimate taboo, but supernatural elements presage a destiny more powerful than the rule of man. With Mezlekia's enchanting storytelling and ironic humor, readers glimpse African deities that have long since weathered away and the social cleavages that have endured through time.

The God Who Begat a Jackal

The God Who Begat a Jackal PDF Author: Nega Mezlekia
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312287011
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
From the author of the hugely acclaimed memoir "Notes from the Hyena's Belly" comes a first novel steeped in African folklore and teeming with the class, ethnic, and religious struggles of pre-colonial Africa. Set in 17th-century Abyssinia, this page-turning drama offers readers a glimpse of African deities that have long since faded away and the social cleavages that have endured through time.

Notes from the Hyena's Belly

Notes from the Hyena's Belly PDF Author: Nega Mezlekia
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1466893249
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Winner of the Governor General's Award A Library Journal Best Book of 2001 Part autobiography and part social history, Nega Mezlekia's Notes from the Hyena's Belly offers an unforgettable portrait of Ethiopia, and of Africa, during the 1970s and '80s, an era of civil war, widespread famine, and mass execution. "We children lived like the donkey," Mezlekia remembers, "careful not to wander off the beaten trail and end up in the hyena's belly." His memoir sheds light not only on the violence and disorder that beset his native country, but on the rich spiritual and cultural life of Ethiopia itself. Throughout, he portrays the careful divisions in dress, language, and culture between the Muslims and Christians of the Ethiopian landscape. Mezlekia also explores the struggle between western European interests and communist influences that caused the collapse of Ethiopia's social and political structure—and that forced him, at age 18, to join a guerrilla army. Through droughts, floods, imprisonment, and killing sprees at the hands of military juntas, Mezlekia survived, eventually emigrating to Canada. In Notes from the Hyena's Belly he bears witness to a time and place that few Westerners have understood.

The Unfortunate Marriage of Azeb Yitades

The Unfortunate Marriage of Azeb Yitades PDF Author: Nega Mezlekia
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780143053064
Category : Ethiopia
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s, "The Unfortunate Marriage of Azeb Yitades" is an epic tale of a small village in eastern Ethiopia struggling to maintain its identity and heritage as the modern world encroaches on its isolation. Aba Yitades, the local priest, takes this challenge very personally. The father of three daughters, he is always alert to the new temptations they face--and never more so than when the arrival of a family of American missionaries threatens to put an end to the community's most treasured traditions. Steeped in the rich and unique culture of the Ethiopian highlands, this story of a village's reluctant but inevitable modernization--and one woman's tragic downfall--is told with Nega Mezlekia's customary wit and charm.

Contemporary Authors

Contemporary Authors PDF Author: Scot Peacock
Publisher: Contemporary Authors
ISBN: 9780787645960
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Your students and users will find biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers in this volume of Contemporary Authors(R).

Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature

Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature PDF Author: Tanure Ojaide
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137560037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Literature remains one of the few disciplines that reflect the experiences, sensibility, worldview, and living realities of its people. Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways. Politics itself has come to intersect and impact on most, if not all, aspects of the African reality. This relationship of literature with African people’s lives and condition forms the setting of this study. Tanure Ojaide’s Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature: Personally Speaking belongs with a well-established tradition of personal reflections on literature by African creative writer-critics. Ojaide’s contribution brings to the table the perspective of what is now recognized as a “second generation” writer, a poet, and a concerned citizen of Nigeria’s Niger Delta area.

Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature

Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature PDF Author: Allen Stroud
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538166070
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 579

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Book Description
Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.

Stories about Stories

Stories about Stories PDF Author: Brian Attebery
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199316074
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
The first comprehensive study of fantasy's uses of myth, this book offers insights into the genre's popularity and cultural importance. Combining history, folklore, and narrative theory, Attebery's study explores familiar and forgotten fantasies and shows how the genre is also an arena for negotiating new relationships with traditional tales.

Burdens of Proof

Burdens of Proof PDF Author: Susanna Egan
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554583691
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Autobiographical impostures, once they come to light, appear to us as outrageous, scandalous. They confuse lived and textual identity (the person in the world and the character in the text) and call into question what we believe, what we doubt, and how we receive information. In the process, they tell us a lot about cultural norms and anxieties. Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography examines a broad range of impostures in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and asks about each one: Why this particular imposture? Why here and now? Susanna Egan’s historical survey of texts from early Christendom to the nineteenth century provides an understanding of the author in relation to the text and shows how plagiarism and other false claims have not always been regarded as the frauds we consider them today. She then explores the role of the media in the creation of much contemporary imposture, examining in particular the cases of Jumana Hanna, Norma Khouri, and James Frey. The book also addresses ethnic imposture, deliberate fictions, plagiarism, and ghostwriting, all of which raise moral, legal, historical, and cultural issues. Egan concludes the volume with an examination of how historiography and law failed to support the identities of European Jews during World War II, creating sufficient instability in Jewish identity and doubt about Jewish wartime experience that the impostor could step in. This textual erasure of the Jews of Europe and the refashioning of their experiences in fraudulent texts are examples of imposture as an outcrop of extreme identity crisis. The first to examine these issues in North America and Europe, Burdens of Proof will be of interest to scholars of life writing and cultural studies.

The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

The A to Z of Fantasy Literature PDF Author: Brian Stableford
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810863456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
Once upon a time all literature was fantasy, set in a mythical past when magic existed, animals talked, and the gods took an active hand in earthly affairs. As the mythical past was displaced in Western estimation by the historical past and novelists became increasingly preoccupied with the present, fantasy was temporarily marginalized until the late 20th century, when it enjoyed a spectacular resurgence in every stratum of the literary marketplace. Stableford provides an invaluable guide to this sequence of events and to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks the evolution of fantasy from the origins of literature to the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulses creating and shaping fantasy literature, the problems of its definition and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes cross-referenced entries on more than 700 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum, while more than 200 other entries describe the fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that ranges from general textbooks and specialized accounts of the history and scholarship of fantasy literature, through bibliographies and accounts of the fantasy literature of different nations, to individual author studies and useful websites.