Author: Abdelfattah Kilito
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811224945
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
A playful and erudite look at the origins of language In the beginning there was one language—one tongue that Adam used to compose the first poem, an elegy for Abel. “These days, no one bothers to ask about the tongue of Adam. It is a naive question, vaguely embarrassing and irksome, like questions posed by children, which one can only answer rather stupidly.” So begins Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Tongue of Adam, a delightful series of lectures. With a Borgesian flair for riddles, stories, and subtle scholarly distinctions, Kilito presents an assortment of discussions related to Adam’s tongue, including translation, comparative religion, and lexicography: for example, how, from Babel onward, can we explain the plurality of language? Or can Adam’s poetry be judged aesthetically, the same as any other poem? Drawing from the commentators of the Koran to Walter Benjamin, from the esoteric speculations of Judaism to Herodotus, The Tongue of Adam is a nimble book about the mysterious rise of humankind’s multilingualism.
Author: Derek Bickerton
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809022818
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
One of the world's leading researchers into the evolution of language argues that the acquisition of words changed the structure of early human's brains, which set into motion the limitless creativity that allowed people to make the world that exists today.
Author: Edmund Shaftesbury
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Adam-man (Artificial language)
Languages : en
Pages : 628
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Book Description
Author: Abdelfattah Kilito
Publisher: Darf Publishers Ltd.
ISBN: 1850773114
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 92
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Book Description
The Clash of Images is a sweet, Borgesian mix of bildungsroman memoir, family history, short-story collection, fable, and literary criticism. Written in a graceful and charming style, Kilito’s story takes place in an unnamed coastal city of memories where a child experiences first-hand the cultural clash of text and image in a changing, modern society. It is a time when the old Arabic world of texts and oral traditions is making way for something new: the era of the image, the comic book, photo IDs, and the cinema. The stories form a kaleidoscopic memoir of growing up in two worlds, a brilliant mixture of cultural and family history. Here are tales of first kisses and first reads, Tintin and the Prophet Muhammad, fantasies of the Wild West, the inferno of the bathhouse, and the lost paradises of childhood. The Clash of Images is a celebration of the pleasures of storytelling, a magic lantern that delicately reveals how the world of books intimately connects with the world outside their pages.
Author: Adam Thirlwell
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429963867
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 691
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Book Description
Having slept with a prostitute in Egypt, a young French novelist named Gustave Flaubert at last abandons sentimentality and begins to write. He influences the obscure French writer Édouard Dujardin, who is read by James Joyce on the train to Trieste, where he will teach English to the Italian novelist Italo Svevo. Back in Paris, Joyce asks Svevo to deliver a suitcase containing notes for Ulysses, a novel that will be viscerated by the expat Gertrude Stein, whose first published story is based on one by Flaubert. This carousel of influence shows how translation and emigration lead to a new and true history of the novel. We devour novels in translation while believing that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. The Delighted States attempts to solve this conundrum while mapping an imaginary country, a country of readers: the Delighted States. This book is a provocation, a box of tricks, a bedside travel book; it is also a work of startling intelligence and originality from one of our finest young writers.
Author: Adam Perry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1499812248
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
"A genre-bending, heart-pounding middle-grade romp into a potential future. . . . Perry's layered approach makes for a masterpiece that feels both familiar yet wholly new." --Shelf Awareness, STARRED REVIEW "This takes getting lost in a book to a whole new level. I loved it!" --James Riley, New York Times-bestselling author of the Story Thieves series "Once you start this book, you truly can't stop. An adventure full of cheeky charm and delightful whimsy." --Marie Lu, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Skyhunter "A fast, fun, furiously inventive, and frequently frightful read." --Geoff Rodkey, New York Times-bestselling author of the Tapper Twins series and We're Not from Here This clever, fast-paced adventure is a mix of the Story Thieves series and Ready Player One! Oliver Nelson has a terrible secret-he's a thief. But he only steals books from the Garden Grove Library that are old, musty, brittle, or incomplete, like his favorite book, The Timekeeper's Children. No one reads anymore, and surely no one will miss them, right? Wrong. The Pribbles are famous inventors of the most popular toy in the world, alternate-reality goggles. They are also book collectors who are searching for The Timekeeper's Children, so the Pribbles hatch a plan. They invite Oliver, the last person to have checked it out, to their mansion and use special software from their goggles to steal the last remaining copy of the book--from inside Oliver's mind. Now, Oliver is thrust into the middle of the story and must help the main characters steal pieces scattered around the fictional world of Dulum to build a magical clock that can turn back time before the evil sorcerer Sigil takes over. They'll encounter hideous giants, bloodsucking bats, vicious eels, a Nasty Rodent Eater, a gang of wicked children, and a strange, dark figure that follows them from chapter to chapter, all the while with the Pribbles in pursuit. Can Oliver save Dulum before Sigil destroys everything? And will he finish The Timekeeper's Children before the Pribbles steal it from his mind?
Author: Derek Bickerton
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429930306
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Why Do Isolated Creole Languages Tend to Have Similar Grammatical Structures? Bastard Tongues is an exciting, firsthand story of scientific discovery in an area of research close to the heart of what it means to be human—what language is, how it works, and how it passes from generation to generation, even where historical accidents have made normal transmission almost impossible. The story focuses on languages so low in the pecking order that many people don't regard them as languages at all—Creole languages spoken by descendants of slaves and indentured laborers in plantation colonies all over the world. The story is told by Derek Bickerton, who has spent more than thirty years researching these languages on four continents and developing a controversial theory that explains why they are so similar to one another. A published novelist, Bickerton (once described as "part scholar, part swashbuckling man of action") does not present his findings in the usual dry academic manner. Instead, you become a companion on his journey of discovery. You learn things as he learned them, share his disappointments and triumphs, explore the exotic locales where he worked, and meet the colorful characters he encountered along the way. The result is a unique blend of memoir, travelogue, history, and linguistics primer, appealing to anyone who has ever wondered how languages grow or what it's like to search the world for new knowledge.
Author: Adam Smith
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781545276204
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 66
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Book Description
A tongue twister is a phrase that's supposed to be difficult to articulate properly. Often times, they take practice to say correctly. Tongue twisters are good practice for children as they learn to form words, phrases, and vowels. It's hard to say a tongue twister without a smile on your face. Kids will be entertained with these tongue twisters for hours. Also if you want to become a better voiceover actor, singer, or public speaker this book is for you and contains fun and challenging tongue twisters and vocal warm-ups that prepare you to read commercial, promo, narration, trailer, and animation copy with the proper energy and vocal dexterity.
Author: Robert G. Brown
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1430322454
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
"The book of Lilith tells the real story of creation. Lilith is the first human to be given a soul by God following a thirteen billion year process of mechanical, soulless evolution. Her job is to give souls to all things and awaken them to the Watcher that watches the watcher, watching the world. The first person she grants a soul to is Adam, who is given a job of his own: to invent the definition of sin, create a moral sense in a world that utterly lacks one, and hence bring about the rule of law in a compassionate society. Unfortunately, Adam has a hard time accepting the fact that he was given his soul second, instead of first, and by Lilith, not God. The conflict this engenders leads to the destruction of Eden, the creation of Eve, and a voyage of self-discovery that spans a world"--P. [4] of cover.
Author: Adam Nicolson
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0060838736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
A network of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King James Bible. It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment "Englishness," specifically the English language itself, had come into its first passionate maturity. The English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own scope than any form of the language before or since. It drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
