Author: Lewis E. Birdseye
Publisher: Archway Publishing
ISBN: 148080066X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Dr. Donald Michaelson knows it is impossible to exist for any length of time without wondering whether life is worth living at all. For five years, he has watched the eyes of his students glaze over with boredom as he lectures about beauty, truth, and justice. But now he has just taught his last English class at Bluestone University, the victim of a forced resignation. He decides on suicide as the means to end his pain and confusion only to find that self-inflicted death is neither an easy nor satisfactory way to end his problems. As he attempts to make his way off campus for the last time, he is recruited by a student dissident to speak in front of hundreds, causing a chain of unpredictable events that leaves Donald horizontal and bleeding, with a lust-driven coed on top of him. Confused and unhappy he is still breathing, Donald begins searching for the perfect way to end his life. In order to achieve his goal, Donald must travel a curious road filled with obstacles and absurdities that include a group of anarchists, a seismologist more interested in measuring her sexual prowess than in determining the power of earthquakes, the ghost of a long-dead Confederate soldier, and figures from his dreams. The Unsubdued Forest shares one man's tragic yet curiously comedic quest to seek a simple death that ultimately leads him down a path where life-changing answers await.
Author: José Donoso
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567920468
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
This haunting jungle of a novel has been hailed as "a masterpiece" by Luis Bunuel and "one of the great novels not only of Spanish America, but of our time" by Carlos Fuentes. The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions, The Obscene Bird of Night is a triumph of imaginative, visionary writing. Its luxuriance, fecundity, horror, and energy will not soon fade from the reader's mind -- Back cover
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0307401383
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 677
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Book Description
On February 14, 1986, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini, a voice reaching across the world from Iran to kill him in his own country. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being “against Islam, the Prophet, and the Quran.” So begins the extraordinary, often harrowing story—filled too with surreal and funny moments—of how a writer was forced underground, moved from house to house, an armed police protection team living with him at all times for more than nine years. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov—Joseph Anton. He became “Joe.” How do a writer and his young family live day by day with the threat of murder for so long? How do you go on working? How do you keep love and joy alive? How does despair shape your thoughts and actions, how and why do you stumble, how do you learn to fight for survival? In this remarkable memoir, Rushdie tells that story for the first time. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; of friendships (literary and otherwise) and love; and of how he regained his freedom. This is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, moving, provocative, not only captivating as a revelatory memoir but of vital importance in its political insight and wisdom. Because it is also a story of today’s battle for intellectual liberty; of why literature matters; and of a man’s refusal to be silenced in the face of state-sponsored terrorism. And because we now know that what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that would rock the whole world on September 11th and is still unfolding somewhere every day.
Author: Henry Ustick Onderdonk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sermons, American
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
Author: Alberto Manguel
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question “Why?” has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different contexts throughout the chapters of human history. Why does evil exist? What is beauty? How does language inform us? What defines our identity? What is our responsibility to the world? In Alberto Manguel’s most personal book to date, the author tracks his own life of curiosity through the reading that has mapped his way. Manguel chooses as his guides a selection of writers who sparked his imagination. He dedicates each chapter to a single thinker, scientist, artist, or other figure who demonstrated in a fresh way how to ask “Why?” Leading us through a full gallery of inquisitives, among them Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Lewis Carroll, Rachel Carson, Socrates, and, most importantly, Dante, Manguel affirms how deeply connected our curiosity is to the readings that most astonish us, and how essential to the soaring of our own imaginations.
Author: Teresa Bartolomei
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110796090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going à rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise". This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante’s humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of eschatological overcoming (Mendonça); finally, the relationship with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni, Bartolomei). A second group of contributions is dedicated to the reconstruction of Dante’s presence in Portuguese literature (Almeida, Espírito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho): they attest to the innovative impact of Dante’s work even in literary traditions more distant from it.
Author: Alfred Minott Copeland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Genealogy
Languages : en
Pages : 548
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Author: Alfred Minott Copeland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hampden County (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 552
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Author: Freeborn Garretson Hibbard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Methodists
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Author: William H. Gibbs
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Blandford (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 90
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Book Description
