The Wrong End of the Telescope

The Wrong End of the Telescope PDF Author: Rabih Alameddine
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island. Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them. Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

The Wrong End of the Telescope

The Wrong End of the Telescope PDF Author: Rabih Alameddine
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island. Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them. Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

An Unnecessary Woman

An Unnecessary Woman PDF Author: Rabih Alameddine
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802192874
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A happily misanthropic Middle East divorcee finds refuge in books in a “beautiful and absorbing” novel of late-life crisis (The New York Times). Aaliya is a divorced, childless, and reclusively cranky translator in Beirut nurturing doubts about her latest project: a 900-page avant-garde, linguistically serpentine historiography by a late Chilean existentialist. Honestly, at seventy-two, should she be taking on such a project? Not that Aailiya fears dying. Women in her family live long; her mother is still going crazy. But on this lonely day, hour-by-hour, Aaliya’s musings on literature, philosophy, her career, and her aging body, are suddenly invaded by memories of her volatile past. As she tries in vain to ward off these emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left. In this “meditation on, among other things, aging, politics, literature, loneliness, grief and resilience” (The New York Times), Alameddine conjures “a beguiling narrator . . . who is, like her city, hard to read, hard to take, hard to know and, ultimately, passionately complex” (San Francisco Chronicle). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, An Unnecessary Woman is “a fun, and often funny . . . grave, powerful . . . [and] extraordinary” Washington Independent Review of Books) ode to literature and its power to define who we are. “Read it once, read it twice, read other books for a decade or so, and then pick it up and read it anew. This one’s a keeper” (The Independent)

Inter State

Inter State PDF Author: José Vadi
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593766963
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
A "must read" debut collection of poetic, linked essays investigating the past and present state of California, its conflicting histories and their impact on a writer's family and life (Los Angeles Times). California has been advertised as a destiny manifested for those ready to pull up their bootstraps and head west across to find wealth on the other side of the Sierra Nevada since the 19th century. Across the seven essays in the debut collection by José Vadi, we hear from the descendants of those not promised that prize. Inter State explores California through many lenses: an aging obsessed skateboarder; a self-appointed dive bar DJ; a laid-off San Francisco tech worker turned rehired contractor; a grandson of Mexican farmworkers pursuing the crops they tilled. Amidst wildfires, high speed rail, housing crises, unprecedented wealth and its underlying decay, Inter State excavates and roots itself inside those necessary stories and places lost in the ever-changing definitions of a selectively golden state.

The Optimist's Telescope

The Optimist's Telescope PDF Author: Bina Venkataraman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735219486
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR “How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . . She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.” —The New York Times Book Review A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future: our own, our families’, and our society’s. Instant gratification is the norm today—in our lives, our culture, our economy, and our politics. Many of us have forgotten (if we ever learned) how to make smart decisions for the long run. Whether it comes to our finances, our health, our communities, or our planet, it’s easy to avoid thinking ahead. The consequences of this immediacy are stark: Deadly outbreaks spread because leaders failed to act on early warning signs. Companies that fail to invest stagnate and fall behind. Hurricanes and wildfires turn deadly for communities that could have taken more precaution. Today more than ever, all of us need to know how we can make better long-term decisions in our lives, businesses, and society. Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A journalist and former adviser in the Obama White House, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead—and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time. With examples from ancient Pompeii to modern-day Fukushima, she dispels the myth that human nature is impossibly reckless and highlights the surprising practices each of us can adopt in our own lives—and the ones we must fight for as a society. The result is a book brimming with the ideas and insights all of us need in order to forge a better future.

I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters

I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters PDF Author: Rabih Alameddine
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393343979
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels Named after the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt, red-haired Sarah Nour El-Din is "wonderful, irresistibly unique, funny, and amazing," raves Amy Tan. Determined to make of her life a work of art, she tries to tell her story, sometimes casting it as a memoir, sometimes a novel, always fascinatingly incomplete. "Alameddine's new novel unfolds like a secret... creating a tale...humorous and heartbreaking and always real" (Los Angeles Times). "[W]ith each new approach, [Sarah] sheds another layer of her pretension, revealing another truth about her humanity" (San Francisco Weekly). Raised in a hybrid family shaped by divorce and remarriage, and by Beirut in wartime, Sarah finds a fragile peace in self-imposed exile in the United States. Her extraordinary dignity is supported by a best friend, a grown-up son, occasional sensual pleasures, and her determination to tell her own story. "Like her narrative, [Sarah's] life is broken and fragmented. [But] the bright, strange, often startling pieces...are moving and memorable" (Boston Globe). Reading group guide included.

Koolaids

Koolaids PDF Author: Rabih Alameddine
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312206581
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in these debates, a âeoecrisis of representationâe stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world became a central concern of literary modernists as they operated under Japanese colonial rule. Christopher P. Hanscom examines the critical and literary production of three prose authors central to 1930s literary circlesâe"Pak Tâe(tm)aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi Tâe(tm)aejunâe"whose works confront this crisis by critiquing the concept of transparent or âeoeempiricistâe language that formed the basis for both a nationalist literary movement and the legitimizing discourse of assimilatory colonization. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse and questions anew the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The Real Modern challenges Eurocentric and nativist perspectives on the derivative particularity of non-Western literatures, opens global modernist studies to the similarities and differences of the colonial Korean case, and argues for decolonization of the ways in which non-Western literatures are read in both local and global contexts.

The Hummingbird's Daughter

The Hummingbird's Daughter PDF Author: Luis Alberto Urrea
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0759567514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The House of Broken Angels and Good Night, Irene, discover the epic historical novel following the journey of a young saint fighting for her survival. This historical novel is based on Urrea's real great-aunt Teresita, who had healing powers and was acclaimed as a saint. Urrea has researched historical accounts and family records for years to get an accurate story.

Choosing and Using a Refracting Telescope

Choosing and Using a Refracting Telescope PDF Author: Neil English
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441964037
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Choosing and Using a Refracting Telescope has been written for the many amateur astronomers who already own, or are intending to purchase, a refracting telescope – perhaps to complement their existing arsenal of larger reflecting telescopes – or for the specialist who requires a particular refractor for serious astronomical applications or nature studies. Four hundred year ago, during the winter of 1609, a relatively unknown Italian scientist, Galileo Galilei designed a spyglass with two crude lenses and turned it skyward. Since then, refractors have retained their dominance over all types of reflector in studies of the Moon, planets and double stars because of the precision of their optics and lack of a central obstruction in the optical path, which causes diffraction effects in all commercially-made reflectors. Most mature amateur astronomers got started with a 60mm refractor, or something similar. Thirty years ago, there was little choice available to the hobbyist, but in the last decade long focus crown-flint achromats have moved aside for some exquisitely crafted apochromatic designs offered by leading commercial manufacturers. There has been a huge increase in the popularity of these telescopes in the last few years, led by a significant increase in the number of companies (particularly, William Optics, Orion USA, StellarVue, SkyWatcher and AstroTech) who are now heavily marketing refractors in the amateur astronomical magazines. In Choosing and Using a Refracting Telescope, well-known observer and astronomy writer Neil English celebrates the remarkable history and evolution of the refracting telescope and looks in detail at the instruments, their development and their use. A major feature of this book is the way it compares not only different classes of refractor, but also telescopes of each class that are sold by various commercial manufacturers. The author is perhaps uniquely placed to do this, having used and tested literally hundreds of different refracting telescopes over three decades. Because it includes many diverse subjects such as imaging with consumer-level digital cameras, imaging with webcams, and imaging with astronomical CCD cameras – that are not covered together in equal depth in any other single volume – Choosing and Using a Refracting Telescope could become the ‘refractor bible’ for amateur astronomers at all levels, especially those who are interested in imaging astronomical objects of every class.

The Japanese Lover

The Japanese Lover PDF Author: Isabel Allende
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501116975
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
House of the Spirits, The Japanese Lover is a profoundly moving tribute to the constancy of the human heart in a world of unceasing change"--

Call Me Zebra

Call Me Zebra PDF Author: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544944607
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction "Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you."--Wall Street Journal "A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bola o and Borges." --New York Times Book Review Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Bestseller Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29, Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Read It Forward, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature--even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love. Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions--until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past. An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author "on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement" (Bustle).