A Strangeness in My Mind

A Strangeness in My Mind PDF Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9385890034
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 643

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Book Description
Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karatas has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of twelve, he comes to Istanbul-"the center of the world"-and is immediately enthralled both by the city being demolished and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father's trade, selling boza on the street, and hopes to become rich like other villagers who have settled on the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But chance seems to conspire against him. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, his relations all make their fortunes while his own years are spent in a series of jobs leading nowhere; he is sometimes attracted to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the lodge of a religious guide. But every evening, without fail, he still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the "strangeness" in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for. Told from the perspectives of many beguiling characters, A Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, and a mesmerizing narrative sure to take its place among Pamuk's finest achievements.

A Strangeness in My Mind

A Strangeness in My Mind PDF Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9385890034
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 643

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karatas has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of twelve, he comes to Istanbul-"the center of the world"-and is immediately enthralled both by the city being demolished and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father's trade, selling boza on the street, and hopes to become rich like other villagers who have settled on the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But chance seems to conspire against him. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, his relations all make their fortunes while his own years are spent in a series of jobs leading nowhere; he is sometimes attracted to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the lodge of a religious guide. But every evening, without fail, he still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the "strangeness" in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for. Told from the perspectives of many beguiling characters, A Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, and a mesmerizing narrative sure to take its place among Pamuk's finest achievements.

The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor

The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor PDF Author: Amy Alznauer
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1592703437
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
“I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs.” —Flannery O’Connor When she was young, the writer Flannery O’Connor was captivated by the chickens in her yard. She’d watch their wings flap, their beaks peck, and their eyes glint. At age six, her life was forever changed when she and a chicken she had been training to walk forwards and backwards were featured in the Pathé News, and she realized that people want to see what is odd and strange in life. But while she loved birds of all varieties and kept several species around the house, it was the peacocks that came to dominate her life. Written by Amy Alznauer with devotional attention to all things odd and illustrated in radiant paint by Ping Zhu, The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor explores the beginnings of one author’s lifelong obsession. Amy Alznauer lives in Chicago with her husband, two children, a dog, a parakeet, sometimes chicks, and a part-time fish, but, as of today, no elephants or peacocks. Ping Zhu is a freelance illustrator who has worked with clients big and small, won some awards based on the work she did for aforementioned clients, attracted new clients with shiny awards, and is hoping to maintain her livelihood in Brooklyn by repeating that cycle.

A Strangeness

A Strangeness PDF Author: Jack R. McClellan
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1452087881
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Two young girls missing. Two youngsters found murdered. Local citizens demand action. Constable Ormond has two suspects, young men, scions of Rochedale Manor. Mr. McClellan tells a fascinating story as he delves into the lives of people who live in and near the Manor. He finds romance, true love, intrigue, hate, incest, devotion, escapades within the royal circle, family secrets and a strangeness that . . . . . . . Mr. McClellan was born in Los Angeles, graduated magna cum laude from the University of Southern California, volunteered for the Air Force, serving in England, France and Germany. At wars end he began a teaching career, becoming an Asst. Superintendent. Using the GI Bill, he earned a masters and a doctorate degree in education at his alma mater where he was an adjunct professor. He has published instructional materials, enjoys travel and reading and is an avid stamp collector.

A Familiar Strangeness

A Familiar Strangeness PDF Author: Stuart Burrows
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Literary critics have traditionally suggested that the invention of photography led to the rise of the realist novel, which is believed to imitate the detail and accuracy of the photographic image. Instead, says Stuart Burrows, photography's influence on American fiction had less to do with any formal similarity between the two media than with the capacity of photography to render American identity and history homogeneous and reproducible. The camera, according to Burrows, provoked a representational crisis, one broadly modernist in character. Since the photograph is not only a copy of its subject but a physical product of it, the camera can be seen as actually challenging mimetic or realistic theories of representation, which depend on a recognizable gap between original and reproduction. Burrows argues for the centrality of photography to a set of writers commonly thought of as hostile to the camera-including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. The photographic metaphors and allusions to the medium that appear throughout these writers' work demonstrate the ways in which one representational form actually influences another--by changing how artists conceive of identity, history, and art itself. A Familiar Strangeness thus challenges the notion of an absolute break between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism, a break that typically centers precisely on the two movements' supposedly differing relation to the camera. Just as modernist fiction interrupts and questions the link between visuality and knowledge, so American realist fiction can be understood as making the world less knowable precisely by making it more visible.

The Book of Strange New Things

The Book of Strange New Things PDF Author: Michel Faber
Publisher: Hogarth
ISBN: 0553418858
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
A monumental, genre-defying novel that David Mitchell calls "Michel Faber’s second masterpiece," The Book of Strange New Things is a masterwork from a writer in full command of his many talents. It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC. His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter’s teachings—his Bible is their “book of strange new things.” But Peter is rattled when Bea’s letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling. Bea’s faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter. Suddenly, a separation measured by an otherworldly distance, and defined both by one newly discovered world and another in a state of collapse, is threatened by an ever-widening gulf that is much less quantifiable. While Peter is reconciling the needs of his congregation with the desires of his strange employer, Bea is struggling for survival. Their trials lay bare a profound meditation on faith, love tested beyond endurance, and our responsibility to those closest to us. Marked by the same bravura storytelling and precise language that made The Crimson Petal and the White such an international success, The Book of Strange New Things is extraordinary, mesmerizing, and replete with emotional complexity and genuine pathos.

I Am a Strange Loop

I Am a Strange Loop PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465030785
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Argues that the key to understanding ourselves and consciousness is the "strange loop," a special kind of abstract feedback loop that inhabits the brain.

Together in a Sudden Strangeness

Together in a Sudden Strangeness PDF Author: Alice Quinn
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0593318722
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives. “One of the best books of poetry of the year . . . Quinn has accomplished something dizzying here: arranged a stellar cast of poets . . . It is what all anthologies must be: comprehensive, contradictory, stirring.” —The Millions **Featuring 107 poets, from A to Z—Julia Alvarez to Matthew Zapruder—with work in between by Jericho Brown, Billy Collins, Fanny Howe, Ada Limón, Sharon Olds, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Vijay Seshadri, and Jeffrey Yang** As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality. In these pages, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement. From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits. A portion of the advance for this book was generously donated by Alice Quinn and the poets to Chefs for America, an organization helping feed communities in need across the country during the pandemic.

Quantum Strangeness

Quantum Strangeness PDF Author: George S. Greenstein
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262039931
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
A physicist's efforts to understand the enigma that is quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is one of the glories of our age. The theory lies at the heart of modern society. Quantum mechanics is one of our most valuable forecasters—a “great predictor.” It has immeasurably altered our conception of the natural world. Its philosophical implications are earthshaking. But quantum mechanics steadfastly refuses to speak of many things; it deals in probabilities rather than giving explicit descriptions. It never explains. Einstein, one of its creators, considered the theory incomplete. Even now, many years after the creation of quantum mechanics, physicists continue to argue about it. Astrophysicist George Greenstein has been both fascinated and confused by quantum mechanics for his entire career. In this book, he describes, engagingly and accessibly, his efforts to understand the enigma that is quantum mechanics. The fastest route to the insight into the ultimate nature of reality revealed by quantum mechanics, Greenstein writes, is through Bell's Theorem, which concerns reality at the quantum level; and Bell's 1964 discovery drives Greenstein's quest. Greenstein recounts a scientific odyssey that begins with Einstein, continues with Bell, and culminates with today's push to develop an industry of quantum machines. Along the way, he discusses spin, entanglement, experimental metaphysics, and quantum teleportation, often with easy-to-grasp analogies. We have known for decades that the world of the quantum was strange, but, Greenstein says, not until John Bell came along did we know just how strange.

The King is Always Above the People

The King is Always Above the People PDF Author: Daniel Alarcón
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1594631727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
LONGLISTED for the 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION An urgent, essential collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families, and other tales of high stakes journeys, from the award-winning author of War by Candlelight and At Night We Walk in Circles. Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcón's hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. In "The Thousands," people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in "The Bridge." A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in "The Ballad of Rocky Rontal." And in the tour de force novella, "The Auroras", a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.

Strangeness and Charm

Strangeness and Charm PDF Author: Mike Shevdon
Publisher: Angry Robot, Limited
ISBN: 9780857662248
Category : Fantasy fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Niall Petersen's whole life has been turned on its head by the revelation that he can do magic. Now a Warder for the ancient Courts of the Feyre, duty and honour must be upheld. His daughter Alex, newly awakened to her own magical powers,has been saved from the terrifying Bedlam prison, but in freeing her, Niall has released others of their kind into the population--half-breed fey who have been mistreated, abused and tortured by the very instituion that was supposed to help them. Now Niall must track them down and persuade them to swap their new-found liberty for the security of the Courts--but is the price of sanctuary merely to swap one cage for another?"--P. [4] of cover.