Author: José Saramago
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
On the first day of the new year, no one dies; the reality hits home as families are left to care for the permanently dying. Death sits in her apartment and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again?
Author: José Saramago
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448114969
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
In an unnamed country, on the first day of the New Year, people stop dying. There is great celebration and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Soon, though, the residents begin to suffer. Undertakers face bankruptcy, the church is forced to reinvent its doctrine, and local 'maphia' smuggle those on the brink of death over the border where they can expire naturally. Death does return eventually, but with a new, courteous approach – delivering violet warning letters to her victims. But what can death do when a letter is unexpectedly returned?
Author: José Saramago
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547581009
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 3869
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Book Description
This essential anthology presents thirteen acclaimed works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Blindness—with anintroduction by Ursula Le Guin. This collection, available exclusively in e-book form, brings together twelve novels (and one novella) of the great Portuguese writer José Saramago. From Saramago’s early work, like the enchanting Baltasar & Blimunda and the controversial Gospel According to Jesus Christ, through his masterpiece Blindness and its sequel Seeing, to his later fables of politics, chance, history, and love, like All the Names and Death with Interruptions, this volume showcases the range and depth of Saramago’s career, his inimitable narrative voice, and his vast reserves of invention, humor, and understanding.
Author: José Saramago
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547545312
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
A “marvelously amusing” political fable in which part of the European continent breaks off and drifts away on its own (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A Nobel Prize winner who has been called “the García Márquez of Portugal” (New Statesman) chronicles world events on a human scale in this exhilarating allegorical novel. One day, quite inexplicably, the Iberian Peninsula simply breaks free from the European continent and begins to drift as if it were a sort of stone raft. Panic ensues as residents and tourists attempt to escape, while crowds gather on cliffs to watch the newly formed island sail off into the sea. Meanwhile, five people on the island are drawn together—first by a string of surreal events and then by love. Taking to the road to explore the limits of their now finite land, they find themselves adrift in a world made new by this radical shift in perspective. As bureaucrats ponder what to do about their unusual predicament, the intertwined lives of these five strangers are clarified and forever changed by a physical, spiritual, and sexual voyage to an unknown destination. At once an epic adventure and a profound fable about the state of the European project, The Stone Raft is a “hauntingly lyrical narrative with political, social, and moral underpinnings” (Booklist) that “may be Saramago’s finest work” (Los Angeles Times). Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero
Author: José Saramago
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547541546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 133
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Book Description
The Nobel Prize–winning author of Blindness recalls the days of his youth in Lisbon and the Portuguese countryside in this charming memoir. José Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside world, but a fount of knowledge, affection, and authority to young José. Small Memories traces the formation of a man who emerged, against all odds, as one of the world’s most respected writers. Shifting between childhood and his teenage years, between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this mosaic of memories looks back into the author’s boyhood: the tragic death of his older brother at the age of four; his mother pawning the family’s blankets every spring and buying them back in time for winter; his grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed on cold nights; and Saramago’s early encounters with literature, from teaching himself to read to poring over a Portuguese-French conversation guide, not realizing that he was in fact reading a play by Molière.
Author: José Saramago
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547391609
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
This novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author asks what happens when the grim reaper decides to stop reaping: “A novel to die for.”—The Washington Post On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration—flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home—families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots. Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small d, were to become human and fall in love? “This novel has many pleasures.”—The New York Times “Arguably the greatest writer of our time.”—Chicago Tribune
Author: Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317077237
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Throughout history mankind has struggled to reconcile itself with the inescapability of its own mortality. This book explores the themes of immortality and survivalism in contemporary culture, shedding light on the varied and ingenious ways in which humans and human societies aspire to confront and deal with death, or even seek to outlive it, as it were. Bringing together theoretical and empirical work from internationally acclaimed scholars across a range of disciplines, Postmortal Society offers studies of the strategies adopted and means available in modern society for trying to ‘cheat’ death or prolong life, the status of the dead in the modern Western world, the effects of beliefs that address the terror of death in other areas of life, the ‘immortalisation’ of celebrities, the veneration of the dead in virtual worlds, symbolic immortality through work, the implications of understanding ‘immortality’ in chemical-neuronal terms, and the apparent paradox of our greater reverence for the dead in increasingly secular, capitalist societies. A fascinating collection of studies that explore humanity’s attempts to deal with its own mortality in the modern age, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and scholars of cultural studies with interests in death and dying.
Author: Tor Guimaraes
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1524549207
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
This book proposes a new religion that links a person directly to God and the universe. To learn about God, mankind uses scientific methods to accumulate scientific knowledge. The biggest problem with organized religions (including voodoo, black magic, etc.) is that they have led mankind nowhere over the centuries. Without science, mankind would still be living in caves and eating raw meat despite following their religions over the centuries. In view of the obvious necessity for increasing scientific knowledge, a disturbing sign is that, perhaps in frustration, religious leaders increasingly show disrespect for scientific knowledge; to them, incredibly and incorrectly, faith should trump science. This blindness to scientific facts underlies much of the social, economic, and political behavior that has brought us to todays reality: a world incapable of living without very destructive wars, massive flows of refugees, growing poverty, environmental pollution, increasing scarcity of fresh water, increasing encounters with microorganisms capable of defeating our most powerful antibiotics, etc. A religion based on science hopefully provides the way to reverse all these negative trends, lest mankind destroys itself by default while indulging in mysticism and the adoration of false gods.
Author: Rex Butler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441122265
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is undoubtedly one of the defining voices of our age. Since the Second World War, his work has had an enormous impact on generations of writers, philosophers, and literary theorists. This guide offers a close reading of ten of Borges' greatest short stories, seeking to bring out the logic that has made his work so influential. The main section of the guide offers an analysis of such key terms in Borges' work as "labyrinth" and the "infinite" and analyzes Borges' particular narrative strategies. This guide also sets Borges' work within its wider literary, cultural and intellectual contexts and provides an annotated guide to both scholarly and popular responses to his work to assist further reading.
Author: M.A. Orthofer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231518501
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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Book Description
A user-friendly reference for English-language readers who are eager to explore contemporary fiction from around the world. Profiling hundreds of titles and authors from 1945 to today, with an emphasis on fiction published in the past two decades, this guide introduces the styles, trends, and genres of the world's literatures, from Scandinavian crime thrillers and cutting-edge Chinese works to Latin American narco-fiction and award-winning French novels. The book's critical selection of titles defines the arc of a country's literary development. Entries illuminate the fiction of individual nations, cultures, and peoples, while concise biographies sketch the careers of noteworthy authors. Compiled by M. A. Orthofer, an avid book reviewer and the founder of the literary review site the Complete Review, this reference is perfect for readers who wish to expand their reading choices and knowledge of contemporary world fiction. “A bird's-eye view of titles and authors from everywhere―a book overfull with reminders of why we love to read international fiction. Keep it close by.”—Robert Con Davis-Udiano, executive director, World Literature Today “M. A. Orthofer has done more to bring literature in translation to America than perhaps any other individual. [This book] will introduce more new worlds to you than any other book on the market.”—Tyler Cowen, George Mason University “A relaxed, riverine guide through the main currents of international writing, with sections for more than a hundred countries on six continents.”—Karan Mahajan, Page-Turner blog, The New Yorker
