Hitting Trees with Sticks

Hitting Trees with Sticks PDF Author: Jane Rogers
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
**Long-listed for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize** **Short-listed for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize** A young textile designer quits Britain to work for a Nigerian women’s refuge, confident that this is her one chance to make a difference… A sixteen-year-old uses his first job, as a window-cleaner, to peer into other people’s lives and carefully plan his own… A leading scientist spends an evening trying to explain his latest theory to a man who could destroy him... The characters in Jane Rogers’ first short story collection are each blessed with an unwavering conviction. Buoyed up on self-belief, they enthuse, take calculated risks, and refuse to be deterred by the odds stacked against them. But just as Rogers’ compassion as a writer endears us to their cause, her keen eye shows how fine the balance can be between conviction and self-delusion. At times, her subject seems to be the fallibility of any point of view, the persistence of blind spots no matter how careful or intelligent the viewer. Hers are not unreliable narrators, merely human ones – diverse, contradictory, imperfect. Indeed it is often their flaws that beguile us. ‘There is nothing predictable about a Jane Rogers story. She has the confidence and skill to inhabit many different voices and different worlds. She slides the reader, in imagination, to a snow-bound France, to Africa, to the Caribbean: she takes us into offices and libraries, under the sea and into the forest, and also into the vast untrodden country of memory that we carry around inside. Her observation of our species is tender, precise, illuminating.’ – Hilary Mantel 'Thrilling, ambitious stories that cross continents and soar from cells to stars.' – Maggie Gee ‘Warm, wise, insightful, sharply observed and beautifully written – each story is a world in microcosm.’ – Marina Lewycka 'This is her first collection of short stories, and it is beautiful.' - The Independent on Sunday

Hitting Trees with Sticks

Hitting Trees with Sticks PDF Author: Jane Rogers
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
**Long-listed for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize** **Short-listed for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize** A young textile designer quits Britain to work for a Nigerian women’s refuge, confident that this is her one chance to make a difference… A sixteen-year-old uses his first job, as a window-cleaner, to peer into other people’s lives and carefully plan his own… A leading scientist spends an evening trying to explain his latest theory to a man who could destroy him... The characters in Jane Rogers’ first short story collection are each blessed with an unwavering conviction. Buoyed up on self-belief, they enthuse, take calculated risks, and refuse to be deterred by the odds stacked against them. But just as Rogers’ compassion as a writer endears us to their cause, her keen eye shows how fine the balance can be between conviction and self-delusion. At times, her subject seems to be the fallibility of any point of view, the persistence of blind spots no matter how careful or intelligent the viewer. Hers are not unreliable narrators, merely human ones – diverse, contradictory, imperfect. Indeed it is often their flaws that beguile us. ‘There is nothing predictable about a Jane Rogers story. She has the confidence and skill to inhabit many different voices and different worlds. She slides the reader, in imagination, to a snow-bound France, to Africa, to the Caribbean: she takes us into offices and libraries, under the sea and into the forest, and also into the vast untrodden country of memory that we carry around inside. Her observation of our species is tender, precise, illuminating.’ – Hilary Mantel 'Thrilling, ambitious stories that cross continents and soar from cells to stars.' – Maggie Gee ‘Warm, wise, insightful, sharply observed and beautifully written – each story is a world in microcosm.’ – Marina Lewycka 'This is her first collection of short stories, and it is beautiful.' - The Independent on Sunday

Promised Lands

Promised Lands PDF Author: Jane Rogers
Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 1405512628
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Winner of the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book Award, 1996 The year is 1788, the place New South Wales. Marine Lieutenant William Dawes has arrived in the Antipodes to build an observatory, reform the convicts and understand the Aborigines. He is a good man who will be subject to many temptations. In England, now, a child is born. His mother knows he has extraordinary powers; his father knows he is a helpless cripple. Olla, defending and nurturing her miraculous son, emerges as one of the strangest and most compelling characters of contemporary fiction. Jane Rogers intertwines the powerful dramas of the first year of the convict-colony with these present-day lives to make a rich and gripping novel.

The Twits

The Twits PDF Author: Roald Dahl
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101653019
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG! Mr. and Mrs. Twit are the smelliest, nastiest, ugliest people in the world. They hate everything—except playing mean jokes on each other, catching innocent birds to put in their Bird Pies, and making their caged monkeys, the Muggle-Wumps, stand on their heads all day. But the Muggle-Wumps have had enough. They don't just want out, they want revenge.

Inside Out & Back Again

Inside Out & Back Again PDF Author: Thanhha Lai
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
ISBN: 0702251178
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

Getting Air

Getting Air PDF Author: Dan Gutman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416979476
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
They can rule the half-pipe, but can they survive this? Jimmy, David, and Henry are psyched. It's summer, school's out, and they are on their way to California, where they will be able to do some major skating. But on the plane, the unthinkable happens: They are hijacked by terrorists. As frightened as they may be, they take action and they succeed. Sort of. They may have beaten the terrorists, but now their plane has crashed in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden, their summer vacation is about finding food, shelter, and a rescue. Can three normal twelve-year-old boys find a way to get by without fast food and skate parks?

The Ice is Singing

The Ice is Singing PDF Author: Jane Rogers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571152308
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
The Ice is Singing is the story of a woman on the run from her husband, her children, herself. Driving through the snowbound February countryside, stopping at anonymous bed and breakfasts, prepared to do anything to duck memory, she begins to write stories. Not about her own life, but about other parents, other children: stories to keep her own life at bay......

Hiroshima

Hiroshima PDF Author: John Hersey
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593082362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Living Up The Street

Living Up The Street PDF Author: Gary Soto
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
ISBN: 0440211700
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
In a prose that is so beautiful it is poetry, we see the world of growing up and going somewhere through the dust and heat of Fresno's industrial side and beyond: It is a boy's coming of age in the barrio, parochial school, attending church, public summer school, and trying to fall out of love so he can join in a Little League baseball team. His is a clarity that rings constantly through the warmth and wry reality of these sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, always human remembrances.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Verity

Verity PDF Author: Colleen Hoover
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 153872474X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Whose truth is the lie? Stay up all night reading the sensational psychological thriller that has readers obsessed, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Too Late and It Ends With Us. #1 New York Times Bestseller · USA Today Bestseller · Globe and Mail Bestseller · Publishers Weekly Bestseller Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered. Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen’s feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife’s words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.