Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories

Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories PDF Author: Joan Silber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Shortlisted for the National Book Award: "Joan Silber writes with wisdom, humor, grace, and wry intelligence. Her characters bear welcome news of how we will survive."—Andrea Barrett Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, these stories are about longings—often held for years—and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort. Though the stories stand alone, a minor element in one becomes major in the next. In "My Shape", a woman is taunted by her dance coach, who later suffers his own heartache. A Venetian poet of the 1500s, another storyteller, is introduced to a modern traveler reading Rilke. His story precedes a mesmerizing narrative of missionaries in China. In the final story, Giles, born to a priesthood family, leans toward Buddhism after a grievous loss, and in time falls in love with the dancer of the first story. So deft and subtle is Joan Silber with these various perspectives that we come full circle surprised and enchanted by her myriad worlds. National Book Award finalist. Reading group guide included.

Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories

Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories PDF Author: Joan Silber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shortlisted for the National Book Award: "Joan Silber writes with wisdom, humor, grace, and wry intelligence. Her characters bear welcome news of how we will survive."—Andrea Barrett Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, these stories are about longings—often held for years—and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort. Though the stories stand alone, a minor element in one becomes major in the next. In "My Shape", a woman is taunted by her dance coach, who later suffers his own heartache. A Venetian poet of the 1500s, another storyteller, is introduced to a modern traveler reading Rilke. His story precedes a mesmerizing narrative of missionaries in China. In the final story, Giles, born to a priesthood family, leans toward Buddhism after a grievous loss, and in time falls in love with the dancer of the first story. So deft and subtle is Joan Silber with these various perspectives that we come full circle surprised and enchanted by her myriad worlds. National Book Award finalist. Reading group guide included.

The Countess

The Countess PDF Author: Gregory Murphy
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 9780822217367
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description
THE STORY: Based on one of the most notorious scandals of the Victorian Age, THE COUNTESS is a true account of madness, cruelty and obsession, and perhaps one of the greatest love stories of its time. In 1853, preeminent art critic John Ruskin, his

The Ten Thousand Things

The Ten Thousand Things PDF Author: Maria Dermout
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Set between Holland and a remote Indonesian island, this intimate magical realism novel offers “an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of a legend” (Time). “Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild The Ten Thousand Things is at once novel of shimmering strangeness—and familiarity. It is the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

How to Get a Literary Agent

How to Get a Literary Agent PDF Author: Michael Larsen
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1402234031
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Written by a top literary agent who gives writers an insider's view of how to find and work with an agent throughout the process of getting published. Includes: -- How to know that you're ready for an agent -- 7 ways to find an agent -- Writing a cover letter that grabs attention -- What to do with an agent once you've got one -- What you can expect and what you'd better not hope for -- Making sure this is the right agent for you -- Congratulations, now you have an agent AND an editor -- How to avoid the 7 worst pitfalls for aspiring writers -- And much, much more. In today's highly competitive publishing industry, literary agents are more important than ever. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, reference or children's books, here is everything you need to know about using an agent to launch and sustain your literary career.a

In the Heart of the Sea

In the Heart of the Sea PDF Author: Nathaniel Philbrick
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007241798
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The Number One best-selling, epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the 19th century, beautifully reissued.

Sybil

Sybil PDF Author: Flora Rheta Schreiber
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780241967638
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This is the true story of a woman with sixteen personalities - two of whom were men - and her struggle, against overwhelming odds, for health and happiness.

Making It Up

Making It Up PDF Author: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440627223
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
"Nobody writes more astutely or affectingly about [love]... than Penelope Lively." -- The Washington Post An intelligent examination of alternative destinies, choices and the moments in our lives when we could have chosen a different path, from Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively In this fascinating piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks 'what if' she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18? If she had married someone else? If she taken a different job? If she had lived her life abroad? These stories offer a sublime dance between realityand imaganation, inviting the reader to ask similar questions.

Saffron Dreams

Saffron Dreams PDF Author: Shaila Abdullah
Publisher: Loving Healing Press
ISBN: 1932690735
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Arissa Illahi, a Muslim artist and writer, discovers in a single moment that life itself chooses one's destiny. After her husband's death in the collapse of the World Trade Center, the discovery of his manuscript marks Arissa's reconnection to life.

The Half-God of Rainfall

The Half-God of Rainfall PDF Author: Inua Ellams
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008324786
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
From the award-winning poet and playwright behind Barber Shop Chronicles, The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic story and a lyrical exploration of pride, power and female revenge.

Let Me Tell You

Let Me Tell You PDF Author: Shirley Jackson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812997670
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • From the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, and other writings. Features “Family Treasures,” nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted. As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion. Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children’s games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space. For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson’s radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist. This volume includes a Foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin. Praise for Let Me Tell You “Stunning.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Let us now—at last—celebrate dangerous women writers: how cheering to see justice done with [this collection of] Shirley Jackson’s heretofore unpublished works—uniquely unsettling stories and ruthlessly barbed essays on domestic life.”—Vanity Fair “Feels like an uncanny dollhouse: Everything perfectly rendered, but something deliciously not quite right.”—NPR “There are . . . times in reading [Jackson’s] accounts of desperate women in their thirties slowly going crazy that she seems an American Jean Rhys, other times when she rivals even Flannery O’Connor in her cool depictions of inhumanity and insidious cruelty, and still others when she matches Philip K. Dick at his most hallucinatory. At her best, though, she’s just incomparable.”—The Washington Post “Offers insights into the vagaries of [Jackson’s] mind, which was ruminant and generous, accommodating such diverse figures as Dr. Seuss and Samuel Richardson.”—The New York Times Book Review “The best pieces clutch your throat, gently at first, and then with growing strength. . . . The whole collection has a timelessness.”—The Boston Globe “[Jackson’s] writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has such enduring power—she brings out the darkness in life, the poltergeists shut into everyone’s basement, and offers them up, bringing wit and even joy to the examination.”—USA Today “The closest we can get to sitting down and having a conversation with . . . one of the most original voices of her generation.”—The Huffington Post