The Silence of Scheherazade

The Silence of Scheherazade PDF Author: Defne Suman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1800246986
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
September 1905. At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the ancient city of Smyrna, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother. At the very same moment, an Indian spy sails into the golden-hued, sycamore-scented city with a secret mission from the British Empire. When he leaves, 17 years later, it will be to the smell of kerosene and smoke as the city, and its people, are engulfed in flames. Told through the intertwining fates of a Levantine, a Greek, a Turkish and an Armenian family, this unforgettable novel reveals a city, and a culture, now lost to time. 'Fiercely intelligent, finely textured and achingly beautiful' Elif Shafak 'Utterly delightful' Buki Papillon 'This rich tale of love and loss gives voice to the silenced, and adds music to their histories' Maureen Freely, Chair, English PEN 'A must-read' Ayse Arman, Hu ̈rriyet 'A symphony of literature' Açik Radyo 'Defne Suman is a story-teller. She tells the story of how love, emotions and identities are influenced by socio-political events of a lifetime' Cumhuriyet Newspaper 'A wonderfully braided story of family secrets set in the magical city of Smyrna, told in luminous prose' Lou Ureneck, author of Smyrna, September 1922

The Silence of Scheherazade

The Silence of Scheherazade PDF Author: Defne Suman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1800246986
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Get Book Here

Book Description
September 1905. At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the ancient city of Smyrna, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother. At the very same moment, an Indian spy sails into the golden-hued, sycamore-scented city with a secret mission from the British Empire. When he leaves, 17 years later, it will be to the smell of kerosene and smoke as the city, and its people, are engulfed in flames. Told through the intertwining fates of a Levantine, a Greek, a Turkish and an Armenian family, this unforgettable novel reveals a city, and a culture, now lost to time. 'Fiercely intelligent, finely textured and achingly beautiful' Elif Shafak 'Utterly delightful' Buki Papillon 'This rich tale of love and loss gives voice to the silenced, and adds music to their histories' Maureen Freely, Chair, English PEN 'A must-read' Ayse Arman, Hu ̈rriyet 'A symphony of literature' Açik Radyo 'Defne Suman is a story-teller. She tells the story of how love, emotions and identities are influenced by socio-political events of a lifetime' Cumhuriyet Newspaper 'A wonderfully braided story of family secrets set in the magical city of Smyrna, told in luminous prose' Lou Ureneck, author of Smyrna, September 1922

At the Breakfast Table

At the Breakfast Table PDF Author: Defne Suman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1800247036
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Told from four different perspectives, At the Breakfast Table is a story of hidden histories and family secrets, from the author of The Silence of Scheherazade. Buyukada, Turkey, 2017. In the glow of a late summer morning, family gather for the 100th birthday of the famous artist Shirin Saka. It ought to be a time of fond reminiscence, looking back on a long and fruitful artistic career, on memories spanning almost a century. But the deep past is something Shirin has spent a lifetime trying to conceal. Her grandchildren, Nur and Fikret, and great-grandchild, Celine, do not know what she's hiding, though they are intimately aware of the secret's psychological consequences. The siblings invite family friend and investigative journalist Burak along to interview Shirin – in celebration of her centenary, and also in the hope of persuading her to open up. Eventually Shirin begins to express her pain the only way she knows how. She paints a story onto her dining room wall, revealing a history wiped from public consciousness and generations of her family's history. 'Fiercely intelligent, finely textured and achingly beautiful.' Elif Shafak

All the Flowers Kneeling

All the Flowers Kneeling PDF Author: Paul Tran
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525508341
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
“Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen) Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights PDF Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812998928
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Harper’s Bazaar • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • The Kansas City Star • National Post • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling. In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining. Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world. Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse. Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption. Praise for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights “Rushdie is our Scheherazade. . . . This book is a fantasy, a fairytale—and a brilliant reflection of and serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian “One of the major literary voices of our time . . . In reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that [Rushdie’s] years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A wicked bit of satire . . . [Rushdie] riffs and expands on the tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns was a matter of life and death.”—USA Today “A swirling tale of genies and geniuses [that] translates the bloody upheavals of our last few decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells.”—The Washington Post “Great fun . . . The novel shines brightest in the panache of its unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and extraordinary range and layering of his voice.”—The Boston Globe

A Woman Is No Man

A Woman Is No Man PDF Author: Etaf Rum
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062699784
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist for Best Fiction and Best Debut • BookBrowse's Best Book of the Year • A Marie Claire Best Women's Fiction of the Year • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year • A PopSugar Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A Washington Post 10 Books to Read in March • A Newsweek Best Book of the Summer • A USA Today Best Book of the Week • A Washington Book Review Difficult-To-Put-Down Novel • A Refinery 29 Best Books of the Month • A Buzzfeed News 4 Books We Couldn't Put Down Last Month • A New Arab Best Books by Arab Authors • An Electric Lit 20 Best Debuts of the First Half of 2019 • A The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the Year “Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns... Etaf Rum’s debut novel is a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice.” —Refinery 29 The New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna TODAY SHOW Book Club pick telling the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community. "Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.” Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.

In Search of The Color Purple

In Search of The Color Purple PDF Author: Salamishah Tillet
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683356853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Mixing cultural criticism, literary history, biography, and memoir, an exploration of Alice Walker’s critically acclaimed and controversial novel, The Color Purple Alice Walker made history in 1983 when she became the ï¬?rst black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the Jazz Age novel tells the story of racial and gender inequality through the life of a 14-year-old girl from Georgia who is haunted by domestic and sexual violence. Prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker’s epistolary novel and shows how it has influenced and been informed by the zeitgeist. The Color Purple received both praise and criticism upon publication, and the conversation it sparked around race and gender still continues today. It has been adapted for an Oscar-nominated ï¬?lm and a hit Broadway musical. Through archival research and interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Quincy Jones (among others), Tillet studies Walker’s life and how themes of violence emerged in her earlier work. Reading The Color Purple at age 15 was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet. It continues to resonate with her—as a sexual violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished academic. Provocative and personal, In Search of The Color Purple is a bold work from an important public intellectual, and captures Alice Walker’s seminal role in rethinking sexuality, intersectional feminism, and racial and gender politics.

Cinnamon and Gunpowder

Cinnamon and Gunpowder PDF Author: Eli Brown
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374123667
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In 1819, kidnapped chef Owen Wedgwood transforms meager shipboard supplies into sumptuous meals at the behest of his kidnapper, pirate queen Mad Hannah Mabbot, while she pushes her exhausted crew to track down a deadly privateer.

Luscious Craving

Luscious Craving PDF Author: Cameron Dean
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345492544
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Candace's job at the glitzy Scheherazade casino drives her right into the center of Ash's deadly domain, for there are rumors of a New Year's Eve vampire assault on the casino, and only Candace can stop it. She must go to Ash for help, even though she knows that the price he'll expect in return is nothing less than her body and her soul. Original.

Passionate Thirst

Passionate Thirst PDF Author: Cameron Dean
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345492536
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In the first of a trilogy of supernatural romance novels featuring vampire killer Candace Steele, Candace is working undercover in a Las Vegas casino as she stalks Sin City's undead, when she assigned to a security detail for popular singer Temptation McCoy, a job that is complicated by the return of her former lover, seductive vampire Ash. Original.

The Enchantress of Florence

The Enchantress of Florence PDF Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0307371662
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar: Qara Köz, ‘Lady Black Eyes’, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbeg warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerised by her presence, and much trouble ensues. The Enchantress of Florence is a love story and a mystery – the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other – the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia’s boyhood friend ‘il Machia’ – Niccolò Machiavelli – is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor’s story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he’s a liar, must he die?