The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories

The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories PDF Author: Penny Edwards
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1785891391
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Peter Bayer was seventy-three. He’d taught at the school just up the road for most of his life and, when the wall came down, saw no reason to move. Nobody could say life had been easy, and when it was built, he’d lost contact with many friends, but he’d learnt to enjoy life as best he could and had had the good fortune of a happy marriage to Elsa. It’s 2006. Peter Bayer and his wife, Elsa, live on the East side of Berlin, as they’ve always done, even when that wasn’t an attractive proposition. What limits Peter’s freedom nowadays isn’t a concrete wall but often feels like one. Elsa has dementia and barely recognises him, so his life is not only hard work, but it’s lonely. What makes it lonelier is that his wife’s illness has given her a distorted view of the past and one that would horrify the woman he married. When Helen, a recently widowed English woman, rents the flat Peter owns nearby, he experiences the kinds of conversations that used to be normal for him, which makes his current reality all the more painful. Helen’s come to Berlin to find out more about her husband’s past in the city and learns things from their German friends that she was unaware of when he was alive. During her struggle to come to terms with her present life, Helen sees that the terrible demands on Peter’s life are almost impossible to endure. Other stories in the book show the toll of war, as fear is passed from one generation to another and we see how the power of secrecy never disappears. They also reveal how gratitude can take various forms and how intergenerational friendships really are all they’re cracked up to be. The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories is a collection of tales, spanning the 1980s to the present day, that will appeal to fans of Anne Tyler, Alan Bennett and Alice Munro, whom Penny Edwards takes inspiration from.

The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories

The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories PDF Author: Penny Edwards
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1785891391
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
Peter Bayer was seventy-three. He’d taught at the school just up the road for most of his life and, when the wall came down, saw no reason to move. Nobody could say life had been easy, and when it was built, he’d lost contact with many friends, but he’d learnt to enjoy life as best he could and had had the good fortune of a happy marriage to Elsa. It’s 2006. Peter Bayer and his wife, Elsa, live on the East side of Berlin, as they’ve always done, even when that wasn’t an attractive proposition. What limits Peter’s freedom nowadays isn’t a concrete wall but often feels like one. Elsa has dementia and barely recognises him, so his life is not only hard work, but it’s lonely. What makes it lonelier is that his wife’s illness has given her a distorted view of the past and one that would horrify the woman he married. When Helen, a recently widowed English woman, rents the flat Peter owns nearby, he experiences the kinds of conversations that used to be normal for him, which makes his current reality all the more painful. Helen’s come to Berlin to find out more about her husband’s past in the city and learns things from their German friends that she was unaware of when he was alive. During her struggle to come to terms with her present life, Helen sees that the terrible demands on Peter’s life are almost impossible to endure. Other stories in the book show the toll of war, as fear is passed from one generation to another and we see how the power of secrecy never disappears. They also reveal how gratitude can take various forms and how intergenerational friendships really are all they’re cracked up to be. The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories is a collection of tales, spanning the 1980s to the present day, that will appeal to fans of Anne Tyler, Alan Bennett and Alice Munro, whom Penny Edwards takes inspiration from.

The Writing On The Wall

The Writing On The Wall PDF Author: Juliet Rieden
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers Aus.
ISBN: 1760788023
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
'Memoirs such as this will ensure we do not lose the struggle against "forgetting" - that sly accomplice of tyranny' Magda Szubanski In 1939, as Hitler's troops march on Prague, a Jewish couple makes a heartbreaking decision that will save their eight-year-old son's life but change their family forever. Australian journalist Juliet Rieden grew up in England in the 1960s and 70s always sensing that her family was different in some way. She longed to have relatives and knew precious little about her Czech father's childhood as a refugee. On the night before Juliet's father died, in 2006, Juliet's father suddenly looked up and said: 'The plane is in the hangar.' In the years after his death, Juliet comes to truly understand the significance of these words. On a trip to Prague she is shocked to see the Rieden name written many times over on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue memorial. These names become the catalyst for a life-changing journey that uncovers a personal Holocaust tragedy of epic proportions. Juliet traces the grim fate of her father's cousins, aunts and uncles on visits to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps and learns about the extremes of cruelty, courage and kindness. Then in a locked box in Britain's National Archives, she discovers a stash of documents including letters from her father that reveal intimate details of his struggle. Meticulously researched and beautifully told, this is the moving story of a woman's quest to piece together the hidden parts of her father's life and the unimaginable losses he was determined to protect his children from. PRAISE FOR THE WRITING ON THE WALL 'Rieden sets out to chart her story with a journalist's rigour: facts, timelines, archival material. She does it brilliantly. But it is the small, powerful resonant moments within a harrowing arc that bring her story alive.' The Australian

Writing on the Wall

Writing on the Wall PDF Author: Tom Standage
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620402858
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Chronicles social media over two millennia, from papyrus letters that Cicero used to exchange news across the Empire to today, reminding us how modern behavior echoes that of prior centuries and encouraging debate and discussion about how we'll communicate in the future.

The Writing on the Wall

The Writing on the Wall PDF Author: Maggi Dawn
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 1444722077
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In an increasingly secularised society, the average person is unlikely to have a working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - is built on Christian concepts and biblical references. THE WRITING ON THE WALL provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories.

The Writing on the Wall

The Writing on the Wall PDF Author: Aeyal Gross
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107145961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
A critical analysis of Israel's control of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, advocating a normative and functional approach.

Writing on the Wall

Writing on the Wall PDF Author: Simon Morley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500284582
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Now published in paperback, this book is the first systematic study to explore the way in which words have encroached on the visual arts from the late 19th century to the present day. From the Impressionists to contemporary practitioners, Writing on the Wall shows how artists have responded to an environment increasingly saturated with words, and how the mass media has adopted and adapted artistic devices in typography, propaganda and advertising.

Writing On The Wall

Writing On The Wall PDF Author: Lynne Reid Banks
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446430367
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Tracy wasn't surprised that her dad disapproved of Kev, with his hair in spikes, his Dayglo socks and all the rest of his punk gear. But she liked the way he looked and enjoyed going round with him. Besides, she was determined to have a good time before she had to get some boring job and settle down, like her sister Mary. That was why the trip to Holland seemed such a great idea. Of course it was Kev who suggested it, and Tracy knew that her parents would never let her go off with Kev, just the two of them. On the other hand, if there was a whole bunch of them going, including her friend Karen and some of the others from school, Dad might - just might - say yes. As things turned out, persuading Dad to say yes was only the beginning of her troubles. In fact so much went wrong that it was hard, afterwards, to remember the good bits, and it wasn't until the whole awful business was over that Tracy realised she should have seen what was going on all along.

The Writing on the Wall

The Writing on the Wall PDF Author: Will Hutton
Publisher: Abacus (UK)
ISBN: 9780349118826
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Will Hutton presents an incisive and thoroughly accessible account of China's emergence as an economic power and its developing relationship with the West.

Writing on the Wall

Writing on the Wall PDF Author: Karen B. Stern
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210705
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
What ancient graffiti reveals about the everyday lives of Jews in the Greek and Roman world Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and Josephus and the rabbinic texts of the Mishnah and Talmud. Commissioned art, architecture, and formal inscriptions displayed on tombs and synagogues equally reflect the sensibilities of their influential patrons. The perspectives and sentiments of nonelite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Focusing on these forgotten Jews of antiquity, Writing on the Wall takes an unprecedented look at the vernacular inscriptions and drawings they left behind and sheds new light on the richness of their quotidian lives. Just like their neighbors throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt, ancient Jews scribbled and drew graffiti everyplace--in and around markets, hippodromes, theaters, pagan temples, open cliffs, sanctuaries, and even inside burial caves and synagogues. Karen Stern reveals what these markings tell us about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Making compelling analogies with modern graffiti practices, she documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors, showing how popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement regularly crossed ethnic and religious boundaries. Illustrated throughout with examples of ancient graffiti, Writing on the Wall provides a tantalizingly intimate glimpse into the cultural worlds of forgotten populations living at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and earliest Islam.

The Grave on the Wall

The Grave on the Wall PDF Author: Brandon Shimoda
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872867935
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
A memoir and book of mourning, a grandson’s attempt to reconcile his own uncontested citizenship with his grandfather’s lifelong struggle. A memoir and book of mourning, a grandson’s attempt to reconcile his own uncontested citizenship with his grandfather’s lifelong struggle. Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life—child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen—mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the twentieth century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather, and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting. Praise for The Grave on the Wall: "Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. … It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle … In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb."—Booklist, starred review "In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making."—Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory "Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate."—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean “Within this haunted sepulcher built out of silence, loss, and grief—its walls shadowed by the traumas of racial oppression and violence—a green river lined with peach trees flows beneath a bridge that leads back to the grandson."—Jeffrey Yang, author of Hey, Marfa: Poems "It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces—through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, Where are you from? I would answer, From The Grave on the Wall."—Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War "Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. This mystery is part of each of us. Shimoda outlines that mystery in silence and silhouette, in objects left behind at site-specific travels to Japan and in the disparate facts of his grandpa’s FBI file. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge."—Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future "Shimoda is a mystic writer … He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. … he has written a book that touches the bottom of my own soul."—Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue "The Grave on the Wall is a passage of aching nostalgia and relentless assembly out of which something more important than objective truth is conjured—a ritual frisson, a veracity of spirit. I am grateful to have traveled along.”—Trisha Low, The Believer