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By Andreas Souvaliotis. 2019
Updated and expanded: A new edition of the inspiring memoir by one of Canada's most unusual, successful and socially conscious…
businesspeople."I am different. I have always been different. I grew up scared of being found out, scared of my natural inability to fit in, to conform, to look and sound and dress and behave 'normal.' I was always drawn to the different ones and I observed them with fascination--but the thought of being even a little bit like them mortified me. I was desperate to fit in. . . ." --From MisfitAndreas Souvaliotis was raised at a time when being on the autism spectrum wasn't easily diagnosed or even discussed. Minds like his were simply considered odd. He also knew from an early age he was gay, and it terrified him as he was growing up with openly homophobic parents in one of Europe's least tolerant societies.Andreas's differences made him an outsider, right through to his mid-forties. And then suddenly, everything changed. Misfit is the extraordinary memoir of a man who realized there was strength in his strangeness, that it could be used as a force for good. "It all happened in a flash. On a beautiful spring morning in 2007, sitting in my backyard and licking my wounds from a spectacular career derailment, I came up with a big idea--and I found myself contemplating the most daring and unconventional pursuit of my life." The weird kid from Greece was on his way to making his world, and everyone's world, a better place.Andreas Souvaliotis's inspiring story shows us that everyone has what it takes to trigger positive change, and that none of us should see our differences and quirks as handicaps.• The author is donating all of his proceeds from this book to 6 Degrees, a global charitable initiative that promotes inclusion, diversity, belonging and citizenhip. 6degreesto.comBy Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Saffran Foer. 2005
Esta historia cuenta el viaje de un joven norteamericano a Ucrania en busca de los origenes de su familia, una…
inquietante y divertida odisea a traves de los claroscuros de la memoria en la que poco a poco se iran iluminando los desertados escenarios de un pasado turbador: la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el holocausto o la fundacion, en el siglo XVIII, de Trachimbrod, el pueblo del que es originaria la familia del protagonistaBy Frank Waters. 1977
Thirty Hopi elders cooperated with the author to describe the Hopis' world view. They shared their legends and rituals and…
the beliefs underlying them. The result is a philosophy much different from those of European culturesBy Irvin Yalom. 2019
Amsterdam, février 1941. Le Reichleiter Rosenberg, chargé de la confiscation des biens culturels des juifs dans les territoires occupés, fait…
main basse sur la bibliothèque de Baruch Spinoza. Qui était donc ce philosophe, excommunié en 1656 par la communauté juive d'Amsterdam et banni de sa propre famille, pour exercer une telle fascination sur l'idéologue du parti nazi trois siècles après sa mort ? La plume romanesque d'Irvin Yalom nous plonge au cœur de l'histoire et explore la vie intérieure de Spinoza, inventeur d'une éthique de la joie, qui influença des générations de penseurs, et celle d'Alfred Rosenberg, qui joua un rôle décisif dans l'extermination des juifs d'EuropeBy Harry Bernstein. 2008
In a small English town on the eve of WWI, Harry's family struggles to make ends meet. His father spends…
his low wages on drinking on gambling. His mother, devoted to her children survives on her dreams. His older sister does the unthinkable; she falls in love with a Christian. They are separated by an "invisible wall". When Harry discovers the affair, he must choose what he knows to be true in his heartDeux sœurs nées à huit ans d'écart dans un petit village de la Gaspésie se retrouvent à Montréal au tournant…
des années 1970 : l'aînée, pionnière du journalisme moderne et future conseillère politique du premier ministre René Lévesque, vit les années d'or d'une brillante carrière, tandis que la cadette met résolument le pied dans l'autonomie. Ni l'une ni l'autre ne se doute qu'au fil de leur engagement respectif dans la société en marche, leurs destins seront soudés par la maladie mentale durant les quarante prochaines annéesBy Gregor Von Rezzori, H. F. Broch De Rothermann. 1989
Gregor von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, a onetime provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be…
absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine--a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.The book is a series of portraits--amused, fond, sometimes appalling--of Rezzori's family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children's health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance.By James Womack, Sergio Del Molino. 2013
Winner of the Premio Ojo Crítico and Premio Tigre Juan, The Violet Hour is the celebration of a life cut…
short. A deeply moving memoir that shows us the inner life of a man confronted with his own limitations.Children who lose their parents are orphans, and those who have to close their spouse's dead eyes are widows and widowers. But we, the parents who sign the documents authorizing our children's funerals, we have no name, no civil status. We remain parents forever.Sergio del Molino is a Spanish writer and journalist who lives in Zaragoza. He has worked for almost ten years as a reporter in the Heraldo de Aragón, where he writes a Sunday column.By Lara Vergnaud, Zahia Rahmani. 2016
This moving tale of imprisonment and escape, persecution and loss, is narrated by the daughter of an alleged Harki, an…
Algerian soldier who fought for the French during the Algerian War for Independence. It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled, first in their homeland after the war, and later in France, where fleeing Harki families sought refuge but instead faced contempt, discrimination, and exclusion. Zahia Rahmani blends reality and imagination in her writing, offering a fictionalized version of her own family's struggle. Lara Vergnaud's beautiful translation from the French perfectly captures the voices and emotions of Rahmani's childhood in a foreign land. While the author delves deeply into the past, she also indicts present-day France and Algeria. From the unique perspective of the daughter of an accused Harki, she examines France's complex and controversial history with its former colony and offers new insight into the French civil riots of 2005. She makes a stirring plea for understanding between generations and cultures, and especially for an end to the destructive practice of condemning children for their fathers' actions and beliefs.Combinando un conocimiento profundo de historia y filosofía con la sensibilidad literaria de un elocuente humanista, Rob Riemen identifica la…
ruta del eterno retorno del fascismo. Gracias a su lucidez y valentía, Albert Camus y Thomas Mann pudieron entender algo que hoy en día muchos politólogos son incapaces de admitir. En 1947, ambos lanzaron una advertencia: la guerra ha terminado, pero el fascismo no fue vencido. Aunque se demore algunas décadas, volverá otra vez. No lo reconoceremos por sus ideas, pues el fascismo no tiene ninguna, pero sí por sus acciones y su política. Una política del resentimiento, el miedo y la ira. Ése es el esqueleto fascista: incitación a la violencia, un vulgar materialismo, un nacionalismo asfixiante, xenofobia, la necesidad de señalar chivos expiatorios, la banalización del arte, el odio por la vida intelectual y una feroz resistenciaal cosmopolitismo. En estos días se presenta en el escenario mundial disfrazado de populismo, haciendo falsas promesas de libertad y grandeza. ¿Cómo podemos detenerlo? ¿Cómo podemos salir de la crisis de civilización de nuestra era, de la cual el fascismo es sólo una manifestación? La respuesta, nos dice el autor de estas consideraciones tempestivas, está en el regreso de la nobleza de espíritu, en la recuperación de los valores universales de verdad, justicia, belleza, compasión y sabiduría. Sólo en estos pilares puede apoyarse una sociedad verdaderamente democrática. Otros autores han opinado: "Rob Riemen tiene un hondo compromiso. Con los valores morales e intelectuales de nuestra frágil comunidad. Con esa elusiva pero vital "decencia del pensamiento". Es un humanista en el sentido clásico y un agudo observador de los cambios tecnológicos que operan en nuestros debates políticos. Leerlo es participar en un diálogo desafiante. Es experimentar tanto angustia como esperanza -quizás estas dos son, de alguna forma misteriosa, lo mismo." George Steiner "Para combatir esta era, de Rob Riemen, es una meditación audaz, valiente, original y provocadora. Desafía muchos de los diagnósticos al uso sobre la presente crisis de la civilización occidental, ofreciendo perspectivas sorprendentes e inesperadas. Rob Riemen nos invita a no dar la espalda a los mejores aspectos de la civilización Europea, sin convertirnos en meros museógrafos de nuestro patrimonio cultural, sino, por el contrario, en herederos activos de esta tradición de humanismo, tolerancia y creatividad. Este libro ha sido escrito con pasión, con entusiasmo y con verdadera devoción." Amos Oz "En este breve pero poderoso libro, Para combatir esta era, Rob Riemen argumenta que la crisis política que se desarrolla a nuestro alrededor es en realidad una crisis de la civilización [#]. Éste es un libro para aquellas personas que quieren que Occidente recupere su autoridad moral y que quieren pensar seriamente en cómo ayudar a conseguirlo." Anne ApplebaumBy Douglas Lochhead, John Preston Buschlen. 1973
The story herein told is true to life; true, the greater part of it, to my own life. Also, I…
am convinced that my experience in A Canadian Bank was but mildly exciting as compared with that of many others. My object in publishing "Evan Nelson's" history is to enlighten the public concerning life behind the wicket and thus pave the way for the legitimate organization of bankclerks into a fraternal association, for their financial and social (including moral) betterment. Bank officials, I trust, will see to it that my misrepresentations are exposed. To mothers of bankclerks who attach overmuch importance to the gentility of their Boy's avocation; to fathers who think that because the bank is rich its employees must necessarily become so in time; to friends who criticize the bankclerks of their acquaintance for not settling down--this story is addressed. To the men of our banks who are dissatisfied with the business they have chosen, or someone else has chosen for them; to Old Country clerks who come out to Canada under the impression that Five Dollars is as good as One Pound; to bank employees in the United States, and to office men everywhere--I am telling my tale. Finally, I appeal to "the girls we have known." Be sure you study the subject thoroughly before accusing that inscrutable, proud and procrastinating clerk of yours of inconstancy. (From the Prologue)By Li-Young Lee. 2013
"It has true spiritual importance for contemporary American literature."-Edward HirschUpon its initial publication, acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee's memoir The Winged…
Seed: A Remembrance (1995), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In lyrical prose, Lee's extraordinary story begins in the 1950s when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. Along with many other Chinese members of the population, his family was persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, his father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. While his entire family was being transported to a prison colony, they escaped and fled to Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and back to Hong Kong where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. Eventually, the family sought asylum in the United States in 1962. When the author was six, they emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where his father became a Presbyterian minister. This reissued edition contains a new foreword by the author and never-before-seen photos of the family from different stages of their journey.Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry that have garnered such awards as the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.By Victor Pelevin. 1996
The Russian author Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing a reputation as one of the most brilliant young writers at work…
today. His comic inventiveness and talent as a pure fabulist have won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, Bulgakov, Gogol, Phillip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller, and Time magazine has described him as a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage. " In Pelevin's new novel, Buddha's Little Finger, Pyotr Void, a leading St. Petersburg poet, unexpectedly finds himself in the midst of the 1919 civil war in Russia, serving as commissar to the legendary Bolshevik commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev and his formidable machine-gunner sidekick, Anna. But what is the secret of her machine gun? Why does Pyotr keep waking to find himself in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow in the 1990s? And where does Arnold Schwarzenegger fit into all this? Shifting between time and place and spinning story upon story, Buddha's Little Finger is unlike any other novel, a work of demonic absurdism that demonstrates Pelevin's genius for metaphysical comedy.By James Womack, Sergio Molino. 2013
Winner of the Premio Ojo Crítico and Premio Tigre Juan, The Violet Hour is the celebration of a life cut…
short. A deeply moving memoir that shows us the inner life of a man confronted with his own limitations.Children who lose their parents are orphans, and those who have to close their spouse's dead eyes are widows and widowers. But we, the parents who sign the documents authorizing our children's funerals, we have no name, no civil status. We remain parents forever.Sergio del Molino is a Spanish writer and journalist who lives in Zaragoza. He has worked for almost ten years as a reporter in the Heraldo de Aragón, where he writes a Sunday column.By Lara Vergnaud, Zahia Rahmani. 2016
This moving tale of imprisonment and escape, persecution and loss, is narrated by the daughter of an alleged Harki, an…
Algerian soldier who fought for the French during the Algerian War for Independence. It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled, first in their homeland after the war, and later in France, where fleeing Harki families sought refuge but instead faced contempt, discrimination, and exclusion. Zahia Rahmani blends reality and imagination in her writing, offering a fictionalized version of her own family's struggle. Lara Vergnaud's beautiful translation from the French perfectly captures the voices and emotions of Rahmani's childhood in a foreign land. While the author delves deeply into the past, she also indicts present-day France and Algeria. From the unique perspective of the daughter of an accused Harki, she examines France's complex and controversial history with its former colony and offers new insight into the French civil riots of 2005. She makes a stirring plea for understanding between generations and cultures, and especially for an end to the destructive practice of condemning children for their fathers' actions and beliefs.By Niccolò Machiavelli, Christopher Celenza. 2018
Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential works. From the musings of intellectuals…
such as Thomas Paine in Common Sense to the striking personal narrative of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our intellectual history through the words of the exceptional few.Widely acknowledged as Machiavelli’s defining work, The Prince is an innovative and rich treatise marked by his political theories and the principles of leadership. Based upon his own experiences witnessing “the actions of great men” and the often immoral aspects that come with power, Machiavelli encouraged ambition amongst leaders—which was a break from the philosophy of other contemporary thinkers. The Prince identifies the aims of powerful leaders, which can help to justify the use of largely immoral means in their methods.With a new foreword by scholar Christopher Celenza, this essential work on politics contemplates leadership in a manner still relevant today. This lesson in autocratic rule will provide the reader with the author’s rational approach to control and the contextualization for the term “Machiavellian.”By Carlos Mateo Balmelli. 2019
El nuevo libro de Carlos Mateo Balmelli, una de las personalidades políticas más sobresalientes de Paraguay hoy, y quien en…
los últimos años ha venido publicando una serie de novelas donde trata temas como el amor, la injusticia, la audacia de querer cumplir con los sueños y la búsqueda de la belleza, mezclando algunos personajes reales con otros de su potente imaginación. En Filosofía de vida, Carlos Mateo Balmelli configura un libro lúcido, honesto y muy consciente de que toda biografía siempre tiene algo ajeno porque el que escribe, al hacerlo, inexorablemente se transforma en otro. Las lecturas filosóficas, literarias y políticas heredadas de su padre se entremezclan con jugosas anécdotas que incluyen los primeros contactos con la muerte, un viaje iniciático a Alemania -donde el protagonista pretende estudiar en una lengua desconocida- y el descubrimiento del amor con todas sus virtudes y miserias. La búsqueda incansable de la belleza, el sacrificio sin concesiones del mundo de la política, la literatura como vía de escape siempre a disposición, las relaciones fundantes que marcan a fuego a una persona y esas contradicciones divinas que condensan nada menos que la humanidad son algunos de los temas de este libro impactante, que se propone algo tan sencillo como colosal: exponer, confesar o simplemente ofrecer la experiencia adquirida a lo largo de una vida intensa.By Sergey Gandlevsky. 2014
Sergey Gandlevsky is widely recognized as one of the leading living Russian poets and prose writers. His autobiographical novella Trepanation…
of the Skull is a portrait of the artist as a young late-Soviet man. At the center of the narrative are Gandlevsky's brain tumor, surgery, and recovery in the early 1990s. The story radiates out, relaying the poet's personal history through 1994, including his unique perspective on the 1991 coup by Communist hardliners resisted by Boris Yeltsin. Gandlevsky tells wonderfully strange but true episodes from the bohemian life he and his literary companions led. He also frankly describes his epic alcoholism and his ambivalent adjustment to marriage and fatherhood. Aside from its documentary interest, the book's appeal derives from its self-critical and shockingly honest narrator, who expresses himself in the densely stylized version of Moscow slang that was characteristic of the nonconformist intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s. Gandlevsky is a true artist of language who incorporates into his style the cadences of Pushkin and Tiutchev, the folk wisdom of proverbs, and slang in all its varieties. Susanne Fusso's excellent translation marks the first volume in English of Sergey Gandlevsky's prose, and it will interest scholars, students, and general readers of Russian literature and culture of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods.By Lore Segal. 2019
"Segal is a monumental writer, one of the finest of her generation; this lovely collection is a fine introduction to…
her work."—Kirkus Reviews A DEFINITIVE COLLECTION FROM ONE OF AMERICA'S FINEST WRITERS—INCLUDING NEW AND NEVER-BEFORE-COLLECTED WORK From the award-winning New Yorker writer comes this essential volume spanning almost six decades. Admired for “a voice unlike any other” (Cynthia Ozick) and a style both “wry and poignant” (The New Yorker), Lore Segal is a master literary stylist. This volume collects some of her finest work—including new and uncollected writing—and selections from her novels, stories, and essays. From her very first story—which appeared in The New Yorker in 1961—to today, Segal’s voice has been unique in contemporary American literature: Hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental. Segal has often used her own biography as both subject and inspiration: At age ten she was sent on the Kindertransport from Vienna to England to escape the Nazi invasion of Austria; grew up among English foster families; and eventually made her way to the United States. This experience was the impetus for her first novel, Other People’s Houses, and one that she has revisited throughout her career. From that beginning, Segal’s writing has ranged widely across form as well as subject matter. Her flawless prose and light touch belie the rigor and intelligence she brings to her art—qualities that were not missed by the New York Times reviewer who pointedly observed, “though it was not written by a man . . . Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel.” With this volume comes a long-awaited career retrospective of an important American Writer.By Ignacio Solares. 2009
Colección de cuentos en los que pasan Madero, Huerta, Felipe Ángeles, Rodolfo Fierro, Carranza, Obregón, León Toral. La magistral pluma…
de Ignacio Solares, ganador del Premio Fernando Benítez, nos acerca a un personaje histórico fundamental de México. De Madero y Huerta a Felipe Ángeles y Rodolfo Fierro, pasando por Carranza, Obregón, León Toral y muchos otros personajes, en cada cuento Ignacio Solares inquieta, deslumbra, sorprende a sus lectores con tramas en las que el destino reparte los balazos de manera distinta a la que consignan las versiones oficiales, los hechos ya no coinciden con las efemérides y los infiernos privados abren sus puertas al público, por si hubiera quien se atreva a trasponerlas. Revolución es una palabra que se extingue, dicen. Tiende a entrar en desuso. Sus oxidados bonos van siempre a la baja. Y sin embargo, los sueños que genera siguen teniendo poderes avasalladores y en ellos permanecen vivos los caudillos, los tiranos, la masa anónima que combatió por motivos concretos, o incluso sin ellos, y regó con sangre páginas de la historia y de las historias que integran este volumen. Lo que ha dicho la crítica: "Diecisiete variaciones, invenciones, diecisiete formas de recrear de manera novedosa una historia por demás manoseada. [...]Son cuentos que se dejan leer y proporcionan disfrute al lector". -Fernando García Ramírez, Letras Libres. "Con el humor que lo caracteriza, Ignacio Solares incursiona en el 'hubiera' para contar una historia distinta de Emiliano Zapata en Chinameca; el general Rodolfo Fierro practicaría la compasión humana; el destino de Pino Suárez no hubiera sido tan trágico y las soldaderas hubieran sido fusiladas por el gran adorador de las Mujeres: Pancho Villa".-Yanet Aguilar Sosa, El Universal.