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RX
By Rachel Lindsay. 2018
A graphic memoir about the treatment of mental illness, treating mental illness as a commodity, and the often unavoidable choice…
between sanity and happiness.In her early twenties in New York City, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Rachel Lindsay takes a job in advertising in order to secure healthcare coverage for her treatment. But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain, developing ads for an antidepressant drug. She is the audience of the work she's been pouring over and it highlights just how unhappy and trapped she feels, stuck in an endless cycle of treatment, insurance and medication. Overwhelmed by the stress of her professional life and the self-scrutiny it inspires, she begins to destabilize and while in the midst of a crushing job search, her mania takes hold. Her altered mindset yields a simple solution: to quit her job and pursue life as an artist, an identity she had abandoned in exchange for medical treatment. When her parents intervene, she finds herself hospitalized against her will, and stripped of the control she felt she had finally reclaimed. Over the course of her two weeks in the ward, she struggles in the midst of doctors, nurses, patients and endless rules to find a path out of the hospital and this cycle of treatment. One where she can live the life she wants, finding freedom and autonomy, without sacrificing her dreams in order to stay well.Last Dance in Havana: Escape to Cuba with the perfect holiday read!
By Rosanna Ley. 2016
From the #1 Kindle Bestseller comes an exotic tale of love, family and friendship'The perfect holiday companion' - Heat'The ultimate…
feel-good read' - Candis'Sun-soaked escapism' - Best**********Cuba, 1958Elisa is only sixteen years old when she meets Duardo and she knows he's the love of her life from the moment they first dance the rumba together in downtown Havana. But Duardo is a rebel, determined to fight in Castro's army, and Elisa is forced to leave behind her homeland and rebuild her life in distant England. But how can she stop longing for the warmth of Havana, when the music of the rumba still calls to her?England, 2012Grace has a troubled relationship with her father, whom she blames for her beloved mother's untimely death. And this year more than ever she could do with a shoulder to cry on - Grace's career is in flux, she isn't sure she wants the baby her husband is so desperate to have and, worst of all, she's begun to develop feelings for their best friend Theo. Theo is a Cuban born magician but even he can't make Grace's problems disappear. Is the passion Grace feels for Theo enough to risk her family's happiness?********SEE WHAT EVERYONE IS SAYING ABOUT ROSANNA LEY:'An impeccably researched and deftly written narrative that kept me hooked until the end' - Kathryn Hughes, bestselling author of The Letter 'Loved it from start to finish. A brilliant holiday read' - Amazon reviewer 'Perfect for fans of Santa Montefiore, Victoria Hislop and Leah Fleming' - Candis 'On so many levels a fantastic read' - Amazon reviewer'A fascinating story with engaging themes' - Dinah Jefferies, bestselling author of The Tea Planter's Wife 'Warm, enthralling, one of my favourite authors' - Amazon reviewerGlass Grapes: and Other Stories
By Martha Ronk. 2008
Glass Grapes and Other Stories is the first full-length collection of short stories by distinguished poet and fiction writer Martha…
Ronk. Ronk's work has garnered critical accolades and numerous awards, including, most recently, a 2005 PEN USA Award in poetry, a 2007 NEA Fellowship, and a 2007 National Poetry Series Award. Glass Grapes is a collection of short, experimental stories, usually dominated by an object imbued with fetishistic qualities by an obsessive, self-involved narrator. The language of these stories is repetitive, provocative, imagistic, occasionally comic, and unnerving. Ronk's fiction moves with the same grace, beauty, and attention to language as her most accomplished poetry.The Magic School Bus Spins A Web: A Book About Spiders
By Joanna Cole. 1997
Rainbow Custodians
By Candice Leathem, Michael Head. 2015
The narrative Rainbow Custodians describes the incredible efforts of creatures to rise against the environmental destruction caused since the European…
invasion of Australia. The central characters Bert and Bennie Koala rally all manner of wildlife to jolt humans into growing a conscience and acting to save endangered creatures and the environment. Rainbow Custodians is designed to link to school curriculum and focuses on important issues such as indigenous people's relationship to land, creation, spiritual connection to mother earth and custodianship. The text exposes environmental degradation, human apathy towards extinct and endangered species and sustainability. Cultural inclusion, sustainability and right relationship are further topics that can be used to enhance the application of this book. Australian wildlife is proudly paraded throughout to familiarise the reader with our unique and wonderful creatures. Poetry is woven throughout the text to enchant the audience with this tale of perplexing complications, intelligent solutions and climactic inspirational codas. The text assumes a life of its own through the brilliant illustrations of Candice Leathem that adorn the cover and each of the ten chapters. These images are designed to delight viewers, provoke discussion and are superb teaching tools. The intended audience ranges from middle - upper primary to early secondary levels, as the text relates to key concepts explored within educational curriculum, but it also has inherent appeal for an older audience. The issues explored within this book have global appeal and it is hoped that a wider audience may enjoy this text and learn from the experience. Thank you for taking the time to read Rainbow Custodians.The Clouds
By Juan Saer, Hilary Dobel. 2016
Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language --Ricardo Piglia What Saer presents marvelously is…
the experience of reality and the characters attempts to write their own narratives within its excess --BookforumIn modern-day Paris Pich n Garay receives a computer disk containing a manuscript--which might be fictional or could be a memoir--by Doctor Real a nineteenth-century physician tasked with leading a group of five mental patients on a trip to a recently constructed asylum Their trip which ends in disaster and fire is a brilliant tragicomedy thanks to the various insanities of the patients among whom is a delusional man who greatly over-estimates his own importance and a nymphomaniac nun who tricks everyone--even the other patients--into sleeping with her Fascinating as a faux historical novel and written in Saer s typically gorgeous Proustian style The Clouds can be read as a metaphor for exile--a huge theme for Saer and a lot of Argentine writers--as well as an examination of madness Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation The author of numerous novels and short-story collections including Scars and La Grande Saer was awarded Spain s prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event Five of his novels are available from Open Letter Books Hilary Vaughn Dobel has an MFA in poetry and translation from Columbia University She is the author of two manuscripts and in addition to Saer she has translated work by Carlos PintadoThe One Before
By Juan Saer, Roanne Kantor. 1976
The most important Argentinian writer since Borges --The IndependentThe One Before is a triptych of sorts consisting of…
a series of short pieces--called Arguments --and two longer stories-- Half-Erased and The One Before --all of which revolve around the ideas of exile and memory Many of the characters who populate Juan Jos Saer s other novels appear here including Tomatis ngel Leto and Washington Noriega who appear in La Grande Scars and The Sixty-Five Years of Washington all of which are available from Open LetterThe Dark
By Sergio Chejfec, Heather Cleary. 2000
Opening with the presently shut-in narrator reminiscing about a past relationship with Delia, a young factory worker, The Dark employs…
Chejfec's signature style with an emphasis on the geography and motion of the mind, to recount the time the narrator spent with this multifaceted, yet somewhat absent, woman. The Dark is the most captivating example of Chejfec's unique narrative approach.The Dog That Talked to God
By Jim Kraus. 2012
A wonderfully quirky, heart-breaking, heart-warming and thought-provoking story of a woman's dog who not only talks to her, he talks…
to God. Recently widowed Mary Fassler has no choice except to believe Rufus, the miniature schnauzer, who claims to speak to the Divine. The question is: Will Mary follow the dog's advice, and leave everything she knows and loves? Is this at the urging of God? Or is it something else? Will Mary risk it all or ignore the urgings of her own heart?Shadow Man
By Jeffrey Fleishman. 2012
Foreign correspondent James Ryan was there whenever the world changed: in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in the former…
Soviet bloc. But now he can't remember these events; he can't recall anything long-term, except the summer of his fifteenth year following his mother's death. It was the summer his father told him to call him Kurt. The summer the mysterious and enchanting Vera burst into their lonely, quiet lives. The summer his own world opened, then irrevocably changed.James, at fifty-two, suffers from a severe case of early onset Alzheimer's. The novel unravels James's predicament through the clear glimpses he retains of that long ago summer, and through the desperate attempts of his wife and his nurse to bring him back to the present, if only for stolen moments. Each has her motives: his wife trying not to lose the man with whom she shared so much - wars, death, love, loss of a child, history. And his nurse, the half sister he never knew he had, needing James's adolescent memory to understand the biological father and mother she never met. Told from the perspective of a man betrayed by his own mind, Shadow Man is a novel of identity and suspense that travels across continents and deep into the pasts that make us each who we are. It explores the power of memory to heal and to mask, and of the limits of unconditional love. Set in Philly and the eastern shore of yesteryear, in the Middle East, and throughout Eastern Europe, Fleishman's trademark descriptive but spare lyricism shines. Shadow Man is a touching and haunting novel perhaps most similar to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though it is a work of fiction. From the Trade Paperback edition.Maleficium
By David Homel, Fred A. Reed, Martine Desjardins. 2009
Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth century…
Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie dares to violate the sanctity of the confessional in this confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afflicted with a debilitating malady or struck with a crippling deformity, relates his encounter with an enigmatic young woman whose lips bear a striking scar.As these men penetrate deep into the exotic Orient, each falls victim to his own secret vice. One treks through Ethiopia in search of wingless locusts. Another hunts for fly-whisks among the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Yet others bargain for saffron in a Srinagar bazaar, search for the rarest frankincense, and pursue the coveted hawksbill turtle in the Sea of Oman. Two more seek the formula for sabon Nablus in Palestine or haggle over Persian carpets in the royal gardens of Shiraz. The men's individual forms of punishment, revealed through the agency of the young woman, are wrought upon their bodies.Baroque in its complexity, Kafka-like in its inexorable mechanics, Maleficium by turns astonishes, amuses, and beguiles. Then author Martine Desjardins's Vicar Savoie-as in any confession worth its communion wafer-saves the best (or worst) for last.Maleficium won the Prix Jacques Brossard and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award (French Fiction), the Prix des libraires du Québec, the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie, and the Prix France-Québec.Mother to Mother
By Sindiwe Magona. 1998
Sindiwe Magona's novel Mother to Mother explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman who…
remembers a life marked by oppression and injustice. Magona decided to write this novel when she discovered that Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl, who had been killed while working to organize the nation's first ever democratic elections in 1993, died just a few yards away from her own permanent residence in Guguletu, Capetown. She then learned that one of the boys held responsible for the killing was in fact her neighbor's son. Magona began to imagine how easily it might have been her own son caught up in the wave of violence that day. The book is based on this real-life incident, and takes the form of an epistle to Amy Biehl's mother. The murderer's mother, Mandisi, writes about her life, the life of her child, and the colonized society that not only allowed, but perpetuated violence against women and impoverished black South Africans under the reign of apartheid. The result is not an apology for the murder, but a beautifully written exploration of the society that bred such violence.Yann Andrea Steiner
By Mark Polizzotti, Marguerite Duras. 1992
Dedicated to Duras' companion with whom she spent her last decade of life, Yann Andréa Steiner is a haunting dance…
between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between Duras and the young Yann Andréa and a seaside romance observed - or imagined - by the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper, a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his sister's murder at the hands of a German soldier. Memory blurs into desire as the summer of 1980 flows into 1944. An enigmatic elegy of history, creation, and raw emotion.Is Your Dog Gay?
By Victoria Roberts, Charles Kreloff, Patty Brown. 2004
Lies, First Person
By Dalya Bilu, Gail Hareven. 2008
From the 2010 winner of the Best Translated Book Award comes a harrowing, controversial novel about a woman's revenge, Jewish…
identity, and how to talk about Adolf Hitler in today's world.Elinor's comfortable life--popular newspaper column, stable marriage, well-adjusted kids--is totally upended when she finds out that her estranged uncle is coming to Jerusalem to give a speech asking forgiveness for his decades-old book, Hitler, First Person.A shocking novel that galvanized the Jewish diaspora, Hitler, First Person was Aaron Gotthilf's attempt to understand--and explain--what it would have been like to be Hitler. As if that wasn't disturbing enough, while writing this controversial novel, Gotthilf stayed in Elinor's parent's house and sexually assaulted her "slow" sister.In the time leading up to Gotthilf's visit, Elinor will relive the reprehensible events of that time so long ago, over and over, compulsively, while building up the courage--and plan--to avenge her sister in the most conclusive way possible: by murdering Gotthilf, her own personal Hilter.Along the way to the inevitable confrontation, Gail Hareven uses an obsessive, circular writing style to raise questions about Elinor's mental state, which in turn makes the reader question the veracity of the supposed memoir that they're reading. Is it possible that Elinor is following in her uncle's writerly footpaths, using a first-person narrative to manipulate the reader into forgiving a horrific crime?Gail Hareven is the author of eleven novels, including The Confessions of Noa Weber, which won both the Sapir Prize for Literature and the Best Translated Book Award.Dalya Bilu is the translator of A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and many others.The Hotel Years
By Joseph Roth, Michael Hofmann. 2015
The first overview of all Joseph Roth's journalism: traveling across a Europe in crisis, he declares,"I am a hotel citizen,…
a hotel patriot." The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four feuilletons: on hotels; pains and pleasures; personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s. Never before translated into English, these pieces begin in Vienna just at the end of the First World War, and end in Paris near the outbreak of the Second World War. Roth, the great journalist of his day, needed journalism to survive: in his six-volume collected works in German, there are three of fiction and three of journalism. Beginning in 1921, Roth wrote mostly for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung who sent him on assignments throughout Germany - the inflation, the occupation, political assassinations - and abroad, to the USSR, Italy, Poland and Albania. And always: "I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid."Vertigo
By Michael Hulse, W. G. Sebald. 2001
The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. Vertigo,…
W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald--the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness--takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts--Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."The Amputated Memory
By Marjolijn De Jager, Michelle Mielly, Werewere Liking. 2007
"....An expansive, eclectic, and innovative novel."--Women's Review of BooksA modern-day Things Fall Apart, The Amputated Memory explores the ways in…
which an African woman's memory preserves, and strategically forgets, moments in her tumultuous past as well as the cultural past of her country, in the hopes of making a healthier future possible.Pinned between the political ambitions of her philandering father, the colonial and global influences of encroaching and exploitative governments, and the traditions of her Cameroon village, Halla Njokè recalls childhood traumas and reconstructs forgotten experiences to reclaim her sense of self. Winner of the Noma Award--previous honorees include Mamphela Ramphele, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ken Saro-Wiwa--The Amputated Memory was called by the Noma jury "a truly remarkable achievement . . . a deeply felt presentation of the female condition in Africa; and a celebration of women as the country's memory."Since 1978, Cameroon-born artiste extraordinaireWerewere Liking has been living in the Ivory Coast, where she established the Village Ki-Yi, a self-supporting center for the performing and fine arts. A singer, dancer, actor, playwright, songwriter, and author of two titles previously published in the United States, Liking has been honored across the globe for her writing and theater work; she has performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center.Marjolijn de Jager teaches French, Dutch, and literary translation at New York University and works as an independent literary translator, most recently on Assia Djebar's Children of the New World.Michelle Mielly received her PhD from Harvard University and is now teaching in the Department of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University.The Present Moment
By Valerie Kibera, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. 1987
Published in conjunction with the award-winning Coming to Birth, this novel is the first U.S. release of a major force…
in East African literature. Of her ability to both empathize with her characters and capture their complex levels, the Weekly Review said, "Macgoye's major virtue as a writer and social critic is the inclusiveness of her vision. Nothing human is alien to her. She refuses to bestow virtue or villainy along ideological or gender lines."The Present Moment tells the story of seven unforgettable Kenyan women as it traces more than sixty years of turbulent national history. Like their country, these women are divided by ethnicity, language, class, and religion. But around the charcoal fire at the Refuge, the old-age home they share, they uncover the hidden personal histories that connect them as women: stories of their struggles for self-determination; of conflict, violence, and loss, but also of survival. As they reflect upon their tragedies, they also become aware of the community they have formed--a community of collective history, strength, humor, and affection. A chronology by Jean Hay provides U.S. readers with context on Kenyan history."Marjorie Macgoye paints a group portrait colored by deep respect, compassion, and admiration."--Commonwealth Today (Great Britain)"With the vividly specific economy of the best poetry . . . [Macgoye] confers a stature and significance on humble lives; or, rather, shows that behind the most unpromising human façades lurk lives of extraordinary courage, enterprise, and resilience."--Sunday Nation (Kenya)Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye is the award-winning author of Coming to Birth, as well as many other novels and volumes of poetry. The first African woman writer to receive the Sinclair Prize in 1986, she lives in Nairobi, Kenya.Valerie Kibera has taught European and African literature at Kenyatta University, Nairobi. She is editor of An Anthology of East African Short Stories.Jean Hay teaches history at the African Studies Center of Boston University.Skywater
By Melinda Worth Popham. 2013
"Brand X and his fellow coyotes . . . are meticulously observed in the desert environment that Ms. Popham seems…
to know like her backyard. And so are the people of this fable--old Hallie and Albert . . . and the several varmint-hunters, callous or alcoholic or both. There is a parable of how we might relate to the creatures that share the world with us; and a parable of dreams versus realty; and a parable of home, of known territory with its comparative safety; and a parable of making the best of a world short of everything. The people and the creatures of Ms. Popham's fable are right, they belong, and they mean." --Wallace Stegner "This spare and affecting novel has the precision and the stinging sweetness of a fable. A wonderful book." --Thomas McGuane "Refreshing . . . Life-affirming . . . The first book I've read in a long time that left me with teary eyes at the end."--The San Diego Tribune "Captivating . . . The animals' arduous westward journey down the Colorado River to the Gulf suggests a coyote world view that is subtly sustained by their mysterious ways." --Publishers Weekly "With dramatic urgency and imaginative tenderness, Melinda Popham has given the world a painful, poetic, and delightfully unpredictable story that pulsates with hope and healing meaning." --Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus "Rich with poetic resonance." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "Evoking a rich sense of place and animal behavior, [Popham] lets us see through very different eyes." --The Seattle Times "A daring and visionary tale. [Popham] dares to tell us what a coyote thinks and sees and feels and dreams. . . . A hero of the classic kind--a furry, howling, water-seeking version of the Hero with a Thousand Faces." --James D. Houston "Masterful . . . Astonishing . . . Remarkable . . . Put down the latest technothriller and bask awhile in the descriptive prose of Skywater." --L.A. Life