Book picks similar to
Slave Song by David Dabydeen
poetry
indo-caribbean
caribbean
arts-one
L'Art de perdre
Alice Zeniter - 2017
Naïma's father claims to remember nothing; he has made himself French. Her grandfather died before he could tell her his side of the story. But now Naïma will travel to Algeria to see for herself what was left behind--including their secrets.The Algerian War for Independence sent Naïma's grandfather on a journey of his own, from wealthy olive grove owner and respected veteran of the First World War, to refugee spurned as a harki by his fellow Algerians in the transit camps of southern France, to immigrant barely scratching out a living in the north. The long battle against colonial rule broke apart communities, opened deep rifts within families, and saw the whims of those in even temporary power instantly overturn the lives of ordinary people. Where does Naïma's family fit into this history? How do they fit into France's future?Alice Zeniter's The Art of Losing is a powerful, moving family novel that spans three generations across seventy years and two shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a resonant people's history of Algeria and its diaspora. It is a story of how we carry on in the face of loss: loss of country, identity, language, connection. Most of all, it is an immersive, riveting excavation of the inescapable legacies of colonialism, immigration, family, and war.
Thomas the Impostor
Jean Cocteau - 1923
Too young to fight, Thomas assumes a noble ancestry, adds a few extra years to his age, and becomes a soldier. In this guise, he meets the society star Princess de Bormes and her impressionable daughter Henriette. While the princess pursues charity work with the wounded, Henriette falls in love with Guillaume. However, Guillaume, resplendent in army uniform and issued with a shiny revolver, is lost like a child in a fantasy land of their own creation. At the novel's denouement, he clings to his imposture, but in mind, if not body, he has grasped the real meaning of war. This visionary novel is a "hymn to the cult of youth" in which World War I battlefields become an exaggerated spectacle where fiction and reality are inseparable.
Writing Science in Plain English
Anne E. Greene - 2013
But, as Anne E. Greene shows in Writing Science in Plain English,writers from all scientific disciplines can learn to produce clear, concise prose by mastering just a few simple principles. This short, focused guide presents a dozen such principles based on what readers need in order to understand complex information, including concrete subjects, strong verbs, consistent terms, and organized paragraphs. The author, a biologist and an experienced teacher of scientific writing, illustrates each principle with real-life examples of both good and bad writing and shows how to revise bad writing to make it clearer and more concise. She ends each chapter with practice exercises so that readers can come away with new writing skills after just one sitting. Writing Science in Plain English can help writers at all levels of their academic and professional careers—undergraduate students working on research reports, established scientists writing articles and grant proposals, or agency employees working to follow the Plain Writing Act. This essential resource is the perfect companion for all who seek to write science effectively.
I Hear America Singing
Walt Whitman - 1966
After a childhood in Brooklyn, he spent many years in and around Manhattan and Washington, where he witnessed troops returning from the Civil War and tended wounded soldiers in the camp hospitals. Whitman's broad humanity, his love of cities (especially Manhattan), his sympathy with all conditions of people, and his visionary - even prophetic - sense of the reality of the American dream make him as much a poet for our time as he was for the time of the American Civil War and its aftermath. This selection of courageous and consoling poems focuses on Whitman's vision of democracy, his love of Manhattan, his sense of the future - and of the community of peoples of this earth.
The Norton Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt - 2008
Students can access the ebook from their computer, tablet, or smartphone via the registration code included in the print volume at no additional charge. As one instructor summed it up, It s a long overdue step forward in the way Shakespeare is taught. "
Poetics
Aristotle
Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (‘imitation’), hamartia (‘error’), and katharsis (‘purification’). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.Malcolm Heath’s lucid English translation makes the Poetics fully accessible to the modern reader. It is accompanied by an extended introduction, which discusses the key concepts in detail and includes suggestions for further reading.
In the Time of the Butterflies
Julia Alvarez - 1994
A skillful blend of fact and fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies is inspired by the true story of the three Mirabal sisters who, in 1960, were murdered for their part in an underground plot to overthrow the government. Alvarez breathes life into these historical figures--known as "las mariposas," or "the butterflies," in the underground--as she imagines their teenage years, their gradual involvement with the revolution, and their terror as their dissentience is uncovered.Alvarez's controlled writing perfectly captures the mounting tension as "the butterflies" near their horrific end. The novel begins with the recollections of Dede, the fourth and surviving sister, who fears abandoning her routines and her husband to join the movement. Alvarez also offers the perspectives of the other sisters: brave and outspoken Minerva, the family's political ringleader; pious Patria, who forsakes her faith to join her sisters after witnessing the atrocities of the tyranny; and the baby sister, sensitive Maria Teresa, who, in a series of diaries, chronicles her allegiance to Minerva and the physical and spiritual anguish of prison life.In the Time of the Butterflies is an American Library Association Notable Book and a 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award nominee.
The Female Quixote
Charlotte Lennox - 1752
Both Joseph Fielding and Samuel Johnson greatly admired Lennox, and this novel established her as one of the most successful practitioners of the Novel of Sentiment.
Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, Selected Stories
Nikolai Gogol - 1835
This expanded collection of influential Russian satirist Nikolay Gogol's ingenious pieces now includes his most famous play.Includes a chronology, explanatory notes, and publishing history for each work.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass - 1845
In 1845, seven years after escaping to the North, he published Narrative, the first of three autobiographies. This book calmly but dramatically recounts the horrors and the accomplishments of his early years—the daily, casual brutality of the white masters; his painful efforts to educate himself; his decision to find freedom or die; and his harrowing but successful escape.An astonishing orator and a skillful writer, Douglass became a newspaper editor, a political activist, and an eloquent spokesperson for the civil rights of African Americans. He lived through the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the beginning of segregation. He was celebrated internationally as the leading black intellectual of his day, and his story still resonates in ours.
Phaedo
Plato
For its moving account of the execution of Socrates, the Phaedo ranks among the supreme literary achievements of antiquity. It is also a document crucial to the understanding of many ideas deeply ingrained in western culture, and provides one of the best introductions to Plato's thought.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1792
Modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 and featuring a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.It relates the events experienced by a mariner who has returned from a long sea voyage. The Mariner stops a man on his way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The Wedding-Guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience, fear, and fascination as the Mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: for example, the use of narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create a sense of danger, or the supernatural, or serenity, depending on the mood each different part of the poem.
The Romance of the Rose
Guillaume de Lorris
In the hands of Jean de Meun, who continued de Lorris's work, it assumed vast proportions and embraced almost every aspect of medieval life from predestination and optics, to the Franciscan controversy and the right way to deal with premature hair-loss.