...y no se lo trago la tierra won the first national award for Chicano literature in 1970 and has become the standard literary text for Hispanic literature classes throughout the country. It is now an award-winning, motion picture entitled And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him.... and the Earth did not devour him / Tomás Rivera --from Voices of the fields: children of migrant farmworkers tell their stories / S. Beth Atkin --Christmas / Langston Hughes --Children for hire / Verena Dobnik and Ted Anthony --First confession / Frank O'Connor --Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez

    He wrote it during 1870–71 and published in 1872, as a prequel to his first book The Innocents Abroad (1869). This book tells of Twain's adventures prior to his pleasure cruise related in Innocents Abroad.

    The expedition was described by the two men in Sea of Cortez, published in 1941. The day-to-day story of the trip is told here in the Log, which combines science, philosophy and high-spirited adventure.Log from the Sea of Cortez includes the narrative of the journey and the essay “About Ed Ricketts.” It does not include pictures and detailed descriptions of the species collected by Steinbeck and Ricketts. (See also Sea of Cortez.)

    There's no traffic light and no mail delivery; people can vanish without a trace and funerals are a community affair. Heather Lende posts both the obituaries and the social column for her local newspaper. If anyone knows the going-on in this close-knit town—from births to weddings to funerals—she does. Whether contemplating the mysterious death of eccentric Speedy Joe, who wore nothing but a red union suit and a hat he never took off, not even for a haircut; researching the details of a one-legged lady gold miner's adventurous life; worrying about her son's first goat-hunting expedition; observing the awe-inspiring Chilkat Bald Eagle Festival; or ice skating in the shadow of glacier-studded mountains, Lende's warmhearted style brings us inside her small-town life. We meet her husband, Chip, who owns the local lumber yard; their five children; and a colorful assortment of quirky friends and neighbors, including aging hippies, salty fishermen, native Tlingit Indians, and volunteer undertakers—as well as the moose, eagles, sea lions, and bears with whom they share this wild and perilous land. Like Bailey White's tales of Southern life or Garrison Keillor's reports from the Midwest, NPR commentator Heather Lende's take on her offbeat Alaskan hometown celebrates life in a dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful place.

    last year, this updated collection contains the best of Robertson Davies' newspaper and magazine articles written over the past 50 years. "Each piece is entertaining and enlightening. . . ".--Publishers Weekly.

    An extraordinarily vivid, unflinching series of portraits of South America today, written from the inside out, by the award-winning New Yorker journalist and widely admired author of Samba.

    J. O'Rourke's classic, best-selling guided tour of the world's most desolate, dangerous, and desperate places. Tired of making bad jokes and believing that the world outside seemed a much worse joke than anything I could conjure, P. J. O'Rourke traversed the globe on a fun-finding mission, investigating the way of life in the most desperate places on the planet, including Warsaw, Managua, and Belfast. The result is Holidays in Hell--a full-tilt, no-holds-barred romp through politics, culture, and ideology. P.J.'s adventures include storming student protesters' barricades with riot police in South Korea, interviewing Communist insurrectionists in the Philippines, and going undercover dressed in Arab garb in the Gaza Strip. He also takes a look at America's homegrown horrors as he braves the media frenzy surrounding the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Washington D.C., uncovers the mortifying banality behind the white-bread kitsch of Jerry Falwell's Heritage USA, and survives the stultifying boredom of Harvard's 350th anniversary celebration. Packed with P.J.'s classic riffs on everything from Polish nightlife under communism to Third World driving tips, Holidays in Hell is one of the best-loved books by one of today's most celebrated humorists.

    Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: A Short History of Nearly Everything, the Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a Walk in the Woods, Notes From a Small Island, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, Shakespeare: the World as Stage, the Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, the Mother Tongue, Notes From a Big Country, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, Down Under, Made in America, Bill Bryson's African Diary. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: A Short History of Nearly Everything (ISBN 0-7679-0817-1) is a general science book by Bill Bryson, which explains some areas of science, using a style of language more accessible to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was the bestselling popular science book of 2005 in the UK, selling over 300,000 copies. A Short History deviates from Bryson's popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. In it, he explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology. Bryson tells the story of science through the stories of the people who made the discoveries, such as Edwin Hubble, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Bill Bryson wrote this book because he was dissatisfied with his scientific knowledge that was, not much at all. He writes that science was a distant, unexplained subject at school. Textbooks and teachers alike did not ignite the passion for knowledge in him, mainly because they never delved in the whys, hows, and whens. "It was as if wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable." Bryson, on the state of science books used within his school. It was in his later years that he realized with stunning shame ...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=101240

    They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item. Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I'm a Stranger Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man's attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.

    This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas’s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The “lecturer” tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will “kill” its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the part literature plays in our lives.

    Like The Hairpin, these essays are funny, weird, adventurous, and moving. There are stories about following a mysterious stranger’s maps in Mexico, attending endless step aerobics classes in Buenos Aires, faking a terrible British accent in London, and navigating a nude spa in Stockholm. About loneliness, connection, and sunburn. And about daring ourselves to be brave and embracing being scared.These stories are tied together by relationships: making them, losing them, how we behave in their absence. How we thrive when we’re far from home and falling in and out of love in all of the world’s beautiful places.

    One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. To the River excavates all sorts of stories from the Ouse's marshy banks, from the brutal Barons' War of the thirteenth century to the 'Dinosaur Hunters', the nineteenth-century amateur naturalists who first cracked the fossil code. Central among these ghosts is, of course, Virginia Woolf herself: her life, her writing and her watery death. Woolf is the most constant companion on Laing's journey, and To the River can be read in part as a biography of this extraordinary English writer, refracted back through the river she loved. But other writers float through these pages too - among them Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Homer and Kenneth Grahame, author of the riverside classic The Wind in the Willows. The result is a wonderfully discursive read - which interweaves biography, history, nature writing and memoir, driven by Laing's deep understanding of science and cultural history. It's a beautiful, lyrical work that marks the arrival of a major new writer.

    Michener set aside a half-completed manuscript. That manuscript was Mexico. It would become an international bestseller in the winter of 1992-93. My Lost Mexico is the story behind the book that took the world by storm.

     Culture has yet to turn away from the mythology of the ancient Greeks, and this fact can be seen in various aspects of our modern life. Through various forms of entertainment, we come across themes and events depicted in Homer’s works of the Iliad and Odyssey. We find ourselves viewing and referencing the strength and trials of Heracles. We even find various parallels between the lives and myths of the ancient Greeks to our own modern world. The history of Greece herself cannot be separated by the mythology of its ancient peoples. From heroes such as Heracles and Perseus, to the underhanded dealings of gods and mortals alike, their story is one a creative attempt to understand the forces which dwell about us and within us. In this book you will find specific stories central to Greek mythology. This is a key into understanding the mindset, not only of these ancient peoples, but of our modern world as well. We may not subscribe as the Greeks did to these myths as factual accounts of historical events, however, these tales allegorically represent the things that humankind still endures and rejoices in. In this text, you will find the spirit of love, of nature, of war and of peace. These myths often deal with very blunt subject matter, as they were the dominant lens through which the world was viewed during much of ancient Greece. The research and writing involved in bringing you this collection of Greek mythology has been an absolute pleasure, and I hope that you are as fascinated in reading this as I was in putting it together. Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn... In the Beginning, There was Chaos The Titans’ Rule The Olympian Rule Hercules and the Twelve Labors Other Important Beings in Greek Mythology Greek Mythology and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey Meet Your Roman Doppelgangers BONUS! Find Inside… and much more! Download Your Copy Today! The contents of this book are easily worth over $10. To order "Greek Mythology: Discovering Greek Mythology!", click the BUY button and download your copy right now! Tags: Greek Mythology, Mythology, Ancient Greece, Civilizations, Ancient Civilizations, Greece, Greeks, Titans, Gods, Zeus, Hercules, Greek Gods, Apollo, Athena, Gaia, Chaos, Uranus, Cyclops, Chronos, Tartarus, Olympia, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Metis, Hades

    He crosses the Rio Bravo, like so many others, to reach "the promised land." And in a barrio like any other, in some gringo city, this illegal immigrant tells his story. As Liborio narrates his memories we discover a childhood scarred by malnutrition and abandonment, an adolescence lived with a sense of having nothing to lose. In his new home, he finds a job at a bookstore. He falls in love with a woman so intensely that his fantasies of her verge on obsession. And, finally, he finds himself on a path that just might save him: he becomes a boxer.Liborio's story is constructed in a dazzling language that reflects the particular culture of border towns and expresses both resistance and fascination.This is a migrants' story of deracination, loneliness, fear, and finally, love told in a sparkling, innovative prose. It's Million Dollar Baby meets The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and a story of migration and hope that is as topical as it is timeless.From the Trade Paperback edition.