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A River Dies of Thirst: journals
Mahmoud Darwish - 2009
“Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.” As always, Darwish’s musings on unrest and loss dwell on love and humanity; myth and dream are inseparable from truth. “Truth is plain as day.” Throughout the book, Darwish returns frequently to his ongoing and often lighthearted conversation with death.Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) was awarded the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2001. He was regarded as the voice of the Palestinian people and one of the greatest poets of our time.
City Sticks
A.H. Sewell - 2015
It was a sample (and not even the correct file - it was an old rough draft that was saved under a new title), and Goodreads will not take it down. The Amazon link directs to the correct, and full, edition. "She is lost, but the world is too. It is a perfect circle.For life is, but a dream /// is not."- "Seeing Ghosts/A Perfect Circle" excerptA. H. SewellCopyright 2015
Saoirse Berger's Bookish Lens In La La Land
Nicole Schubert - 2021
She has an internship with her famous film director uncle, a hit BookTube channel with her actress cousin Sadie and is fully determined to get her world on track as a true adult person, complete with happiness and sparkly love in spades. But nothing is going to plan. She applied to all the wrong colleges, is the only one of her friends still single and is majorly crushing on 23-year-old cinema genius wunderkind Leo Landis, even though he may or may not be breaking up with his girlfriend and may or may not even notice her. But Saoirse's not giving up.She steels herself with hyper-romantic hope and sets out to be her best positive self, which works fabulously until it doesn't and things get complicated. Luckily, life turns in Saoirse's favor as her Hollywood family spins out of control and a sweet and equally quirky street artist, Hector Rojas, spots her magical sparkle and inspires her to see things from a kaleidoscope of angles, even her own beautiful self.Uniquely charming in a Bridget Jones's Diary way with a Cyrano de Bergerac twist, Saoirse Berger takes us on an 18-year-old's hilariously painful journey through love, self-doubt, rejection and the search for belonging as a new adult, ultimately discovering she's already right where she's supposed to be.
Ashes of Her Love
Pierre Jeanty - 2019
Best-selling author Pierre Alex Jeanty helps to bring clarity and understanding to the countless women who are faced with the reality of heartbreak. Ashes of Her Love exposes the fire for what it truly was, and encourages women to drown out the embers that threaten to reignite. With this book, women are inspired to free themselves from the weight of dead relationships, find freedom in walking away, and are empowered to stay away and avoid the reoccurring cycle of heartache. If you’re in a dying relationship, walking away from a terrible love story, learning to put what is no longer good in the past, Ashes of Her love is the fire you need to turn the pages and start writing a new love story. The ending is just the beginning…
Heat
Geneva Holliday - 2007
Between their bedroom antics and their busy lives, Crystal, Geneva, Chevy, and Noah are all faced with situations that are way too hot to handle . . .Crystal’s finding it hard to concentrate at work, and no wonder—she’s got a stud in Antigua who’s beginning to mean more to her than just steamy sex. While things are red-hot with Geneva and her sexy young man, Deeka, her new diet pills stir up more trouble than her collection of slinky lingerie ever did.Chevy’s out-of-control spending has finally caught up with her; when her paycheck is almost entirely garnished, she is forced to resort to sex with an ex to keep a roof over her head.Noah and his partner can’t come to an agreement about adopting children, but one thing’s for sure: A blast from his little-known past with a woman is about to rock his world.
The Divine Boys
Laura Restrepo - 2018
As friends, only disloyalty to each other is forbidden. When a little girl from the slums disappears, the limits of a perverse and sacred bond will be tested in ways none of them could have imagined.Hauntingly true, this daringly told work of fiction explores the tragic dynamic between genders, social classes, and victim and victimizer, and between five men whose intolerable transgressions will shake the conscience of a country.
A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son's Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha
Rodrigo García - 2021
The woman who had been beside him for more than fifty years, his wife Mercedes Barcha, was not hopeful; her husband, affectionately known as “Gabo,” was then nearly 87 and battling dementia. I don't think we'll get out of this one, she told their son Rodrigo. Hearing his mother’s words, Rodrigo wondered, “Is this how the end begins?” To make sense of events as they unfolded, he began to write the story of García Márquez’s final days. The result is this intimate and honest account that not only contemplates his father’s mortality but reveals his remarkable humanity.Both an illuminating memoir and a heartbreaking work of reportage, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes transforms this towering genius from literary creator to protagonist, and paints a rich and revelatory portrait of a family coping with loss. At its center is a man at his most vulnerable, whose wry humor shines even as his lucidity wanes. Gabo savors affection and attention from those in his orbit, but wrestles with what he will lose—and what is already lost. Throughout his final journey is the charismatic Mercedes, his constant companion and the creative muse who was one of the foremost influences on Gabo’s life and his art.Bittersweet and insightful, surprising and powerful, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes celebrates the formidable legacy of Rodrigo’s parents, offering an unprecedented look at the private family life of a literary giant. It is at once a gift to Gabriel García Márquez’s readers worldwide, and a grand tribute from a writer who knew him well.
The Invention of Morel
Adolfo Bioy Casares - 1940
Set on a mysterious island, Bioy’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.Inspired by Bioy Casares’s fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction’s now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.
Nine Months
Sarah Ball - 2002
But Tom's left her with rather more than just a passionate memory of their last night together. Holly's clothes are getting tighter, she has cleavage for the first time in her life, and the sickness she thought was down to the morning-after-the-night-before is lasting all day. Holly Piper is pregnant! Suddenly thrown into an alien world of antenatal classes, stretch marks and big knickers, Holly is relieved that at least she has the support of Alice and Maggie, her two broody best friends. But what of Tom? Holly isn't even sure how she feels about him, let alone his feelings for her. And she has no way of contacting him. A year is a long time for him to be away. But for Holly, the first nine months are going to be the hardest...
Irma Voth
Miriam Toews - 2011
Nineteen-year-old Irma lives in a rural Mennonite community in Mexico. She has already been cast out of her family for marrying a young Mexican ne'er-do-well she barely knows, although she remains close to her rebellious younger sister and yearns for the lost intimacy with her mother. With a husband who proves elusive and often absent, a punishing father, and a faith in God damaged beyond repair, Irma appears trapped in an untenable and desperate situation. When a celebrated Mexican filmmaker and his crew arrive from Mexico City to make a movie about the insular community in which she was raised, Irma is immediately drawn to the outsiders and is soon hired as a translator on the set. But her father, intractable and domineering, is determined to destroy the film and get rid of the interlopers. His action sets Irma on an irrevocable path toward something that feels like freedom. A novel of great humanity, written with dry wit, edgy humor, and emotional poignancy, Irma Voth is the powerful story of a young woman's quest to discover all that she may become in the unexpectedly rich and confounding world that lies beyond the stifling, observant community she knows.
The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God: The Story of Ruth Pakaluk, Convert, Mother, and Pro-Life Activist
Ruth Pakaluk - 2011
She became a renowned pro-life leader and brilliant debater, who was struck with breast cancer and died at the young age of forty-one. Ruth's inspiring story is told primarily through her humorous, sparkling and insightful letters in which her realistic cheerfulness shines. A biographical overview by her husband fills in important details about her life, and a collection of her talks on abortion, faith and being a Catholic wife and mother conclude the volume. Ruth Pakaluk exemplified the powerful integrity of someone who lived what she believed. She was steadfastly committed to Christ and to the culture of life, and this commitment was manifested in her consistent affirmation of life in her family, in society and even in the face of her own death. Peter Kreeft, well known Professor of Philosophy and author, described Ruth as the best, most effective and inspiring pro-life speaker he had ever heard. She was such a compelling, articulate pro-life debater that eventually Planned Parenthood spokeswomen refused to spar with her in public.All Ruth's virtues revealed in this book - her love as a devoted wife and mother, her zeal for the truth, and her faith & hope while battling a terminal illness - offer inspiration and encouragement to anyone striving to put Christian faith into action.
The Little Ship
Margaret Mayhew - 1999
Guy is the eldest, handsome, skilled at everything, a tad selfish. Matt is quieter and has a crippled right arm. Lizzie adores them both, to the extent of putting up with being sea-sick everytime they go out in the old boat and continually getting bashed on the head by the sail. These are idyllic days of sun, and sea, the golden era of the thirties.
Lizzie's father is a doctor and, as the thirties progress, they take the daughter of a Viennese colleague into their home, a Jewish girl called Anna, who is miserable and hates England, and misses her Jewish family and friends. The fifth child to join them is Otto, son of a German diplomat, reared in the best traditions of the Hitler doctrine and destined for the army. These five have a tense and highly involved relationship as they grow up. Anna is resented by the English boys but one of them eventually comes to love her. Otto's relationship with her is more complicated. She is, after all, a Jew. They have one wonderful day together when somehow their rivalries are forgotten as they fight the sea in the little ship, and when they all write their names on the mast. Then the world explodes into war and they all go their separate ways. They all meet again at Dunkirk. Anna getting out from France at the last moment with the help of Guy, Otto as part of the victorious Reich, and Lizzie and Matt taking the little ship over to save them from the beaches.
It is strong, wonderful, atmospheric, romantic with intriguing characters, all involved with each other in love/hate relationships.
Count the Waves: Poems
Sandra Beasley - 2015
A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer."Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.
Luck Is Luck: Poems
Lucia Perillo - 2005
Hers is a vision like no other. In “To My Big Nose,” she muses: “hard to imagine what the world would have looked like / if not seen through your pink shadow. / You who are built from random parts / like a mythical creature–a gryphon or sphinx–.”Fearless, focused, ironic, irreverent, truly and deeply felt, the poems in Luck Is Luck draw upon the circumstances of being a woman, the harsh realities of nature, the comfort of familiar things, and universally recognizable anxieties about faith and grief, love and desire. In “Languedoc,” she writes, “Long ago / I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons / but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument / that looks like a gourd with strings attached / (the problem is always the strings attached).”Perillo’s versions of nature are always unflinching: “Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree, / a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill. / The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree’s black thorns / and the sun had stripped them of their feathers. / . . . well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless. / With a chunk of sky in each eye socket. / And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl.”Down-to-earth, full of playful twists of language, and woven from grand themes in an accessible, appealing way, these poems pierce the heart and delight the mind. Not one word is wasted.
Violeta
Isabel AllendeIsabel Allende - 2022
Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of five boisterous sons. From the start, her life will be marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses all and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. . . .She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, times of both poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life will be shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics.Told through the eyes of a woman whose unforgettable passion, determination, and sense of humor will carry her through a lifetime of upheaval, Isabel Allende once more brings us an epic that is both fiercely inspiring and deeply emotional.