Josep Pla

Josep Pla
Author: Joan Ramon Resina
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1487501846

In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer's deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual.

Occupation Journal

Occupation Journal
Author: Jean Giono
Publisher: Archipelago
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1939810574

A captivating literary and historical record, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal offers a glimpse into life in collaborationist France during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes and thoughts of one of France's greatest and most independent writers. Written during the years of France's occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France's great literary minds during one of the country's darkest hours. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s--a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation--Giono spent the war in the village of Contadour in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his consumptive daughter. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions. Giono recounts the details of his life with fierce independence of thought and novelistic attention to character and dialogue. Occupation Journal is a fascinating historical document as well as a unique window into one of French literature's most voracious and critical minds.

Call Me Zebra

Call Me Zebra
Author: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2018
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0544944607

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction "Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you."--Wall Street Journal "A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bola o and Borges." --New York Times Book Review Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Bestseller Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29, Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Read It Forward, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature--even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love. Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions--until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past. An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author "on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement" (Bustle).

Hellfire

Hellfire
Author: Nick Tosches
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780802135667

A portrait of singer Jerry Lee Lewis details his early life, music, controversial marriage, problems and decline, endurance, and revival in popularity.

Uncertain Glory

Uncertain Glory
Author: Joan Sales
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681371812

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF 2017 A classic Catalan work about love, family, and class during the Spanish Civil war. Spain, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo—a beautiful widow with a shadowy past—puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís’s son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city’s morale, she leaves to spend the winter with Lluís’s brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on “dead” fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini’s decision will put her family’s fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, an old friend and a traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth, and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Language in Late Capitalism

Language in Late Capitalism
Author: Alexandre Duchêne
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 041588859X

This book examines the ways in which our ideas about language and identity which used to be framed in national and political terms as a matter of rights and citizenship are increasingly recast in economic terms as a matter of added value. It argues that this discursive shift is connected to specific characteristics of the globalized new economy in what can be thought of as "late capitalism". Through ten ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the complex ways in which older nationalist ideologies which invest language with value as a source of pride get bound up with newer neoliberal ideologies which invest language with value as a source of profit. The complex interaction between these modes of mobilizing linguistic resources challenges some of our ideas about globalization, hinting that we are in a period of intensification of modernity, in which the limits of the nation-State are stretched, but not (yet) undone. At the same time, this book argues, this intensification also calls into question modernist ways of looking at language and identity, requiring a more serious engagement with capitalism and how it constitutes symbolic (including linguistic) as well as material markets.

Essays One

Essays One
Author: Lydia Davis
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0374719241

A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.” Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis’s gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. In Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades. In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote’s painting, and from the Shepherd’s Psalm to early tourist photographs. On display is the development and range of one of the sharpest, most capacious minds writing today.

Arthur

Arthur
Author: Mikael Lindnord
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2017-09-09
Genre: Pets
ISBN: 1771643382

The uplifting true story of an extreme athlete, a stray dog, and how they found each other. “Heroic and heartwarming” (Forbes), this unbelievable adventure will make readers laugh, gasp, cry, and see rescue dogs with a whole new perspective. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING MARK WAHLBERG—STREAMING ON STARZ When you're racing 435 miles through the jungles and mountains of South America, the last thing you need is a stray dog tagging along. But that's exactly what happened to Mikael Lindnord, captain of a Swedish adventure racing team, when he threw a scruffy but dignified mongrel a meatball one afternoon. When the team left the next day, the dog followed. Try as they might, they couldn't lose him—and soon Mikael realized that he didn't want to. Crossing rivers, battling illness and injury, and struggling through some of the toughest terrain on the planet, the team and the dog walked, kayaked, cycled, and climbed together toward the finish line, where Mikael decided he would save the dog, now named Arthur, and bring him back to his family in Sweden, whatever it took. Illustrated with candid photographs, Arthur provides a testament to the amazing bond between dogs and people.

Betrayal in Berlin

Betrayal in Berlin
Author: Steve Vogel
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 682
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062449613

"A riveting and vivid account. ... A remarkable story. ... It reads like a Hollywood screenplay." —Foreign Affairs The astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of the West’s greatest espionage operations of the Cold War—and the dangerous Soviet mole who betrayed it. Its code name was “Operation Gold,” a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries. Success would provide the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service access to a vast treasure of intelligence. Exposure might spark a dangerous confrontation with the Soviets. Yet as the Allies were burrowing into the German soil, a traitor, code-named Agent Diamond by his Soviet handlers, was burrowing into the operation itself. . . Betrayal in Berlin is Steve Vogel’s heart pounding account of the operation. He vividly recreates post-war Berlin, a scarred, shadowy snake pit with thousands of spies and innumerable cover stories. It is also the most vivid account of George Blake, perhaps the most damaging mole of the Cold War. Drawing upon years of archival research, secret documents, and rare interviews with Blake himself, Vogel has crafted a true-life spy story as thrilling as the novels of John le Carré and Len Deighton. Betrayal in Berlin includes 24 photos and two maps.

A Thousand Forests in One Acorn

A Thousand Forests in One Acorn
Author: Valerie Miles
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781934824917

A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction brings together twenty-eight of the most important Spanish-language writers of the twentieth century--several of which will be familiar to English-language readers, like Carlos Fuentes, Javier Marías, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and many who will be new revelations, such as Aurora Venturini, Sergio Pitol, and Elvio Gandolfo--and provides them with a chance to discuss their careers and explain the aesthetic influences behind the pieces they chose to include in this volume. Unlikeother anthologies, the stories and excerpts collected here were selected by the authors themselves and represent the "high point" of their writing career. Valerie Miles--translator, editor, and co-founder of Granta en español--not only curated perhaps the greatest cross-section of contemporary Spanish-language literature to be anthologized, but also brings to this collection original interviews with every author, along with biographic prefaces before each, in order to best introduce the reader to the author's entire oeuvre and his or her literary impact. Breathtaking in scope and historical detail, this anthology will no doubt become a fixture in personal literary collections, as well as a go-to resource for classrooms and libraries alike. Valerie Miles is a publisher, writer, translator, and the co-founder ofGranta en español. She is also the co-director ofThe New York Review of Books in its Spanish translation and, in 2013, was voted one of the "Most Influential Professionals in Publishing" by the Buenos Aires Book Fair. Contributors: Rafael Chirbes Edgardo Cozarinsky Jose de la Colina Cristina Fernandez Cubas Alfredo Bryce Echenique Jorge Edwards Abilio Estevez Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio Carlos Fuentes Elvio Gandolfo Juan Goytisolo Javier Marias Juan Marse Ana Maria Matute Eduardo Mendoza Jose Maria Merino Antonio Munoz Molina Horacio Castellanos Moya Ricardo Piglia Ramiro Pinilla Sergio Pitol Evelio Rosero Alberto Ruy Sanchez Esther Tusquets Hebe Uhart Mario Vargas Llosa Aurora Venturini Enrique Vila-Matas