Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories

Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories
Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0803217900

The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce. Packed with lyrical prose and vivid detail, acclaimed writer Katherine Vaz conjures a captivating blend of Old World heritage and New World culture to explore the links between families, friends, strangers, and their world. ø From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl?s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother?s yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours.

Fado and Other Stories

Fado and Other Stories
Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2013-11-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0822978849

• Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden's fruit: "In the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen."Vaz's beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. "Listen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose," on character sings, "that the song might be more beautiful." Such a verse might describe Vaz's own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject's ambiguities and her characters' conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life's discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.

Mariana

Mariana
Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: Aliform Publishing
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2004
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780970765291

Interpreter of Maladies

Interpreter of Maladies
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 202
Release: 1999
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 039592720X

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and a baffling new world, the characters in Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.

American Grown

American Grown
Author: Michelle Obama
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2012-05-29
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 0307956032

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The former First Lady, author of Becoming, and producer and star of Waffles + Mochi tells the inspirational story of the White House Kitchen Garden and how gardens can transform our lives and the health of our communities. Early in her tenure as First Lady, despite being a novice gardener, Michelle Obama planted a kitchen garden on the White House’s South Lawn. To her delight, she watched as fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs sprouted from the ground. Soon the White House Kitchen Garden inspired a new conversation all across the country about the food we feed our families and the impact it has on the nutrition and well-being of our children. In American Grown, Mrs. Obama invites you inside the White House Kitchen Garden, from the first planting to the satisfaction of the seasonal harvest. She reveals her early worries and struggles—would the new plants even grow?—and her joy as lettuce, corn, tomatoes, collards and kale, sweet potatoes and rhubarb flourished in the freshly tilled soil. She shares the stories of other gardens that have moved and inspired her on her journey across the nation. And she offers what she learned about planting your own backyard, school, or community garden. American Grown features: • a behind-the-scenes look at every season of the garden’s growth • unique recipes created by White House chefs • striking original photographs that bring the White House garden to life • a fascinating history of community gardens in the United States From a modern-day vegetable truck that brings fresh produce to underserved communities in Chicago, to Houston office workers who make the sidewalk bloom, to a New York City school that created a scented garden for the visually impaired, to a garden in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that devotes its entire harvest to those less fortunate, American Grown isn’t just the story of a single garden. It’s a celebration of the bounty of our nation and a reminder of what we can all grow together.

A Drizzle of Honey

A Drizzle of Honey
Author: David M. Gitlitz
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2000-09-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1466824778

When Iberian Jews were converted to Catholicism under duress during the Inquisition, many struggled to retain their Jewish identity in private while projecting Christian conformity in the public sphere. To root out these heretics, the courts of the Inquisition published checklists of koshering practices and "grilled" the servants, neighbors, and even the children of those suspected of practicing their religion at home. From these testimonies and other primary sources, Gitlitz & Davidson have drawn a fascinating, award-winning picture of this precarious sense of Jewish identity and have re-created these recipes, which combine Christian & Islamic traditions in cooking lamb, beef, fish, eggplant, chickpeas, and greens and use seasonings such as saffron, mace, ginger, and cinnamon. The recipes, and the accompanying stories of the people who created them, promise to delight the adventurous palate and give insights into the foundations of modern Sephardic cuisine.

Luso-American Literature

Luso-American Literature
Author: Robert Henry Moser
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0813550572

Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants have had a significant presence in North America since the nineteenth century. Recently, Brazilians have also established vibrant communities in the U.S. This anthology brings together, for the first time in English, the writings of these diverse Portuguese-speaking, or "Luso-American" voices. Historically linked by language, colonial experience, and cultural influence, yet ethnically distinct, Luso-Americans have often been labeled an "invisible minority." This collection seeks to address this lacuna, with a broad mosaic of prose, poetry, essays, memoir, and other writings by more than fifty prominent literary figures--immigrants and their descendants, as well as exiles and sojourners. It is an unprecedented gathering of published, unpublished, forgotten, and translated writings by a transnational community that both defies the stereotypes of ethnic literature, and embodies the drama of the immigrant experience.

Now We Will Be Happy

Now We Will Be Happy
Author: Amina Gautier
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2014-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0803256906

Now We Will Be Happy is a prize-winning collection of stories about Afro-Puerto Ricans, U.S.-mainland-born Puerto Ricans, and displaced native Puerto Ricans who are living between spaces while attempting to navigate the unique culture that defines Puerto Rican identity. Amina Gautier’s characters deal with the difficulties of bicultural identities in a world that wants them to choose only one. The characters in Now We Will Be Happy are as unpredictable as they are human. A teenage boy leaves home in search of the mother he hasn’t seen since childhood; a granddaughter is sent across the ocean to broker peace between her relatives; a widow seeks to die by hurricane; a married woman takes a bathtub voyage with her lover; a proprietress who is the glue that binds her neighborhood cannot hold on to her own son; a displaced wife develops a strange addiction to candles. Crossing boundaries of comfort, culture, language, race, and tradition in unexpected ways, these characters struggle valiantly and doggedly to reconcile their fantasies of happiness with the realities of their existence.

Hybrid Englishes and the Challenges of and for Translation

Hybrid Englishes and the Challenges of and for Translation
Author: Karen Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2019-03-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351391984

This volume problematizes the concept and practice of translation in an interconnected world in which English, despite its hegemonic status, can no longer be considered a coherent unified entity but rather a mobile resource subject to various kinds of hybridization. Drawing upon recent work in the domains of translation studies, literary studies and (socio-)linguistics, it explores the centrality of translation as both a trope for the analysis of contemporary transcultural dynamics and as a concrete communication practice in the globalized world. The chapters range across many geographic realities and genres (including fiction, memoir, animated film and hip-hop), and deal with subjects as varied as self-translation, translational ethics and language change. As a whole, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how meanings are generated and relayed in a context of super-diversity, in which traditional understandings of language and translation can no longer be sustained.

Boundless Deep, and Other Stories

Boundless Deep, and Other Stories
Author: Gen Del Raye
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2023-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496238230

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a portrait of a family that holds together despite everything. By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows the tenacity of relationships fractured by language and distance. At the funeral of her old boss, a grandmother confronts the legacy of the draft letters she delivered as a girl during World War II. Facing the loss of his job, a father becomes the caricature strangers have always believed him to be. A graduate student living far from home is worn down by the reality of what it takes to save even a small piece of the world. Along the way, we meet communist revolutionary Shigenobu Fusako hiding out in a Tokyo hotel, submariner and war criminal Nishina Sekio in his tortured dreams, and Edwin, a half-dolphin friend, wreaking havoc in a public pool. Written in the compressed style of Amy Hempel and Lucia Berlin, these stories examine characters whose struggles submerge them, weighing them down from every angle, until they can finally float free.