Natural History of Silence

Natural History of Silence
Author: Jérôme Sueur
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2024-11-05
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1509564039

In our busy, noisy world, we may find ourselves longing for silence. But what is silence exactly? Is it the total absence of sound? Or is it the absence of the sound created by humans – the kind of deep stillness you might experience in a remote mountain landscape covered in snow, far away from the bustle of human life? When we listen closely, silence reveals a neglected reality. Neither empty nor singular, silence is instead plentiful and multiple. In this book, eco-acoustic historian Jérôme Sueur allows us to discover a vast landscape of silences which trigger the full gamut of our emotions: anxiety, awe and peace. He takes us from vistas resplendent with full and rich natural silences to the everyday silence of predators as they stalk their prey. To explore silences in animal behaviour and ecology is to discover a counterpoint to the acoustic diversity of the natural world, throwing into sharp relief the grating reverberations of the human activity which threatens it. It is to attune ourselves to a world that our human insensitivities have closed off to us, to take a moment simply to breathe and listen to the place of silence in nature.

Expressing Silence

Expressing Silence
Author: Natsuko Tsujimura
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2022-03-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1498569250

In Expressing Silence: Where Language and Culture Meet in Japanese, Natsuko Tsujimura discusses how silence is conceptualized and linguistically represented in Japanese. Languages differ widely in the specific linguistic and rhetorical modes through which vivid depictions of silence are achieved. In Japanese, sounds in nature evoke silence, and onomatopoeia plays an important role in simulating silent scenes. These linguistic mechanisms mediate the perception of the symbiotic relationship between sound and silence, a perception deeply embedded in the Japanese cultural experience. Expressing Silence brings the tools of both linguistic and cultural analysis in examining the remarkably rich array of representations of silence in Japanese language and culture, finding that depictions of silence through language cannot be understood without exploring what sound or silence mean to the speakers.

Cicada

Cicada
Author: Moira McKinnon
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2014-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1743432976

A stunning novel of terror, love and survival in the greatest wilderness on earth. A lyrical, heartbreaking epic debut. An isolated property in the middle of Western Australia, just after the Great War. An English heiress has just given birth and unleashed hell. Weakened and grieving, she realises her life is in danger, and flees into the desert with her Aboriginal maid. One of them is running from a murderer; the other is accused of murder. Soon the women are being hunted across the Kimberley by troopers, trackers and the man who wants to silence them both. How they survive in the searing desert and what happens when they are finally found will take your breath away.

The Country Silence

The Country Silence
Author: David Atkins
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 667
Release: 2013-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1483677486

August, 1608, seven ships loaded with two-hundred men, woman, children, and everything else that they would need to start over again in the New World sailed into the Delaware Bay and went ashore at present day Kent. These people had fled the forest of England and sailed to the new world seeking the same things that the Puritans would, twelve years later in 1620. Only the Indians were aware of them but they kept their distance from the strange pale people that lived in a part of the forest they long believed was inhabited with the evil spirits of the enemies they killed in the wars among the tribes. They stayed hidden among the giant Eastern Hemlocks and American Beech trees from other Europeans until the Drake Well in Titusville discovered oil in 1859. That was when the first Europeans---the descendents of those whom they escaped--- ventured into their new home looking to get rich. And that's when the killing first began.

Glory

Glory
Author: NoViolet Bulawayo
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2022-03-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525561145

2022 BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST “Manifoldly clever…brilliant… ‘Glory’ is its own vivid world, drawn from its own folklore. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny.” —Violet Kupersmith, The New York Times Book Review "Genius."—#1 New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds From the award-winning author of the Booker-prize finalist We Need New Names, an exhilarating novel about the fall of an oppressive regime, and the chaos and opportunity that rise in its wake. NoViolet Bulawayo’s bold new novel follows the fall of the Old Horse, the long-serving leader of a fictional country, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup in November 2017 of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president of nearly four decades, Glory shows a country's imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices that unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination and bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely. By immersing readers in the daily lives of a population in upheaval, Bulawayo reveals the dazzling life force and irresistible wit that lie barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances. And at the center of this tumult is Destiny, a young goat who returns to Jidada to bear witness to revolution—and to recount the unofficial history and the potential legacy of the females who have quietly pulled the strings here. The animal kingdom—its connection to our primal responses and its resonance in the mythology, folktales, and fairy tales that define cultures the world over—unmasks the surreality of contemporary global politics to help us understand our world more clearly, even as Bulawayo plucks us right out of it. Although Zimbabwe is the immediate inspiration for this thrilling story, Glory was written in a time of global clamor, with resistance movements across the world challenging different forms of oppression. Thus it often feels like Bulawayo captures several places in one blockbuster allegory, crystallizing a turning point in history with the texture and nuance that only the greatest fiction can.

Cicada Summer: A Novel

Cicada Summer: A Novel
Author: Erica McKeen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1324073829

A woman, her grandfather, and her lover quarantine in the remote lakeside wilderness—where their world splits apart at the seams. In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They’re soon joined by Husha’s ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio. Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother’s house. When she, Arthur, and Nellie begin to read it together, they learn that her mother’s last missive was a short story collection, crawling with unsettling imagery and terrifying transformations. As the stories bleed into their cloistered life in the cabin, they must each reckon with loss, longing, and what it means to truly know another person. Incantatory and atmospheric, Cicada Summer is a dazzlingly original novel about how we grieve and care for one another.

Silence

Silence
Author: Shusaku Endo
Publisher: Picador Modern Classics
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250082242

"Originally published in Japanese under the title Chinmoku by Monumenta Nipponica"--Title page verso.

The Golden Window of Silence

The Golden Window of Silence
Author: Christopher Bear Beam
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2008-08-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1453518371

The Golden Window of Silence integrates the use of silence as spiritual discipline and its abusive use by systemic structures. Silence may be used as a lifegiving practice or in a destructive way at all levels of societal systems. One of the contentions of The Golden Window of Silence is that when one uses silence to listen to all levels, one may find the source of all non-violent communication. It is by this means that silence becomes one of the most powerful means of social justice. "Proceeds from book sales go to Sunbear Community Alliance, a Texas Non-Profit Corporation."

Ezra Pound and the Spanish World

Ezra Pound and the Spanish World
Author: Viorica Patea
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2024-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1835539661

This collection offers for the first time criticism, biographical essays, analysis, translation studies, and reminiscences of Ezra Pound’s extensive interaction with Spain and Spanish culture, from his earliest visits to Spain in 1902 and 1906 and his study of significant Spanish writers to the dedication of the first monument erected anywhere to Pound in the small Spanish village of Medinaceli in 1973. Divided into two sections, Part One: “ON EZRA POUND AND THE SPANISH WORLD” includes a general introduction on Pound’s lifelong involvement with Spain, together with chapters on Pound’s study of classical Spanish literature, the Spanish dimension in The Cantos, Pound’s contemporary Spanish connections, and his legacy in contemporary Spanish letters. Part Two: “EZRA POUND AND THE SPANISH WORLD: A READER,” then gathers for the first time Pound’s own writings (postcards, letters, and essays) concerning Spain and Spanish writers, as well as his correspondence with Spanish poets Miguel de Unamuno and Juan Ramón Jiménez and with José Vázquez Amaral, the first Spanish translator of The Cantos in its entirety. The volume includes reminiscences by Spanish Novísimos poets, Antonio Colinas and Jaime Siles, written explicitly for this collection. Besides providing a thorough exploration into Pound’s engagement with Spain, this volume pays homage to Pound’s considerable influence on Spanish culture.

The Fertile Earth

The Fertile Earth
Author: Ruthvika Rao
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2024-08-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250899958

An unforgettable story of love and resistance surrounding two young people born across social lines, set against a tumultuous political landscape in India. Vijaya and Sree are the daughters of the Deshmukhs of Irumi. Hailing from a lineage of ancestral aristocrats, their family’s social status and power over villagers on their land is absolute. Krishna and Ranga, brothers, are the sons of a widowed servant in the Deshmukh household. When Vijaya and Krishna meet, they forge an intense bond that is beautiful and dangerous. But after an innocent attempt to hunt down a man-eating tiger in the jungle goes wrong, what happens between the two of them is disastrous, the consequences reverberating through their lives into young adulthood. Years later, when violent uprisings rip across the countryside and the Marxist, ultra-left Naxalite movement arrives in Irumi, Vijaya and Krishna are forced to navigate the insurmountable differences of land ownership and class warfare in a country that is burning from the inside out—while being irresistibly drawn back to each other, their childhood bond now full of possibilities neither of them are willing to admit. The Fertile Earth is a vast, ambitious debut that is equal parts historical, political, and human, with the enduring ties of love and family loyalty at its heart. Who can be loved? What are the costs of transgressions? How can justice be measured, and who will be alive to bear witness?