Still Life and Other Stories

Still Life and Other Stories
Author: Junzo Shono
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2010-10-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1458761843

The 13 stories in this collection by Japanese writer Junzo Shono are linked by the daily life of a husband and wife and their children. The stories are like the back of a tapestry where threads seem to cross randomly. Births, weddings, school activities, a suicide attempt - all occur out of view. Readers understand crucial events through ordinary days. But these quiet tales have a cumulative power. Toys, birds, and playing cards relate to human lives as portents, parallels, parodies. The mother, with her secret sorrows, and the puzzled, bemused father savor reveries and survive unexplained misfortunes. Shono's vivid snapshot technique, the layering of images, events, and conversations, creates an effect Western readers may find more akin to an Ozu film crossed with haiku than to traditional short stories.

Still Life and Other Stories

Still Life and Other Stories
Author: Junzo Shono
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1998-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1880656027

Thirteen stories are linked by the daily life of a husband and wife and their three children

Still Life

Still Life
Author: Sarah Winman
Publisher: Penguin Group
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2024-07-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0735249202

*A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK* *A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK* “[A] winsome, large-hearted novel ... [Still Life] pulses from the page.” —Entertainment Weekly Set between World War II and the 1980s, Still Life is a beautiful, big-hearted story of strangers brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Tin Man and When God Was a Rabbit. In the wine-cellar of a Tuscan villa, as the Allies advance and bombs fall around them, two people meet and share an extraordinary evening: Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier from London's East End; Evelyn Skinner is a worldly older art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to rescue paintings from the ruins and relive her memories of the time she encountered E.M. Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view. Evelyn's talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses's mind that night, one that will shape the trajectory of his life—and the lives of those who love him—for the next four decades. Moving from war-ravaged Tuscany to the boozy confines of The Stoat and Parrot pub in London and the piazzas of post-war Florence, Still Life is both sweeping and intimate, mischievous and deeply felt. It is a novel about beauty, love and fate, about the things that make life worth living, and the things we're prepared to die for.

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
Author: Mark Doty
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2002-07-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0807066109

Mark Doty's prose has been hailed as "tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene" (The New York Times Book Review) and "achingly beautiful" (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.

Still Life with Monkey

Still Life with Monkey
Author: Katharine Weber
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2018-08-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 158988129X

“A brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with heart.”―Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage “Rich and compelling . . . Her characters are vividly, achingly real, including the tiny, furry one at the novel’s center.”―Ann Packer, author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier “Stark and compelling . . . rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion.”―Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn’t sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become “a broken series of unsuccessful gestures.” Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan’s will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey―a tufted capuchin named Ottoline―to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan’s life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough? Katharine Weber is a masterful observer of humanity, and Still Life with Monkey, full of tenderness and melancholy, explores the conflict between the will to live and the desire to die.

My Life and Other Stories

My Life and Other Stories
Author: Bob Elles
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2013-05-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1481752901

Intelligence comes from ignorance as wisdom comes from naivet and there is nothing like gathering both from people who represent a diverse swath of nations throughout the world. As cultures require contact with each other in order to grow and remain viable, and not succumb to atrophy, man too requires contact with men of different beliefs and practices. No one nation or culture or religion has a hold on logic or is immune to extremism. I feel blessed that Ive had the opportunity to absorb and learn about aspects of life that Im sure I wouldnt have learned otherwise. In fact, my whole belief system was changed over the past forty-five years through this contact. I began to do some research on my family and what I learned, coupled with what I had experienced in my life, literally brought me to tears in gratitude and admiration, and hopefully in wisdom. If you like to sit down and listen to stories told by, say, an old friend, an uncle, or a person with wrinkles on his face, grey in his hair, and a sparkle of wisdom in his eyes, coupled with a smile on his face, then you should so bother. If you dont, then stop right here and go pick up and read a book on vampires or loves lost or whatever turns your fancy. My life has been tragic and wondrous and I have what I call life lessons that I believe you will find helpful in your life. Ill even go so far as to say that, given even a fraction of introspection in you, your life will be significantly altered after youve read this book. I know that doesnt sound humble but I also know this to be true. I have learned, forgot, and made up many a good story. Keep this in mind when you read these chapters (stories) compiled within this book. Are they all true? Mostly, with only the most embarrassing events removed. An old retired Air Force fighter pilot once told me I have secrets only God and I know and thats the way it will remain.

Still Life

Still Life
Author: A.S. Byatt
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 406
Release: 1996
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0684835037

In this sequel to 'The Virgin in the Garden, ' in the 1950s, Stephanie Potter, now married to a clergyman, is conflicted about her domestic life and her strivings for intellectual fulfillment; her brilliant sister Frederica eagerly embarks on her academic (and sexual) education at Cambridge University; and their troubled brother Marcus painfully tries to find friendship and love.

Dear Life

Dear Life
Author: Alice Munro
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2012-11-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307961044

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE© IN LITERATURE 2013 A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction A Best Book of the Year: The Atlantic, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, AV Club In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer. Illumined by Munro’s unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro’s own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.

The Still Life in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt

The Still Life in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt
Author: Elizabeth Hicks
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2010-08-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1443824607

This book explores the ways in which English writer A. S. Byatt’s visual still lifes (descriptions of real or imagined artworks) and what are termed “verbal still lifes” (scenes such as laid tables, rooms and market stalls) are informed by her veneration of both realism and writing. It examines Byatt’s adoption of the Barthesian concept of textual pleasure, showing how her ekphrastic descriptions involve consumption and take time to unfold for the reader, thereby highlighting the limitations of painting. It also investigates the ways in which Byatt’s still lifes demonstrate her debts to English modernist author Virginia Woolf, French writer Marcel Proust, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of nineteenth-century Britain. A number of Byatt’s verbal still lifes are read as semiotic markers of her characters, particularly with regard to economic status and class. Further, her descriptions uniting food and sexuality are perceived as part of her overall representation of pleasure. Finally, Byatt’s employment of vanitas iconography in many of her portrayals of death is discussed showing how her recurring motif of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” teases out the still life’s inherent tension between living passion and “cold” artwork.

The Fuss About Queens and Other Stories

The Fuss About Queens and Other Stories
Author: Darius Cooper
Publisher: Om Books International
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2014
Genre: Short stories, Indic (English)
ISBN: 9384225606

The Fuss About Queens and Other Stories, a brilliant collection of short stories by Darius Cooper, delves into disparate universes, including the charming world of the Parsis in Mumbai, caught in a cultural and historical time warp, with the fire temple, the tower of silence, dusty tomes of Dostoevsky, and the British monarch’s portrait in a drawing room, set up with period furniture a truly stunning mosaic. Talking Points: Includes some of the finest short stories by the authorEach story provides a glimpse into the humanistic outlook of the writerEncompasses a variety of socially relevant themes that are close to the writer’s heart