A General Theory of Oblivion PDF Download

Author: José Eduardo Agualusa
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448191548
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2017 A finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 The brilliant new novel from the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace.

Author: Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1939810493
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Splitting through the clear waters beside the rainbow hotel, Daniel Benchimol finds a waterproof mango-yellow camera and uncovers the photographed reveries of a famous Mozambican artist, Moira. In this exquisite new novel, Agualusa's reader loses all sense of reality. In The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Daniel dreams of Julio Cortázar in the form of an ancient giant cedar, his friend Hossi transforming into a dark crow, and most often of the Cotton-Candy-Hair-Woman, Moira, staring right back at him. After emails back-and-forth, Moira and Daniel meet, and Daniel becomes involved in a mysterious project with a Brazilian neuroscientist, who's creating a machine to photograph people's dreams. Set against the dense web of Angola's political history, Daniel crosses the hazy border between dream and reality, sleepwalking towards a twisted and entirely strange present.

Author: Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Félix Ventura trades in an unusual commodity; he is a dealer in memories, clandestinely selling new pasts to people whose futures are secure and who lack only a good lineage to complete their lives. In this completely original murder mystery, where people are not who they seem and the briefest of connections leads to the forging of entirely new histories, a bookish albino, a beautiful woman, a mysterious foreigner, and a witty talking lizard come together to discover the truth of their lives. Set in Angola, Agualusa's tale darts from tormented past to dream-filled present with a lightness that belies the savage history of a country in which many have something to forget -- and to hide. A brilliant American debut by one of the most lauded writers in the Portuguese-speaking world, this is a beautifully written and always surprising tale of race, truth, and the transformative power of creativity.

Author: José Eduardo Agualusa
Publisher: Arcadia Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A journalist is trying to find out what happened to Lidia, who disappeared in Luanda in 1992 - a point in time when the civil war flared up again with unprecedented ferocity. The story tells of the disappointment of the two protagonists, which represents the disappointment of a whole nation."

Author: Aki Ollikainen
Publisher: Peirene Press
ISBN: 1908670215
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
What does it take to survive? This is the question posed by the extraordinary Finnish novella that has taken the Nordic literary scene by storm. 1867: a year of devastating famine in Finland. Marja, a farmer's wife from the north, sets off on foot through the snow with her two young children. Their goal: St Petersburg, where people say there is bread. Others are also heading south, just as desperate to survive. Ruuni, a boy she meets, seems trustworthy. But can anyone really help? Why Peirene chose to publish this book: 'Like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, this apocalyptic story deals with the human will to survive. And let me be honest: There will come a point in this book where you can take no more of the snow-covered desolation. But then the first rays of spring sun appear and our belief in the human spirit revives. A stunning tale.' Meike Ziervogel ' White Hungeris Aki Ollikainen's debut work, but it is written with the control of someone who has mastered the form.' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian 'Such a powerful, honest and thought-provoking story deserves an audience far beyond the shores of Scandinavia.' Pam Norfolk, Lancashire Evening Post 'Impossible not to respond to its raw, unsparing drama.' Elizabeth Bucan, Daily Mail 'A tale of epic substance compacted into a mere seven-score pages.' Ben Paynter, Los Angeles Review of Books

Author: Jeffrey Bennett
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537034
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
A renowned astrophysicist’s approachable introduction to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and its application in our daily lives. It is commonly assumed that if the Sun suddenly turned into a black hole, it would suck Earth and the rest of the planets into oblivion. Yet, as prominent author and astrophysicist Jeffrey Bennett points out, black holes don't suck. With that simple idea in mind, Bennett begins an entertaining introduction to Einstein's theories of relativity, describing the amazing phenomena readers would actually experience if they took a trip to a black hole. The theory of relativity reveals the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit, the mind-bending ideas of time dilation and curvature of spacetime, and what may be the most famous equation in history: E = mc2. Indeed, the theory of relativity shapes much of our modern understanding of the universe. It is not “just a theory”―every major prediction of relativity has been tested to exquisite precision, and its practical applications include the Global Positioning System (GPS). Amply illustrated and written in clear, accessible prose, Bennett's book proves anyone can grasp the basics of Einstein's ideas. His intuitive, nonmathematical approach gives a wide audience its first real taste of how relativity works and why it is so important to science and the way we view ourselves as human beings. “Well-written and uniquely readable . . . Bennett carefully avoids bombastic statements and “spectacularization” of the subject.” —Alberto Nicolis, Columbia University “I have read lots of introductions to relativity, but none is as clear and compelling as this one.” —Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute

Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 075951156X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101911123
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN eBOOK! General Simon Bolivar, “the Liberator” of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life. Infinitely charming, prodigiously successful in love, war and politics, he still dances with such enthusiasm and skill that his witnesses cannot believe he is ill. Aflame with memories of the power that he commanded and the dream of continental unity that eluded him, he is a moving exemplar of how much can be won—and lost—in a life.

Author: Bernadette Meyler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501739409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty. Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion," for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.

Author: David Kennedy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691180873
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
How today's unjust global order is shaped by uncertain expert knowledge—and how to fix it A World of Struggle reveals the role of expert knowledge in our political and economic life. As politicians, citizens, and experts engage one another on a technocratic terrain of irresolvable argument and uncertain knowledge, a world of astonishing inequality and injustice is born. In this provocative book, David Kennedy draws on his experience working with international lawyers, human rights advocates, policy professionals, economic development specialists, military lawyers, and humanitarian strategists to provide a unique insider's perspective on the complexities of global governance. He describes the conflicts, unexamined assumptions, and assertions of power and entitlement that lie at the center of expert rule. Kennedy explores the history of intellectual innovation by which experts developed a sophisticated legal vocabulary for global management strangely detached from its distributive consequences. At the center of expert rule is struggle: myriad everyday disputes in which expertise drifts free of its moorings in analytic rigor and observable fact. He proposes tools to model and contest expert work and concludes with an in-depth examination of modern law in warfare as an example of sophisticated expertise in action. Charting a major new direction in global governance at a moment when the international order is ready for change, this critically important book explains how we can harness expert knowledge to remake an unjust world.