Author: Anatole France Publisher: Standard Ebooks ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
Penguin Island, published by Anatole France in 1908, is a comic novel that satirizes the history of France, from its prehistory to the author’s vision of a distant future. After setting out on a storm-tossed voyage of evangelization, the myopic St. Maël finds himself on an island populated by penguins. Mistaking them to be humans, Maël baptizes them—touching off a dispute in Heaven and ushering the Penguin nation into history. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Author: Anatole France Publisher: 谷月社 ISBN: Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 222
Book Description
I. LIFE OF SAINT MAEL Mael, a scion of a royal family of Cambria, was sent in his ninth year to the Abbey of Yvern so that he might there study both sacred and profane learning. At the age of fourteen he renounced his patrimony and took a vow to serve the Lord. His time was divided, according to the rule, between the singing of hymns, the study of grammar, and the meditation of eternal truths. A celestial perfume soon disclosed the virtues of the monk throughout the cloister, and when the blessed Gal, the Abbot of Yvern, departed from this world into the next, young Mael succeeded him in the government of the monastery. He established therein a school, an infirmary, a guest-house, a forge, work-shops of all kinds, and sheds for building ships, and he compelled the monks to till the lands in the neighbourhood. With his own hands he cultivated the garden of the Abbey, he worked in metals, he instructed the novices, and his life was gently gliding along like a stream that reflects the heaven and fertilizes the fields. At the close of the day this servant of God was accustomed to seat himself on the cliff, in the place that is to-day still called St. Mael's chair. At his feet the rocks bristling with green seaweed and tawny wrack seemed like black dragons as they faced the foam of the waves with their monstrous breasts. He watched the sun descending into the ocean like a red Host whose glorious blood gave a purple tone to the clouds and to the summits of the waves. And the holy man saw in this the image of the mystery of the Cross, by which the divine blood has clothed the earth with a royal purple. In the offing a line of dark blue marked the shores of the island of Gad, where St. Bridget, who had been given the veil by St. Malo, ruled over a convent of women. Now Bridget, knowing the merits of the venerable Mael, begged from him some work of his hands as a rich present. Mael cast a hand-bell of bronze for her and, when it was finished, he blessed it and threw it into the sea. And the bell went ringing towards the coast of Gad, where St. Bridget, warned by the sound of the bell upon the waves, received it piously, and carried it in solemn procession with singing of psalms into the chapel of the convent....
Author: Tim Winton Publisher: Milkweed Editions ISBN: 1571319581 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 125
Book Description
The writer explores his beloved Australia in a memoir that is “a delight to read [and] a call to arms . . . It beseeches us to revere the land that sustains us” (Guardian). From boyhood, Tim Winton’s relationship with the world around him?rock pools, sea caves, scrub, and swamp?has been as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets, walking in high rocky desert, diving in reefs, bobbing in the sea between surfing sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, and learned to see landscape as a living process. In Island Home, Winton brings this landscape?and its influence on the island nation’s identity and art?vividly to life through personal accounts and environmental history. Wise, rhapsodic, exalted?in language as unexpected and wild as the landscape it describes?Island Home is a brilliant, moving portrait of Australia from one of its finest writers, the prize-winning author of Breath, Eyrie, and The Shepherd’s Hut, among other acclaimed titles.
Author: Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen Publisher: Pushkin Press ISBN: 1782275819 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
A young Danish woman explores her family's past and Faroe Islands ancestry across three generations. In the process she uncovers details of the passions and challenges her grandparents and their siblings confronted when they were her age, and considers universal themes of home and identity. Lush, lyrical prose transports the reader. Family brings the young woman back to the Faroe Islands - the windswept, rocky northern archipelago where she has never lived but which she has always called home. There she finds her stories entwining with those of her ancestors as she searches for a way to connect with the culture and her kin. Rooted in the wild beauty of the islands and the author's own history, this is a bewitching tale of exile, homecoming, and what it means to belong.
Author: Amitav Ghosh Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0374719411 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, Chicago Review of Books and Amazon From the award-winning author of the bestselling epic Ibis trilogy comes a globetrotting, folkloric adventure novel about family and heritage Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one that turns Deen Datta’s world upside down. A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey that will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood, and about the world around him. Amitav Ghosh‘s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.
Author: Shawna Yang Ryan Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 1101872365 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
BEST BOOK AWARD IN FICTION BY THE ASSOCIATION FOR ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • A stunning, lyrical novel that tells "the story of how the Tsais, a Taiwanese family, survive the 'February 28 Incident' of 1947 and precariously navigate the decades that follow" (The New York Times). As an uprising rocks Taiwan, a young doctor in Taipei is taken from his newborn daughter by Chinese Nationalists, on charges of speaking out against the government. Although the doctor eventually returns to his family, his arrival is marked by alienation from his loved ones and paranoia among his community. Years later, this troubled past follows his youngest daughter to America, where, as a mother and a wife, she too is forced to decide between what is right and what might save her family—the same choice she witnessed her father make many years before. The story of a family and a nation grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival, Green Island raises the question: how far would you go for the ones you love?
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company ISBN: 9781402741197 Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 36
Book Description
A brief, simplified retelling of the episode in "Treasure Island" during which the ship arrives at the island and Jim Hawkins follows the pirates, but discovers Ben Gunn who has been stranded there for three years.
Author: Anatole France
Author: Anatole France
Author: Jonathan Routh
Author: Alison Lester
Author: Tim Winton
Author: Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen
Author: Amitav Ghosh
Author: Shawna Yang Ryan
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Author: Sir Edward Hertslet