Author: Mathias Énard Publisher: New Directions Publishing ISBN: 0811231305 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
From the winner of the Prix Goncourt, an exciting comic masterwork rooted in the French countryside. To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents. But what David doesn’t yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language. Brimming with Mathias Énard’s characteristic wit and encyclopedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess.
Author: Mathias Énard Publisher: New Directions Publishing ISBN: 0811226638 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 454
Book Description
Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie—and binds them together in a most magical way.
Author: Mathias Énard Publisher: New Directions Publishing ISBN: 0811227057 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 157
Book Description
Michelangelo’s adventure in Constantinople, from the “mesmerizing” (New Yorker) and “masterful” (Washington Post) author of Compass In 1506, Michelangelo—a young but already renowned sculptor—is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, along with an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design was rejected: “You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.” Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II—whose commission he leaves unfinished—and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork. Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants—constructed from real historical fragments—is a thrilling page-turner about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched fragments, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.
Author: Mathias Enard Publisher: ISBN: 9780992974701 Category : Croats Languages : en Pages : 528
Book Description
One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard's Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond.
Author: Jamie Edmundson Publisher: Rarn Publishing ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 146
Book Description
Two heads are better than one Three can be a real pain in the arse Everyone knows ogres can't be heroes. But Og-Grim-Dog is no ordinary ogre. Recruited by a team of eccentric dungeon crawlers, all three heads are determined to prove their worth. Will their new crewmates accept them? Will the pencil pushers at the Bureau of Dungeoneering be able to stop them? Will Gal'azu become a more tolerant society...and will Og-Grim-Dog solve the dark mystery that drew them into this new world in the first place? Reader reviews: "a marathon of craziness that will tickle your sense of humor. Loved all the gritty characters and enjoyed the fast paced action plot." "If you've ever played D&D, you'll enjoy this tale of orcs, and dwarves and ogres. There's good silliness and a serious theme." "The characters are fun and diverse. The jokes are funny and adult without being lewd or gross. The plot is fun, engaging, and well timed." "This book sets up an awesome character, some great side characters, and an interesting world filled with surprisingly similar issues that we have in our own. I wasn’t expecting to love this book, but I did." "This little book was SO MUCH FUN! There were plenty of in-jokes that, as a fantasy fan, I loved and the characters were extremely likable. The whole thing just makes me want to go on an adventure." If you're looking for something lighthearted, with some cleverness, silliness, and a little grit, start this fun, feelgood adventure today! Me Three: Book 2 Og-Grim-Dog and The Dark Lord Book 3 Og-Grim-Dog and The War of The Dead Book 4 Og-Grim-Dog: Ogre's End Game KEYWORDS: humorous fantasy, comic fantasy, fantasy comedy, sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, dungeons and dragons, wizards, elves and dwarves, free fantasy, free fantasy ebook, free humorous fantasy, free epic fantasy, free sword and sorcery, free comic fantasy, free humourous fantasy, free book, free series starter, fantasy audiobook
Author: Fred Turner Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022606414X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
A “smart and fascinating” reassessment of postwar American culture and the politics of the 1960s from the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Reason Magazine). We tend to think of the sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication—and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture. In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ‘50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. He tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the best-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe. Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today. “Brilliant . . . [an] excellent and thought-provoking book.” —Tropics of Meta
Author: Barbara Comyns Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1681371324 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
A feminist reimagining of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about a single mother and an enchanted friendship—from one of most bewitching British writers of the 20th century. “Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful . . . Tragic , comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.” —The Observer Bella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whose name she didn’t quite catch, and her once pretty face is disfigured by the scar she acquired in a car accident. Friendless and without family, she’s recently disentangled herself from a selfish and indifferent boyfriend and a cruel and indifferent mother. But she shares a quality common to Barbara Comyns’s other heroines: a bracingly unsentimental ability to carry on. Before too long, Bella has found not only a job but a vocation; not only a place to live but a home and a makeshift family. As Comyns’s novel progresses, the story echoes and inverts the Brothers Grimm’s macabre tale The Juniper Tree. Will Bella’s hard-won restoration to life and love come at the cost of the happiness of others?
Author: Miriam Usher Chrisman Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9780391039445 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Cultural and textual analysis of 300 German propaganda pamphlets reveals lay people responding to the Protestant Reformation. They urge changes based on the perceptions and aspirations of their social class, supporting their proposals by personal interpretations of the Bible.
Author: Mathias Énard
Author: Mathias Énard
Author: Mathias Énard
Author: Mathias Enard
Author: Mathias Énard
Author: Jamie Edmundson
Author: Fred Turner
Author: Yuri Herrera
Author: Barbara Comyns
Author: Miriam Usher Chrisman