The Rag Doll Plagues PDF Download

Author: Alejandro Morales
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
ISBN: 9781611922561
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204

View

Book Description
A mysterious plague is decimating the population of colonial Mexico. One of His MajestyÍs highest physicians is dispatched from Spain to bring the latest advances in medical science to the backward peoples of the New World capital. Here begins the cyclical tale of man battling the unknown, of science confronting the eternally indifferent forces of nature. Morales takes us on a trip through ancient and future civilizations, through exotic but all-too-familiar cultures, to a final confrontation with our own ethics and world views. In later chapters, the colonial physician finds his successors as they once again engage in life or death struggles, attempting to balance their own hopes, desires and loves with the good society and the state. Book II of the novel takes place in modern-day southern California, and Book III in a futuristic technocratic confederation known as Lamex. In the tradition of Latin American born novelist, Alejandro Morales is one of the finest representatives of magic realism in the English language. In The Rag Doll Plagues, Morales creates a many layered fictional world, taking us on an entertaining and thought-provoking safari thorough lands, times, peoples and ideas never before encountered or presented in this manner. But ultimately, this valuable trip leads to a reacquaintance with our own society and its moral vision.

Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807083704
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

View

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.

Author: Elena Poniatowska
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0142001228
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

View

Book Description
A remarkable novel that uniquely melds journalism with fiction, by Elena Poniatowska, the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Cervantes Prize Jesusa is a tough, fiery character based on a real working-class Mexican woman whose life spanned some of the seminal events of early twentieth-century Mexican history. Having joined a cavalry unit during the Mexican Revolution, she finds herself at the Revolution's end in Mexico City, far from her native Oaxaca, abandoned by her husband and working menial jobs. So begins Jesusa's long history of encounters with the police and struggles against authority. Mystical yet practical, undaunted by hardship, Jesusa faces the obstacles in her path with gritty determination. Here in its first English translation, Elena Poniatowska's rich, sensitive, and compelling blend of documentary and fiction provides a unique perspective on history and the place of women in twentieth-century Mexico.

Author: Miguel López-Lozano
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557534842
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

View

Book Description
Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares traces the history of utopian representations of the Americas, first on the part of the colonizers, who idealized the New World as an earthly paradise, and later by Latin American modernizing elites, who imagined Western industrialization, cosmopolitanism and consumption as a utopian dream for their independent societies. Carlos Fuentes, Homero Aridjis, Carmen Boullosa, and Alejandro Morales utilize the literary genre of dystopian science fiction to elaborate on how globalization has resulted in the alienation of indigenous peoples and the deterioration of the ecology. This book concludes that Mexican and Chicano perspectives on the past and the future of their societies constitute a key site for the analysis of the problems of underdevelopment, social injustice, and ecological decay that plague today's world. Whereas utopian discourse was once used to justify colonization, Mexican and Chicano writers now deploy dystopian rhetoric to interrogate projects of modernization, contributing to the current debate on the global expansion of capitalism. The narratives coincide in expressing confidence in the ability of Latin American and U.S. Latino popular sectors to claim a decisive role in the implementation of enhanced measures to guarantee an ecologically sound, ethnically diverse, and just society for the future of the Americas.

Author: Alejandro Morales
Publisher: Bilingual Review Press (AZ)
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : es
Pages : 232

View

Book Description
Barrio on the Edge/Caras viejas y vino nuevo presents contemporary barrio life through the eyes of two teenage boys - the self-destructive and irresponsible Julian, and Mateo, his friend and admirer. These two viewpoints come to represent larger conflicts within a community in which the shared values of friendship, family, and religion are menaced by generational conflicts and the increasing role of violence, drugs, and brutal sexuality in barrio life. The Spanish is paired with a new English translation by Francisco A. Lomeli prepared with the author's collaboration. The volume includes an introduction by the translator and a bibliography of works by and about Morales.

Author: Alejandro Morales
Publisher: Arte Público Press
ISBN: 1611928710
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

View

Book Description
“I’m sick of you punks,” Micaela said. “And I’m warning you now. I’m going to get you for that murder!” In the title story, the Latino community in East L.A. suffers horrible gang-related violence, and the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl is the last straw for Micaela Clemencia, a local teacher. With the help of other women in the neighborhood, Micaela keeps her promise to punish the murderer. And much to the dismay of the police and other city officials, the women take control of the barrio, their “little nation.” While some characters face a violent world driven by greed, others long for a sense of belonging or a place to call their own. In “Mama Concha,” a grandmother shares her ancient wisdom with her grandson, teaching him to appreciate the land and the fruits and vegetables she grows. In “The Gardens of Versailles,” a home with beautiful gardens is a local favorite, until it stands in the way of “progress” that will benefit the entire community. And in “Prickles,” an artist who is a grotesque oddity because of the thorny tumors that sprout all over his body develops a special, unusual relationship with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Alejandro Morales returns to his native Southern California community of Montebello in four of these five stories that examine identity and injustice. Originally written in Spanish, this compelling collection contains Adam Spires’ English translation of these thought-provoking stories, in which Morales explores the Chicano community’s marginalization and search for a space to call its own.

Author: Karl Kroeber
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231100298
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 204

View

Book Description
Kroeber argues that literary criticism needs to reestablish connections to a wide range of social activities, especially the thinking of contemporary scientists. This new kind of criticism, "ecological literary criticism," sets out to correct the abstractions of current theorizing about literature, and to make humanistic studies more socially responsible. Though applicable to any writer of any period, Kroeber points out that the proto-ecological tendencies of the English Romantic poets make them especially useful as a starting point for this approach. Since the Romantics believed that people were, and should be, at home in the natural world. Ecological Literary Criticism asks that we examine poetry from a perspective that assumes that the imaginative acts of cultural beings offer valuable insights into how and why cultural and natural phenomena have interrelated in the past and how they could more advantageously interrelate in the future. Kroeber argues that this approach to criticism will help us to develop mutually enriching links between humanistic and scientific modes of understanding humankind and the earth we inhabit.

Author: Kate Christensen
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385530927
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 330

View

Book Description
From the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of The Great Man, a scintillating novel of love, loss, and literary rivalry set in rapidly changing Brooklyn. The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apart­ment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fer­vent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry’s that ignite her long-simmering sus­picions of infidelity, and he’s been summarily kicked out. He now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures (and perhaps oth­ers) and find his way forward—and back into Luz’s good graces. Harry Quirk is, in short, a loser, living small and low in the water. But touched by Kate Christensen’s novelistic grace and acute perception, his floundering attempts to reach higher ground and forge a new life for himself become funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men—and she turns them into literary art of the highest order. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special.

Author: Alejandro Morales
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
ISBN: 1558857753
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

View

Book Description
The West was a place where dreams could come true, and in this epic novel Alejandro Morales introduces two very different families and an unpredictable river to explore the allure of Southern California and the development of Los Angeles. Although the Rivers and Kellers families come from different backgrounds—ethnic, class and linguistic—their lives and fortunes become inextricably linked through their children. An illicit love affair leads to tragedy as the families are victims of racism and the pseudo-scientific philosophy of eugenics, or selective breeding, proposed by those fearful of Los Angeles’ diverse population in the 1920s. River of Angels is a richly detailed look at the people who lived on both sides of the river that separated the haves from the have-nots, from the mystical and forgotten Native Americans and their mixed-blood Latino descendants to the opportunity-seeking Yankees and the African, Mexican and Asian migrants. Acclaimed novelist Alejandro Morales excavates the layered history of Los Angeles in this stirring epic of love, loss and redemption.

Author: Damien Broderick
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429971320
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

View

Book Description
Damien Broderick has been a leading Australian SF writer since the ‘70s. His novel The Dreaming Dragons was listed in SF: the 100 best novels. His recent nonfiction book, The Spike, is a mind-stretching look at the wonders of the high-tech future. Now in Transcension he brings to life one of the futures he imagined in The Spike, a world pervaded by nanotechnology and governed by artificial intelligence. Transcension may be Broderick’s best book yet. Amanda is a brilliant violinist, a mathematical genius, and a rebel. Impatient for the adult status her society only grants at age thirty, but determined to have a real adventure first, she has repeatedly gotten into trouble and found herself in the courtroom of Magistrate Mohammed Abdel-Malik, the sole resurrectee from among those who were frozen in the early twenty-first century, the man whose mind was the seed for Aleph, the AI that rules this utopia. Mathewmark is a real adolescent, living in the last place where they still exist, the reservation known as the Valley of the God of One's Choice, where those who have chosen faith over technology are allowed to live out their simpler lives. When Amanda determines that access to the valley is the key to the daring stunt she plans, it is Mathewmark she will have to lead into temptation. But just as Amanda, Mathewmark, and Abdel-Malik are struggling to find themselves and achieve their potentials, so is Aleph, and the AI's success will be a challenge to them and all of humanity. At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.