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Author: Dick Harrison Publisher: University of Alberta ISBN: 9780888640192 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Americans have an idea of what the Great Plains did to the people who settled there but know little about the analogous process north of the 49th parallel, or how it was reflected in fiction. Dick Harrison's Unnamed Country fills this gap. Harrison traces the varying literary responses to the Canadian prairies, from the bewilderment of the first English-speaking visitors, who saw the country in essentially negative terms -- no wood, no water -- down to the contemporary novelists who are employing sophisticated modem fictional techniques to reinterpret the whole experience from a new perspective. Between these two ends of the literary continuum he finds the early writers of fiction too loaded down with what he calls "excess cultural baggage" brought from Britain or eastern Canada to see the country as it was; the early twentieth-century writers, bemused by the myth of the garden, who portrayed the prairies subdued and fruitful; the prairie realists of the 1920s and 1930s, akin to O. E. Rolvaag in their tragic view; and their contemporaries, the popular novelists, who depicted the pioneering process in more affirmative tones.
Author: Dick Harrison Publisher: University of Alberta ISBN: 9780888640192 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Americans have an idea of what the Great Plains did to the people who settled there but know little about the analogous process north of the 49th parallel, or how it was reflected in fiction. Dick Harrison's Unnamed Country fills this gap. Harrison traces the varying literary responses to the Canadian prairies, from the bewilderment of the first English-speaking visitors, who saw the country in essentially negative terms -- no wood, no water -- down to the contemporary novelists who are employing sophisticated modem fictional techniques to reinterpret the whole experience from a new perspective. Between these two ends of the literary continuum he finds the early writers of fiction too loaded down with what he calls "excess cultural baggage" brought from Britain or eastern Canada to see the country as it was; the early twentieth-century writers, bemused by the myth of the garden, who portrayed the prairies subdued and fruitful; the prairie realists of the 1920s and 1930s, akin to O. E. Rolvaag in their tragic view; and their contemporaries, the popular novelists, who depicted the pioneering process in more affirmative tones.
Author: Jeffrey Thomas Publisher: ISBN: 9781939905543 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
"Other countries have conquered us over our long history, and sometimes they changed our name. Hundreds of years ago, our Emperor Tho tried to think of ways to protect his country from being attacked again, after he managed to drive out the last invaders. And he knew he had to change the name his enemies had given to his country. Then Tho had an idea... a way to keep other people from wanting to come here and steal his empire. He would hide it from their eyes, and their minds, and the eyes and minds of any demon lords who might try to bring more bad luck to his empire. So he gave our land the name it has to this day." "And what name is that?" "The Unnamed Country." From Jeffrey Thomas, creator of Punktown, comes The Unnamed Country, a mosaic novel weaving tales of a land and people poised between the ancient traditions of the past and the burgeoning technology of the future. Where devils, gods, and ghosts still haunt the land, and where you may just discover a unicorn.
Author: Safia Elhillo Publisher: Make Me a World ISBN: 0593177088 Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “Nothing short of magic.” —Elizabeth Acevedo, New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X From the acclaimed poet featured on Forbes Africa’s “30 Under 30” list, this powerful novel-in-verse captures one girl, caught between cultures, on an unexpected journey to face the ephemeral girl she might have been. Woven through with moments of lyrical beauty, this is a tender meditation on family, belonging, and home. my mother meant to name me for her favorite flower its sweetness garlands made for pretty girls i imagine her yasmeen bright & alive & i ache to have been born her instead Nima wishes she were someone else. She doesn’t feel understood by her mother, who grew up in a different land. She doesn’t feel accepted in her suburban town; yet somehow, she isn't different enough to belong elsewhere. Her best friend, Haitham, is the only person with whom she can truly be herself. Until she can't, and suddenly her only refuge is gone. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen—the name her parents meant to give her at birth—Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might be more real than Nima knows. And the life Nima wishes were someone else's. . . is one she will need to fight for with a fierceness she never knew she possessed.
Author: Joshua Ferris Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books ISBN: 0316078174 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
The Unnamed is a dazzling novel about a marriage, family, and the unseen forces of nature and desire that seem to threaten them both. He was going to lose the house and everything in it. The rare pleasure of a bath, the copper pots hanging above the kitchen island, his family-again he would lose his family. He stood inside the house and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted. How had that happened again? He had promised himself not to take anything for granted and now he couldn't recall the moment that promise had given way to the everyday. Tim Farnsworth is a handsome, healthy man, aging with the grace of a matinee idol. His wife Jane still loves him, and for all its quiet trials, their marriage is still stronger than most. Despite long hours at the office, he remains passionate about his work, and his partnership at a prestigious Manhattan law firm means that the work he does is important. And, even as his daughter Becka retreats behind her guitar, her dreadlocks and her puppy fat, he offers her every one of a father's honest lies about her being the most beautiful girl in the world. He loves his wife, his family, his work, his home. He loves his kitchen. And then one day he stands up and walks out. And keeps walking. The Unnamed is a heartbreaking story of a life taken for granted -- and what happens when that life is abruptly and irrevocably taken away.
Author: Daniel Mason Publisher: Picador ISBN: 1743030118 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
When they spoke of it in town, they called it simply the city, as if it was the only city in the world ... Raised in a remote village on the edge of a sugarcane plantation, Isabel was born with the gift and curse of 'seeing farther'. When drought and war grip their land, her beloved brother Isaias joins a great exodus to a teeming, labyrinthine city in the south. Soon the fourteen-year-old Isabel follows, forsaking the only home she's ever known, her sole consolation the thought of being with her brother again. But when she arrives, she discovers that Isaias has disappeared. Weeks and then months pass, until one day, armed only with her unshakeable hope, Isabel descends into the chaos of the city to find him. Told with extraordinary empathy, richly evocative, the story of Isabel's quest - of her dignity and determination, her deeply spiritual world - becomes a universal tale about the bonds of family and a sister's love for her brother, about being caught between two worlds, and about true heroism. A tour de force of emotional and narrative power, it is destined to become a classic. 'Mason is a superb storyteller. He inhabits Isabel's mind with fine sensitivity, and cleverly uses his imaginary setting to write of dauntless, timeless love and loyalty' - The Times
Author: Ben Metcalf Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0812972783 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Against the Country is a gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction alike. Set in the Virginia pines, and overrun with failed parents, racist sex offenders, cast-off priests, and suicidal chickens, this novel challenges literary convention even as it attacks our national myth—that the rural naturally engenders good, while the urban breeds an inevitable sin. In a voice both perfectly American and utterly new, Ben Metcalf introduces the reader to Goochland County, Virginia—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, lackluster farms, and horrifying trees—and details one family’s pitiful struggle to survive there. Eventually it becomes clear that Goochland is not merely the author’s setting; it is a growing, throbbing menace that warps and scars every one of his characters’ lives. Equal parts fiery criticism and icy farce, Against the Country is the most hilarious sermon one is likely to hear on the subject of our native soil, and the starkest celebration of the language our land produced. The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here? Praise for Against the Country “Iconoclastic . . . Against the Country has obvious affinities to Southern Gothic, both in its voice and in the delight it takes in rural ignorance and grotesqueries. . . . [A] country cousin of David Foster Wallace.”—The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional in its verbal brilliance and conscientiousness, Against the Country involves us in a family’s anguished and hilarious struggle against the strange dooms that seem peculiar to white rural America. This is a savage and gladdening novel.”—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland and The Dog “Metcalf’s unnamed narrator dazzles with his Puritan deadpan and capacious intellect, not to mention his double-barreled blasts of dark humor and wicked satire. . . . There are so many brilliant turns of phrase in Against the Country that it’s hard to choose favorites, but Metcalf is at his sharpest and most seductive when his antihero does more than blast and blame, when he steps outside his sermons to say something real. . . . Every note in every solo is sounded with exquisite perfection.”—Slate “Faulknerian . . . eccentric, magnificent Southern Gothic metafiction.”—Vanity Fair “Ben Metcalf is a brilliant writer, and Against the Country is an ingenious and hilarious novel, a glittering, bitter celebration of how the lousiness of life can be redeemed in the hands (and mouth) of a top-shelf teller of life’s stories.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Fun Parts “A daring conglomeration of every trick, swindle and gimmick possible using only ink and paper, a pulpwood imagination machine so finely and expertly wrought that it can take on Jefferson, Thoreau, the church, patriotism, race relations, sexual identity, J. D. Salinger, the myth of America and a thousand other targets . . . [Against the Country] is absolutely and completely worth all investment of time and effort, because it is an undeniably beautiful object, sharp as a new razor.”—NPR “One of the more necessary—and most eloquent—expressions of a distinctly American, provincial rage in some years.”—Flavorwire
Author: Uzodinma Iweala Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061844543 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
“Remarkable. . . . Iweala never wavers from a gripping, pulsing narrative voice. . . . He captures the horror of ethnic violence in all its brutality and the vulnerability of youth in all its innocence.” —Entertainment Weekly (A) The harrowing, utterly original debut novel by Uzodinma Iweala about the life of a child soldier in a war-torn African country As civil war rages in an unnamed West-African nation, Agu, the school-aged protagonist of this stunning novel, is recruited into a unit of guerilla fighters. Haunted by his father’s own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family, still intact. As he vividly recalls these sunnier times, his daily reality continues to spin further downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of selfhood. In a powerful, strikingly original voice, Uzodinma Iweala leads the reader through the random travels, betrayals, and violence that mark Agu’s new community. Electrifying and engrossing, Beasts of No Nation announces the arrival of an extraordinary writer.
Author: Robert Olmstead Publisher: Algonquin Books ISBN: 1616208627 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
“The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . .” Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother’s debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land. Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named “dead line” demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods—and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls. Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead’s gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it’s also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.
Author: Paul Auster Publisher: Faber & Faber ISBN: 0571266738 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
'That is how it works in the City. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense . . .' This is the story of Anna Blume and her journey to find her lost brother, William, in the unnamed City. Like the City itself, however, it is a journey that is doomed, and so all that is left is Anna's unwritten account of what happened. Paul Auster takes us to an unspecified and devastated world in which the self disappears amidst the horrors that surround us. But this is not just an imaginary, futuristic world: like the settings of Kafka stories, it is one that echoes our own, and in doing so addresses some of our darker legacies. In the Country of Last Things is a tense, psychological take on the dystopian novel. It continues Auster's deep exploration of his central themes: the modern city, the mysteries of storytelling, and the elusive and unstable nature of truth.
Author: Dick Harrison
Author: Dick Harrison
Author: Jeffrey Thomas
Author: Safia Elhillo
Author: Joshua Ferris
Author: Daniel Mason
Author: Ben Metcalf
Author: Uzodinma Iweala
Author: Robert Olmstead
Author: Paul Auster
Author: Didier Leclair