Black Shack Alley

Author : Joseph Zobel
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143133950
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Shack Alley written by Joseph Zobel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The semiautobiographical Caribbean novel that explores shifting race relations in early twentieth-century colonial Martinique, with a foreword by Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau A Penguin Classic Following in the tradition of Richard Wright's Black Boy, Joseph Zobel's semiautobiographical 1950 novel Black Shack Alley chronicles the coming-of-age of José, a young boy grappling with issues of power and identity in colonial Martinique. As José transitions from childhood to young adulthood and from rural plantations to urban Fort-de-France on a quest for upward mobility, he bears witness to and struggles against the various manifestations of white supremacy, both subtle and overt, that will alter the course of his life. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M'man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. Zobel's masterpiece, the basis for the award-winning film Sugar Cane Alley directed by Euzhan Palcy, is a powerful testament to twentieth-century life in Martinique, with a foreword by award-winning Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau.

Author : Jasmine Sealy
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 1443465208
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Island of Forgetting written by Jasmine Sealy and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Award How does memory become myth? How do lies become family lore? How do we escape the trauma of the past when the truth has been forgotten? Barbados, 1962. Lost soul Iapetus roams the island, scared and alone, driven mad after witnessing his father’s death at the hands of his mother and his older brother, Cronus. Just before Iapetus is lost forever, he has a son, but the baby is not enough to save him from himself—or his family’s secrets. Seventeen years later, Iapetus’s son, the stoic Atlas, lives in a loveless house, under the care of his uncle, Cronus, and in the shadow of his charismatic cousin Z. Knowing little about the tragic circumstances of his father’s life, Atlas must choose between his desire to flee the island and his loyalty to the uncle who raised him. Time passes. Atlas’s daughter, Calypso, is a beautiful and wilful teenager who is desperate to avoid being trapped in a life of drudgery at her uncle Z’s hotel. When she falls dangerously in love with a visiting real estate developer, she finds herself entangled in her uncle’s shady dealings, a pawn in the games of the powerful men around her. It is now 2019. Calypso’s son, Nautilus, is on a path of self-destruction as he grapples with his fatherless condition, his mixed-race identity and his complicated feelings of attraction towards his best friend, Daniel. Then one night, after making an impulsive decision, Nautilus finds himself exiled to Canada. The Island of Forgetting is an intimate saga spanning four generations of one family who run a beachfront hotel. Loosely inspired by Greek mythology, this is a novel about the echo of deep—and sometimes tragic—love and the ways a family’s past can haunt its future.

Author : Wei Hui
Publisher : Atria
ISBN 13 : 9780743464772
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shanghai Baby written by Wei Hui and published by Atria. This book was released on 2002-08-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gap that divides those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation has never been so wide. Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China. The risque contents of the breakthrough novel by hip new author Wei Hui have so alarmed Beijing authorities that thousands of copies have been confiscated and burned. As explicit as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, as shocking as Trainspotting, this story of a beautiful writer and her erotically charged affairs jumps, howls, and hits the ground running as it depicts the new generation rising in the East. Set in the centuries-old port city of Shanghai, the novel follows the days, and nights, of the irrepressibly carnal Coco, who waits tables in a café when she meets her first lover, a sensitive Chinese artist. Defying her parents, Coco moves in with her boyfriend and enters a frenzied, orgasmic world of drugs and hedonism. But, helpless to stop her gentle lover's descent into addiction, Coco becomes attracted to a boisterous Westerner, a rich German businessman with a penchant for S/M and seduction. Now, with an entourage of friends ranging from a streetwise madame to a rebellious filmmaker, Coco's forays into in the territory of love and lust cross the borders between two cultures -- awakening her guilt and fears of discovery, yet stimulating her emerging sexual self. Searing a blistering image into the reader's imagination, Shanghai Baby provides an alternative travelogue into the back streets of a city and the hard-core escapades of today's liberated youth. Wei Hui's provocative portrayal of men, women, and cultural transition is an astonishing and brave exposure of the unacknowledged new China, breaking through official rhetoric to show the inroads of the West and a people determined to burst free.

Author : Tom Clavin
Publisher : Chicago Review Press
ISBN 13 : 1569768137
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book That Old Black Magic written by Tom Clavin and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both a love story and a tribute to the entertainment mecca, this exploration shines a spotlight on one of the hottest acts in Las Vegas in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The illuminating depiction showcases the unlikely duo--a grizzled, veteran trumpeter and vocalist molded by Louis Armstrong and a meek singer in the church choir--who went on to invent "The Wildest." Bringing together broad comedy and finger-snapping, foot-stomping music that included early forays into rock and roll, Prima and Smith's act became wildly popular and attracted all kinds of star-studded attention. In addition to chronicling their relationships with Ed Sullivan, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and other well-known entertainers of the day--and their performance of "That Old Black Magic" at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration--the narrative also examines the couple's ongoing influence in the entertainment world. Running concurrent with their personal tale is their role in transforming Las Vegas from a small resort town in the desert to a booming city where the biggest stars were paid tons of money to become even bigger stars on stage and television.

Author : Janet Fitch
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 9780759568129
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.2X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Paint It Black written by Janet Fitch and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A dark, crooked beauty that fulfills all the promise of White Oleander and confirms that Janet Fitch is an artist of the very highest order." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Josie Tyrell, art model, runaway, and denizen of LA's rock scene finds a chance at real love with Michael Faraday, a Harvard dropout and son of a renowned pianist. But when she receives a call from the coroner, asking her to identify her lover's body, her bright dreams all turn to black. As Josie struggles to understand Michael's death and to hold onto the world they shared, she is both attracted to and repelled by his pianist mother, Meredith, who blames Josie for her son's torment. Soon the two women are drawn into a twisted relationship that reflects equal parts distrust and blind need. With the luxurious prose and fever pitch intensity that are her hallmarks, Janet Fitch weaves a spellbinding tale of love, betrayal, and the possibility of transcendence. "Lushly written, dramatically plotted. . . Fitch's Los Angeles is so real it breathes." --Atlantic Monthly "There is nothing less than a stellar sentence in this novel. Fitch's emotional honesty recalls the work of Joyce Carol Oates, her strychnine sentences the prose of Paula Fox." --Cleveland Plain Dealer "A page-turning psychodrama. . . . Fitch's prose penetrates the inner lives of [her characters] with immediacy and bite." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Fitch wonderfully captures the abrasive appeal of punk music, the bohemian, sometimes squalid lifestyle, the performers, the drugs, the alienation. This is crackling fresh stuff you don't read every day." --USA Today "In dysfunctional family narratives, Fitch is to fiction what Eugene O'Neill is to drama." --Chicago Sun-Times "Riveting. . . . An uncommonly accomplished page-turner." --Elle

Author : Rachel Caine
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 110112850X
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Glass Houses written by Rachel Caine and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: College freshman Claire Danvers has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation, where the popular girls never let her forget just where she ranks in the school's social scene: somewhere less than zero. When Claire heads off-campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life. But they'll have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood. Watch a Windows Media trailer for this book.

Author : Walter Mosley
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 145161246X
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned written by Walter Mosley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley introduces an "astonishing character" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) in this acclaimed collection of entwined tales. Meet Socrates Fortlow, a tough ex-con seeking truth and redemption in South Central Los Angeles—and finding the miracle of survival. "I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in jail. Once you go to prison you belong there." Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working for the Bounty supermarket, and moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and fearsome. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.

Author : Walter Mosley
Publisher : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN 13 : 0307949788
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Little Green written by Walter Mosley and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Little Green, Walter Mosley’s acclaimed detective Easy Rawlins returns from the brink of death to investigate the dark side of that haven for Los Angeles hippies, the Sunset Strip. He’s soon back in top form, cruising the gloriously psychedelic mean streets of L.A. with his murderous sidekick, Mouse. They’ve been hired to look for a young black man, Evander “Little Green” Noon, who disappeared during an acid trip. Fueled by an elixir called Gator’s Blood, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual, and emotional resurrection, but peace and love soon give way to murder and mayhem.

Author : Bruce Wagner
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0142196878
Total Pages : 657 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dead Stars written by Bruce Wagner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dead Stars is the London Fields of Los Angeles, the Ulysses of TMZ culture—an immensely literate, fearsomely interior novel about people who are neither.”—Tom Bissell, GQ At age thirteen, Telma is famous as the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor until threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old who’s just undergone a mastectomy…. Reeyonna believes that auditioning for pregnant teenage porn will help fulfill her dream of befriending Kanye West…. Jackie, a photographer once celebrated for arty nudes of her young daughter, is working at a Sears Family Portrait boutique…. And Oscar-winning Michael Douglas searches for meaning while his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on Glee. Moving forward with the inexorable force of a tsunami, Dead Stars is Bruce Wagner’s most lavish and remarkable translation yet of the national zeitgeist: post-privacy porn culture, a Kardashianworld of rapid-cycling, disposable narrative where reality-show triumph is the new American narcotic.

Author : Joseph Zobel
Publisher : Schiffer Book
ISBN 13 : 9780764328497
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Antique Vienna Bronzes written by Joseph Zobel and published by Schiffer Book. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small bronze figures, made in Vienna, Austria, beginning around 1850, are well known for their great detail and expressiveness. They were produced in small factories and private artist studios in the forms of animals and humans, and were exported to sell in New York, London, and Paris. Depicted here in over 650 brilliant color photos are cast bronze birds, camels, cats, dogs, horses, bears, bulls, reptiles, and rodents as well as humans figures from around the globe and many professions. Figures integrated into lamps are also displayed. The informative text highlights major artists and firms that produced Vienna bronze figures, and values are included in the captions. Antique and figurine collectors will find much pertinent information in this new study.