In Our Strange Gardens

Author : Michel Quint
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101215682
Total Pages : 70 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In Our Strange Gardens written by Michel Quint and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Our Strange Gardens was named a BookSense 76 Recommended Pick for January 2002! Michel has a story to tell. It's about his father, an exquisitely common man whose very ordinariness is a source of grave embarrassment for the boy. It's also the story told to him by his uncle, who shared a family secret with the child in the flickering black and white images of a Sunday matinee. Years before, in the bitter years of World War II, during the Nazi occupation of France, two brothers found themselves at the mercy of a German guard following an explosive act of resistance. Thrown into a deep pit with a small group of terrified prisoners, the men are told that one of them will die by dawn to serve as an example for the others. It's up to the prisoners to propose who will be sacrificed. But in the middle of the night, the guard returns with an extraordinary proposition of his own. A novel of revelation, innocence and ignorance, of the power of language and the strength and complexity of family, In Our Strange Gardens is a fable of nuance and power, a mesmerizing addition to the literature of war.

Author : Michel Quint
Publisher : Turtleback Books
ISBN 13 : 9781417725922
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In Our Strange Gardens written by Michel Quint and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The international bestseller is now available in the United States. In the bitter years of World War II, during the Nazi occupation, two brothers find themselves at the mercy of a German guard who makes a surprising proposition of his own.

Author : Charlotte Mendelson
Publisher : Octopus Books
ISBN 13 : 0857836366
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rhapsody in Green: A Writer, an Obsession, a Laughably Small Excuse for a Vegetable Garden written by Charlotte Mendelson and published by Octopus Books. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Charming, inspiring, uplifting ... pure lovely,' - Marian Keyes 'Read Rhapsody in Green. A novelist's beautiful, useful essays about her tiny garden.' - India Knight 'Glorious...for anyone who loves fruit, vegetables, herbs and language. It makes you see them with new eyes.' - Diana Henry 'A witty account of 'extreme allotmenteering' for all obsessive gardeners' - Mail on Sunday 'An extremely entertaining and inspiring story of one woman's passionate transformation of a small, irregular shaped urban garden into a bountiful source of food.' - Woman & Home 'A gardening book like no other, this is the author's 'love letter' to her garden. She relays warm and witty stories about the trials and tribulations throughout her gardening year.' - Garden News '...this inspirational, funny book, written by someone who hankers after a homesteader's lifestyle, will make you look at even your window box in a new, more productive light.' - The Simple Things Gardening can be viewed as a largely pointless hobby, but the evangelical zeal and camaraderie it generates is unique. Charlotte Mendelson is perhaps unusually passionate about it. For despite her superficially normal existence, despite the fact that she has only six square metres of grotty urban soil and a few pots, she has a secret life. She is an extreme gardener, an obsessive, an addict. And like all addicts, she wants to spread the joy. Her garden may look like a nasty drunk old man's mini-allotment, chaotic, virtually flowerless, with weird recycling and nowhere to sit. When honoured friends are shown it, they tend to laugh. However, it is actually a tiny jungle, a minuscule farm, a wildly uneconomical experiment in intensive edible cultivation, on which she grows a taste of perhaps a hundred kinds of delicious fruits and odd vegetables. It is a source of infinite happiness and deep peace. It looks completely bonkers. Arguably, it's the most expensive, time-consuming, undecorative and self-indulgent way to grow a salad ever invented, but when tired or sad or cross it never fails to delight.

Author : Christophe Corbin
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1498582060
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Revisiting the French Resistance in Cinema, Literature, Bande Dessinée, and Television (1942–2012) written by Christophe Corbin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revisiting the French Resistance in Cinema, Literature, Bande Dessinée, and Television (1942–2012) examines how fictional works have contributed to shaping the image of the French Resistance, and offers a key to understanding France’s national psyche. Christophe Corbin explores themes including the making of the myth of an honorable country united against a common enemy, comedies gently poking fun at it and fictional works debunking it straightforwardly, the invisibility and resurfacing of women in films and novels, as well as contemporary depictions of the Resistance on television. Case studies include sometimes forgotten or lesser-known works such as Aragon’s wartime poetry, early films such as Le Père tranquille or Casablanca-inspired Fortunat, iconic films and novels such as Le Silence de la mer or La Grande Vadrouille, but also contemporary fictional works such as Effroyables jardins and Un Héros très discret, or the popular TV series Un Village français. It will be of interest to scholars and students in cultural studies, film studies, French studies, history, and media studies.

Author : Anne Serre
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0811228088
Total Pages : 112 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Governesses written by Anne Serre and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sensational US debut of a major French writer—an intense, delicious meringue of a novella In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.” Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0385534949
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dissident Gardens written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose’s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. Flawed and idealistic, Lethem’s characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference. As the decades pass—from the parlor communism of the ’30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged ’70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment—we come to understand through Lethem’s extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal. Lethem’s characters may pursue their fates within History with a capital H, but his novel is—at its mesmerizing, beating heart—about love.

Author : Paul Mcauley
Publisher : Prometheus Books
ISBN 13 : 1616143436
Total Pages : 524 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gardens of the Sun written by Paul Mcauley and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-06-30 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, founded by descendants of refugees from Earth’s repressive regimes, the Outers, have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union, and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earth’s forces loot their cities and settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the ‘Outer problem.’ But Earth’s victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by the Outers’ greatest genius, Avernus, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isn’t as easy as he thought. And on Earth, in Greater Brazil, the democratic traditions preserved and elaborated by the Outers have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them. Meanwhile, in the outer reaches of the Solar System, a rag-taggle group of refugees struggle to preserve the last of the old ideals. And on Triton, fanatical members of a cabal prepare for a final battle that threatens to shatter the future of the human species. After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war -- especially the victors.

Author : George Williams
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781935738114
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gardens of Earthly Delight written by George Williams and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern alchemist falls prey to a magic darker than his own. The Antichrist's mother goes on the run in Spain. In his garage a physicist builds a tribute to his beloved. An old man and his mule tour the roadside wastelands of the Gulf of Mexico. Sixteen stories span the world from Texas to Paris by way of Damascus. Filtered through the lens of the strange and uncanny, everyday events take on a sinister aspect. These gardens are delightful, but a serpent lurks behind each blushing fruit, beckoning the reader into the shadows. Gardens of Earthly Delight reaches beneath the surface of simple stories and casts them in an ominous, tragic-comic light. Heists, revenge, a trip to the casino, author George Williams takes all of them and makes them new, exotic and not a little bit disturbing.

Author : Rachel Kushner
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0811224228
Total Pages : 96 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Strange Case of Rachel K written by Rachel Kushner and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three early stories of myth, regime, and harlotry by the acclaimed author of The Flamethrowers. An explorer’s whereabouts keeps a queen in waiting; a faith healer’s illegal radio broadcasts give hope to an oppressed people; a president’s offer of ice cream surprises a prostitute expecting to cooperate fully — the three short fictions gathered in The Great Exception build into a vision of Cuba that is black-humored, brutal, and beautiful. Written prior to the publication of Rachel Kushner’s first acclaimed novel Telex From Cuba, these stories, like Roberto Bolano’s Antwerp, burst forth with the genesis of her fictional universe as though fired from a cannon. From the mythical title story, to the ominous “Debouchment” — originally published in her too short-lived journal Soft Targets — to the sexy and noirish “Strange Case of Rachel K,” this is Kushner saddling up for a journey into the wilds of the modern novel.

Author : Michel Quint
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 88 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Strange Gardens written by Michel Quint and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A little boy is ashamed of his father. Acutely so. He cannot understand why his father accepts, at the drop of a hat, to appear as a clown at his birthday parties. He is not even paid for his act. But worse of all, he is a hopless clown, an appallingly bad one - a cringing embarrassment. In his everyday life, his father is a run of the mill teacher - nothing flamboyant, nothing special. So why does he insist on ridiculing himself in front of strangers, friends, his son Through the telling of a secret that dates back to the second World War, the boy will grow to understand what drives his father - and to respect and love the clown in him, the survivor.