The Union Of Synchronised Swimmers

Author : Cristina Sandu
Publisher : Scribe Publications
ISBN 13 : 1925938336
Total Pages : 63 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Union of Synchronised Swimmers written by Cristina Sandu and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s summer behind the Iron Curtain, and six girls are about to swim their way to the Olympics — and a new life. In an unnamed Soviet state, six girls meet each day to swim. At first, they play, splashing each other and floating languidly on the water’s surface. But soon the game becomes something more. They hone their bodies relentlessly. Their skin shades into bruises. They barter cigarettes stolen from the factory where they work for swimsuits to stretch over their sunburnt skin. They tear their legs into splits, flick them back and forth, like herons. They force themselves to stop breathing. When they find themselves representing their country as synchronised swimmers in the Olympics, they seize the chance they have been waiting for to escape and begin new lives. Scattered around the globe, six women live in freedom. But will they ever be able to forget what they left behind?

Author : Cristina Sandu
Publisher : Scribe Us
ISBN 13 : 9781950354399
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Union of Synchronized Swimmers written by Cristina Sandu and published by Scribe Us. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maybe they imagined they were stars, or angels, or insane birds. Sometimes they grabbed each other's hands and legs and twisted them so harshly that it was a miracle nothing broke. When they all squatted in the water with just their hands above the surface, it was as if they were praying. There was something terrifying about it. In a stateless place, on the wrong side of a river separating East from West, six girls meet each day to swim. At first, they play, splashing each other and floating languidly on the water's surface. But as summer draws to an end, the game becomes something more. They hone their bodies relentlessly. Their skin shades into bruises. They barter cigarettes stolen from the factory where they work for swimsuits to stretch over their sunburnt skin. They tear their legs into splits, flick them back and forth, like herons. They force themselves to stop breathing. Then, one day, it finally happens: their visas arrive. But can what's waiting on the other side of the river satisfy their longing for a different kind of life?

Author : Jordan Whitney-Wei
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476638233
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Katharine Whitney Curtis written by Jordan Whitney-Wei and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you invent an Olympic sport? For Katharine Whitney Curtis, it took the right idea, great talent, some good timing, and the determination to make it happen. The originator of synchronized swimming as we know it today, she even wrote the first book on the subject in 1936. But there was much more to her life and career. After the start of World War II, Curtis became a recreational director in the American Red Cross and followed the troops wherever the course of war took them, serving under Generals Patton and Eisenhower, before becoming a director of travel for the U.S. Army in Europe during the Cold War. Unbound by fear or the narrow expectations of society, this was a woman who lived ahead of her time, making things happen along the way. As her first biography, this book generously features Curtis's own words, selected from more than 2,000 pages of letters, and contextualized by her surviving friends and family members.

Author : Raphaela Edelbauer
Publisher : Scribe Us
ISBN 13 : 9781957363080
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Liquid Land written by Raphaela Edelbauer and published by Scribe Us. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A town that doesn't want to be found. A countess who rules over the memories of an entire community. A hole in the earth that threatens to drag them all into its depths. When her parents die in a car accident, the highly talented physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with an almost intractable problem. Her parents' will calls for them to be buried in their childhood home--but for strangers, Gross-Einland is a village that remains stubbornly hidden from view. When Ruth finally finds her way there, she makes a disturbing discovery: beneath the town lies a vast cavern that seems to exert a strange control over the lives of the villagers. There are hidden clues about the hole everywhere, but nobody wants to talk about it--not even when it becomes clear that the stability of the entire town is in jeopardy. Is this silence controlled by the charming countess who rules the community? And what role does Ruth's family history, a history she is only just beginning to uncover, have to play? The more questions Ruth asks, the more vehement the resistance she encounters from the residents. But as she continues to dig deeper, she comes to realize that the key to deciphering the mysterious codes of the people of Gross-Einland can only lie in the history of the hole. In the literary tradition of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, Raphaela Edelbauer weaves the complexities of small-town social structures into an opaque dream fabric that is frighteningly true to life, and in the process she turns us towards the abject horror that lies beneath repressed memory. The Liquid Land is a dangerous novel, at once glittering nightmare and dark reality, from an extraordinary new literary voice.

Author : William Boyd
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1408835185
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Restless written by William Boyd and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.

Author : Paul Cliff
Publisher : National Library Australia
ISBN 13 : 0642107041
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Sporting Nation written by Paul Cliff and published by National Library Australia. This book was released on 1999 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sporting Nation will appeal equally to the serious sports enthusiast and mainstream reader. Its main text comprises excerpts from the Library's oral history recordings, with additional features by Olympian Marlene Mathews, and Eric Rolls and Marion Halligan.Twenty-six richly illustrated features present a broad and popular sweep through the nation's sporting culture, opening with a recollection of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and a survey of the Sydney 2000 Games by Marlene Mathews.

Author : Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher : Tinder Press
ISBN 13 : 0755372263
Total Pages : 125 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox written by Maggie O'Farrell and published by Tinder Press. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Costa Award winning, bestselling author of THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and I AM, I AM, I AM, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen, and reclaimed. 'Unputdownable' Ali Smith Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris's questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?

Author : Dennis Scheller-Boltz
Publisher : Georg Olms Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3487156083
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Discourse on Gender Identity in Contemporary Russia written by Dennis Scheller-Boltz and published by Georg Olms Verlag. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conchita Wursts Sieg beim Eurovision Song Contest 2014 war ein zentrales diskursives Moment, welches das derzeitige Spannungsfeld zwischen Postgenderismus und Traditionalismus in Russland offenlegte und aufzeigte, wie sehr Geschlecht und Sexualität, nicht zuletzt für das russische Selbstbild und die Konstruktion einer russischen nationalen Identität, instrumentalisiert und politisiert werden und wie sehr Identitätskonzepte den russischen Alltag mitbestimmen. Die Monografie widmet sich der Diskussion um Geschlecht und Sexualität in Russland nach dem Sieg von Conchita Wurst und untersucht das Verhältnis von Diskurs und Identität. Im Vordergrund steht die Funktion von Sprache sowohl für die Identitätskonstruktion als auch für die Schaffung und Abgrenzung von Räumen. Dabei lassen sich nicht nur lexikologische und wortbildnerische Besonderheiten beobachten, sondern es liegt insgesamt ein auffälliger Sprachgebrauch mit interessanten Argumentationsstrategien vor. Ausführungen zu Identität und kritische Anmerkungen zur russischen Gender- und Queer-Linguistik komplettieren diesen Band. Conchita Wurst’s 2014 victory in the Eurovision Song Contest was a significant discursive moment which revealed the current tensions between postgenderism and traditionalism in contemporary Russia. This case also made clear just how far gender and sexuality are instrumentalised and politicised – not least in creating Russians’ self-perception and constructing a Russian national identity – and how massively notions of identity impact on Russian everyday life. The monograph focuses on the discussion of gender and sexuality in Russia following the 2014 event and investigates the relation between discourse and identity. Above all, it is concerned with the function of language in identity construction, and in the creation and demarcation of spaces. In this context, Dr. Scheller-Boltz’s study not only analyses lexicological and word-formation peculiarities, but also provides some revealing research findings about specific language use, including certain argumentation strategies. The monograph begins with a detailed introduction to notions of identity and concludes with some critical remarks on Russian gender and queer linguistics.

Author : Thomas Mann
Publisher : e-artnow
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Royal Highness (Philosophy Classic) written by Thomas Mann and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Royal Highness takes place around the turn of the 20th century in the fictional German state of Grimmburg, which despite the efforts of Minister Trümmerhauff, Dr. Krippenreuther and Knobelsdorff is characterized by economic decline and high public debt. Agriculture is underdeveloped, mines are exhausted, the railroad is unprofitable, the university provincial. The income from the healing Ditlinden spring is limited, the castles scattered across the country lapse. The symbol of all this is a rose bush in the courtyard of the old castle, the beautiful flowers of which smell like mold. The novel is a sharp satire of a dying monarchy with a wonderful portrayal of a loveless childhood.

Author : Bridget Collins
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 006283813X
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Betrayals written by Bridget Collins and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International Bestseller! “Dizzyingly wonderful . . . a perfectly constructed work of fiction, with audacious twists . . . Collins plays her own game here with perfect skill.” — The Times (UK) An intricate and utterly spellbinding literary epic brimming with enchantment, mystery, and dark secrets from the highly acclaimed author of the #1 international bestseller The Binding. If your life was based on a lie, would you risk it all to tell the truth? At Montverre, an ancient and elite academy hidden high in the mountains, society’s best and brightest are trained for excellence in the grand jeu—the great game—an arcane and mysterious competition that combines music, art, math, poetry, and philosophy. Léo Martin once excelled at Montverre but lost his passion for scholarly pursuits after a violent tragedy. He turned to politics instead and became a rising star in the ruling party, until a small act of conscience cost him his career. Now he has been exiled back to Montverre, his fate uncertain. But this rarified world of learning Léo once loved is not the same place he remembers. Once the exclusive bastion of men, Montverre’s most prestigious post is now held by a woman: Claire Dryden, also known as the Magister Ludi, the head of the great game. At first, Léo feels an odd attraction to the magister—a mysterious, eerily familiar connection—though he’s sure they’ve never met before. As the legendary Midsummer Game approaches—the climax of the academy’s year—long-buried secrets rise to the surface and centuries-old traditions are shockingly overturned. A highly imaginative and intricately crafted literary epic, The Betrayals confirms Bridget Collins as one of the most inventive and exquisite new voices in speculative fiction.