Hernan Diaz2.5 A young Swedish boy finds himself in penniless and alone in California. He travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the West. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Díaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre (travel narratives, the bildungsroman, nature writing, the Western), offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.
At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their side and stay until Håkan got up. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. But there were no such travelers—the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days.
Hernán Díaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. He lives in New York.
Скотт Шибуя Браун0.0 Fiction. THE TRADERS takes place in 1974 in the fictitious Southeast Asian nation of Tandomon, where an aging used bookseller pretends to have been the close friend of a famous writer currently the subject of a posthumous literary study. The deceit, undertaken via correspondence, becomes harder to sustain when the pompous American professor writing the study arrives in Tandomon to meet his "valuable contributor." And matters get further complicated when the bookseller in the course of his own research discovers some disturbing facts about his "former friend" and "notable writer."
"Scott Brown is an (as yet) unsung hero of contemporary American letters: subversive, hilarious, his gaze unsparing. Read him and your universe will expand--as you laugh out loud. He tackles big topics with a microscopic lens, inimitably blending the personal with the political. Brown's latest work, THE TRADERS, is a rollicking take on the misplaced ambitions of one Cecil Po, a bookseller in the fictitious Asian country of Tandomon. Told in his inimitable, oddly insightful voice, we are privileged to witness the outlandish skewering and exalting of literary ambitions, including his own. To what lengths will Po go to ensure his legacy? Read this delightful tale of loss and belonging to find out."--Cristina Garcia
Шанти Секаран0.0 A gripping tale of adventure and searing reality, Lucky Boy gives voice to two mothers bound together by their love for one lucky boy.
Solimar Castro Valdez is eighteen and drunk on optimism when she embarks on a perilous journey across the US/Mexican border. Weeks later she arrives on her cousin's doorstep in Berkeley, CA, dazed by first love found then lost, and pregnant. This was not the plan. But amid the uncertainty of new motherhood and her American identity, Soli learns that when you have just one precious possession, you guard it with your life. For Soli, motherhood becomes her dwelling and the boy at her breast her hearth.
Kavya Reddy has always followed her heart, much to her parents' chagrin. A mostly contented chef at a UC Berkeley sorority house, the unexpected desire to have a child descends like a cyclone in Kavya's mid-thirties. When she can't get pregnant, this desire will test her marriage, it will test her sanity, and it will set Kavya and her husband, Rishi, on a collision course with Soli, when she is detained and her infant son comes under Kavya's care. As Kavya learns to be a mother - the singing, story-telling, inventor-of-the-universe kind of mother she fantasized about being - she builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else's child.
Lucky Boy is an emotional journey that will leave you certain of the redemptive beauty of this world. There are no bad guys in this story, no obvious hero. From rural Oaxaca to Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto to the dreamscapes of Silicon valley, author Shanthi Sekaran has taken real life and applied it to fiction; the results are moving and revelatory.
Роберт Мур3.9 Тропы повсюду. Тропы пронизывают мир – невидимые муравьиные тропы, пешеходные тропинки и дороги между континентами, автомагистрали, маршруты и гиперссылки в сети.
Как образуются эти пути? Почему одни втаптываются и остаются, а другие – исчезают? Что заставляет нас идти по тропе или сходить с нее?
Исходив и изучив тысячи вариаций различных троп, Мур обнаружил, что именно в тропах кроятся ответы на самые важные вопросы – как сформировался мир вокруг нас, как живые организмы впервые выбрались на сушу, как из хаоса возник порядок и, в конце концов, как мы выбираем нашу дорогу по жизни.
Анджела Палм0.0 Angela Palm grew up in a place not marked on the map, her house set on the banks of a river that had been straightened to make way for farmland. Every year, the Kankakee River in rural Indiana flooded and returned to its old course while the residents sandbagged their homes against the rising water. From her bedroom window, Palm watched the neighbor boy and loved him in secret, imagining a life with him even as she longed for a future that held more than a job at the neighborhood bar. For Palm, caught in this landscape of flood and drought, escape was a continually receding hope.
Though she did escape, as an adult Palm finds herself drawn back, like the river, to her origins. But this means more than just recalling vibrant, complicated memories of the place that shaped her, or trying to understand the family that raised her. It means visiting the prison where the boy that she loved is serving a life sentence for a brutal murder. It means trying to chart, through the mesmerizing, interconnected essays of Riverine, what happens when a single event forces the path of her life off course.
Эдуард Уилсон-Ли0.0 Investigating the literary culture of the early interaction between European countries and East Africa, Edward Wilson-Lee uncovers an extraordinary sequence of stories in which explorers, railway labourers, decadent ?migr?s, freedom fighters, and pioneering African leaders made Shakespeare their own in this alien land.Whilst travelling in Luxor, Edward Wilson-Lee encountered a man who called out to him from the summer shade with lines from Shakespeare's Macbeth: 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow….' Unable to resist the temptation, Wilson-Lee responded with the next line and so began a fascination with unexpected cultural encounters, especially those made memorable by the poignancy of discovering beauty out of place.Shakespeare may have heard of Luxor (although he would have known it as Thebes) but it is unlikely that he imagined his lines ever being spoken there, close by the feluccas sailing on the Nile and the acres of pharaonic ruins beyond.This radical, breath-taking book combines travel, history, biography and satire in an ode to Shakespeare. Wilson-Lee teaches Shakespeare at Cambridge but grew up in East Africa and Shakespeare in Swahililand explores Shakespeare’s global legacy like no other book before it. In these pages explorers stagger through Africa's interior accompanied by Shakespeare; eccentrics live out their dreams on the African Savannah with Shakespeare by their side; decadent emigres, railway labourers, Indian settler communities, African intellectuals and rebels all turned to Shakespeare and adapted his plays to fit their needs. The book examines how Shakespeare influenced the first African leaders of independent nations, Cold War intrigues and even Che Guevara.With its extraordinary sequence of stories and momentous travels from Zanzibar, through Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan, this literary adventure throws high culture and the wild together in celebration of Shakespeare's legacy as a poet of the world.
