In Manav’s world, memories are like little birds perched upon the windowsill of time. In his world there are no boundaries between thoughts and reality. In his world the past and the present form a mirror that disintegrates into the memory of a single day... Known for writing silences and articulating dreams, in this book Manav sifts through the past, delves into the present and talks about all the creative impulses, writing, directing theatre and acting that have made him who he is. Through his poetry and prose, he creates vignettes of his life, a long-lost love, his interactions with people as he travels, his favourite authors and their writings, almost as if he’s trying to weave a world for the reader as well. Beautifully symbolic, this book is a rich tapestry of thoughts and feelings, of todays and tomorrows, of being alone and seeking loneliness.
In The Lost Seeker, poet Richard Kydd focuses on the human spiritual journey, and the pain and conflict of man's dual spiritual and material makeup. A consistent theme is his observation that we are trapped in an illusion while in this life. In The Portal he calls reality 'A dream, a portal to a window. A view of semi-detached visions, alone to itself, floating in nothingness." He refers often to ' . this dream we call life," as in Locked in a Dream, and in The Window, which we see through dimly. The sadness of the passing of time, and the loss of loved ones, is mentioned often. In Of Yesterday he describes, 'Magic Moments lost in time, gone without a trace." In Dreams he calls a fond memory 'A photo in an album, a picture in a frame, a moment trapped in time, to never come again." Yet Kydd's message is primarily one of hope. He sees the human spirit as always in longing, always seeking the infinite-but ultimately arriving home, to find peace. In The Flaming Spirit a soul is 'Lost to itself beyond the great reaches of eternity. Forever flying higher." And in Born Eternal Kydd says, 'For we are spirit, born unencumbered." Kydd sees love as the end to the human soul's suffering, and this volume contains some touching love poems, in particular The Passing, a memorial to his Spiritual Grandmother.
A sweeping, psychedelic romance of two men caught in a looping world of artificial realities, edited memories, secretive cabals and conspiracies to push humanity to the next step in its evolution. For fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Ubik, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Evangelion. Fox is a memory editor – one of the best – gifted with the skill to create real life in the digital world. When he wakes up in Field of Reeds Center for Memory Reconstruction with no idea how he got there, the therapists tell him he was a victim in a terrorist bombing by Khadija Banks, the pioneer of memory editing technology turned revolutionary. A bombing which shredded the memory archives of all its victims, including his husband Gabe. Thrust into reconstructions of his memories exploded from the fragments that survived the blast, Fox tries to rebuild his life, his marriage and himself. But he quickly realises his world is changing, unreliable, and echoing around itself over and over. As he unearths endless cycles of meeting Gabe, falling in love and breaking up, Fox digs deep into his past, his time in the refugee nation of Aaru, and the exact nature of his relationship with Khadija. Because, in a world tearing itself apart to forget all its sadness, saving the man he loves might be the key to saving us all.
A Beast In Silence By: Yvonne Francisco In these short stories, the author conveys the feelings and anguish of women living under the yoke of domineering and abusive men, or, as she calls them, ‘men-beasts’, a new sub-species, which, in her own words, emerged as a hybrid between humans and some kind of wild animal. Through her tales, the author vividly shows that no specific social class or educational levels can prevent women from being caught up in the so-called cycle of violence, as reflected by increasingly shocking statistics worldwide, with so many women experiencing violence at the hands of their current and former partners or husbands on a daily basis. Readers will also be able to discover the particular characteristics that define this ‘man-beast’ or abuser. In a break from literary convention, the author does not name any of her characters, using just personal pronouns like ‘he’ or ‘she’ to help readers to identify with them. If they too are experiencing identical or similar situations, some readers might come to realize that what is going on in their own lives is not normal but part of that same vicious cycle of domestic violence.
WINNER OF THE 2020 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION “Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader…This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force.” —Jane Urquhart An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present. We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale—we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation. Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.
Thirteen-year-old Tori Porter and her mother--fun-loving best friends--compete against other relatives in hopes of inheriting a fortune from eccentric Great Aunt Muriel by spending two weeks in a colonial mansion with no modern conveniences, no outside help, and daily tests.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The fates of a cast of seemingly unconnected people converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday in “a darkly glittering novel” (The New York Times) that brings to mind Station Eleven and The Age of Miracles. “A beautifully written, thought-provoking book about life at the end.”—Refinery29 In Domenica Ruta’s profoundly original novel, the end of the world comes once a year. Every May 28, humanity gathers to anticipate the planet’s demise—and to celebrate as if the day is truly its last. On this holiday, three intersecting sets of characters embark on a possibly last-chance quest for redemption. In Boston, bookish wunderkind Sarah is looking for love and maybe a cosmic reversal from the much older Kurt, a tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ—but he’s still trying to make amends to the family he destroyed long ago. Dysfunctional Karen keeps getting into trouble, especially when the voices she’s been hearing coax her to abandon everything to search for her long-lost adoptive brother; her friend Rosette has left the Jehovah’s Witnesses to follow a new pastor at the Last Kingdom on Earth, where she brings Karen on this fateful day. Meanwhile, above them all, three astronauts on the International Space Station, Bear, an American; Russian Svec; and billionaire Japanese space tourist Yui, contemplate their lives as well as their precious Earth from afar. With sparkling wit, verbal ingenuity, and wild imagination, Ruta has created an alternate world in which an ancient holiday brings into stark reflection our deepest dreams, desires, hopes, and fears. In this tour-de-force debut novel she has written a dazzling, haunting love letter to humanity and to our planet. Praise for Last Day “In Ruta’s fiction debut, each May 28 people around the world gather to celebrate what could be the end of the world. The author chooses seven quite different characters, tied together in various ways (romantically, for one pair; orbiting Earth on a space station for three others). Her focus on individual needs and choices as disaster potentially looms gives her story emotional heft.”—The Washington Post “Domenica Ruta’s empathy is broad and deep, her prose fine-grained, her humor sharp but tender. Last Day is a life-affirming antidote to these pre-apocalyptic times.”—Teddy Wayne, author of Loner
On the back side of the universe beyond the heavenly bodies exists a world where darkness knows no light. Time has no meaning, yet this Dark World remains due to its being shrouded in evil personified. The evil lord of this realm is Vacak, who has given birth to his three children, Uki, Deitra, and Demondog. Vacak wants immortality and has an impending coronation forthcoming, but there is one obstacle in his way, and that is his daughter Deitra. When she was a young woman, her brother Uki made a decision, either to betray his father by not telling him he had taken her to Earth or to leave her there to be bitten by Vacak, therefore losing her power to prevent Vacak from becoming immortal. He decided to take her to Earth for what he hoped would be a safe haven. Vacak suspected treachery of his oldest son but had no proof. Instead, he commanded that Uki travel to Earth by way of the cosmos to see if Deitra was living there. He had to find her and turn her into a vampire before his coronation because she was the only one to prevent his transformation due to the fact she was still pure.
After the many interdisciplinary perspectives on nonverbal communication offered by the author in his previous seven John Benjamins books, which have generated a wide range of scholarly applications, the present monograph is dominated by a very broad concept of translation. This treatment of translation includes theater and cinema (enriching our intellectual-sensorial experience of both 'reading act' and 'viewing act') and offers among other topics: sensorial-intellectual-emotional pre- and post-reading interactions with books; mute or audible 'oralization' of texts; the translator's linguistic and nonverbal-cultural fluency and implicit textual paralanguage and kinesics; translating functions of pictorial illustrations; the blind's text and film perception; the foreign reader's cultural background and circumstances; theater and cinema spectators' total sensory-intellectual experience of plays and films beyond staging or projection; the multiple interrelationships between cinema and theater performers, spectators and their environments, of special interest to all those involved in the theater; and the translator's challenging textual perception of sounds and movements. Over 800 literary quotations, and two virtually exhaustive English inventories of sound- and movement-denoting words with many examples, offer serious students of translation, language or literature a rich reference and drill source.
