1987. The Philippine government fights a total war against insurgency. The village of Iraya is militarised. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped. With her twelve-metre hair, Estrella, the Fish-hair Woman, trawls corpses from the water that tastes of lemon-grass. She falls in love with the Australian Tony McIntyre who disappears in the conflict. Ten years later, his son travels to Manila to find his father. From the Philippines to Australia, Hawai'i, to evocations of colonial Spain, this transnational novel spins a dark, epic tale. Its storytelling is expansive, like the heart -- How much can the heart accommodate? ... Only four chambers but with infinite space like memory, where there is room even for those whom we do not love.
WINNER, Lambda Literary Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction; $60,000 Amazon Canada First Novel Award When thirty-year-old trans woman Wendy Reimer comes across evidence that her late grandfather—a devout Mennonite farmer—might have been transgender himself, she dismisses this revelation, having other problems at hand. But as she and her friends struggle to cope with their increasingly volatile lives—which range from alcoholism, to sex work, to suicide—Wendy grows increasingly drawn to the lost pieces of her grandfather’s life, becoming determined to unravel the mystery of his truth. Alternately warm-hearted and dark-spirited, desperate and mirthful, Little Fish explores the winter of discontent in the life of one transgender woman as her past and future become irrevocably entwined. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
Winner of the Commonwealth Prize New York Times Book Review—Notable Fiction 2002 Entertainment Weekly—Best Fiction of 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Review—Best of the Best 2002 Washington Post Book World—Raves 2002 Chicago Tribune—Favorite Books of 2002 Christian Science Monitor—Best Books 2002 Publishers Weekly—Best Books of 2002 The Cleveland Plain Dealer—Year’s Best Books Minneapolis Star Tribune—Standout Books of 2002 Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled. Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould’s Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.
As the old axiom goes: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." But teach a woman to fish, and everyone eats for a lifetime. In this firsthand account, Ritu Sharma shares how women can, and are, overcoming the forces that keep them in poverty. She chronicles her travels through four countries—Sri Lanka, Burkina Faso, Honduras, and Nicaragua—and the intimate interactions she had with the women living there. Sharma's story not only details her experiences, but also looks at the broader systems that prevent women from leaving poverty behind. From lack of property rights and government corruption to the scarcity of basic infrastructure like roads, these women are restricted by the external limitations placed upon them. Sharma draws from her experiences to frame a larger exploration of how Americans can be instrumental in helping women break free of restrictive systems and begin to facilitate women's upward mobility. Written in her engaging personal voice, Teach a Woman to Fish provides an insider's look at women in poverty, how Washington works, and how change really happens—from the United States to the rest of the world.
The firsthand account of one woman's rugged travels through three impoverished nations, and of the women living, struggling, and overcoming the forces that threaten to keep them in poverty
The Grasp That Reaches beyond the Grave investigates the treatment of the ancestor figure in Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata and A Sunday in June, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Tananarive Due's The Between, and Julie Dash's film, Daughters of the Dust in order to understand how they draw on African cosmology and the interrelationship of ancestors, elders, and children to promote healing within the African American community. Venetria K. Patton suggests that the experience of slavery with its concomitant view of black women as "natally dead" has impacted African American women writers' emphasis on elders and ancestors as they seek means to counteract notions of black women as somehow disconnected from the progeny of their wombs. This misperception is in part addressed via a rich kinship system, which includes the living and the dead. Patton notes an uncanny connection between depictions of elder, ancestor, and child figures in these texts and Kongo cosmology. These references suggest that these works are examples of Africanisms or African retentions, which continue to impact African American culture.
“In the fall, I went for walks and brought home bones. The best bones weren’t on trails—deer and moose don’t die conveniently—and soon I was wandering so far into the woods that I needed a map and compass to find my way home. When winter came and snow blew into the mountains, burying the bones, I continued to spend my days and often my nights in the woods. I vaguely understood that I was doing this because I could no longer think; I found relief in walking up hills. When the night temperatures dropped below zero, I felt visited by necessity, a baseline purpose, and I walked for miles, my only objective to remain upright, keep moving, preserve warmth. When I was lost, I told myself stories . . .” So Charles D’Ambrosio recounted his life in Philipsburg, Montana, the genesis of the brilliant stories collected here, six of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Each of these eight burnished, terrifying, masterfully crafted stories is set against a landscape that is both deeply American and unmistakably universal. A son confronts his father’s madness and his own hunger for connection on a misguided hike in the Pacific Northwest. A screenwriter fights for his sanity in the bleak corridors of a Manhattan psych ward while lusting after a ballerina who sets herself ablaze. A Thanksgiving hunting trip in Northern Michigan becomes the scene of a haunting reckoning with marital infidelity and desperation. And in the magnificent title story, carpenters building sets for a porn movie drift dreamily beneath a surface of sexual tension toward a racial violence they will never fully comprehend. Taking place in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations, the backloads of Iowa and the streets of Seattle, this collection of stories, as muscular and challenging as the best novels, is about people who have been orphaned, who have lost connection, and who have exhausted the ability to generate meaning in their lives. Yet in the midst of lacerating difficulty, the sensibility at work in these fictions boldly insists on the enduring power of love. D’Ambrosio conjures a world that is fearfully inhospitable, darkly humorous, and touched by glory; here are characters, tested by every kind of failure, who struggle to remain human, whose lives have been sharpened rather than numbed by adversity, whose apprehension of truth and beauty has been deepened rather than defeated by their troubles. Many writers speak of the abyss. Charles D’Ambrosio writes as if he is inside of it, gazing upward, and the gaze itself is redemptive, a great yearning ache, poignant and wondrous, equal parts grit and grace. A must read for everyone who cares about literary writing, The Dead Fish Museum belongs on the same shelf with the best American short fiction.
"The Laughing Prince: A Book of Jugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales" is a fascinating collection of fairy tales and folk tales, presented by an American folklorist Parker Fillmore to demonstrate the incredible vigor and the artistic inventiveness of the Jugoslav imagination to the western reader. The tradition of the Hungarian folk tales was greatly influenced by Oriental and Northern as well as Slavic myths, which have made it incredibly rich and exciting to the reader of any time—first published in 1921.
