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Author: Sony Labou Tansi
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 150
ISBN-13: 0253222877
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis crisp translation by Alison Dundy maintains the fast-paced action and bitingly satiric tone of the original.
Author: Darin Strauss
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-05-31
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 0679643826
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this powerful, unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Darin Strauss examines the far-reaching consequences of the tragic moment that has shadowed his whole life. In his last month of high school, he was behind the wheel of his dad's Oldsmobile, driving with friends, heading off to play mini-golf. Then: a classmate swerved in front of his car. The collision resulted in her death. With piercing insight and stark prose, Darin Strauss leads us on a deeply personal, immediate, and emotional journey—graduating high school, going away to college, starting his writing career, falling in love with his future wife, becoming a father. Along the way, he takes a hard look at loss and guilt, maturity and accountability, hope and, at last, acceptance. The result is a staggering, uplifting tour de force. Look for special features inside, including an interview with Colum McCann.
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2012-03-15
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 0307370593
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.
Author: Jill Ciment
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2015-06-17
Total Pages: 197
ISBN-13: 1101905484
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJill Ciment weaves an unforgettable tale of survival, compassion, and courage, in this haunting recollection of a child surrounded by confusion and madness, and her struggle to find an identity. Half a Life traces Jill Ciment's family from Toronto to the California desert—a landscape and culture so alien to her father that the last vestiges of sanity leave him. As madness engulfs him he becomes increasingly brutal and the family, grasping at survival, throws him out the door. Having no understanding that he has done anything wrong, he first lives in his car at the end of the driveway, waiting to be invited back in, before exiting completely from their lives. Poor and fatherless, Ciment spends the years from age fourteen to seventeen, as a gang girl, a professional forger, a stripper, a corporate spy, and finally, a high school dropout who by age eighteen has seduced her art teacher, a man nearly three decades her senior and bluffed her way into college in an effort to shape a future. Ciment is cutting, insightful and clearly unapologetic as she details the confusion and bravado of a child heroine whose dreams and tenacity allow her finally, to create the life she has been so desperately seeking.
Author: Shanna Greene Benjamin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2021-04-01
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 1469661896
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNellie Y. McKay (1930–2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay’s private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.
Author: Kim Ablon Whitney
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
Published: 2010-05-11
Total Pages: 259
ISBN-13: 0375844228
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA heartbreaking novel based on the true story of a World War II voyage. In May of 1939, the SS St. Francis sets sail from Germany, carrying German Jews and other refugees away from Hitler’s regime. The passengers believe they are bound for freedom in Cuba and eventually the United States, but not all of them are celebrating. Fifteen-year-old Thomas is anxious about his parents and didn’t want to leave Germany: his father, a Jew, has been imprisoned and his mother, a Christian, is left behind, alone. Fourteen-yearold Priska has her family with her, and she’s determined to enjoy the voyage, looking forward to their new lives. Based on the true story of the MS St. Louis, this historical young adult novel imagines two travelers and the lives they may have lived until events, and immigration laws, conspired to change their fates. Kim Ablon Whitney did meticulous research on the voyage of the St. Louis to craft her compelling and moving story about this little-known event in history.
Author: James Hollis
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-05-05
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13: 1101216697
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat does it really mean to be a grown up in today’s world? We assume that once we “get it together” with the right job, marry the right person, have children, and buy a home, all is settled and well. But adulthood presents varying levels of growth, and is rarely the respite of stability we expected. Turbulent emotional shifts can take place anywhere between the age of thirty-five and seventy when we question the choices we’ve made, realize our limitations, and feel stuck—commonly known as the “midlife crisis.” Jungian psycho-analyst James Hollis believes it is only in the second half of life that we can truly come to know who we are and thus create a life that has meaning. In Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Hollis explores the ways we can grow and evolve to fully become ourselves when the traditional roles of adulthood aren’t quite working for us, revealing a new way of uncovering and embracing our authentic selves. Offering wisdom to anyone facing a career that no longer seems fulfilling, a long-term relationship that has shifted, or family transitions that raise issues of aging and mortality, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life provides a reassuring message and a crucial bridge across this critical passage of adult development.
Author: Big Boy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2011-12-27
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 1936399210
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA rare three-time winner of the Marconi Awards, Big Boy (aka Kurt Alexander) is one of the country's biggest hip-hop DJs. Unfortunately, for a time he was big in every sense of the word, finally weighing in at 510 pounds. Busy with work, he opted for duodenal switch stomach surgery and shrank by over 250 pounds, but nearly lost his life. Not a diet guide but a probing memoir.
Author: Tim Leffel
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781505651690
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPresents good value destinations to live in around the world and how to transition.
Author: Angeles Arrien
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Published: 2010-04
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 1458770729
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen you find the courage to change at midlife, Angeles Arrien teaches, a miracle happens. Your character is opened, deepened, strengthened, softened. You return to your souls highest values. You are now prepared to create your legacy: an imprint of your dream for our world - a dream that can fully come true in The Second Half of Life. Worki...
