Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?
An Ordinary Marriage is the story of the Chikhachevs, middling-income gentry landowners in nineteenth-century provincial Russia. In a seemingly strange contradiction, the mother of this family, Natalia, oversaw serf labor and managed finances while the father, Andrei, raised the children, at a time when domestic ideology advocating a woman's place in the home was at its height in European advice manuals. But Andrei Chikhachev defined masculinity as a realm of intellectualism; the father could be in charge of moral education, defined as an intellectual task. Managing estates that often barely yielded a livable income was a practical task and therefore considered less elevated, though still vitally important to the family's interests. Thus estate management was available to gentry women like Natalia Chikhacheva, and the fact that it inevitably expanded their realm of influence and opportunity (within the limits of their estates), and that it increased their centrality to the family's material security relative to their social counterparts to the west, was accidental. An Ordinary Marriage examines the daily activities and ideas of the family based on multiple overlapping diaries and informal correspondence by the husband, wife, and son of the family, as well as the wife's brother. No such cache of intimate Russian family documents has ever previously been studied in such depth. The family's relative obscurity (with no pretensions to fame, wealth, or influence) and the presence of a woman's private documents are especially unusual in any context. The book considers the Chikhachevs' social life, reading habits, attitudes toward illness and death, as well as their marital roles and their reception of major ideas of their time, such as domesticity, Enlightenment, sentimentalism, and Romanticism.
THE ALLIANCE Second installment to the A Broken Paradise Series. "Oh my god!" "WENI!" "WENI!, open your eyes!" "What happened?" "CUALLI!" "What's happened to Weni, Cualli?." Sheriton asked, tears already welling up in her eyes. "I know this is a little hard to understand right now." I began again, "I know right now you're all just thinking about the fact that she's gone, but there is still hope, there is still hope that this can work." "THAT IS NOT WENI!!" Sheriton screamed at me. "What happens if people find out? What if Damson finds out." Tess blurted out. "The Alliance will fall apart?" Perri mumbles under his breath. Galina wiped her tears. "Awen is still in there, that body is still hers." "How can you trust her?" Tess asked. "I don't think it's a case of trust right now...." Ceri said as he got to his feet and walked to Galina and Sheriton. "She's keeping my sister alive."
When the mysterious boy Frindleswylde enters Cora and Granny's house in the woods, he steals the light from their lantern. Without it, Granny will not be able to return home from work in the dark. Cora is determined to get the light back, but first she must follow Frindleswylde down a hole in the pond that leads to his magical frozen kingdom...
Finally free of her mother’s controlling ways, Natalia, a quirky misfit, heads to New York City after learning her family’s darkest secret—Daniel, a stepbrother previously unknown to her. With her desire to be loved and accepted by someone for the first time, Natalia pretends to be the person her half-brother expects. However, behind his back, Natalia is someone completely different. Natalia works for Stuart, a powerful and eccentric corporate executive, eliminating costly retired pension recipients one by one. Not completely without emotion or a moral compass, Natalia tries to find annoying habits or irritating personality traits to justify her doings. Getting better at what she does, with good reason and even better pay in hand, she makes each hit look like natural causes. But after spending more time with Stuart, his wife, and a new love interest, the innocent facade she presents to Daniel begins to crack and her true colors start to slip through. With Daniel’s suspicion growing, Natalia finds herself at a crossroads: either conform to Daniel's expectations or embrace her true identity.
Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works. In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.
BioTech ChemLabs continues to operate under a murderous vampire, with shifters hired to do his dirty work—no one has what it takes to stop him. Coverton is still plagued by kidnappings and murder, leaving only one thing left to do; betray everyone and everything one holds dear. That’s what Tia thought when she decided to take matters into her own hands. But when her past catches up to the present, what she had planned goes sideways and disrupts the fight for a safe future. Trust is hard-earned and not easy to give, but in order to do what needs to be done, Tia must learn to trust someone. Can she trust anyone she meets on the other side of the fight—including the shifter hired to hunt her down for her betrayal? Could trust really be the key to bringing down the cruelest company Coverton has ever seen and opening a heart that never wanted to be opened again? The Coverton Chronicles continues with book three, Hunted.
For more than thirty years Natalie Goldberg has been challenging and cheering on writers with her books and workshops. In her groundbreaking first book, she brings together Zen meditation and writing in a new way. Writing practice, as she calls it, is no different from other forms of Zen practice—"it is backed by two thousand years of studying the mind." This thirtieth-anniversary edition includes new forewords by Julia Cameron and Bill Addison. It also includes a new preface in which Goldberg reflects on the enduring quality of the teachings here. She writes, "What have I learned about writing over these thirty years? I’ve written fourteen books, and it’s the practice here in Bones that is the foundation, sustaining and building my writing voice, that keeps me honest, teaches me how to endure the hard times and how to drop below discursive thinking, to taste the real meat of our minds and the life around us."
Photo tutorials show stitching in action for 50+ free-motion quilting designs to create modern quilts with classic style! Popular blogger and designer, Natalia Bonner, illustrates her instructions with detailed photos that make it easier to get beautiful results on your home sewing machine. Learn how to quilt all-over, as filler, on borders, and on individual blocks…using loops and swirls, feathers and flames, flowers and vines, pebbles and more! Includes tips for choosing batting and thread, layering and basting, starting and stopping, and prepping your machine are included. After you’ve practiced, show off your new skills with six geometric quilt projects.
Running late for work one morning in September 1994, Tom Hargrove, communications director for an international agricultural aid organization in Cali, Colombia, was mildly annoyed when he spotted a roadblock, or reten, manned by soldiers in fatigues. He chafed at the delay, but told himself that guerrillas and kidnappers didn't operate on a main highway in broad daylight. But Hargrove had been dreadfully mistaken. Despite his assertions that he worked for a non-profit agricultural agency, he was forced at gunpoint into a vehicle and driven into the mountains by communist narco-terrorists who believed he was a valuable hostage. For almost a year, Hargrove was held by the guerillas and moved from one remote location to another. To maintain his grip on sanity, he recorded his daily experiences in makeshift journals: in a checkbook; on children's notebooks; and on scraps of paper scrounged during his ordeal. Hargrove's story, originally published in 1995, was the basis for the major motion picture Proof of Life, starring Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan. Now available again in paperback, Long March to Freedom chronicles one man's spirited determination to hang onto life and faith amid nearly impossible circumstances.
