Key Selling Points A sweet summer camp story about a painfully shy girl who meets a boy with a rare genetic condition. The book explores themes of facing your fears and the nature of true friendship. One of the main characters has progeria, a genetic condition that causes premature aging. Most children who have this don’t live past age 14. This story had its genesis in a terrible summer camp experience for the author. The book has a happy ending. Bea and her new friends stay in touch after summer is over.
An insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge us. In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.
A talented pianist and composer in his own right, Sun Ra (1914 - 1993) founded and conducted one of jazz's last great big bands from the 1950s until he left planet Earth. Few only know that he also was a gifted thinker and poet. Sun Ra's poetry leaves everything behind what's called contemporary, and flings out pictures of infinity into the outer space. These poems are for tomorrow. This is the only edition of Sun Ra's complete poetry and prose in one volume. The Contributors James L. Wolf Earned a music degree from Carleton College, and studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Now works at the Library of Congress in the Music Division. Active musician in various bands in the DC area. Many contributions to Sun Ra scholarship. Hartmut Geerken Oriental studies, philosophy and comparative religion at the universities of Tübingen and Istanbul. Writer, filmmaker, musician, composer. Since the 1970s, close relationships to Sun Ra and his works, setting up the world's most comprehensive Waitawhile Sun Ra Archive Sigrid Hauff Studied oriental languages and arts, philosophy, and romance studies at the universities of Tübingen and Istanbul. Free lance writer on literary and philosophical subjects. Klaus Detlef Thiel Studied philosophy and history at Trier University, Ph.D. Philosophical author, focussing on theory and history of writing. Brent Hayes Edwards Teaches in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Author and Co-Editor of works on jazz and literature.
A moving, compelling memoir about growing up and escaping the tragic legacy of mental illness, suicide, addiction, and depression in one of America’s most famous families: the Hemingways. She opens her eyes. The room is dark. She hears yelling, smashed plates, and wishes it was all a terrible dream. But it isn’t. This is what it was like growing up as a Hemingway. In this deeply moving, searingly honest new memoir, actress and mental health icon Mariel Hemingway shares in candid detail the story of her troubled childhood in a famous family haunted by depression, alcoholism, illness, and suicide. Born just a few months after her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, shot himself, it was Mariel’s mission as a girl to escape the desperate cycles of severe mental health issues that had plagued generations of her family. Surrounded by a family tortured by alcoholism (both parents), depression (her sister Margaux), suicide (her grandfather and four other members of her family), schizophrenia (her sister Muffet), and cancer (mother), it was all the young Mariel could do to keep her head. In a compassionate voice she reveals her painful struggle to stay sane as the youngest child in her family, and how she coped with the chaos by becoming OCD and obsessive about her food, schedule, and organization. The twisted legacy of her family has never quite let go of Mariel, but now in this memoir she opens up about her claustrophobic marriage, her acting career, and turning to spiritual healers and charlatans for solace. Ultimately Mariel has written a story of triumph about learning to overcome her family’s demons and developing love and deep compassion for them. At last, in this memoir she can finally tell the true story of the tragedies and troubles of the Hemingway family, and she delivers a book that beckons comparisons to Mary Karr and Jeanette Walls.
The world’s second-wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America. But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends. Japan has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries, and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Equally as troubling are the more than one million young men who shut themselves in their rooms, withdrawing from society, and the growing numbers of “parasite singles,” the name given to single women who refuse to leave home, marry, or bear children. In Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger argues that Japan’s rigid, tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality and the expression of self are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution. Giving a human face to the country’s malaise, Zielenziger explains how these constraints have driven intelligent, creative young men to become modern-day hermits. At the same time, young women, better educated than their mothers and earning high salaries, are rejecting the traditional path to marriage and motherhood, preferring to spend their money on luxury goods and travel. Smart, unconventional, and politically controversial, Shutting Out the Sun is a bold explanation of Japan’s stagnation and its implications for the rest of the world.
Elspeth Huxley captivated readers throughout the world with her 'memories of an African childhood' in THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA and THE MOTTLED LIZARD. In this final volume of her trilogy she tells the story of her adult life in Africa, in which the vigorously evoked personalities - from the pioneer Lord Delamere and Baroness Blixen to Jomo Kenyatta - blend with her supurb description of the social, cultural and political upheavals of the time. 'An accomplished story-teller, she weaves anecdotes, character sketches, political history together without losing her thread or the readers momentum. ' SUNDAY TIMES 'She evokes it all lovingly but astringently, especially the glittering, often scandelous life of the young aristocrats who lived in Happy Valley. ' DAILY EXPRESS
We can all have mornings when we don't feel like getting out of our beds. But what if its the Sun that doesn't want to get up? And how angry will this make the Moon? This charming story tells a tale of two old friends who have been rising and falling for a very long time. The Day the Sun Wouldn't Get Out of Bed, looks at the idea of friendship and consolation as well as how to keep going when things get a bit tough. It will bring comfort to children and parents alike.The amusing storyline, with beautiful illustrations, is written in rhyme, which is helpful for young ones that are just starting out on their reading journey.The first in its series, all of Deep Breath Publications books are designed to create a chance to reflect and open up conversations about relationships, looking out for one another and looking after yourself.
Mr. Koch’s poems have a natural voice, they are quick, alert, instinctive . . . He has vivacity and go, originality of perception and intoxication with life. Most important of all, he is not dull.” --Frank O’Hara, Poetry, 1955 Gathered together for the first time, the exciting, startling early work of one of our finest poets. Writing as a young man in the 1950s, Koch, a member of the now famed New York School along with John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, and others, experimented with the delicate balance between sound and sense to offer a series of poems resembling music or abstract painting. For example, he opens the title poem with: “Bananas, piers, limericks / I am postures / Over there, I, are / The lakes of delectation / Sea, sea you!” Also included are a selection of short plays in verse and Koch’s innovative masterpiece, “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” a poem that “produces a radical reworking of the life-poem myth predominant in American poetics since ‘Song of Myself’” (William Watkins, In the Process of Poetry). About “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” David Lehman wrote, “Koch takes a great deal of delight in the sounds of words and his consciousness of them; he splashes them like paint on a page with enthusiastic puns, internal rhymes, titles of books, names of friends, and seems surprised as we are at the often witty outcome” (Poetry, 1968). When the poems in Sun Out were originally published, they set a standard for the freshness and surprise of language used in extraordinary ways. For almost five decades they have delighted readers lucky enough to find them. It is our pleasure to make them once again available in this new and provocative collection.
The story of British Malaya and Singapore, from the days of Victorian pioneers to the denouement of independence, is a momentous episode in Britain’s colonial past. Through memoirs, letters and interviews, Margaret Shennan chronicles its halcyon years, the two World Wars, economic depression and diaspora, revealing the attitudes of the diverse quixotic characters of this now quite vanished world. The British came as fortune-seekers to exploit Asian trade shipped through Penang and Singapore. They found a mature Asian culture in a land of palm-fringed shores and primeval jungle. Like modern Romans, they built townships, defences, communications and hill stations, they spurred a rivalry between the fledgling commercial centres of Singapore, Penang and Kuala Lumpur, and they superimposed their law and established an idiosyncratic political system. They also developed the tin and rubber of the Malay States, encouraging Chinese and Indian immigrants by their open-door policy. The outcome was a vibrant multi-racial society – the most cosmopolitan in the East.
