Russia, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the almost-living portrait that the Tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts she wrote just before her death, one of which opens a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairytale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapón, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa lifts the voices of coachmen, sailors, maids, and seamstresses in this playful, polyphonic, and subversive revision of the Russian revolution, told through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.
Poetry. Fiction. Jewish Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. THE BOOK OF ANNA is written in the voice of Anna Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jew who spent her adolescence in a concentration camp and now lives in 1950s Prague answering phones for the secret police. This genre-defying book of prose diary entries and autobiographical poems offers intimate glimpses of Anna's present --her writing process, relationships with neighbors, obsessive sexual behavior, chain-smoking, and idiosyncratic exploration of Jewish tradition --while the poems recount her unsparing efforts to reckon with horror, survival, and their aftermath. Written in the midst of Joy Ladin's gender transition, this book asks provocative questions about the meaning of trauma, gender, suffering and empathy that speak to our current historical moment in haunting and indelible ways. This second edition of a classic text of trans literature features a new afterword by the author, "Anna and Me," reflecting on this book's pivotal importance for the development of the author's poetics and identity. "Part novel, part shattering lyric sequence, THE BOOK OF ANNA presents itself as the work of Anna Asher, a Holocaust survivor living in 1950s Prague who looks back on her pre-war love of a Heidegger-reading yeshiva bocher, on the women who saved her life in Barracks 10 (The Rebbetzin, The Physicist, The Whore), and on the Biblical 'song made of songs' where 'God is so utterly absent that the rabbis decided --what else could they do? --to see Him everywhere.' A stunning, sometimes shocking mix of Jewish learning and daring, THE BOOK OF ANNA was Ladin's breakthrough volume, and scarred, sardonic Anna is an unforgettable contribution to Jewish American poetry." --Eric Selinger "It's nearly impossible to capture the magnificence that is Joy Ladin's THE BOOK OF ANNA, what it begins and what it foretells. There is something deeply familiar in the text. I feel as if I am suddenly sitting on the yellow plastic-covered couch in my grandmother's living room, listening to the conversations while she and her friends play bridge or mahjong. The women speak Yiddish or Hungarian, and their talk is filled with cigarettes, gossip, and the kind of dry side-eyed humor that belies their own survival and the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, entire families, in the genocide that occurred not two decades before in the villages and towns of their birth. These were women trying to live. Through poems and accounts of a friendship with another survivor, Ladin follows Anna's efforts to find some sign that will allow her to go on living. 'And something shaped like a woman / As you are shaped like a man / Waiting in the middle of the Charles Bridge / For death or truth / To make her breathe again.' In the end, Ladin's Anna chooses to breathe, and we are grateful for her journey in all of its reckoning, and for this prescient and gorgeous book of becoming." --Samuel Ace
This biography of the legendary fashion journalist and media mogul follows her journey from the trendy fashion scene of swinging 1960s London to becoming the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine.
Anna had everything figured out – she was about to start senior year with her best friend, she had a great weekend job and her huge work crush looked as if it might finally be going somewhere... Until her dad decides to send her 4383 miles away to Paris. On her own. But despite not speaking a word of French, Anna finds herself making new friends, including Étienne St. Clair, the smart, beautiful boy from the floor above. But he's taken – and Anna might be too. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with the French kiss she's been waiting for?
In Chinese, peng you means friend. But in any language, all Anna knows for certain is that friendship is complicated. When Anna needs company, she turns to her books. Whether traveling through A Wrinkle in Time, or peering over My Side of the Mountain, books provide what real life cannot—constant companionship and insight into her changing world. Books, however, can’t tell Anna how to find a true friend. She’ll have to discover that on her own. In the tradition of classics like Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books and Eleanor Estes’ One Hundred Dresses, this novel subtly explores what it takes to make friends and what it means to be one.
AN ILLUMINATING ACCOUNT OF THE DMK AND ITS CHARISMATIC FOUNDER In 1967, C.N. Annadurai became the chief minister of Madras state, when his party, the DMK, swept to power for the first time. In this definitive biography, R. Kannan traces the growth of Annadurai—from a young protégé of the radical thinker Periyar E.V. Ramasamy into a revered leader known as Anna, or elder brother. Kannan draws on Anna’s considerable body of writing, and the memoirs of other leaders and authors in Tamil, to candidly examine Anna’s complex relationship with Periyar and his disillusionment with the corruption he witnessed when in power. Featuring luminaries like Rajagopalachari and Kamaraj, K. Karunanidhi and MGR, among many others, Anna offers a warm and rounded portrait of a man who showed the way for the democratic expression of regional aspirations within a united India.
When a fierce blizzard suddenly kicks up on a mild winter day, a young Nebraska girl must find the courage and strength to lead others to safety in this novel inspired by the true story of the 1888 School Children's Blizzard. Twelve-year-old Anna loves life on the Nebraska prairie where she lives with her parents and four-year-old brother in a simple sod house. She doesn't mind helping out with chores, especially when she is herding sheep with her beloved pony, Top Hat. On the open prairie, Anna feels at home. But at school she feels hopelessly out of place. Arithmetic is too hard, her penmanship is abysmal, and stuck-up Eloise Baxter always laughs at her mistakes. When a unexpected blizzard traps Anna, her schoolmates, and their young teacher in the one-room schoolhouse, Anna knows they must escape before it is too late. Does she have the courage and strength to lead her class through the whiteout to safety? Alison Hart offers young readers a dramatic story of rescue and survival featuring a plucky, determined protagonist. An author's note provides more information about prairie life in the late nineteenth century and about the School Children's Blizzard.
In this channelled sequel to the international bestseller Anna, Grandmother of Jesus, we journey with Anna, the Holy Family and 18 other Magdalene–Essenes as they travel to France and Britain after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. This book gives a completely new perspective on the gnostic Mount Carmel Essene mystery school, in which Jesus and Mary Magdalene took initiations, as well as on the Holy Family and the Magdalene Order. Through Claire Heartsong, Anna tells not only the story of Jesus, but also the story of the women who surrounded him throughout his life. The book reveals the deeper mysteries they have safeguarded for aeons of time, including aspects of Jesus’s personal life not recorded in history – his relationships and, most radically, his offspring.In this one-of-a-kind story, Claire shares the information she received from Anna on the ‘Seeding of Light’ – the dispersion of Anna, Mother Mary and Jesus’s enlightened descendants whose ‘bloodline’ acts as a living catalyst for the awakening of the Christ–Magdalene potential today. Not only does this book give a new view of the Christ drama 2,000 years ago but, more importantly, it offers the potential to lift the suppressed Divine Feminine voice in our time.
If you have a group of friends with whom you've shared many of life's trials and celebrations, then you'll find the women of The Book Club: Just Desserts very interesting. If one of your hobbies is reading, then you're sure to enjoy the great book selections and group discussions that play an integral part of The Book Club: Just Desserts. And if you enjoy delicious desserts, then you're sure to love the wonderful recipes found in The Book Club: Just Desserts.
