Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer. Rieff's brave, passionate and unsparing witness of the last nine months of her life is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it means to confront death in our culture. David Rieff confronts his feelings in relation to his motherandmdash;the guilt, the self-questioning, the sense of not having done enough. And he tries to understand what it means to desire so desperately, as his mother did to the end of her life, and to try almost anything in order to go on living.
Swordsman, thief, adventurer, rogue--Gord is the ultimate hero of the sword and sorcery genre from the creator of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Game. In this saga, two evil forces seek a powerful artifact hidden in the desert and Gord must find it first.
A Penguin Classic Widely considered the greatest work by the foremost Brazilian author of the twentieth century, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray comes to Penguin Classics in a new translation by the dean of Portuguese-language translators, Gregory Rabassa. It tells the story of Joaquim Soares da Cunha, who drops dead after he abandons his life of upstanding citizenship to assume the identity of Quincas Water-Bray, a “champion drunk” and bum who is whisked along on a postmortem journey that climaxes in his loss at sea. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Kehl hates pirates. His father, the Warrior Prince, has always told him they were responsible for his mother’s death. So when he is kidnapped by Temoc, the Pirate King, Kehl is more furious than frightened. But Temoc is mapping the vast seas known as the Carrillon and needs Kehl’s cartography expertise. As Kehl spends more and more time with Temoc and his crew, he comes to realize that his father has not been honest with him and that his past is linked to the future of the new world he is mapping.
Fierce Vikings and mystical Sirens face each other in a neverending battle to claim the most significant natural resource their world has to offer: the sea. For generations, Viking clans have faced Siren tribes in battles waged on land and sea. Battles that pit brute strength against sorcery, and cunning versus charm. Their war has torn apart the very world they fight over while also filling graveyards that span farther than the eye can see. But on these battlefields, you are just as likely to encounter love as you are death. These are the tales of their mythical encounters. These are the tales of the Sirens of the Norse Sea.
Like other groups with dangerous occupations, mariners have developed a close-knit culture bound by loss and memory. Death regularly disrupts the fabric of this culture and necessitates actions designed to mend its social structure. From the ritual of burying a body at sea to the creation of memorials to honor the missing, these events tell us a great deal about how sailors see their world. Based on a study of more than 2,100 gravestones and monuments in North America and the United Kingdom erected between the seventeenth and late twentieth centuries, David Stewart expands the use of nautical archaeology into terrestrial environments. He focuses on those who make their living at sea--one of the world's oldest and most dangerous occupations--to examine their distinct folkloric traditions, beliefs, and customs regarding death, loss, and remembrance.
With zombies taking over the cities, a group of humans escapes the carnage by taking a small Coast Guard ship out to sea, but there's no getting away—even in the wide ocean.
Now available in paperback, Death on the Hellships chronicles the true dimensions of the Allied POW experience at sea. It is a disturbing story; many believe the Bataan Death March even pales by comparison. Survivors describe their ordeal in the Japanese hellships as the absolute worst experience of their captivity. Crammed by the thousands into the holds of the ships, moved from island to island and put to work, they endured all the horrors of the prison camps magnified tenfold. Gregory Michno draws on American, British, Australian, and Dutch POW accounts as well as Japanese convoy histories, declassified radio intelligence reports, and a wealth of archival sources to present a detailed picture of the horror.
“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry. "Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary minds."—Publishers Weekly “An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable”—Seamus Perry, Literary Review "Reading, this stirring collection testifies, ‘helps in staying alive.’“—Kirkus Reviews, starred review This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed weeks before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.” Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature,” he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.” In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself “edged by nothingness,” uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear‑eyed, this is among Harold Bloom’s most ambitious and most moving books.
