The remarkable meshing of these two diametrically opposed yet inextricably intertwined facets of literature (and of life) makes for an intriguing sphere of investigation, for the carnival spirit is animated by a human need to dissolve borders and eliminate boundaries - including, symbolically, those between life and death - in an ongoing effort to merge opposing forces into new configurations of truth and meaning.
Carnival of the Spirit is a vibrant synergy of African Spirituality, folktales, and kitchen-table wisdom in an exuberant tribute to world holidays and nature's four seasons. Luisah Teish serves up stories of her own family's traditions along with festivals from all over the world-from the Lily Festival in Japan to the Yam Festival in West Africa, from intimate family gatherings to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and from traditional European holidays to sacred African rituals.
Simon Santiago returns in the second book in the Ghost Talker Files! It's been a year since Simon Santiago almost lost his sanity and soul in The Library of Souls. When Simon and his uncle are called to a town that's been tormented by the spirit of a clown named Grimshaw, Simon isn't sure he'll be able to handle the case. But when another paranormal investigation crew shows up in the town, it sets off a dreadful chain of events that might lead Simon and his new friends down the tunnel to insanity. Will Simon be lucky enough to succeed once more? Or will the evil spirit of a long dead clown make sure that never happens again?Find out in The Carnival of Doom, filled once again with spooky photos and plenty of scares
This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.
The definitive guide to all things Mardi Gras . . . past and present! From Twelfth Night to Ash Wednesday, New Orleans is transformed. Queens and fools, demons and dragons reign over the Crescent City. This vividly photographed book is a lively, comprehensive history of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Fascinating and intimate, this book seamlessly intertwines the past with the present.
A heist by the Serenity crew goes badly wrong in a captivating original Firefly tie-in novel from the award-winning series by Titan Books. City of sin Neapolis: a desert city on planet Bethel where all manner of entertainment can be found: high-stakes gambling, luxurious hotels, exclusive clubs and any form of diversion imaginable may be had for a price. It’s the eve of the annual carnival: three days of decadent revelry, and Serenity arrives to take a security job, guarding a costly shipment. An unattainable ransom Tragedy strikes: the shipment is stolen, and the wealthy owner kidnaps Zoë and Book, holding them to ransom for the lost shipment’s value. If Mal can’t find the enormous sum of five hundred platinum by the next evening, both of them will be killed. A race against time As the carnival begins the crew must attempt the impossible, calling on contacts, calling in favours, and revealing hidden talents to save their crewmates’ lives. Meanwhile, the hostages have their own plans…
Carnival for the Dead is a suspenseful spin-off from the Nic Costa series, David Hewson's detective novels of love and death in Italy. In Venice the past was more reticent. Beyond the tourist sights, San Marco and the Rialto, it lurked in the shadows, seeping out of the cracked stones like blood from ancient wounds, as if death itself was one more sly performance captured beneath the bright all-seeing light of the lagoon. It’s February, and Carnival time in Venice. Forensic pathologist Teresa Lupo visits the city to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her beloved bohemian Aunt Sofia. But from the moment she is greeted off the vaporetto by a masked man dressed in the costume of The Plague Doctor, Teresa starts to suspect that all is not well. The puzzle deepens when a letter reveals a piece of fiction in which both Sofia and Teresa appear. Even more strange, are the links to the past which gradually begin to surface. Are the messages being sent by Sofia herself? Her abductor? Or a third party seeking to help her unravel the mystery? The revelation is as surprising and shocking as Sofia’s fate. And Teresa herself comes to depend upon the unravelling of a mystery wrapped deep inside the art and culture of Venice itself.
Overall Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas—a key feature of Trinidad performance—as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness. The first series, “Seeing Blue,” features Blue Devils from the village of Paramin, whose performances signify an important revision of the post-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad. The second series, “La Femme des Revenants,” chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar’s La Diablesse, which reintroduced the “Caribbean femme fatale” to a new audience. The third series, “Moko Jumbies of the South,” looks at Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, a pair of stilt-walkers from the performance group Touch de Sky from San Fernando in southern Trinidad. “Jouvay Reprised,” the fourth series, follows the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performing a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain on Emancipation Day in 2015. Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, the book interrogates what audiences understand about the role of the participant-observer in public contexts. Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, the book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions. For Browne, Mas performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence.
ALA 2015 Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults Chicago Weekly Best Books of 2014 A Michael L. Printz Honor Award Winner Winner, 2014 Helen Sheehan YA Book Prize Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2014 Finalist, William C. Morris Award It's 1993, and Generation X pulses to the beat of Kurt Cobain and the grunge movement. Sixteen-year-old Maggie Lynch is uprooted from big-city Chicago to a windswept town on the Irish Sea. Surviving on care packages of Spin magazine and Twizzlers from her rocker uncle Kevin, she wonders if she'll ever find her place in this new world. When first love and sudden death simultaneously strike, a naive but determined Maggie embarks on a forbidden pilgrimage that will take her to a seedy part of Dublin and on to a life- altering night in Rome to fulfill a dying wish. Through it all, Maggie discovers an untapped inner strength to do the most difficult but rewarding thing of all, live. The Carnival at Bray is an evocative ode to the Smells Like Teen Spirit Generation and a heartfelt exploration of tragedy, first love, and the transformative power of music. The book won the 2014 Helen Sheehan YA Book Prize.
Minnesota Book Awards 2022 -- Finalist in Novel & Short Story "Fluid in time and place, Carnival Lights flows between one past and another, offering a heartbreaking portrait of multigenerational trauma in the lives of one Ojibwe family. This tapestry of stories is beautifully woven and gut-wrenching in its effect. Read it, and it may change you forever." -- William Kent Krueger, New York Times Bestselling author Blending fiction and fact, Carnival Lights ranges from reverie to nightmare and back again in a lyrical yet unflinching story of an Ojibwe family's struggle to hold onto their land, their culture, and each other. Carnival Lights is a timely book for a country in need of deep healing. In August 1969, two teenage Ojibwe cousins, Sher and Kris, leave their northern Minnesota reservation for the lights of Minneapolis. The girls arrive in the city with only $12, their grandfather's WWII pack, two stainless steel cups, some face makeup, gum, and a lighter. But it's the ancestral connections they are also carrying - to the land and trees, to their family and culture, to love and loss - that shapes their journey most. As they search for work, they cross paths with a gay Jewish boy, homeless white and Indian women, and men on the prowl for runaways. Making their way to the Minnesota State Fair, the Indian girls try to escape a fate set in motion centuries earlier. Set in a summer of hippie Vietnam War protests and the moon landing, Carnival Lights also spans settler arrival in the 1800s, the creation of the reservation system, and decades of cultural suppression, connecting everything from lumber barons' mansions to Nazi V-2 rockets to smuggler's tunnels in creating a narrative history of Minnesota. "Fluid in time and place, Carnival Lights flows between one past and another, offering a heartbreaking portrait of multigenerational trauma in the lives of one Ojibwe family, this tapestry of stories is beautifully woven and gut-wrenching in its effect. Read it, and it may change you forever." -- William Kent Krueger, New York Times Best Selling Author "Chris Stark's newest novel explores the evolution of violence experienced by Native women. Simultaneously graphic and gentle, Carnival Lights takes the reader on a daunting journey through generations of trauma, crafting characters that are both vulnerable and resilient." -- Sarah Deer, (Mvskoke), Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas, MacArthur Genius Award Recipient "Carnival Lights is a heartbreaking wonder of gorgeous prose and urgent story. It propels the reader at a breathless pace as history crashes down on the readers as much as it does on the book's vivid characters. The author's brilliant heart restores their dignity and via the realm of imagination, brings them home." -- Mona Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer, a PEN/Hemingway Winner "It's not every day that one is given an inimitable gift of truth. Carnival Lights is that gift. The history books that we've all read throughout time were purposely devoid of the realities of decades of Native genocide, attempts to eradicate our culture, and the horrendous effects of the boarding school era-trauma that continues to permeate the American Indian communities today. Carnival Lights is an opportune story of how two young girls navigate these lived experiences and provides a veracity that will reach deep into your heart, creating a newfound reflection of the actualities of this historical trauma. Chris Stark, a skilled narrative artist, once again engenders storytelling that ingeniously weaves multi-generational authenticities for not only the Native communities, but also as reflected for so many others. It's time for all of us to embrace this gift of truth." -- Deb Foster, Anishinaabe, MS-MFT Executive Director for the Ain Dah Yung Center, a meeting place for American Indian homeless youth and families "There are so many moods and story currents running through this wonder of a novel that I can attribute to individual women whose lives experiences run parallel to Stark's many characters. The two female adolescences in this novel take us to high and low heights, just like a carnival ride. It's overwhelming, irrational and dangerous, and there is no one to help, just as it has been for Indigenous people from the moment colonizers stepped foot on this continent of Turtle Island. Carnival Lights is powerful storytelling. Indigenous ancestors are persistently returning, so as not to be forgotten in death and memory, and Stark puts the reader right in the center of their pain and struggles." -- Mary K. Kunesh, Minnesota Senator, Standing Rock Lakota descendant, chair of Minnesota Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women taskforce "Carnival Lights is a powerful story of resilience, an emotional rollercoaster ride and an expression of the raw truth of multigenerational trauma. Sher, a lesbian and protector, or what we call 'two-spirit, ' is particularly connected with the old ways." -- Lenny Hayes, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, and Two-Spirit activist "Chris Stark weaves Native spirituality throughout Carnival Lights from the 1960s, before the Religious Freedom Act of 1978. We will lay under a fern, waiting for a drop of water to fall from the tip of the leaf with Em, feel the freedom of fleeing abuse with Kris and get to know the protector Sher who watches over Kris like a wolf. Carnival Lights reminds us that we are not alone, and we are watched over by ones we would have never known or seen if it were not for this desperate moment we are in right now. Chris Stark reminds us how important our teachings are, how our memories can comfort us in our darkest hour when we need it the most. Chris draws us into the inspiration and comfort provided to the characters at times guiding their next move." -- Babette Sandman, Ojibwe elder, White Earth Nation enrolled citizen living in Duluth "Chris Stark has done a beautiful job of incorporating this story of cousins; Sher and Kristin, within a historical and cultural narrative. The trauma that they experience is a familiar tale for many of us. I did not just read this story.... I felt this story and I journeyed with Sher and Kristin in all directions, and through many emotions. The connection to the story of Native women today is clear and brilliantly written. Chi miigwetch, Chris!" -- Nicole Matthews, ED of Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition, White Earth Anishinaabe Learn more at www.ChristineStark.com From Modern History Press
