Adios, Happy Homeland!

Adios, Happy Homeland!

Author: Ana Menéndez

Publisher: Black Cat

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0802170846

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This critical look at the life of the Cuban writer pulls apart and reassembles the myths that have come to define her culture, blending illusion with reality and exploring themes of art, family, language, superstition, and the overwhelming need to escape--from the island, from memory, from stereotype, and, ultimately, from the self.


Adios, Happy Homeland

Adios, Happy Homeland

Author: Ana Menéndez

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2011-08-02

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0802195520

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the award–winning author of In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, short stories with a magical and modern take on the idea of migration and flight. Adios, Happy Homeland! is a collection of interlinked tales that challenge our preconceptions of storytelling. It examines the life of the Cuban writer, deconstructing and reassembling the myths that define her culture. It blends illusion with reality and explores themes of art, family, language, superstition, and the overwhelming need to escape—from the island, from memory, from stereotype, and, ultimately, from the self. We’re taken into a sick man’s fever dream as he waits for a train beneath a strange night sky, into a community of parachute makers facing the end in a windy town that no longer exists, and onto a Cuban beach where the body of a boy last seen on a boat bound for America turns out to be a giant jellyfish. With Adios, Happy Homeland!, Menéndez puts a contemporary twist on the troubled history of Cuba and offers a wry and poignant perspective on the conundrum of cultural displacement.


In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

Author: Ana Menéndez

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1555847870

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Eleven short stories of the Cuban immigrant experience as characters adjust to life in the United Sates, from an award-winning author. From the prize–winning title story—a masterpiece of humor and heartbreak—unfolds a collection of tales that illuminate the landscape of an exiled community rich in heritage, memory, and longing for the past. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is at once “tender and sharp-fanged” as Ana Menéndez evocatively charts the territory from Havana to Coral Gables, Florida, and explores whether any of us are capable, or even truly desirous, of outrunning our origins (LA Weekly). “With the grace of Margaret Atwood and the sensuality of Laura Esquivel,” Menéndez makes an unforgettable debut “rich in metaphor, wisdom, and delicious subtlety” (St. Petersburg Times).


Loving Che

Loving Che

Author: Ana Menéndez

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1555847889

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this “evocative first novel,” an elderly woman looks back on the world of revolutionary Cuba as she recalls her intimate, secret love affair with Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Publishers Weekly). A young Cuban woman has been searching in vain for details of her birth mother. All she knows of her past is that her grandfather fled the turbulent Havana of the 1960s for Miami with her in tow, and that pinned to her sweater—possibly by her mother—were a few treasured lines of a Pablo Neruda poem. These facts remain her only tenuous links to her history, until a mysterious parcel arrives in the mail. Inside the soft, worn box are layers of writings and photographs. Fitting these pieces together with insights she gleans from several trips back to Havana, the daughter reconstructs a life of her mother, her youthful affair with the dashing, charismatic Che Guevara and the child she bore by the enigmatic rebel. Loving Che is a brilliant recapturing of revolutionary Cuba, the changing social mores, the hopes and disappointments, the excitement and terror of the times. It is also an erotic fantasy, a glimpse into the private life of a mythic public figure, and an exquisitely crafted meditation on memory, history, and storytelling. Finally, Loving Che is a triumphant unveiling of how the stories we tell about others ultimately become the story of ourselves. “A moving novel from a writer to watch.” —Publishers Weekly “Inventive and hypnotic . . . [An] artful and restless examination of the exile soul.” —Los Angeles Times “[Menendez] captures Cuba’s potential, its desperation and decay, and also its dark humor.” —The New York Times “The writing is consistently beautiful. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal


The Last War

The Last War

Author: Ana Menéndez

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-05-21

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0061879932

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Exquisitely crafted. . . strikingly real and heartfelt." —Denver Post “[A] potent literary novel . . . A deft portrait of an estranged couple whose pain is veiled by the fog of war.” —People A breathtaking novel of love, war, and betrayal from the critically acclaimed author of Loving Che and the New York Times Notable Book, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. From the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq to the strange, shimmering streets of Istanbul, The Last War is a “seductive meditation” (O, The Oprah Magazine) on cruelty and violence, love and identity from Pushcart Prize-winning author Ana Menéndez.


Palmerino

Palmerino

Author: Melissa Pritchard

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781934137680

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

O, The Oprah Magazine "Title to Pick Up Now" American Library Association "Over the Rainbow List" selection Welcome to Palmerino, the British enclave in rural Italy where Violet Paget, known to the world by her pen name and male persona, Vernon Lee, held court. In imagining the real life of this brilliant, lesbian polymath known for her chilling supernatural stories, Melissa Pritchard creates a multilayered tale in which the dead writer inhabits the heart and mind of her lonely, modern-day biographer. Positing the art of biography as an act of resurrection and possession, this novel brings to life a vividly detailed, subtly erotic tale about secret loves and the fascinating artists and intellectuals--Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Robert Browning, Bernard Berenson--who challenged and inspired each other during an age of repression. Melissa Pritchard is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Odditorium, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Among other honors, her books have received the Flannery O'Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg awards, and two of her short fiction collections were New York Times Notable Book and Editors' Choice selections.


At Night We Walk in Circles

At Night We Walk in Circles

Author: Daniel Alarcón

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1101622989

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A breathtaking, suspenseful story of one man’s obsessive search to find the truth of another man’s downfall, from the author of The King Is Always Above the People, which was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction. Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his acting career can’t seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson’s hero, Henry Nunez, leader of the storied guerrilla theater troupe Diciembre. And that’s when the real trouble begins. The tour takes Nelson out of the shelter of the city and across a landscape he’s never seen, which still bears the scars of the civil war. With each performance, Nelson grows closer to his fellow actors, becoming hopelessly entangled in their complicated lives, until, during one memorable performance, a long-buried betrayal surfaces to force the troupe into chaos. Nelson’s fate is slowly revealed through the investigation of the narrator, a young man obsessed with Nelson’s story—and perhaps closer to it than he lets on. In sharp, vivid, and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a compulsively readable narrative and a provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices.


Adiós Muchachos

Adiós Muchachos

Author: Sergio Ramírez

Publisher: Duke University Press Books

Published: 2011-10-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780822350873

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Adiós Muchachos is a candid insider’s account of the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the 1970s, Sergio Ramírez led prominent intellectuals, priests, and business leaders to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), against Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Ramírez served as vice-president under Daniel Ortega from 1985 until 1990, when the FSLN lost power in a national election. Disillusioned by his former comrades’ increasing intolerance of dissent and resistance to democratization, Ramírez defected from the Sandinistas in 1995 and founded the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In Adiós Muchachos, he describes the utopian aspirations for liberation and reform that motivated the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza regime, as well as the triumphs and shortcomings of the movement’s leadership as it struggled to turn an insurrection into a government, reconstruct a country beset by poverty and internal conflict, and defend the revolution against the Contras, an armed counterinsurgency supported by the United States. Adiós Muchachos was first published in 1999. Based on a later edition, this translation includes Ramírez’s thoughts on more recent developments, including the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president in 2006.


Demonic

Demonic

Author: Ann Coulter

Publisher: Crown Forum

Published: 2012-08-07

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0307353494

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob. Sweeping in its scope and relentless in its argument, Demonic explains the peculiarities of liberals as standard groupthink behavior. To understand mobs is to understand liberals. In her most provocative book to date, Ann Coulter argues that liberals exhibit all the psychological characteristics of a mob, for instance: Liberal Groupthink: “The same mob mentality that leads otherwise law-abiding people to hurl rocks at cops also leads otherwise intelligent people to refuse to believe anything they haven’t heard on NPR.” Liberal Schemes: “No matter how mad the plan is—Fraternité, the ‘New Soviet Man,’ the Master Race, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Building a New Society, ObamaCare—a mob will believe it.” Liberal Enemies: “Instead of ‘counterrevolutionaries,’ liberals’ opponents are called ‘haters,’ ‘those who seek to divide us,’ ‘tea baggers,’ and ‘right-wing hate groups.’ Meanwhile, conservatives call liberals ‘liberals’—and that makes them testy.” Liberal Justice: “In the world of the liberal, as in the world of Robespierre, there are no crimes, only criminals.” Liberal Violence: “If Charles Manson’s followers hadn’t killed Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, Clinton would have pardoned him, too, and he’d probably be teaching at Northwestern University.” Citing the father of mob psychology, Gustave Le Bon, Coulter catalogs the Left’s mob behaviors: the creation of messiahs, the fear of scientific innovation, the mythmaking, the preference for images over words, the lack of morals, and the casual embrace of contradictory ideas. Coulter traces the history of the liberal mob to the French Revolution and Robespierre’s revolutionaries (delineating a clear distinction from America’s founding fathers), who simply proclaimed that they were exercising the “general will” before slaughtering their fellow citizens “for the good of mankind.” Similarly, as Coulter demonstrates, liberal mobs, from student radicals to white-trash racists to anti-war and pro-ObamaCare fanatics today, have consistently used violence to implement their idea of the “general will.” This is not the American tradition; it is the tradition of Stalin, of Hitler, of the guillotine—and the tradition of the American Left. As the heirs of the French Revolution, Democrats have a history that consists of pandering to mobs, time and again, while Republicans, heirs to the American Revolution, have regularly stood for peaceable order. Hoping to muddy this horrifying truth, liberals slanderously accuse conservatives of their own crimes—assassination plots, conspiracy theorizing, political violence, embrace of the Ku Klux Klan. Coulter shows that the truth is the opposite: Political violence—mob violence—is always a Democratic affair. Surveying two centuries of mob movements, Coulter demonstrates that the mob is always destructive. And yet, she argues, beginning with the civil rights movement in the sixties, Americans have lost their natural, inherited aversion to mobs. Indeed, most Americans have no idea what they are even dealing with. Only by recognizing the mobs and their demonic nature can America begin to defend itself.


Bibliophile: Diverse Spines

Bibliophile: Diverse Spines

Author: Jane Mount

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 1797214721

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It's time to diversify your reading list. This richly illustrated and vastly inclusive collection uplifts the works of authors who are often underrepresented in the literary world. Using their keen knowledge and deep love for all things literary, coauthors Jamise Harper (founder of the Diverse Spines book community) and Jane Mount (author of Bibliophile) collaborated to create an essential volume filled with treasures for every reader: • Dozens of themed illustrated book stacks—like Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Mysteries, Cookbooks, and more—all with an emphasis on authors of color and own voices • A look inside beloved bookstores owned by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color • Reading recommendations from leading BIPOC literary influencers Diversify your reading list to expand your world and shift your perspective. Kickstart your next literary adventure now! EASY TO GIFT: This portable guide is packed with more than 150 colorful illustrations is a perfect gift for any booklover. The textured paper cover, gold foil, and ribbon marker make this book a special gift or self-purchase. DISCOVER UNSUNG LITERARY HEROES: The authors dive deep into a wide variety of genres, such as Contemporary Fiction, Classics, Young Adult, Sci-Fi, and more to bring the works of authors of color to the fore. ENDLESS READING INSPIRATION: Themed book stacks and reading suggestions from luminaries of the literary world provide curated book recommendations. Your to-read list will thank you. Perfect for: bookish people; literary lovers; book club members; Mother's Day shoppers; stocking stuffers; followers of #DiverseSpines; Jane Mount and Ideal Bookshelf fans; Reese's Book Club and Oprah's Book Club followers; people who use Goodreads.com; readers wanting to expand/decolonize their book collections; people interested in uplifting BIPOC voices; antiracist activists and educators; grads and students; librarians and library patrons wanting to expand/decolonize their book collections; people interested in uplifting BIPOC voices; antiracist activists and educators; grads and students; librarians and library patrons