When Margaretha Zelle, a young woman living in The Hague, answers a lonely hearts advertisement she becomes drawn into a relationship with an army captain twice her age. After a hasty wedding, they depart for Indonesia, where the marriage collapses amid infidelity and violence. Seeking a new life, Margaretha returns to Europe and travels to Paris, where she adopts the stage name Mata Hari, reinventing herself as an exotic dancer. In her new role she attracts the attention of numerous admirers, many of whom are officers, ready to share their secrets with a woman of notorious allure and intrigue, as Europe lurches towards explosive conflict.
The girl in red, the girl in yellow, the girl in blue, and the boy in black and white are all set to stir up the rainbow. Watch them create a living kaleidoscope, step by step by step.
While in a fine state of total inebriation, Gabriel drained his vein onto a sand dune and perceived a most perfect being. A godlike image appeared on a starless night while in country. This powerful force would permit him safe passage through the conflict if he would replace an eyelash lost in a child's dream and return to the "world" or home with the souls of his dead comrades. His five-year-old niece had given him an earring for good luck before he left for the war. He wore the black crescent shape on a silver chain around his neck alongside a Saint Christopher medal. This earring made it possible for him to return home with the souls of his more unfortunate companions. Back from Southeast Asia, he enters a saloon in New York City and chats with the owner. He mentions he had served overseas. This man asks for a quiet moment and summons the patrons to propose a toast. No one takes him seriously as he is in his cups. When the bartender turns up the jukebox, the room resumes its convivial atmosphere of the '60s free love and introspection. Realizing he is not amused, he leaves for an evening with a war buddy and his young family. It's the commencement of his postwar experience with souls in tow. He finds solace with his body wasted. "My body's aching and I can't find my way home," like the song plays out. His years pass with no great interests, and he gets by well enough with a day-to-day existence but has accomplished nothing but keeps himself in blue-collar work and in more barrooms. When he meets up with a wealthy acquaintance from a tiny Midwest college they had attended, he thinks of him as a shimmering deity of sorts. Wings, the handsome poet who drove his hunter green Morgan sports car through Lake Forest's bright autumn afternoons down Sheridan Road scattering bushels of fallen leaves with selfless irony, a smirk and no smile, now conversed regularly with Gabriel who thinks him quite the fellow in the sense that anyone with that amount of wealth should be able to do the greatest things. Wings had married while still in college, and his wife gave birth to a daughter who kept him out of the draft. The child was another man's progeny. Wings too had to survive the war. His conversation of manuscripts, investments, inheritance, love entanglements with no resolution or sense didn't matter to Gabriel. It made him feel wealthy by association. One evening on a walk through Central Park, they and Wings' daughter, Ruth, sat in a clearing to enjoy a bottle of wine. She slips a pill into Gabriel's cup without him batting an eye as they were out to enjoy themselves. Wings leaves abruptly. Ruth follows shortly. As night falls, he finally goes in search of his two friends. He approaches a big man cloaked in an animal skin who is armed with a large broad sword. Gabriel inquires about his friends and is aggressively attacked. In short order, he has this man on his knees crying for help, which he can't see. A woman comes to the fallen man's aid, but he mistakenly strikes her with his weapon. The former marine awakens the next the morning and is arrested for the death of a woman not far from him. He is released on bail and is presented with the opportunity of taking the fall. After a short term in a psychiatric hospital, he would be recompensed with a rather large sum of money. Wings had arranged this to collect monies for himself and his daughter. His wife had gone through his fortune. Gabriel had never dreamed of such machinations. His honor is at stake as that of his fellow war companions. He decides to make a stand and dons an expensive navy blue suit over his service automatic and grabs a dagger. On his way to Wings' coop, he finds himself walking through Central Park. The intense clamoring of his men on his mind causes him to stumble and fall for an instant. He shakes it off but doesn't know who he is. In the waning daylight, he wanders through a sett
A ballerina tale with a thoroughly modern twist! Casey Quinn has got more grace in her pinkie toe than all those prissy ballet-school girls put together, even if you'd never guess it from the looks of her too-long legs and dirty high-top sneakers. It's 1959, and freckle-faced Casey lives in the red-dust countryside of South Carolina. She's a farm girl: Her family can't afford ballet lessons. But Casey's dream is to dance in New York City. And if anyone tries to stand in her way, she's going to pirouette and jete right over them! Casey's got the grit, and Casey's got the grace: Is that enough to make it in Manhattan someday? Or might the Big Apple have something even better in mind? When she meets a visionary choreographer she calls "Miss Martha," Casey's ballerina dream takes a thoroughly, thrillingly modern twist!
Breadth of Bodies seeks to investigate and dismantle the language and stereotypes often used to describe professional dancers with disabilities. Spearheaded by dancer/writer Emmaly Wiederholt and dance educator Silva Laukkanen with illustrations by visual artist Liz Brent-Maldonado, the team collected interviews with 35 professional dance artists with disabilities from 15 countries, asking about training, access, and press, as well as looking at the state of the field.
Dancers After Dark is an amazing celebration of the human body and the human spirit, as dancers, photographed nude and at night, strike poses of fearless beauty. Without a permit or a plan, Jordan Matter led hundreds of the most exciting dancers in the world out of their comfort zones—not to mention their clothes—to explore the most compelling reaches of beauty and the human form. After all the risk and daring, the result is extraordinary: 300 dancers, 400 locations, more than 150 stunning photographs. And no clothes, no arrests, no regrets. Each image highlights the amazing abilities of these artists—and presents a core message to the reader: Say yes rather than no, and embrace the risks and opportunities that life presents.
A poor girl, adopted by a rich old woman after the death of her mother, grows up to be vain and spoilt. She buys a pair of red shoes and wears them everywhere, even when she is asked not to. Because of her disobedience, the shoes become cursed and the girl must dance continuously, unable to remove the red shoes.
Kayla never really thought of her double Ds as "problem breasts." It made them sound like children who wouldn't behave. Kayla Callaway has prima ballerina grace and something else that most ballerinas don't have: a full figure. Her heart is set on a future in dance. Unfortunately, her proportions just got her cast as an ugly stepsister in Florida Arts High School's production of Cinderella. Kayla's disappointment makes her a prime suspect when the dance troupe receives a string of threatening messages.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom. “This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen. Praise for The Water Dancer “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone
The National Book Award–winning author’s biographical novel of Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev: “Exuberant and exhilarating . . . a brilliant leap of imagination” (San Francisco Chronicle). In Dancer, Colum McCann tells the ballet icon’s story through the myriad voices of those who knew him. There is Anna Vasileva, Rudi’s first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the ‘80s, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn, and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
