The Salt Smugglers
The Salt Smugglers

Author: Gerard de Nerval

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2009-07-10

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0981987397

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First published as a feuilleton in a left-wing newspaper in 1850, The Salt Smugglers provides a political satire of the waning days of France’s short-lived Second Republic. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this shaggy-dog story deals less with contraband salt smugglers than with the subversive power of fiction to transgress legal and esthetic boundaries. By writing what he claimed was a purely documentary account of his picaresque adventures in search of an elusive book recording the true history of a certain seventeenth-century swashbuckler, Nerval sought to deride the press censors of the day who forbade the serial publication of novels in newspapers – and in the process he provocatively deconstructed existing distinctions between fact and fiction. Never before translated into English and still unavailable as a separately published volume in French, The Salt Smugglers is a pre-postmodern gem of experimental prose. Richard Sieburth’s vibrant translation and illuminating afterword remind us why Gérard de Nerval’s blend of sly irony and acerbic social criticism proved so inspiring to authors as various as Baudelaire, Proust, and Leiris.

The Salt Smugglers
The Salt Smugglers

Author: Gerard de Nerval

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2009-08-28

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13:

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First published as a sprawling feuilleton in the newspaper Le National in 1850, The Salt Smugglers was political and topical. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this protean, digressive satire deals less with contraband salt and more with questions of subversion, transgression, censorship and marginality. Never-before-translated into English and never published as a free-standing volume, The Salt Smugglers is an unearthed pre-postmodern gem.

Salt Water
Salt Water

Author: Josep Pla

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1939810728

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Peter Bush, winner of the Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers. Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious (and often tasty!) depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. After describing the process of beating an octopus with branches to soften up its flesh, Pla writes, "These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort." Pla inflects the mundane with the hidden rhythms of power sculpting culture, so that a hot supper is never just food--it embodies economic precarity and environmental erosion along with its own peculiar flavor. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

The Smugglers
The Smugglers

Author: Iain Lawrence

Publisher: Yearling

Published: 2000-10-10

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0440415969

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"Steer clear of that ship," warns the mysterious gentleman who shares a coach with John and his father. "Death she'll bring you," says the man. "It's the way of a ship that was christened with blood." This is an ominous introduction to the schooner John is about to be entrusted with for a voyage to London. But he's too charmed by the pretty Dragon to heed the advice. The ship looks clever and quick, and John can hardly wait to sail her. She was a smugglers' vessel once, but now she's his Dragon, and she'll proudly carry wool for honest trade. But soon John will be forced to consider the gentleman's warning. And to wonder what he really knows about his bonny crew.

O Jerusalem
O Jerusalem

Author: Laurie R. King

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2009-04-28

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0553901354

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At the close of the year 1918, forced to flee England's green and pleasant land, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes' enigmatic brother, Mycroft. "Gentlemen, we are at your service." Thus Holmes greets the two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. Whatever role could the volatile Ali and the taciturn Mahmoud play in Mycroft's design for this land the British so recently wrested from the Turks? After passing a series of tests, Holmes and Russell learn their guides are engaged in a mission for His Majesty's Government, and disguise themselves as Bedouins--Russell as the beardless youth "Amir"--to join them in a stealthy reconnaissance through the dusty countryside. A recent rash of murders seems unrelated to the growing tensions between Jew, Moslem, and Christian, yet Holmes is adamant that he must reconstruct the most recent one in the desert gully where it occurred. His singular findings will lead him and Russell through labyrinthine bazaars, verminous inns, cliff-hung monasteries--and into mortal danger. When her mentor's inquiries jeopardize his life, Russell fearlessly wields a pistol and even assays the arts of seduction to save him. Bruised and bloodied, the pair ascend to the jewellike city of Jerusalem, where they will at last meet their adversary, whose lust for savagery and power could reduce the city's most ancient and sacred place to rubble and ignite this tinderbox of a land.... Classically Holmesian yet enchantingly fresh, sinuously plotted, with colorful characters and a dazzling historic ambience, O Jerusalem sweeps readers ever onward in the thrill of the chase.

Power and Protest in the Countryside
Power and Protest in the Countryside

Author: Robert Paul Weller

Publisher: Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13:

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"Constitutes an important and timely addition to the literature on peasant rebellion; wisely, the editors have been eclectic in drawing from some of the leading historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists active in the field an analysis of the forms that rural violence has taken through the past three centuries."--Pacific Affairs

The Mary Russell Series 8-Book Bundle
The Mary Russell Series 8-Book Bundle

Author: Laurie R. King

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2014-03-24

Total Pages: 3327

ISBN-13: 0804180482

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In daring to re-imagine the life of Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic Sherlock Holmes, Laurie R. King’s New York Times bestselling mystery series—now celebrating its twentieth anniversary!—succeeds on the strength of its own now-beloved protagonist: Mary Russell, the young American who literally stumbles upon the great retired detective-turned-beekeeper. With the dazzling mix of suspense, period detail, and enthralling pace that is King’s hallmark, these acclaimed novels follow Russell as she rises out of her mentor’s shadow to form a long-running partnership with the always inscrutable and charismatic Holmes. Traversing such exotic locales as British-occupied Palestine, the Moroccan underworld, and the wilds of India amidst the turmoil of the early twentieth century, this convenient eBook bundle compiles eight of their most thrilling adventures: O JERUSALEM JUSTICE HALL THE GAME LOCKED ROOMS THE LANGUAGE OF BEES THE GOD OF THE HIVE PIRATE KING GARMENT OF SHADOWS Also includes the eBook short story “Beekeeping for Beginners” and an exclusive preview of the next Mary Russell mystery from Laurie R. King, Dreaming Spies! Praise for Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell mysteries “The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.”—Lee Child “The great marvel of King’s series is that she’s managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes’s character and yet somehow conjure up a woman astute, edgy, and compelling enough to be the partner of his mind as well as his heart.”—The Washington Post Book World “A lively adventure in the very best of intellectual company.”—The New York Times “Erudite, fascinating . . . by all odds the most successful re-creation of the famous inhabitant of 221B Baker Street ever attempted.”—Houston Chronicle “An engaging romp guaranteed to please . . . perfectly written in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”—USA Today, on Pirate King “Mesmerizing—another wonderful novel etched by the hand of a master storyteller. No reader who opens this one will be disappointed.”—Michael Connelly, on The God of the Hive “Historical fiction doesn’t get any better than this.”—The Denver Post, on The Game

Zibuyu, “What The Master Would Not Discuss”, according to Yuan Mei (1716 - 1798): A Collection of Supernatural Stories (2 vols)
Zibuyu, “What The Master Would Not Discuss”, according to Yuan Mei (1716 - 1798): A Collection of Supernatural Stories (2 vols)

Author: Paolo Santangelo

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 1312

ISBN-13: 9004216286

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Although the preface says that the tales in this collection of supernatural stories should not be taken seriously and just aim to dispel boredom, Zibuyu is a work with different reading levels, which allows to uncover several deep trends, taboos and fantasies of late imperial intellectual circles. Disgust, surprise and laughter are constantly evoked, by continually attracting and repulsing the reader. Yuan Mei’s approach guides the reader to an adventure in the dangerous recesses of the self. It is a sort of allegoric fantastic reflection on the relative and polyphonic essence of human beings, the multiplicity of selves from psychological perception, and a challenge to the traditional biographical and historical perspective for the unreliability of destiny. Dreams, madness, delusions and other extreme cognitive and affective conditions, abnormal events, gods and spirits, and the dark world of death lead to a reversal of perspective and destroy the Apollonian vision of the social-centered Confucian orthodoxy. With introduction, translation and comments.

The Merchants of Zigong
The Merchants of Zigong

Author: Madeleine Zelin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9780231135962

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From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin's history details the novel ways in which Zigong merchants mobilized capital through financial-industrial networks and spurred growth by developing new technologies, capturing markets, and building integrated business organizations. She provides new insight into the forces and institutions that shaped Chinese economic and social development (independent of Western or Japanese influence) and challenges long-held beliefs that social structure, state extraction, the absence of modern banking, and cultural bias against business precluded industrial development in China.