![]() ![]() They must overcome their foibles or the follies of their counterparts to gain entry to elsewhere, to these alternate identities. ![]() The characters in Moshfegh’s fictions are searching for other sites of being: other worlds, other towns, other selves. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.” ![]() “I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. With a hunger for detachment and direction, the complicated unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel begins a deep sleep regimen. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Franzak's personal narrative captures the day-by-day details of his deployment, from family good-byes on departure day to the squadron's return home. I prayed when I heard the muted cries of men who at last understood their fate. ![]() I was safe and comfortable in my sheltered cocoon 20,000 feet over the Hindu Kush. ![]() And in what appeared to be a forgotten war half a world away from home, Franzak and his colleagues struggled to stay motivated and do their job providing air cover to soldiers patrolling the inhospitable terrain. But what should have been a standard six-month deployment soon turned to a yearlong ordeal as the Iraq conflict intensified. ![]() The squadron was the first to base Harriers in Bagram in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Michael "Zak" Franzak was an AV-8B Marine Corps Harrier pilot who served as executive officer of VMA-513, "The Flying Nightmares," while deployed in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003. Winner of the 2012 Colby Award and the first Afghanistan memoir ever to be written by a Marine Harrier pilot, A Nightmare's Prayer portrays the realities of war in the twenty-first century, taking a unique and powerful perspective on combat in Afghanistan as told by a former enlisted man turned officer. ![]() ![]() Over the course of the episode, we discuss the extent to which Kavan's heroin addiction influenced the novel, consider the novels place in the tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction, and explore the unique brutality of the novel's narrator. The novel proceeds with the torturous, cyclical quality of an inescapable nightmare in which the reader is cocooned. Kavan herself was a complex individual with a personal life. ![]() In some ways a post-nuclear dystopian tale, in others a brutal critique of patriarchal power this slim volume of surrealism left me pondering over what I had just read for days. Our unnamed narrator roams through this barren, frozen wasteland in pursuit of a young girl with a halo of hair as bright as spun glass his designs on her are decidedly sinister. ‘Ice’ (1967) by Anna Kavan is a fever dream of a novel that seems to defy genre and categorisation. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, society is rapidly crumbling as a wall of ice threatens to engulf the entire planet. The book is Kavan’s final and best known work, and appeared just one year before her death. ![]() ![]() Anna Kavan’s Ice was originally published in 1967 by Peter Owen books. ![]() ![]() ![]() From West Country torrents to Levels and Fens, rocky Welsh canyons, the salmon highways of Scotland and the chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, Amy-Jane follows springs, streams and rivers to explore tributary themes of wildness and wonder, loss and healing, mythology and history, cyclicity and transformation. The Flow is a book about water, and, like water, it meanders, cascades and percolates through many lives, landscapes and stories. ![]() ![]() Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration. ![]() Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored. On New Year's Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer's beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. 'A book of wit, wonder and of wisdom.' NICK ACHESONĪ visit to the rapid where she lost a cherished friend unexpectedly reignites Amy-Jane Beer's love of rivers setting her on a journey of natural, cultural and emotional discovery. 'An extraordinary book by an extraordinary author.' CHRIS JONES 'Lyrical, wholehearted and wise.' LEE SCHOFIELD 'A true masterpiece.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Check out these wonderful organizations to learn and lend your support: What the fuck do you care about? Ending domestic violence. ![]() Anne with an E fully explores the dark side of Anne, but the tone of the book is hopeful (I hope.) She is a loving character and an optimist, but she definitely had a dark side. PJ sings, “One day there’ll be a place for us.” This is something that Anne (an orphan and an eccentric) would say. If Anne with an E was a song, a person, or a place, what/who would it be? And why? “A Place Called Home” by PJ Harvey. I love the idea of further exploring well-known characters from a different perspective. The poems undoubtedly embody Anne, but a side of Anne that we have never seen before. I borrowed Anne’s essence as well as her experiences from the books and twisted them into 22 corrupt and wicked poems. Why the fuck should we care? Anne with an E is a group of persona poems based on the character of Anne from the 19 th century Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. I have nothing to declare but my genius and … my forthcoming chapbook Anne with an E (dancing girl press). Who the fuck are you? I’m April, a weirdo poet and the obsessive (errr…I mean dedicated) editor of Up the Staircase Quarterly. One day soon-ish we shall be buying her beer. ![]() April Michelle Bratten’s ‘I Was Born Next to a Trolley Car’ appears in the newly published Slim Volume 3: This Body I Live In, and she is very much our sort of people. ![]() ![]() ![]() Alcott subsequently wrote two sequels to her popular work, both also featuring the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). The two volumes were issued in 1880 as a single novel titled Little Women. Alcott quickly completed a second volume (titled Good Wives in the United Kingdom, though the name originated with the publisher and not Alcott). Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success, with readers eager for more about the characters. ![]() ![]() Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, : 202 it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters-Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy-and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott, originally published in two volumes in 18 at the request of her publisher. ![]() ![]() ![]() Was she a divinely inspired saint? A schizophrenic? A demonically possessed heretic, as her persecutors and captors tried to prove?Įvery era must retell and reimagine the Maid of Orleans's extraordinary story in its own way, and in Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, the superb novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time-a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. The profoundly inspiring and fully documented saga of Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose "voices" moved her to rally the French nation and a reluctant king against British invaders in 1428, has fascinated artistic figures as diverse as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Dreyer, and Robert Bresson. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() All depict the more sanguine, serious Christina, and she figures as the model for the young Virgin Mary in two of his defining Pre-Raphaelite paintings, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9, Tate Britain) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation) (1849, Tate Britain). The sketch is by brother Dante Gabriel, who also made several other drawings and paintings of her. The caricature’s appeal lies in the incongruity between Christina Rossetti the reclusive, modest, devout Anglo-Catholic who sought (in the title of one of her poems) the ‘lowest place’, and the Christina Rossetti portrayed who is energetically taking a hammer to the furniture. My favourite Pre-Raphaelite drawing shows Christina Rossetti smashing up the drawing room in apparent rage at reviews of her first published volume, Goblin Market, and Other Poems (1862, Wightwick Manor). ![]() ![]() it is interdisciplinary - it pools many fields together."Įducation College Common Reads: Learning From 'Wes Moore' So instead of forcing all freshmen to read a book in one field. And on the other hand, it attempts to answer these questions of history by drawing on linguistics and genetics and animal behavior. On the one hand, it's about questions of history, drawing upon anthropology and archaeology. "College faculty like to assign the book to freshmen because it is interdisciplinary. On why the book has had such broad appeal ![]() ![]() For example, why have walnut trees been domesticated, while oak trees have never been domesticated, despite acorns being edible? And why have European sheep been domesticated, but bighorn sheep never domesticated? Those are some of the cocktail party facts that turn out to be basic to understanding why history went the way it did." And they're full of surprising facts that will make you the life of cocktail parties. "Students have no difficultly understanding it, because the answers are understandable and surprising. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Guns, Germs, and Steel Subtitle The Fates of Human Societies Author Jared Diamond ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Successive Peanuts TV specials remained in that pop realm for the next dozen years.Īt the same time, though - shortly after Guaraldi's death - when Charlie Brown and his friends accepted a few outside "moonlighting" assignments, Mendelson instead returned to his Main Man. That likely was a shrewd decision rather than have somebody else try to imitate Guaraldi's distinctive Peanuts sound - which clearly would have been impossible, and perhaps even unwise - Mendelson went in an entirely different direction. Perhaps after considerable soul-searching, Mendelson shifted from jazz to a more pop-oriented sound, teaming former psychedelic rocker Ed Bogas with singer/songwriter Judy Munson. Guaraldi's untimely passing in February 1976 left Lee Mendelson in an obvious bind, when it came time to score the next Peanuts TV special, It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown. Guaraldi scored 15 Peanuts TV specials (from A Charlie Brown Christmas through It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown), one big-screen film ( A Boy Named Charlie Brown) and two half-hour TV documentaries (the unsold A Boy Named Charlie Brown and Charlie Brown and Charles Schulz).įew people realize, however, that Guaraldi also had a hand in three more animated Peanuts projects. It's a frequent trivia question, and one that many otherwise reputable reference books get wrong: ![]() |