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In this interesting study, Jenny Edkins explores how we remember traumatic events such as wars, famines, genocides and terrorism, and questions the assumed role of commemorations as simply reinforcing state and nationhood. Taking examples from the World Wars, Vietnam, the Holocaust, Kosovo and September 11th, Edkins offers a thorough discussion of practices of memory such as memorials, museums, remembrance ceremonies, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress and the act of bearing witness. She examines the implications of these commemorations in terms of language, political power, sovereignty and nationalism. She argues that some forms of remembering do not ignore the horror of what happened but rather use memory to promote change and to challenge the political systems that produced the violence of wars and genocides in the first place. This wide-ranging study embraces literature, history, politics and international relations, and makes a significant contribution to the study of memory.
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Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel The Following Story,is one of the most distinguished and significant authors living in the Netherlands today. Self-Portrait of an Other is one of the most unique and innovative works in his oeuvre. Written in response to and published together with a series of drawings by the Berlin-based artist Max Neumann, the book draws on Nooteboom's personal reflections --his arsenal of memories, dreams, fantasies, landscapes, stories and nightmares-- and presents a set of prose poems that complements and echoes Neumann's work. Full of striking scenes and disturbing images, the poems, driven by the logic of dreams, create the self-portrait of the title. Available now for the first time in English, Self-Portrait of an Other brings together both the images and the text inspired by them, creating an unusual and creative poetic collection.
When a family takes a boating trip, the last thing they expect is to be shipwrecked on an island-especially an island with weird, otherworldly plants and animals. Now, what started out as a bad vacation turns into a terrible one as Lyle, Karen, and their two kids, Janie and Reese, must find a way off the island while they dodge its strange and dangerous inhabitants. Is the island alive? Is it from another world? In this rousing, Swiss-Family-Robinson tale with a twist, the answers to these questions could save them... or spell their doom.
[In this novel by the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature], "a benign old monk listens to a prospective novice's tale of depravity, violence and carnivorous excess while a nice little family drama--in which nearly everyone dies--unfurls ... As his dual narratives merge and feather into one another, each informing and illuminating the other, Mo Yan probes the character and lifestyle of modern China."--Publisher's description.
Ocean’s Eleven meets The Secret Life of Pets in this hilarious and delightfully illustrated novel following a ragtag group of pets who will do whatever it takes to avoid being sent to the pound. Butterbean knew she wasn’t always a good dog. Still, she’d never considered herself a BAD dog—until the morning that her owner, Mrs. Food, fell in the hallway. Admittedly the tile was slipperier than usual, mostly because Butterbean had just thrown up on it. Now Butterbean and her fellow pets have to come up with a grand plan to support themselves in case Mrs. Food is unable to keep taking care of them. When they discover a mysterious man in their building who seems to have lots of loot, they plan a heist. Oscar the mynah bird is the brains of the operation. Walt the cat has the necessary slyness and slink. Marco and Polo are the reconnaissance rats. And Butterbean...well, no one would ever suspect a cute little wiener dog, right? Can these animal friends can pull off the heist of the century?
The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile with his wife. Stalin, "the Kremlin mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer," is undoubtedly responsible for his fatal decline. From the depths of his prison cell, lost in a world full of ghosts, Mandelstam sees scenes from his life pass before him: constant hunger, living hand to mouth, relying on the assistance of sympathetic friends, shunned by others, four decades of creation and struggle, alongside his beloved wife Nadezhda, and his contemporaries Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and many others. With her sensitive prose and innate sense of drama, French-Lebanese writer V nus Khoury-Ghata brings Mandelstam back to life and allows him to have the last word--proving that literature is one of the surest means to fight against barbarism.
Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that comprise Krisztina Tóth's book similarly produce an interconnected web. While each tale of love, loss, and failed self-determination narrates the sensuousness of an individual's life, together, the thirty stories tell a more complicated tale of relationships. Circumstances that appear unrelated may converge in harmony or in heartbreak, just as the events that loom largest may fail to produce a longed-for outcome. These threads often determine the course of lives in unpredictable ways--sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but rarely in the ways we originally anticipated.