You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Versailles is the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history. As the novel begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé, the mild, abstracted Louis. He will become the sixteenth Louis to reign in France, and Antoinette will be his queen, hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, the larger-than-life figures of Mirabeau, Du Barry, Robespierre, and the manifold twists and turns of the palace she calls home. The novel moves from room to room, from garden to fountain, occasionally breaking into playlets in which we glimpse characters struggling to mind their step in the great ballroom of the world. Driving our tour is the relentless engine of time, that friend to youth, for whom anything is possible. Antoinette gives birth to four children, two of whom will outlive her; she falls in love; she dies at the guillotine. A meditation on time and the soul’s true journey within it, Versailles is at once wittily entertaining and astonishingly wise.
An eerily dreamlike memoir, and the first work of nonfiction by one of our most inventive novelists. Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can “try on personae like dresses.” She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions—Woolf, Durrell, Bergman—sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, “climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling.” Kathryn Davis’s hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves...
Discovering a dead body at a lake near the Canadian border, twelve-year-old Mees Kipp inexplicably brings the man back to life and realizes that she possesses an extraordinary gift that irrevocably shapes the lives of Mees, her two friends, and their community. By the author of Versailles.
The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Neil Gaiman, “Orange” Aimee Bender, “The Color Master” Joyce Carol Oates, “Blue-bearded Lover” Michael Cunningham, “The Wild Swans” These and more than thirty other stories by Francine Prose, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, and many other extraordinary writers make up this thrilling celebration of fairy tales—the ultimate literary costume party. Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and in...
Miss D & Me is a story of two powerful women--one at the end of her life and the other at the beginning--and how they changed each other forever. As Bette Davis aged, she was looking for an assistant, but she found something more than that in Kathryn Sermak: a loyal and loving confidante, a co-conspirator in her jokes and schemes, and a competent worker whom she trained to never miss a detail. For ten years, Kathryn was at Miss D's side--first as an employee and then as her closest friend. Throughout their time together, Kathryn had a front-row seat to Davis's late-career renaissance, as well as to the humiliating public betrayal that nearly killed her beloved boss and benefactor. Miss D & Me is an intimate account of the last years of the unique and formidable Bette Davis--a tale of extreme kindness, unfailing loyalty, breathtaking style, and the beautiful friendship that endured through it all.
Controlling national borders has once again become a key concern of contemporary states and a highly contentious issue in social and political life. But controlling borders is about much more than patrolling territorial boundaries at the edges of states: it now comprises a multitude of practices that take place at different levels, some at the edges of states and some in the local contexts of everyday life – in workplaces, in hospitals, in schools – which, taken together, construct, reproduce and contest borders and the rights and obligations associated with belonging to a nation-state. This book is a systematic exploration of the practices and processes that now define state bordering and the role it plays in national and global governance. Based on original research, it goes well beyond traditional approaches to the study of migration and racism, showing how these processes affect all members of society, not just the marginalized others. The uncertainties arising from these processes mean that more and more people find themselves living in grey zones, excluded from any form of protection and often denied basic human rights.
The bestselling author of "Too Deep for Tears" and "All We Hold Dear" continues her acclaimed Scottish saga. New to the legend is Edna Rose, Ailsa's daughter, who is more at home among the woodland animals than she is among people.
Engaged Language Policy and Practices re-envisions language policy and planning as an engaged approach, drawing on and portraying theoretical and educational equity perspectives. It calls for the right to language policy-making in which all concerned—communities, parents, students, educators, and advocates—collectively imagine new strategies for resisting global neoliberal marginalization of home languages and cultural identities. This book subsequently emphasizes the means by which engaged dialectic processes can inform and clarify language policy-making decisions that promote equity. In other words, rather than descriptions of outcomes, the authors emphasize the need to detail the mean...
Two kids are about to find out that their lives are anything but ordinary when a ghost from the 1918 flu pandemic arrives and stirs up adventure. Perfect for fans of A Tale Dark and Grimm! Ghosts only haunt when they've left something behind... When Henry Davis moves into the neighborhood, Barbara Anne and her classmates at Washington Carver Elementary don't know what to make of him. He's pale, small, odd. For curious Barbara Anne, Henry's also a riddle--a boy who sits alone at recess sketching in a mysterious notebook, a boy, she soon learns, who's being haunted by a ghost named Edgar. With the help of some new friends, this unlikely duo is off on an adventure to discover who Edgar was while alive and why he's haunting Henry now. Together, they might just help Edgar find what he needs to finally be at peace.
"Sometimes things happen that can't be explained. I am one of those things. I'm not exactly human; I'm evolved into something else, but what that is I don't know. My parents were human, but they're long gone now...a trend that everyone in my life seems to have followed. I am nothing like you know. My beginning is not unlike yours, though my end is another story." Haunted by nightmares living deep within her past, Rose Hawthorne is anything but perfect, at least on the inside. Outside, her appearance tells a very different story. She is so beautiful that the mere sight of her face makes normal men mad. She is lethal too, just like all her friends. Five teenagers with superhuman powers should be dangerous, though. They are the only ones standing between the human race and an Infestation of mass proportions. Sometimes, when the world sets you apart, the only way to save it is to come together. This is their story. They are the Gifted.