Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Edge of the Alphabet PDF full book. Access full book title The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: CS Richardson Publisher: Anchor Canada ISBN: 0307371948 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 162
Book Description
Ambrose Zephyr and his wife Zappora Ashkenazi (“Zipper”) have achieved a happy and balanced life together. The two live contentedly in a narrow London terrace full of books. That contentment is thrown into turmoil on Ambrose’s fiftieth birthday, when they receive the news that he has contracted a mysterious illness that will most certainly lead to his death within the month. In panicked delirium, from beneath their bed Ambrose withdraws an oxblood suitcase containing the ephemera of his long-suppressed life’s ambition: to travel the world in a pilgrimage through the alphabet, from Amsterdam to Zanzibar. Scuttling the responsibilities of their respectably successful careers, the two set off on an urgent voyage through real and imagined geographies of place, of history, of art, and of love. In Amsterdam, they revisit past debates on beauty and art. In Berlin, they weigh the burdens of history. In the glow of the Chartres windows, they explore the stations of life. In Deauville, they fondly recall their youthful love. At “E,” Ambrose adjusts his long-drafted itinerary, crossing out Elba and replacing it with the Eiffel Tower of Zipper’s beloved Paris, the city of their first predestined encounter. While resting in Florence beside the youthfully vital David, they meet a chivalrous old man who shares his insight into enduring romance. It is in Giza that Ambrose begins to falter as he climbs a pyramid, and they miss Haifa thanks to a sandstorm. In Istanbul, they realize that Ambrose can go no further and they must return to their London terrace. But their voyage is not over. The two continue their odyssey, no longer via plane and rail, but now through the power of shared desire and love. In the tradition of romantic legend and fable, The End of the Alphabet is a lovingly rendered, richly nuanced treatise on the nature of true and enduring love. The story of Ambrose and Zappora is a precious gift, one that illuminates a pathway to the return of balance and joy after unthinkable loss.
Author: Madhulika Sikka Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0385348517 Category : Health & Fitness Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
A definitive and approachable guide to life during, and after, breast cancer The biggest risk factor for breast cancer is simply being a woman. Madhulika Sikka's A Breast Cancer Alphabet offers a new way to live with and plan past the hardest diagnosis that most women will ever receive: a personal, practical, and deeply informative look at the road from diagnosis to treatment and beyond. What Madhulika Sikka didn't foresee when initially diagnosed, and what this book brings to life so vividly, are the unexpected and minute challenges that make navigating the world of breast cancer all the trickier. A Breast Cancer Alphabet is an inspired reaction to what started as a personal predicament. This A-Z guide to living with breast cancer goes where so many fear to tread: sex (S is for Sex - really?), sentimentality (J is for Journey - it's a cliché we need to dispense with), hair (H is for Hair - yes, you can make a federal case of it) and work (Q is for Quitting - there'll be days when you feel like it). She draws an easy-to-follow, and quite memorable, map of her travels from breast cancer neophyte to seasoned veteran. As a prominent news executive, Madhulika had access to the most cutting edge data on the disease's reach and impact. At the same time, she craved the community of frank talk and personal insight that we rely on in life's toughest moments. This wonderfully inventive book navigates the world of science and story, bringing readers into Madhulika's mind and experience in a way that demystifies breast cancer and offers new hope for those living with it.
Author: Katrina Vandenberg Publisher: Milkweed Editions ISBN: 1571318631 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 96
Book Description
In her accomplished second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg writes from the intersection of power and forgiveness. With poems named for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, Vandenberg deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in this extraordinary becoming of self through language. Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, Alphabet Not Unlike the World unearths meaning—with astonishing beauty—from the pain of loss and separation. “A deeply confident, compelling voice, with strong music, originality, and flow. I wanted to go wherever it went. Passionate with a keen sense of surprise, these poems are funny, serious, and wise all at once. Bravo.” —Naomi Shihab Nye
Author: Marc Delrez Publisher: Rodopi ISBN: 9789042015081 Category : Literature and society Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
This study of Janet Frame's fiction addresses with unusual directness the Utopian momentum that underpins her concern with fundamental social issues, traditionally highlighted in existing criticism of her work. The idea behind this book is that Frame's critique of society, while it is offered for its own sake on one level, should not lead us to neglect the author's more speculative interest in an alternative conception of the human person. Her engagement in a species of experimental portraiture proves elusive, though, owing to an indirectness of approach that usually takes the form of thematic circumscription, rather than explicit representation. For example, the figure of the mute child, recurrent in her work, may well testify to a concern with the plight of the mentally ill; but on another level it also points to an envelope of intractable experience which it is the artist's task to penetrate and explain. Such aspiration is inseparable from the search for a new medium of expression, felt to be necessary if one is to meet the challenge of apprehending the scope of pioneering knowledge. This close reading of the novels reveals that the alternative dimension of experience to be found in Frame's novels is characterized by an intact capacity for remembering, or for imaginatively re-creating, eclipsed aspects of the present. Frame's view of Utopia thus turns out to be manifold: it is existential and ontological, linguistic and epistemological, but also historical and political. An unravelling of these intertwined strains then serves to clarify the complex question of Frame's post-colonial sensibility, which cannot be said to rely on a sense of rigid identity, whether national or otherwise.
Author: Ben Marcus Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307957519 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a novel about how far we will go in order to protect our loved ones. The sound of children's speech has become lethal. In the park, adults wither beneath the powerful screams of their offspring. For young parents Sam and Claire, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther. But they find it isn't so easy to leave someone you love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a foreign world to try to save his family.
Author: Claudia Rankine Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic ISBN: 0802198538 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 113
Book Description
A “harrowing and hallucinogenic” collection of poems from author of the New York Times–bestselling National Book Award-finalist Citizen: An American Lyric (Library Journal). Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem about rising racial tensions in America, Citizen: An American Lyric, won numerous prizes, including the The National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Her new collection of poems—intrepid, obsessive, and erotic—tell the story of a woman’s attempt to reconcile herself to her own despair. Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, what remains long after is her singular voice—its beguiling cadence and vivid physicality. There is an unprotected quality to this writing, as if each word has been pushed out along the precipice, daring us to go with it. Rankine’s power lies in the intoxicating pull of that dare. From one of contemporary poetry’s most powerful and provocative authors, The End of the Alphabet is a work where “wits at once keen and tenacious match themselves against grief’s genius” (Boston Review).
Author: Susan Fletcher Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 0689851529 Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
Mitra and her brother Babak are exiled royals living on the streets as orphaned beggars. Babak possesses a strange gift of being able to know someone's dreams, and they soon find themselves on the road to Bethlehem. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
Author: Janet Frame Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 9781869417383 Category : Mentally ill Languages : en Pages : 503
Book Description
In Faces in the Water (first published in 1961), Janet Frame responded to her doctor's suggestion that 'as I was obviously suffering from the effects of my long stay in hospital in New Zealand, I should write my story of that time to give me a clearer view of my future'. The 'documentary' evolved into an intensely imagined fictionalised account in which Istina Mavet moves in and out of mental hospitals, facing the terrors of electric-shock treatment and the threat of a leucotomy. This riveting novel became an international classic translated into nine languages and has also been used as a medical school text. Doris Lessing was moved to write, 'what an extraordinary woman she is, overcoming such obstacles, and making fresh and good use of them in her work'. The Edge of the Alphabet is a sequel to Owls Do Cry. Within it, Thora Pattern creates her own fiction about epileptic Toby Withers as he leaves behind the judgements of home. On board a liner for London, he encounters Zoe Bryce and Irishman Pat Keenan. Both Thora (the writer) and Zoe (the lone traveller) echo aspects of Frame herself, though because of a misconstrued identification of the Toby character as her real-life brother, she refused to allow any further reprints. As a result this is the first reissue of that novel since first publication in 1962, when Patrick White was 'knocked sideways' by it and said that Frame 'strikes me as really doing something that nobody else has done'. Both novels, like her first (Owls Do Cry), draw on the experiences of her early life, but also explore the world of the mind - isolated and inarticulate - and very different ways of leaving the protection and confines of home.
Author: Janet Frame
Author: Janet Frame
Author: CS Richardson
Author: JANET. FRAME
Author: Madhulika Sikka
Author: Katrina Vandenberg
Author: Marc Delrez
Author: Ben Marcus
Author: Claudia Rankine
Author: Susan Fletcher
Author: Janet Frame