Two Lives and a Dream PDF Download

Author: Marguerite Yourcenar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226965291
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Set in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, "An Obscure Man" is the story of Nathanaël—innocent, open to experience—born like Everyman upon the stream of life. In "A Lovely Morning," Nathanaël's young son joins a touring company of Jacobean actors. "Anna, soror . . . ," the final tale, is an account of illicit passion in the baroque world of Naples. "An Obscure Man swarms with life. This intricately researched, imaginative, beautifully written tale of a young man's brief life in the mid-17th century is entirely engrossing."—Leona Weiss, San Francisco Chronicle "In these three stories, [Yourcenar] succeeds in making the essences of these past lives a part of the reader's future through the sheer intensity of their portrayal."—Margaret Ezell, Houston Chronicle

Author: Josie Silver
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0593498275
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Two lives. Two loves. One impossible choice. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club Pick One Day in December . . . “I read The Two Lives of Lydia Bird in a single sitting. What a beautiful, emotional gift Josie Silver has given us.”—Jodi Picoult Written with Josie Silver’s trademark warmth and wit, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird is a powerful and thrilling love story about the what-ifs that arise at life’s crossroads, and what happens when one woman is given a miraculous chance to answer them. Lydia and Freddie. Freddie and Lydia. They’d been together for more than a decade and Lydia thought their love was indestructible. But she was wrong. On Lydia’s twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie died in a car accident. So now it’s just Lydia, and all she wants is to hide indoors and sob until her eyes fall out. But Lydia knows that Freddie would want her to try to live fully, happily, even without him. So, enlisting the help of his best friend, Jonah, and her sister, Elle, she takes her first tentative steps into the world, open to life—and perhaps even love—again. But then something inexplicable happens that gives her another chance at her old life with Freddie. A life where none of the tragic events of the past few months have happened. Lydia is pulled again and again through the doorway to her past, living two lives, impossibly, at once. But there’s an emotional toll to returning to a world where Freddie, alive, still owns her heart. Because there’s someone in her new life, her real life, who wants her to stay.

Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300137710
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master "whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness" and "thin, plain, tense, sour" Alice B. Toklas, the "worker bee" who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate "marriage." As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. "The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties," she writes. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. "Even the most hermetic of [Stein's] writings are works of submerged autobiography," Malcolm writes. "The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning-you need a crowbar for that-but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion." Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein "solves the koan of autobiography," or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of "magisterial disorder," Malcolm is stunningly perceptive. Praise for the author: "[Janet Malcolm] is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."-David Lehman, Boston Globe "Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography."-Christopher Benfey

Author: Brian James
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
ISBN: 1429942223
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Sabrina, an artist, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and her parents check her into the Wellness Center. There she meets Alec, who is convinced it's the world that's crazy, not the two of them. They are meant to be together; they are special. But when Alec starts to convince Sabrina that her treatment will wipe out everything that makes her creative, she worries that she'll lose hold of her dreams and herself. Should she listen to her doctor? her decision may have fatal consequences. Brian James calls Life is But a Dream "the most intense book I've written. Bringing this unique character to life and seeing the world through her eyes, with all its beauty and confusion, was an immense challenge that I hope is just as rewarding to read as it was to write." Intense--yes. Unforgettable--definitely.

Author: Michael Phillips
Publisher: RosettaBooks
ISBN: 1625391587
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
The author of Dream of Freedom returns to the South, where one family risks everything to help runaway slaves, as the drums of Civil War begin to sound. With their beloved plantation, Greenwood, now a vital link in the Underground Railroad, Richmond and Carolyn Davidson must balance the need for safety with their commitment to helping the many runaways who appear at their door. Compounding their danger, the Davidson’s neighbors, the Beaumonts, do not approve of their decision—and view them with suspicion. The danger intensifies when the Davidsons’ older son, Seth, becomes engaged to Veronica, the Beaumonts’ beautiful, scheming daughter—against her parents’ wishes. As the two families are swept up in events leading up to the Civil War, they must choose sides—in a conflict that will change their lives forever.

Author: Abbigail Rosewood
Publisher: Europa Editions UK
ISBN: 1787701719
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
A young woman's search for home and belonging This luminous debut follows a young woman from her childhood in Vietnam to her life in the United States – and her necessary return to her homeland. As a child, isolated from the world in a secretive military encampment with her distant mother, she turns for affection to a sympathetic soldier and to the only other girl in the camp, forming two friendships that will shape the rest of her life. As a young adult in New York, cut off from her native country and haunted by the scars of her youth, she is still in search of a home. She falls in love with a married woman who is the image of her childhood friend, and follows strangers because they remind her of her soldier. When tragedy arises, she must return to Vietnam to confront the memories of her youth – and recover her identity. An inspiring meditation on love, loss, motherhood, and the presence of a past that never dies, If I Had Two Lives explores the ancient question: do we value the people in our lives because of who they are, or because of what we need them to be?

Author: Eric Bentley
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557830067
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
(Applause Books). Translations of four great Spanish dramas: Calderon de la Barca Life Is a Dream ; Miguel de Cervantes Siege of Numantia ; Lope de Vega Fuente Ovejuna ; Tirso de Molina The Trickster of Seville .

Author: Isabelle Dupuy
Publisher: Jacaranda Books
ISBN: 9781913090043
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The further Naomi's husband rises, the more space accumulates in their home - space for doubts, for secrets, and for loftier dreams than she ever considered.

Author: Claire Messud
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781649697295
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
A JEWEL OF A NOVEL BY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER CLAIRE MESSUD. When the Armstrong family moves from New York at the dawn of the 1970s, Australia feels, to Alice Armstrong, like the end of the earth. Residing in a grand manor on the glittering Sydney Harbour, her family finds their life has turned upside down. As she navigates this strange new world, Alice must find a way to weave an existence from its shimmering mirage. Lies and self-deception are at the heart of this keenly observed story. This is a sharp, biting and playful tale with a cast of unscrupulous characters adrift in a dream life of their own making. Written with the characteristic delicacy of touch, humour and emotional insight that make Claire Messud one of our greatest writers. '[Messud is] among our greatest contemporary writers.' -- The New Yorker 'A perfect frolic of a book, puffed on breezes of beauty and wit: it waltzes you through a little fear, a little darkness, and tips you out, refreshed and laughing, into the sun.' -- Helen Garner 'Witty, arch and acutely observed, A Dream Life expertly captures the excruciating insecurities of class in our supposedly classless society.' -- Geraldine Brooks 'A novelist of unnerving talent.' -- The New York Times

Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0679645985
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.