Author: Leo Mellor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501534
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Yet throughout the years prior to the Second World War, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. They appeared as content, with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper; and also as form, in the shapes of broken poetics. But from the outbreak of the Second World War what had been an aesthetic mode began to resemble a proleptic template. During that conflict many modernist writers – such as Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, David Jones, J. F. Hendry, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot and Rose Macaulay – engaged with devastated cityscapes and the altered lives of a nation at war. To understand the potency of the bombsites, both in the Second World War and after, Reading the Ruins brings together poetry, novels and short stories, as well as film and visual art.

Author: Scott Smith
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307266044
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 427

View

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Trapped in the Mexican jungle, a group of friends stumble upon a creeping horror unlike anything they could ever imagine in "the best horror novel of the new century" (Stephen King). Also a major motion picture! Two young couples are on a lazy Mexican vacation—sun-drenched days, drunken nights, making friends with fellow tourists. When the brother of one of those friends disappears, they decide to venture into the jungle to look for him. What started out as a fun day-trip slowly spirals into a nightmare when they find an ancient ruins site ... and the terrifying presence that lurks there. "The Ruins does for Mexican vacations what Jaws did for New England beaches.” —Entertainment Weekly “Smith’s nail-biting tension is a pleasure all its own.... This stuff isn’t for the faint of heart.” —New York Post “A story so scary you may never want to go on vacation, or dig around in your garden, again.” —USA Today

Author: Angela Thirkell
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 0349018642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 460

View

Book Description
'You read her, laughing, and want to do your best to protect her characters from any reality but their own' New York Times It's the summer of 1947, and peacetime has brought new challenges to Barsetshire. Beliers Priory, once a military hospital during the War, has now become a flourishing preparatory school for boys run by Leslie and Philip Winter. When Charles Belton is hired as the new school master, six young people are thrown together in a web of flirtations and misunderstandings: Charles and his elder brother, Naval Captain Freddy Belton; Susan Dean, now Red Cross Depot Librarian, and her glamorous sister Jessica, an actress in thrall to the theatre; pragmatic Lucy Marling and her brother Oliver. And with the old social order in ruins, the scene is set for a delicious summer of comic - and romantic - possibilities. Love Among the Ruins is a delightful, clever and wryly poignant classic, and the 17th novel in Angela Thirkell's beloved Barsetshire series.

Author: Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735211167
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 528

View

Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE A sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions -- the much anticipated masterpiece from Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The Shape of the Ruins is a masterly story of conspiracy, political obsession, and literary investigation. When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings. This novel explores the darkest moments of a country's past and brings to life the ways in which past violence shapes our present lives. A compulsive read, beautiful and profound, eerily relevant to our times and deeply personal, The Shape of the Ruins is a tour-de-force story by a master at uncovering the incisive wounds of our memories.

Author: Victoria Gosling
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250759145
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
Named a Best New Book of 2021 (so far) by Real Simple Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Lit Hub and Bustle A gripping, multilayered debut in the tradition of Tana French and Donna Tartt about four friends, an empty manor, and a night that will follow them for the rest of their lives It's the summer of 1996 and school's out forever for Andy, her boyfriend Marcus, her best friend Peter, and Em. When Andy's alcoholic mother predicts the apocalypse, the four teenagers decide to see out the end of the world at a deserted manor house, the site of a historic unsolved mystery. There they meet David—charming and unreliable, he seems to have appeared out of nowhere. David presents an irresistible lure for both Andy and Peter and complicates the dynamics of their lifelong friendship. When the group learns that a diamond necklace, stolen fifty years ago, might still be somewhere on the manor grounds, the Game—half treasure hunt, half friendly deception—begins. But the Game becomes much bigger than the necklace, growing to encompass years of secrets, lies, and, ultimately, one terrible betrayal. Meticulously plotted and gorgeously written, Before the Ruins is a page-turner of the highest order about the sealed-off places in our pasts and the parts of ourselves waiting to be retrieved from them.

Author: Martin Devecka
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421438429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

View

Book Description
Drawing on literature, legal texts, epigraphic evidence, and the narratives embodied in monuments and painting, Broken Cities is an expansive and nuanced study that holds great significance for the field of historiography.

Author: Todd Robert Petersen
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640093230
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

View

Book Description
Named Best Mystery Thriller in the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards "Part mystery; part quirky, darkly funny, mayhem-filled thriller; and part meditation on what it means to 'own' land, artifacts, and the narrative of history in the West . . . A fast-paced, highly entertaining hybrid of Tony Hillerman and Edward Abbey." --Kirkus Reviews Anthropologist Sophia Shepard is researching the impact of tourism on cultural sites in a remote national monument on the Utah-Arizona border when she crosses paths with two small-time criminals. The Ashdown brothers were hired to steal maps from a "collector" of Native American artifacts, but their ineptitude has alerted the local sheriff to their presence. Their employer, a former lobbyist seeking lucrative monument land that may soon be open to energy exploration, sends a fixer to clean up their mess. Suddenly, Sophia must put her theories to the test in the real world, and the stakes are higher than she could have ever imagined. What begins as a madcap caper across the RV-strewn vacation lands of southern Utah becomes a meditation on mythology, authenticity, the ethics of preservation, and one nagging question: Who owns the past?

Author: Michael Dante DiMartino
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
ISBN: 1506708897
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 80

View

Book Description
Kuvira's true nature is revealed, and the Earth Kingdom will feel the consequences! Thanks to Commander Guan and Doctor Sheng's brainwashing technology, all hope for a fair election in the Earth Kingdom is lost. Korra works with Toph, Su, and Kuvira to plan a means to rescue not just the brainwashed Mako, Bolin, and Asami, but everyone else caught up in Guan's plan! With the Earth Empire potentially on the rise again, Kuvira pulls another trick from her sleeve . . . but whose side is she truly on? Written by series co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino and illustrated by Michelle Wong (Goosebumps: Download and Die), with consultation by Bryan Konietzko and Tim Hedrick, this is the ultimate continuation of the beloved television series!

Author: Peter Kuper
Publisher: SelfMadeHero
ISBN: 9781914224188
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
A story of love, adventure, and politics--and two lives changed forever by Mexico and the monarch butterfly Samantha and George are about to launch into a sabbatical year in the quaint Mexican town of Oaxaca. For Samantha, their journey to this historic town is about fulfilling a lifelong dream; for George, it is an unsettling step into the unknown. As the couple embark on their adventure, a monarch butterfly begins its arduous migration south from the United States to Mexico . . . It is a challenging journey--a flight that requires remarkable endurance and a will to survive. Beneath Oaxaca's picturesque and serene veneer--the 16th-century architecture, the nearby ruins--it is a town shaken to the core by political unrest. As the monarch butterfly makes its challenging journey south, political events threaten to change the town forever. What's more, personal events look like they will alter the paths of Samantha and George for good. Ruins masterfully captures the shadows and light of a troubled country steeped in history and culture, weaving together personal, political and natural dramas into a thrilling portrait of life south of the Rio Grande.

Author: David B.
Publisher: Europe Comics
ISBN:
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 87

View

Book Description
Is every man killed in combat reborn in the sky in the form of a star? Is seeing a bus in your dreams really a sign of impending death? In 1917, Jan Van Meer, an operative with the Allies' intelligence services and a renowned expert on folklore, travels across Europe in search of an engineer named Hellequin, inventor of the dream cannon and barbed plant-wire now obsessed with reading the ruins of war. Van Meer's mission: not to find Hellequin at all costs. With his trademark wit, original drawing style, and wild animation, David B. takes viewers deep into the torment of the Great War, where beliefs and superstitions inextricably mix with the horror of reality.