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  Balkan Bombshells - Contemporary...

  Will Firth

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  A collection to whet the appetite of anyone wishing to learn more about a region rich in history, folklore and (her)stories. Telling it like a woman does not mean literature for women only: it provides an insight into half of humanity, a window onto the lives of citizens who work, love and develop their inner lives. This collection brings together the voices of a wide selection of prize-winning and established authors:
  Balkan Bombshells brings together established Serbian and Montenegrin writers like Svetlana Slapšak, Jelena Lengold (winner of the EU Prize for Literature 2013), Dana Todorović and Olja Kneżević (author of Catherine the Great and the Small, Istros 2020), together with a select group of up-coming writers: Marijana Čanak (1982, Serbia): "Awakened" (Probuđena) follows the early years of a girl from a very simple background, who discovers she has extrasensory powers. A gruesome fascination with biology allows her to attend high school, where she ends up sewing a voodoo doll to take revenge on a molesting teacher. Marijana Dolić (1990, Bosnia-Herzegovina & Serbia): "Notes from the attic" (Zapisi iz potkrovlja), originally diary entries, are intense mediatations on faith, love and hope – poignant testimony to a struggle to cope in difficult times. Ana Miloš (1992, Serbia): "Peace" (Mir) portrays a woman struggling with disparate feelings after her only child dies. She has long since broken up with the child's father. She enjoys finally having time for herself, but she has to confront accusations of people around her that she is heartless. Once a mother, always a mother? Katarina Mitrović (1991, Serbia):"Small death" (Mala smrt). We are introduced to a fearful young woman who is far from happy with life, and we follow her on a summer holiday by the Adriatic, where a halfhearted romantic adventure takes a scary turn. Andrea Popov Miletić (1985, Serbia):|: excerpt from the novel Young pioneers, we are seaweed (Pioniri maleni, mi smo morska trava; 2019). This stand-alone excerpt is a poetic flashback to her childhood in the province of Vojvodina in the Yugoslav era, to holidays by the Mediterranean, and to feelings of belonging and home. Lena Ruth Stefanović (1970, Sebria/ Montenegro): "Zhenya" is a fragment from her 2016 novel Daughter of the Childless Man (Šćer onoga bez đece), is an entertaining meta-story about an ordinary woman in the late Soviet Union, whom the author decides to grant a new lease of life, so Zhenya studies languages, becomes a mondain writer and moves with her new husband to Montenegro, where the author loses track of her.

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  Désirée's Baby - From their pens...

  Kate Chopin

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  Katherine O'Flaherty was born on the 8th February 1850 in St Louis, Missouri to parents of French and Irish descent. 
  At age 5, she was sent to the Sacred Heart Academy and, apart from a 2 year period at home when her father died, remained there until graduating in 1868.  Whilst there she began writing and became an avid reader of almost anything that crossed her path.   
  Kate married Oscar Chopin in 1870 and the couple moved to New Orleans, and later to the rural setting of Cloutierville, Louisiana to raise their 6 children.  
  In 1882 her husband died leaving her in a deep trench of debt.  Despite her best efforts to turn the businesses around they were sold, and she moved the family back to St Louis and the financial help of her mother.  Sadly, her mother died within the year.  Kate, now struggling with depression, pushed herself to write and gained a local reputation as a writer of short stories that captured the local color and vibrancy of her surroundings.  
  By the early 1890’s her short stories were published nationally.  With this widespread audience also came negative reviews, controversy, and cries of immorality as themes such as interracial relationships, the rights of women and other burning issues of the day were written about. 
  Despite the criticism, which unnerved her, she continued to write though in the main her works, around 100 short stories and two novels, were not attributed with any literary worth. 
  Kate Chopin died from a brain haemorrhage in St Louis Missouri on the 22nd of August 1904.  She was 54. 
  For much of the 20th Century her work was forgotten and out of print.  It was only in early 1970’s, with the rise of feminism and the call for a more just society that she was given the status her works had long described and shone a literary light at.  She is now safely revered as one of America’s great authors.

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  An Eye to the Hills

  Cameron McNeish

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  For over four decades, Cameron McNeish has chronicled Scotland's majestic landscapes and the outdoor communities who inhabit them. While much has changed, especially in terms of conservation and access, the hills themselves remain little altered, as do the reasons people visit them. In this collection of essays and diary entries, Cameron shines the light of experience on memory, and renews his vision, keen to share his insights with the many people who love Scotland's outdoors.

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  What Makes You Come Alive - A...

  Lerita Coleman Brown

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  Known as the godfather of the civil rights movement, Howard Thurman served as a spiritual adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders and activists in the 1960s. Thurman championed silence, contemplation, common unity, and nonviolence as powerful dimensions of social change. But Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown didn't learn about him during her years of spiritual-direction training. Only when a friend heard of her longing to encounter the work of Black contemplatives did she finally learn about Thurman, his mystical spirituality, and his liberating ethic. 
   
   
   
  In What Makes You Come Alive, Brown beckons listeners into their own apprenticeship with Thurman. Brown walks with us through Thurman's inimitable life and commitments as he summons us into centering down, encountering the natural world, paying attention to sacred synchronicity, unleashing inner authority, and recognizing the genius of the religion of Jesus. We learn from Thurman's resilience in the psychologically terrorizing climate of the Jim Crow South, his encounters with Quakers and with Mahatma Gandhi, and his sense of being guided by the Spirit. Each chapter illuminates an aspect of Thurman's work and includes reflection questions and spiritual practices.

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  The Corfu Trilogy - My Family...

  Gerald Durrell

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  National Bestseller: The complete trilogy that inspired Masterpiece production The Durrells in Corfu in one volume. The tales of a naturalist and his family, who left England for the Greek island of Corfu—where they interacted with fascinating locals of both human and animal varieties—these memoirs have become beloved bestsellers and inspired the delightful series that aired on PBS television.   Included in this three-book collection are:  My Family and Other Animals: Ten-year-old Gerald Durrell arrives on sun-drenched Corfu with this family and pursues his interest in natural history, making friends with the island’s fauna—from toads and tortoises to scorpions and geckos—while reveling in the joyous chaos of growing up in an unconventional household.  Birds, Beasts and Relatives: Written after a boyhood spent studying zoology, this memoir is part nature guide, part coming-of-age tale, and all charmingly funny memoir.  The Garden of the Gods: In the conclusion of the trilogy, Durrell shares more tales of wild animals and his even wilder family, including his mother, Louisa, and his siblings Lawrence, Leslie, and Margo, in the years before World War II.   “[Durrell’s] books have an unfailing charm. . . . It is a tribute to his skill that one never tires of his accounts” (Chicago Tribune).  This ebook features an illustrated biography of Gerald Durrell including rare photos from the author’s estate.  

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  Anguish The double secret

  Max Dorra

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  The words of others, as an unpleasant remark ("You’re not hardworking") or a medical diagnosis ("You’re bipolar"), have the power to plunge us into anguish whenever they show an image of ourselves that we do not recognize: "In a world where words become viruses, certain sentences can kill." 
  The reductive identity that is thus assigned to us creates the illusion that our life can be summed up by these few words, allowing others to exercise the tyrannical power of anxiety over us. 
  Max Dorra explains how this illusion, created temporarily by the gaze of others, is just a montage-effect of our memory—as in a movie—and that it is enough to understand the mechanisms of this illusion in order to free ourselves from it: "To become aware of the fact that one is held captive by a montage is to be freed from a false confinement."
  In virtuosic and sensitive language ("The affects—shapeless and promising, wonderful clouds"), the author journeys through music, painting and cinema, appealing to sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, while remaining firmly rooted in reality: "There are more things in a hospital elevator than in all of philosophy." 
  He shows us that trusting our imagination allows us to tame anxiety without fearing it, and understanding that "another montage is possible" allows us to go towards the other without losing ourselves.

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