Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Learning to Talk - Stories

  Hilary Mantel

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  "The multiple performances in this audiobook are uniformly adept, providing listeners the disarming experience of adults unflinchingly looking back at childhood." -AudioFile on Learning to TalkLearning to Talk is a dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy.With a new foreword by Hilary Mantel.In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In “King Billy Is A Gentleman,” the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. “Curved Is the Line of Beauty" is a story of friendship, faith, and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In “Third Floor Rising," she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed.“A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.” —USA Today“Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.” —The Washington PostA Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.

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  Delicious Hunger

  Hai Fan

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  From 1976 to 1989, Hai Fan was part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party. These short stories are inspired by his experiences during his thirteen years in the rainforest.  
   
  Struggling through an arduous trek, two comrades pine for each other but don't know how to declare their love; a woman who has annoyed all her comrades finally wins their approval when she finds a mythical mousedeer; improvising around the lack of ingredients, a perpetually hungry guerrilla makes delicious cakes from cassava and elephant fat. The rainforest may be a dangerous place where death awaits, but so do love, desire and hope.  
   
  Delicious Hunger is a book about the moments in and between warfare, when hunger is so palpable it can be tasted, and the natural world becomes an extension of the body. Deftly translated by Jeremy Tiang, Hai Fan's stories are about a group of people who chose to fight for a better world and, in the process, built their own.

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  Don Quixote

  Miguel de Cervantes

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  Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote's fancy leads them wildly astray. At the same time the relationship between the two men grows in fascinating subtlety. Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a wonderful burlesque of the popular literature its disordered protagonist is obsessed with.

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  Tombs Without Bodies - (Halfway...

  Susan Kaye Quinn

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  SHORT STORY: Humanity has left the cities to live in the "greenbelt," but a young woman’s curiosity brings her back to the bot-patrolled streets where human beings used to live... until she gets caught.Tombs Without Bodies is one of six short solarpunk stories in the Halfway to Better collection.If you enjoyed the optimistic climate solutions in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future or the cozy cooperative future in Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series, you will enjoy Halfway to Better.

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  A Man with Two Lives - From...

  Ambrose Bierce

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  Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born on 24th June 1842 at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio. His parents were poor but they introduced him to literature at an early age, instilling in him a deep appreciation of books, the written word and the elegance of language.  
  Growing up in Koscuisko County, Indiana poverty and religion were defining features of his childhood, and he would later describe his parents as “unwashed savages” and fanatically religious, showing him little affection but always quick to punish. He came to resent religion, and his introduction to literature appears to be their only positive effect. 
  At age 15 Bierce left home to become a printer’s devil, mixing ink and fetching type at The Northern Indian, a small Ohio paper. Falsely accused of theft he returned to his farm and spent time sending out work in the hopes of being published. 
  His Uncle Lucius advised he be sent to the Kentucky Military Institute. A year later he was commissioned as an Officer.  As the Civil War started Bierce enlisted in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment.  
  In April 1862 Bierce fought at the Battle of Shiloh, an experience which, though terrifying, became the source of several short stories. Two years later he sustained a serious head wound and was off duty for several months. He was discharged in early 1865.  
  A later expedition to inspect military outposts across the Great Plains took him all the way to San Francisco. He remained there to become involved with publishing and editing and to marry, Mary Ellen on Christmas Day 1871.  They had a child, Day, the following year.  
  In 1872 the family moved to England for 3 years where he wrote for Fun magazine. His son, Leigh, was born, and first book, ‘The Fiend’s Delight’, was published.  
  They returned to San Francisco and to work for a number of papers where he gained admiration for his crime reporting. In 1887 he began a column at the William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner.  
  Bierce’s marriage fell apart when he discovered compromising letters to his wife from a secret admirer. The following year, 1889 his son Day committed suicide, depressed by romantic rejection. 
  In 1891 Bierce wrote and published the collection of 26 short stories which included ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’.  Success and further works including poetry followed.  
  Bierce with Hearst’s resources helped uncover a financial plot by a railroad to turn 130 million dollars of loans into a handout. Confronted by the railroad and asked to name his price Bierce answered “my price is $130 million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States”.  
  He now began his first foray as a fabulist, publishing ‘Fantastic Fables’ in 1899.  But tragedy again struck two years later when his second son Leigh died of pneumonia relating to his alcoholism.  
  He continued to write short stories and poetry and also published ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’.  
  At the age of 71, in 1913 Bierce departed from Washington, D.C., for a tour of the battlefields where he had fought during the civil war. At the city of Chihuahua he wrote his last known communication, a letter to a friend. It’s closing words were “as to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination,” Ambrose Bierce then vanished without trace.

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  Robert Louis Stevenson - Chapter...

  Robert Louis Stevenson

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  Literature is a world of words and wonder, able to take us on almost unimaginable journeys from the wild and fantastic to the grind and minutiae of life. 
   
  An author’s ideas are his building blocks, his architecture of the mind, building a structure on which all else will rest; the narrative, the characters, the words - those few words that begin the adventure. 
   
  In this series we look at some of our leading classic authors across two genres: the short story and the poem.  In this modern world there is an insatiable need to categorise and pigeon-hole everyone and everything.  But ideas, these grains and saplings of the brain, need to roam, to explore and find their perfect literary use vehicle.  Our authors are masters of many literary forms, perhaps known for one but themselves favouring another. 
   
  Story. Poems. Story.  Within these boundaries come all manner of invention and cast of characters.  And, of course, each author has their own way of revealing their own chapter and verse.    
   
  1 - Chapter & Verse - Robert Louis Stevenson 
  2 - The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  3 - Death to the Dead For Evermore by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  4 - The Land of Nod by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  5 - A Song of the Road by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  6 - The Vagabond by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  7 - Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  8 - The Canoe Speaks by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  9 - Men Are Heaven's Piers by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  10 - I Do Not Fear to Own Me Kin by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  11 - To by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  12 - Windy Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  13 - I Sit Up Here at Midnight by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  14 - Youth and Love by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  15 - A Valentines Song by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  16 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson

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