Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Seasons of Purgatory

  Shahriar Mandanipour

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  The first English-language story collection from "one of Iran's most important living fiction writers" (Guardian) 
   
   
   
  In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

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  Splinter & Shard - Stories

  Lulu Keating

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  A smashing debut collection from award-winning filmmaker Lulu Keating
  		 
  Splinter & Shard is the debut story collection by acclaimed filmmaker-turned-writer Lulu Keating. Vivid and precise, the stories in this collection offer an uncompromising journey into what it means to be human.
  		 
  Keating catches her characters at their pivotal moments of discovery, self-reckoning, and change. A dutiful mother of grown children learns a life-shattering secret about two of her children that upends her life. A macho man in mid-life must reconcile himself to his new role as a cosmetics consultant. A young woman, pregnant and unhappy, travels to the Yukon to bury her husband. An old woman turns away from her family to bond with the convicts of the small jail next door. An orphaned girl stumbles onto an unexpected connection with a stranger.
  		 
  In these stories, flaws and strengths are writ large as characters fumble toward redemption.
  		 
  From flash fiction to deep-dive character studies, Splinter & Shard turns over the rocks of everyday experience to reveal the psychological and philosophical truths underneath. The stories range back and forth in time, from Nova Scotia to the Yukon (with a side trip to Florida), and explore universal themes — loss, infidelity, faith, mortality, and love.

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  One Good Story That One - Stories

  Thomas King

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  One Good Story, That One is a collection steeped in native oral tradition and shot through with Thomas King's special brand of wit and comic imagination. These highly acclaimed stories conjure up Native and Judeo-Christian myths, present-day pop culture, and literature while mixing in just the right amount of perception and experience.

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  Aristocratic Education - From...

  Stephen Leacock

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  Stephen P H Butler Leacock FRSC was born on the 30th December 1869 in Swanmore, near Southampton, England, the third of eleven children. 
  The family emigrated to Canada in 1876 to live on a 100-acre farm in Sutton, Ontario.  There Leacock was home-schooled and later enrolled into the elite private school Upper Canada College in Toronto.  Academically he was very strong and enrolled at the University of Toronto to study languages and literature.  He left there after his alcoholic father abandoned the family and finances were too stretched to continue his attendance.  He now enrolled in a three-month course at Strathroy Collegiate Institute to become a qualified high school teacher and with it a regular income. 
  Leacock published humorous articles in many Canadian and US magazines but his real passion was economics and political theory.  In 1899 he enrolled for postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago and earned his PhD in 1903. 
  His marriage to Beatrix Hamilton produced a single child 15 years later.  Over time father and son developed a love-hate relationship, partially caused by his son’s diminutive stature of only four feet.  
  He accepted a post at McGill University and kept it until he retired in 1936.  His work ‘Elements of Political Science’, was adopted as a standard textbook for two decades and was also his most profitable.  He now also began public speaking and lecturing.  
  In 1910, he privately printed some articles as ‘Literary Lapses’.  It was then released by a recognised publisher, and he became a commercially successful writer.  His collections of light-hearted whimsy, parody, nonsense, and satire were now frequently published along with biographies and several award-winning volumes on Canada. 
  Politically Leacock was a difficult creature.  He opposed women’s right to vote, was a champion of Empire but advocated social welfare legislation and wealth redistribution, but he often caused friction with his racist views. 
  Leacock has been forgotten as an economist, but it’s often said that in 1911 more people had heard of him than had heard of Canada.  For the decade after 1915 Leacock was the most popular humorist in the English-speaking world. 
  Stephen Leacock died on 28th March 1944 of throat cancer in Toronto, Canada.  He was 74.

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  Enlargement - From their pens to...

  John Davys Beresford

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  John Davys Beresford was born on 17th March 1873.  His life was blighted by infantile paralysis which left him partially disabled. 
  After an education at Oundle school he trained to be an architect.  However, he quickly decided that his life was to be centred on a literary career.  His first offerings were in drama and as a journalist. 
  As well as being a book reviewer for the Manchester Guardian he contributed to New Statesman, The Spectator, Westminster Gazette, and the Theosophist magazine The Aryan Path.   
  His spiritual journey in early adulthood had claimed him as an agnostic, in defiance of his clergyman father.  This view he later abandoned in preference to describing himself as a Theosophist and a pacifist. 
  As well as many novels, many themed with spiritual and philosophical elements.  Beresford was also a gifted short story writer particularly across the science-fiction, horror and ghost genres. 
  All of these elements helped him to obtain a prominent place in Edwardian Literary London. 
  John Davys Beresford died on the 2nd February 1947. He was 73.

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  A Lickpenny Lover - From their...

  O Henry

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  William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him. 
  He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle’s drugstore and gained a pharmacists’ license in 1881.  
  A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change of climate would help his symptoms. He took on various types of work, initially from ranch hand and cook and then as varied as pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began to write, though for now, purely as a hobby. 
  He was a member of several singing and dramatic groups when he met 17 year old Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy Austin family. Despite her mother’s objection owing to Athol’s tuberculosis, they began courting and in July 1887, they eloped and soon married. 
  Athol, impressed by his writing, encouraged him to get them published. A job as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office paid a healthy $100 dollars per month and life was good. 
  But then life turned cruel. His son died a few hours after birth although a daughter, Margaret, came the following year.  His job had to be vacated but another was found at the First National Bank of Austin. The bank operated informally and Porter was careless in keeping the books. He lost that job but began writing for the humourous weekly The Rolling Stone and the Houston Post. Some time later the federal Bank auditors went through his former accounts and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement. 
  Porter fled the day before his trial to Honduras. Holed up for several months he began to write.  Athol had become too ill to travel to meet him and learning that her health was deteriorating he surrendered to the court in February 1897.  Bail was obtained so that he could stay with Athol during her final days.  
  Porter was sentenced to five years at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. His pharmacy qualifications got him the job of night druggist.  His sentence also gave him time to write and publish fourteen short stories. In December 1899 in McClure’s Magazine he published a short story as O Henry.  
  He was released two years early in July 1901, and reunited with Margaret, now 11, in Pittsburgh.  He now began his most prolific period of writing; a short story per week for the New York World, while also publishing works in other magazines.  Eventually over 600 of his short stories were published. 
  Porter was a heavy drinker and in 1908 his health, which had deteriorated for several years, took a dramatic turn for the worse, as did his writing.  
  O Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver complicated by diabetes and an enlarged heart on 5th June 1910.

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