"I've never written a line that I'd be ashamed for my young daughters to read, and I never shall write such a line!" Thus Jack London, well along in his career. And thus almost any collection of his adventure stories is acceptable to young readers as well as to their elders.
Jack London, pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney, American novelist and short-story writer whose best-known works—among them The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906)—depict elemental struggles for survival. During the 20th century he was one of the most extensively translated of American authors.
Deserted by his father, a roving astrologer, he was raised in Oakland, California, by his spiritualist mother and his stepfather, whose surname, London, he took. At age 14 he quit school to escape poverty and gain adventure. He explored San Francisco Bay in his sloop, alternately stealing oysters or working for the government fish patrol. He went to Japan as a sailor and saw much of the United States as a hobo riding freight trains and as a member of Charles T. Kelly’s industrial army (one of the many protest armies of the unemployed, like Coxey’s Army, that was born of the financial panic of 1893). London saw depression conditions, was jailed for vagrancy, and in 1894 became a militant socialist.
London educated himself at public libraries with the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, usually in popularized forms. At 19 he crammed a four-year high school course into one year and entered the University of California, Berkeley, but after a year he quit school to seek a fortune in the Klondike gold rush. Returning the next year, still poor and unable to find work, he decided to earn a living as a writer.
London studied magazines and then set himself a daily schedule of producing sonnets, ballads, jokes, anecdotes, adventure stories, or horror stories, steadily increasing his output. The optimism and energy with which he attacked his task are best conveyed in his autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909). Within two years, stories of his Alaskan adventures began to win acceptance for their fresh subject matter and virile force. His first book, The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North (1900), a collection of short stories that he had previously published in magazines, gained a wide audience.
During the remainder of his life, London wrote and published steadily, completing some 50 books of fiction and nonfiction in 17 years. Although he became the highest-paid writer in the United States at that time, his earnings never matched his expenditures, and he was never freed of the urgency of writing for money. He sailed a ketch to the South Pacific, telling of his adventures in The Cruise of the Snark (1911). In 1910 he settled on a ranch near Glen Ellen, California, where he built his grandiose Wolf House. He maintained his socialist beliefs almost to the end of his life.
Jack London’s output, typically hastily written, is of uneven literary quality, though his highly romanticized stories of adventure can be compulsively readable. His Alaskan novels The Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and Burning Daylight (1910), in which he dramatized in turn atavism, adaptability, and the appeal of the wilderness, are outstanding. His short story “To Build a Fire” (1908), set in the Klondike, is a masterly depiction of humankind’s inability to overcome nature; it was reprinted in 1910 in the short-story collection Lost Face, one of many such volumes that London published.
"The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" will open a world of success, happiness, prosperity, and peace for you. It is one of the most brilliant and beloved spiritual self-help works of all time which can help you heal yourself, banish your fears, sleep better, enjoy better relationships and just feel happier. The techniques are simple and results come quickly. You can improve your relationships, your finances, your physical well-being.
In this book, the author fuses his spiritual wisdom and scientific research to bring to light how the sub-conscious mind can be a major influence on our daily lives. Once you understand your subconscious mind, you can also control or get rid of the various phobias that you may have in turn opening a brand new world of positive energy.
It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality.First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes—heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies—into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.
When African American intellectuals announced the birth of the "New Negro" around the turn of the twentieth century, they were attempting through a bold act of renaming to change the way blacks were depicted and perceived in America. By challenging stereotypes of the Old Negro, and declaring that the New Negro was capable of high achievement, black writers tried to revolutionize how whites viewed blacks--and how blacks viewed themselves. Nothing less than a strategy to re-create the public face of "the race," the New Negro became a dominant figure of racial uplift between Reconstruction and World War II, as well as a central idea of the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro collects more than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and representation in African American culture. These readings--by writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright--discuss the trope of the New Negro, and the milieu in which this figure existed, from almost every conceivable angle. Political essays are joined by essays on African American fiction, poetry, drama, music, painting, and sculpture. More than fascinating historical documents, these essays remain essential to the way African American identity and history are still understood today.
Women commit just 4% of homicides in comparison to men. But this disproportion can make their crimes seem all the more shocking. In this chilling casebook, Al Cimino explores 34 female murderers. We meet 'Angel of Death' Kristen Gilbert who induced multiple cardiac arrests among her patients while working as a hospital nurse, Enriqueta Martí, the 'Vampire of Barcelona' who killed children to make cosmetics, and many more. These case studies give riveting insight into the lives and motives of women who decided to commit the ultimate transgression. In many of these cases, the women had suffered years of abuse and psychological breakdown before their eventual crimes. Other times their heinous acts seemed to spring from nowhere, with an unpredictability that is haunting.
A diverse anthology of poetry, fiction and essays from the most exciting writers around the world in this “fresh, provocative, engrossing” literary journal (BBC.com).
The literary anthology Freeman’s, created by writer, critic, and former Granta editor John Freeman, has quickly gained an international following with wide acclaim. It has been called “bold [and] searching” by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and “impressively diverse” by O Magazine. This issue introduces a list of more than twenty-five poets, essayists, novelists, and short story writers from around the world who are shaping contemporary literature and will continue to impact it in years to come.
Drawing on recommendations from book editors, critics, translators, and authors from across the globe, Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing includes pieces from writers aged twenty-five to seventy, from almost twenty countries and writing in almost as many languages. This will be a new kind of list, and an aesthetic manifesto for our times. Against a climate of nationalism and siloed thinking, this special issue celebrates a global view of where writing is going next.
“The oldest is 70. The youngest, 26. In between, the best list of this kind I have ever seen.”—Marlon James
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
Maurice Maeterlinck received the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature, for this excellent book about the life of bees. Far from being an entomologist’s study paper, this magnificent poetic work puts the nature of this very special insect centre stage.
The Life of the Bee constitutes a real philosophical voyage of discovery about the plant world and more particularly, these social insects. This original text is surprising by it’s scientific precision and accuracy. Maeterlinck's meticulous observations lead us to a veritable masterpiece of descriptions and fundamental questions, bringing into question the observer and the observed.
Indeed, the analogies that he uses between the animal kingdom and that of men, make us humble and inquiring, moved and pensive. This portrayal of the hive and the bees becomes at the same time poetic, philosophical and political.
Moving between wonder and knowledge, Maeterlinck asks us to preserve the links that unite us with nature. Now that an ecological disaster is threatening to destroy this fragile harmony, this book is well worth reading.
