Meet Cushla Lavery, an occasional Catholic and 24-year-old schoolteacher who moonlights as a bartender in her family’s pub. The fog of war, even a guerrilla war, is still a fog. Louise Kennedy recreates the Troubles in her restrained, absorbing debut, Trespasses, set in Belfast in the mid-1970s. The past leaves its thumbprints on us all, and on none more than an emerging generation of dazzling literary talent. Artists across mediums have tapped that dark era as well, evidenced by the suspense-laden television series Bloodlands. Colum McCann’s sublime novel TransAtlantic stole its plot, in part, from real-world headlines, including George Mitchell’s Herculean efforts to secure a truce among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland in 1998, known as the Good Friday Agreement, the terminus of the Troubles, the decades-long conflict that pitted families and neighbors against each other.
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Originally composed by Padmasambhava, an important Indian master of the eighth century, the Tibetan Book of the Dead was concealed in Tibet until it was discovered in the fourteenth century by Karma Lingpa, a famous Tibetan tertön (discoverer of ancient texts). Revealing a set of instructions designed to facilitate the inner liberation of the dead or dying person, the book provides a guide to navigating the bardo-the interval between death and rebirth. Both a practical guide and intriguing historical, cultural, and spiritual document, this new version incorporates recent discoveries that have allowed for a better translation of previously ambiguous passages. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Awakening Upon Dying, with introductory commentary by Dzogchen Buddhist master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, is a new translation of the ancient text also known as The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State. Taking us from the end of the Seven Years’ War to 1783, and drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, The Cause interweaves action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with parlor-room intrigues back in England, creating a thrilling narrative that brings together a cast of familiar and long-forgotten characters. Completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers, The Cause returns us to the very heart of the American founding, telling the military and political story of the war for independence from the ground up, and from all sides: British and American, loyalist and patriot, white and Black. With this much-anticipated volume, he at last brings the story of the revolution to vivid life, with “surprising relevance” (Susan Dunn) for our modern era. These questions have intrigued Ellis-one of our most celebrated scholars of American history-throughout his entire career. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War.įor more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all, its meaning. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. In one of the most “exciting and engaging” (Gordon S.
In the novel, I felt that the Crawfords were more morally ambiguous than outright villainous. As they grow up Fanny starts to fall in with Edmund, but her heart is broken when the attractive Crawford siblings move into the neighborhood. Tennant–regrettably not Scottish in this–is her lazy, gambling cousin Tom while Cumberbatch plays her more staid cousin, Edmund, who is destined for the church.įanny isn’t treated fantastically by her relatives verbally cut down by Aunt Norris (made wonderfully shrill by Julia McKenzie), largely ignored by Lady and Sir Thomas Bertram, her only real friend is Edmund. Strangely, when the novel was abbreviated into the radio drama, it worked better for me than the book itself.įelicity Jones plays Fanny Price, a poor young girl who goes to live with her much wealthier relations at Mansfield Park. Or Pounded by the Gay Color Changing Dress. No question, I’d secretly love that. Those men have two of the sexist voices in media, and I’d listen to them read the phone book. For me, the story is overly moralistic and doesn’t necessarily translate well to a modern reader.īut when I saw that the BBC had done a radio drama of the novel featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and David Tennant in the cast, I knew I had to listen. Mansfield Park is my least favorite of Jane Austen’s novels. Ten years later she got pregnant with the help of a sperm donor and then suffered a miscarriage while on assignment in Mongolia. Though Levy longed for motherhood and a comfortable life, she also had a “compulsion” for adventure. At 28, she fell in love with and married a 41-year-old woman with substance abuse problems. As a successful young writer in the 1990s (first for New York magazine), Levy traveled widely, writing primarily on the topic of sexuality and gender. Her mother encouraged her to make her own rules, with one caveat: never become dependent upon a man. As a child in Larchmont, N.Y., Levy was taught that she could achieve anything she wanted. In this dark and absorbing memoir, Levy ( Female Chauvinist Pigs), a staff writer for the New Yorker, recounts her complicated life and, with stunning clarity, reveals that the best laid plans can be sidetracked. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions. Al-Jahiz transformed the world forty years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. So when someone murders a secret brotherhood dedicated to one of the most famous men in history, al-Jahiz, Agent Fatma is called onto the case. Djèlí Clark (Published by Tordotcom and Orbit UK) Winner,Ĭairo, 1912: Though Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she’s certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer. He appeared in Robinson Crusoe (1997) as Patrick Conner. His first television appearance was as a rakish student in an early episode of the drama series A Touch of Frost (1996). Lewis once worked as a telemarketer selling car alarms, a job he detested. He also starred in another of Ibsen's plays, as Karsten Bernick in Pillars of the Community at the National Theatre in November 2005. He graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1993, after which he worked as an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company.ĭuring his time with the RSC, he played Borgheim in Adrian Noble's production of Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf and Posthumus in William Shakespeare's Cymbeline. He was educated at the independent Ashdown House School in Forest Row, East Sussex, and at Eton College. He first decided to become an actor at the age of 16. As a child, Lewis made several visits to the US to visit relatives during summer breaks. The book travels back and forth from his present peacefulness and hope to the major mistakes and desperate acts of his youth, as the novel leads up to a confrontation between past and present. The past catches up to Bill Reed who thought he'd escaped the consequences of his youthful past in Reno, NV by moving to rural Idaho and assuming a new identity. Stretched to the Point of No Turning Back In finely sculpted prose imaginatively at odds with the harsh, volatile world Kiefer evokes, The Animals builds powerfully toward the revelation of Bill's defining betrayal - and the drastic lengths Bill goes to in order to escape the consequences. Suddenly forced to confront the secrets of his criminal youth, Bill battles fiercely to preserve the shelter that protects these wounded animals and to keep hidden his turbulent, even dangerous, history.Īlternating between past and present, Christian Kiefer contrasts the wreckage of Bill's crime-ridden years in Reno, Nevada, with the elusive promise of a peaceful future. Seemingly rid of his troubled past, Bill hopes to marry the local veterinarian and live a quiet life together, the promise of which is threatened when a childhood friend is released from prison. Bill Reed manages a wildlife sanctuary in rural Idaho, caring for injured animals - raptors, a wolf, and his beloved bear, Majer, among them - that are unable to survive in the wild. It is a story of the American Paris, but not along quite the usual lines, because the Americans who figure in it happen to be people without money. Miller himself insists that it is straight autobiography, but the tempo and method of telling the story are those of a novel. Tropic of Cancer is a novel in the first person, or autobiography in the form of a novel, whichever way you like to look at it. And in fact the subject matter of the book, and to a certain extent its mental atmosphere, belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passos, Ezra Pound-on the whole, not the writers who are in fashion at this moment. When Henry Miller's novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1935, it was greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. |