| Author | : William Stanley Merwin |
| Publisher | : National Geographic Society |
| Total Pages | : 192 |
| Release | : 2002 |
| Genre | : Fiction |
| ISBN | : |
Poet W. S. Merwin interweaves his own reminiscences with, "a chronicle of the lordly 12th-century bards who once ruled a world where kings were poets and poets kings."
| Author | : Margaret Atwood |
| Publisher | : Basic Books |
| Total Pages | : 448 |
| Release | : 2009-04-21 |
| Genre | : Literary Collections |
| ISBN | : 0786747765 |
From one of the world's most passionately engaged and acclaimed literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood's nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces to great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize -- winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.
| Author | : Aubrey Burl |
| Publisher | : The History Press |
| Total Pages | : 353 |
| Release | : 2011-11-08 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0752475320 |
The figure of the Troubadour combines the ideals of knighthood with the inspiration of the poet and musician and created a cultural explosion which influenced the whole course of Western art and civilisation. Burl traces the story from the birth of the first Troubadour in 1071 to the execution of the last Cathar Good Man in 1231 and the close of the distinctive southern French culture that had given rise to it. The tale incorporates the Crusades to the Holy Lands and the Albigensian Crusades through the Languedoc and the regular incursions from the English. In telling his story of the Troubadours and their song he brings to life the world of medieval Languedoc. The author is acknowledged as an authority on the Troubadours, one of the most evocative subjects in history.
| Author | : Robert Hughes |
| Publisher | : National Geographic Books |
| Total Pages | : 152 |
| Release | : 2011-06-15 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1426209134 |
Beginning with a vivid description of his wedding in the splendid medieval ceremonial chamber in Barcelona's city hall, Hughes launches into a lively account of the history, art, and architecture of the storied city. He tells of architectural treasures abounding in 14th-century Barcelona, establishing it as one of Europe's great Gothic cities, while Madrid was hardly more than a cluster of huts. The city spawned such great artists as Antoni Gaudi, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Casals. Hughes's deep knowledge of the city is evident—but it's his personal reflections of what Barcelona, its people, and its storied history and culture have meant to him over the decades that sets Barcelona the Great Enchantress apart from all others' books.
| Author | : Doug Fullington |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 889 |
| Release | : 2024-03-26 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 0190944501 |
This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.
| Author | : Truman State University Press |
| Publisher | : Truman State University Press |
| Total Pages | : 136 |
| Release | : 2018-06-30 |
| Genre | : Literary Collections |
| ISBN | : |
Chariton Review Spring/Summer 2018
| Author | : Jamaica Kincaid |
| Publisher | : National Geographic Books |
| Total Pages | : 150 |
| Release | : 2011-06-15 |
| Genre | : Travel |
| ISBN | : 1426209010 |
In this delightful hybrid of a book—part memoir and part travel journal—the bestselling author takes us deep into the mountains of Nepal with a trio of botanist friends in search of native Himalayan plants that will grow in her Vermont garden. Alighting from a plane in the dramatic Annapurna Valley, the ominous signs of Nepal's Maoist guerrillas are all around—an alarming presence that accompanies the travelers throughout their trek. Undaunted, the group sets off into the mountains with Sherpas and bearers, entering an exotic world of spectacular landscapes, vertiginous slopes, isolated villages, herds of yaks, and giant rhododendron, thirty feet tall. The landscape and flora and so much else of what Kincaid finds in the Himalaya—including fruit bats, colorful Buddhist prayer flags, and the hated leeches that plague much of the trip—are new to her, and she approaches it all with an acute sense of wonder and a deft eye for detail. In beautiful, introspective prose, Kincaid intertwines the harrowing Maoist encounters with exciting botanical discoveries, fascinating daily details, and lyrical musings on gardens, nature, home, and family. From the Trade Paperback edition.
| Author | : Ananya Jahanara Kabir |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 324 |
| Release | : 2005-03-10 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 9780521827317 |
A collection of original essays exploring the intersections between medieval and postcolonial studies.
| Author | : Francine Prose |
| Publisher | : Disney Electronic Content |
| Total Pages | : 190 |
| Release | : 2011-06-15 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 1426209088 |
A blending of art and cultural criticism, travel writing, and personal narrative, Sicilian Odyssey is Francine Prose's imaginative consideration of the diverse cultural legacies found juxtaposed and entangled on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. She writes of the intensity of Sicily, the "commitment to the extreme," where the history is more colorful, the sun hotter, the cooking earthier, the violence more horrific, the carnival more raucous, the politics more Byzantine than other places on Earth, and how much the island can teach us about the triumph of beauty over violence and life over death. Prose examines architectural sites and objects and looks at the ways in which myth and actuality converge. Exploring the intact and beautiful Greek amphitheaters at Siracusa and Taormina, the cathedral at Monreale, the Roman mosaics at Piazza Armerina, and some of the masterpieces of the Baroque scattered throughout the island, Prose focuses her keen insight to imagine them in their own time, to examine the evolution and decline of the cultures that produced them, and to deconstruct powerful responses each evokes in her. Illuminated by the author's own photographs, Sicilian Odyssey brings exotic and enigmatic Sicily to life through the prism of its past.
