Alma Lolloon


Book Description

Alma Lolloon is writing a book about her five husbands, and she reads installments of her work in progress to her surprised knitting group. The group's boisterous feedback influences Alma's work in progress as she tells her story from childhood to old age, improvising to find her pitch and style.




Breathing for Two


Book Description

Ever wonder exactly why anesthesiologists describe their job as hours of boredom, moments of panic? With gentle precision, anesthesiologist Wolf Pascoe teases apart an overlooked world and unveils the eggshell dance that takes place at the head of an operating table. A personal odyssey that goes deep into the heart of anesthesia's scariest mystery-breathing-this short book will change the way you think about life, and breath.




Tally


Book Description

It is raining love in Greenwich Village. . . When Erin, a young poet, reads these words on a piece of folded paper in the garret of Paul Johnston (PJ), an elderly Bohemian artist, she does not know she is on the threshold of a life-changing adventure. She is brought together with PJ by Rogue, another poet, who has known PJ for a decade. Her presence creates tension between the two men. And PJ confides in her that he needs the female perspective in his study of human nature. PJ is a living example of Greenwich Village's "revolution of consciousness." Coming to the Village in 1919, he took in the full flavor, substance and style of the Bohemian philosophy of life. Over the years, through his heightened awareness, he created his own philosophy. He and Erin embark on a journey through the human psyche. Erin learns of PJ's death and rebirth after an operation at the age of 40, in the skeleton of the man he had been. He is reborn into a second innocence, but has the mind and memory of a grown man. In his search for new reasons to live, he forms new identities: The Artist, the Professor of Love, and The Old Man, among others. But who is PJ? And who will Erin become?




Carol Reed


Book Description

Carol Reed is one of the truly outstanding directors of British cinema, and one whose work is long overdue for reconsideration. This major study ranges over Reed’s entire career, combining observation of general trends and patterns with detailed analysis of twenty films, both acknowledged masterpieces and lesser-known works. Evans avoids a simplistic auteurist approach, placing the films in their autobiographical, socio-political and cultural contexts and relating these to the analysis of Reed’s art. The critical approach combines psychoanalysis, gender theory, and the analysis of form. Archival research is also relied on to clarify Reed’s relations with his creative team, financial backers and others. Films examined include Bank Holiday, A Girl Must Live, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, Night Train to Munich, The Way Ahead, Outcast of the Islands, Trapeze and Oliver!.




I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast


Book Description

Poetry - ISBN: 978-0-9889447-5-6 Melissa Studdard's high-flying, bold poetic language expresses an erotic appetite for the world: "this desire to butter and eat the stars," as she says, in words characteristically large yet domestic, ambitious yet chuck- ling at their own nerve. This poet's ardent, winning ebullience echoes that of God, a recurring character here, who finds us Her children, splotchy, bawling and imperfect though we are, "flawless in her omni- scient eyes." -Robert Pinsky In so many ways the poems in this book read like paintings, touching and absorbing the light of the known world while fingering the soul until it lifts, trembling. Gates splayed, bodies read as books, and hearts born of mouths, Studdard's study, which is a creation unto itself, would have no doubt pleased Neruda's taste for the alchemic impurity of poetry, which is, as we know, poetry that is not only most pure of heart, but beautifully generous in vision and feeling. -Cate Marvin




Gaia's Children


Book Description

This Scottish novel offers a glimpse of a world ravaged by climate change, where heroes struggle against impossible odds to preserve the land, and those whom they love. In a fast paced narrative, the reader is drawn into the lives of climate refugees.Aberdeenshire 2050 In a world transformed by climate change, Scotland has become a war zone. City gangs battle homesteaders for food supplies. An unstoppable plague kills one in ten. A new race is born, the Lupans: golden-eyed and wild, they reject their mothers and live apart, speaking no recognizable language. Alienated from society, these Lupans are even hunted for sport.For thirty years Linella Sienkiewicz has taken in climate refugees. She has protected Lupans from captivity and death. But the Scottish government, responding to public xenophobia, plans to imprison the refugees and destroy the Lupan colony. The only man who can help her is Scott Maguire, a lawyer on the run. Infected by plague he has taken shelter among the Lupans. He discovers a fascinating and impenetrable society, destined to take up the evolutionary torch from the human race. Even as he is healed and transformed by living with them, he uncovers a secret that could spell salvation for humanity – but at a terrible cost. Against impossible odds, Scott and Linella must stop the approaching army. If the Lupans are destroyed the last hope for the survival of the human race will be gone.




Penina's Letters


Book Description

"Penina's Letters" takes place in the beach cities along Santa Monica Bay, with a fictionalized beach town named Refugio squeezed in between El Porto and Grand Avenue. The town of Refugio replaces the iconic towers and power plant between the water and the dunes of El Segundo. The style includes epistolary writing, bildungsroman, and satire and irony. The time of the setting is not explicitly stated, nor is the war involved given a specific name, but readers may think the story takes place in the 1960s and the early 1970s - in any case, it's not a history book. The main characters include Salvador (Sal or Salty) Persequi, the first person narrator, just returned from the war; his girlfriend, Penina Seablouse; and their two friends Puck Malone and Henry Killknot - all of whom have known one another since high school, and in the present time of the story are in their twenties. Draft segments of "Penina's Letters" appeared in The Boulevard (Summer 2012), a publication of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Parts of the "How to Surf" chapter appeared in different form on Berfrois on September 29, 2015. File Under: Ocean Surfing Love Letters War Epistolary Bildungsroman Santa Monica Bay Beach Cities School Work Family Friendship Self-deception Literary Fiction Folk Song Narrative. "All the fuss and hullabaloo, and a war just peters off. But none of that matters here. This isn't going to be about the war. I don't have any gory stories, nothing painting war as hell. Hell is an ocean with no waves. This is going to be about surfing and how I paddled out to live on the water after throwing Penina's letters off the end of the Refugio jetty." Penina's Letters, a Novel by Joe Linker




Black Inked Pearl


Book Description

An epic romance about the naïve Irish girl Kate and her mysterious lover, whom she rejects in panic and then spends her life seeking. After the opening rejection, Kate recalls her Irish upbringing, her convent education, and her coolly-controlled professional success, before her tsunami-like realisation beside an African river of the emotions she had concealed from herself and that she passionately and consumingly loved the man she had rejected.Searching for him she visits the kingdom of beasts, a London restaurant, an old people's home, back to the misty Donegal Sea, the heavenly archives, Eden, and hell, where at agonising cost she saves her dying love. They walk together toward heaven, but at the gates he walks past leaving her behind in the dust. The gates close behind him. He in turn searches for her and at last finds her in the dust, but to his fury (and renewed hurt) he is not ecstatically recognised and thanked. And the gates are still shut.On a secret back way to heaven guided by a little beetle, Kate repeatedly saves her still scornful love, but at the very last, despite Kate's fatal inability with numbers and through an ultimate sacrifice, he saves her from the precipice and they reach heaven. Kate finally realises that although her quest for her love was not vain, in the end she had to find herself - the unexpected pearl.The novel, born in dreams, is interlaced with the ambiguity between this world and another, and increasingly becomes more poetic, riddling and dreamlike as the story unfolds. The epilogue alludes to the key themes of the novel - the eternity of love and the ambiguity between dream and reality.




Mud Ball - How I Dug Myself Out of the Daily Grind


Book Description

I couldn't teach another lesson. Nor could I tolerate another day with a boss, a punch card, and the indigestion I suffered from bolting my muesli. This was why I'd spent the past five months camping in a remote Turkish field. Then the first winter storm crashed through the valley, turning my tent into a canvas pole dancer. It dawned on me I might need a house. There were only two problems: I had just $6000 left in my account, and 6 weeks before winter. "Despite having very little money, almost no building experience, and endless naysayers who told her she would fail, Atulya K. Bingham completed her lovely earthbag home. Her personal, inspirational story shows how anyone can build their own sustainable home with earthbags." Dr. Owen Geiger, Director of the Geiger Research Institute of Sustainable Building, author of the Natural Building Blog and Earthbag Building website. "A joy from beginning to end - a brave, funny, moving account of building a new life and a new home out of mud in Turkey's mountain wilderness." Sara Crowe, author of Bone Jack (Nominated for the Carnegie Medal in 2015).




Climatological Data


Book Description