Into the Dark Night, Falling


Book Description

This is the story of the original Jack Riordan, uncle of the Jack Riordan of Drowning in Her Eyes and The House that Jack Built. He grows up in a sleepy country town and joins the air force during the Second World War. He trains and travels to England, where he becomes a bomber pilot. He is reported missing on operations, and presumed dead, his body never recovered. But the story is not that simple. He is shot down into the North Sea and he and two of his crew survive to be rescued by Dutch fishermen. They get him ashore and feed them into the escape network for downed fliers. There Jack meets Dominique, a French girl who is part of the resistance. They fall in love and stay together, fighting the Germans, until Jack is taken prisoner by the SS just before the liberation of Paris. He does not know that Dominique has fallen pregnant and he never knows, for he is executed by the Germans. After the war, Dominique searches for him without success. Finally, after her death, their daughter, Vivienne, becomes obsessed with finding her lost fathers last resting place. After much research she does find him. He had been buried wearing another mans identity discs. Vivienne travels to Australia to find her unknown relatives, and in the process she finds a love of her own.




Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night


Book Description

The poetry of Dylan Thomas has long been heralded as amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and along with his play, Under Milk Wood, his books are amongst the best-loved works in the literary canon. This new selection of his poetry contains all of his best-loved verse - including 'I See the Boys of Summer', 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and, of course, 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night' - as well as some of his lesser-known lyrical pieces, and aims to show the great poet in a new light. '[Then] the greatest living poet in the English language.' (Observer) 'He is unique, for he distils an exquisite mysterious moving quality which defies analysis.' (Sunday Times)




New Tracks, Night Falling


Book Description

"Anyone who can get through a newspaper," Jeanne Murray Walker says, "will find this book a piece of cake." Indeed, the poems in this book are strong but unpretentious pieces rich in meaning and feeling. / The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other. Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be: / In this dark time I want to / make light bigger, / to toss it in the air like a pizza chef, / to stick my fists in, stretching it / till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow / and spin it above us. / Hope continually threads its way through these poems. We hear its voice as Walker writes about choices both those we make and those beyond our making. / And we feel hope rising like bread when Walker focuses on the gifts of potential, resolution, mercy, joy the new tracks that we can make in fresh snow, on old paths, along the roads more or less traveled. These are stays against the falling night. / With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world.




The Poems of Dylan Thomas


Book Description

The most complete and current edition of Dylan Thomas' collected poetry in a beautiful gift edition celebrating the centenary of his birth The reputation of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has not waned in the fifty years since his death. A Welshman with a passion for the English language, Thomas’s singular poetic voice has been admired and imitated, but never matched. This exciting, newly edited annotated edition offers a more complete and representative collection of Dylan Thomas’s poetic works than any previous edition. Edited by leading Dylan Thomas scholar John Goodby from the University of Swansea, The Poems of Dylan Thomas contains all the poems that appeared in Collected Poems 1934-1952, edited by Dylan Thomas himself, as well as poems from the 1930-1934 notebooks and poems from letters, amatory verses, occasional poems, the verse film script for “Our Country,” and poems that appear in his “radio play for voices,” Under Milk Wood. Showing the broad range of Dylan Thomas’s oeuvre as never before, this new edition places Thomas in the twenty-first century, with an up-to-date introduction by Goodby whose notes and annotations take a pluralistic approach.




Darkness Falls on the Land of Light


Book Description

This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors of today's evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment. The 1740s and 1750s were the dark night of the New England soul, as men and women groped toward a restructured religious order. Conflict transformed inclusive parishes into exclusive networks of combative spiritual seekers. Then as now, evangelicalism emboldened ordinary people to question traditional authorities. Their challenge shattered whole communities.




Black Night Falling


Book Description

It was almost dark when i landed... 'There are echoes of Chandler in washed-up journalist Charlie Yates's terse, cynical narration but this is more than a mere pastiche: it's subtle, original and enthralling.' Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express Having left Texarkana for the safety of the West Coast, reporter Charlie Yates finds himself drawn back to the South, to Hot Springs, Arkansas, as an old acquaintance asks for his help. This time it's less of a story Charlie's chasing, more of a desperate attempt to do the right thing before it's too late. Rod Reynolds' exceptional second novel picks up just a few months on from The Dark Inside, and once again displays the feel for place, period and atmosphere which marked out his acclaimed debut.




Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money


Book Description

Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money is a groundbreaking study covering a range of contemporary authors and issues, from Haizi to Yin Lichuan and from poetic rhythm to exile-bashing. Its rigorous scholarship, literary sensitivity and lively style make it eminently fit for classroom use.




As Night Falls


Book Description

In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated and exposed, there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. This fascinating and vivid picture of nocturnal life in Middle Eastern cities shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. Offering the possibility of livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; the darkness allowed confiding, hiding and conspiring - activities which had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the early modern period. Instead of dismissing the night as merely a dark corridor between days, As Night Falls demonstrates how fundamental these nocturnal hours have been in shaping the major social, cultural and political processes in the early modern Middle East.




When Grown Ups Cry


Book Description

"Yoyo was interesting because she was always having a lot of secrets and she never shared them, sometimes maybe with anyone. She felt that if she will talk about it those words and things will disappear so she rather was just listening and observing and was quiet. " The book is about a growing up girl. She was adopted and she sees things a bit different and since she was little, she loves the stars the most. First she saw them on the sky at night than as people too.




Before Night Falls


Book Description

"Any attempt to reckon with Cuba's torturous twentieth century will have to take into account Arenas's monumental work ... an essential human testimony, joyful and enraged, a triumph of conscience." -- Garth Greenwell The acclaimed memoir of queer Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas chronicling his tumultuous yet luminary life, from his impoverished upbringing in Cuba to his imprisonment at the hands of a Communist regime The astonishing memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas "is a book above all about being free," said The New York Review of Books--sexually, politically, artistically. Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his supression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his "deathbed ode to eroticism," Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author's acclaimed novels.