Norma


Book Description

The hair-raising mash-up of feminist X-Men, gothic fairy tale, family saga and biting social criticism that is taking Europe by storm.When Anita Naakka jumps in front of an oncoming train, her daughter, Norma, is left alone with the secret they have spent their lives hiding: Norma has supernatural hair, sensitive to the slightest changes in her mood--and the moods of those around her--moving of its own accord, corkscrewing when danger is near. And so it is her hair that alerts her, while she talks with a strange man at her mother's funeral, that her mother may not have taken her own life. Setting out to reconstruct Anita's final months--sifting through puzzling cell phone records, bank statements, video files--Norma begins to realise that her mother knew more about her hair's powers than she let on: a sinister truth beyond Norma's imagining.




Norma Kamali: I Am Invincible


Book Description

Wit and wisdom from the innovative, influential, and empowering wellness guru and designer Norma Kamali In her first book, fashion legend Norma Kamali offers readers a stylish, inspiring, and heartfelt handbook for gliding boldly through each of life’s decades with purpose and power. Manifesto, memoir, and essential guide, its pages are informed by 50 years of Kamali’s twists, turns, triumphs, and failures experienced while ï¬?nding the courage and conviction to race after her dreams and never look back. At 75, Kamali looks—and acts—nearly half her age. The secret, she writes, is learning to age with power: Embracing a healthy lifestyle and looking forward to every milestone and the changes they bring, with the realization that reaching one’s potential has no date. With wisdom and wit, Kamali imparts her lessons on authentic beauty, timeless style, career-building, ï¬?tness, and health through personal stories, worldly insight, and actionable advice designed to help women of every age create their happiest, healthiest, most successful and fulfilling lives.




Norma


Book Description




Norma


Book Description

Norma, a new work of fiction by writer Mark Zwolinski, asks you to enjoy a roller coaster like story about a kind, elderly woman, who saves a town from corruption and violence by surviving those very things herself. But the book also asks you to consider how you read fiction. Norma, as a work of fiction, intends to take its audience through a heroic tale where a 56 year old woman's life changes after she discovers a phone that belonged to a young murder victim, who bravely took a video of her assailants during a fatal altercation. There is all manner of life therein: love, sadness, emotion, endurance, the things we see when we look in the mirror, the challenges facing the elderly, poetry, youth, and above all, kindness. At the same time, there are two dissertations on the unseen balances between truth and lies. They are meant to create an over-riding ideology, which presents a constant reminder about the always undefinable space in which the characters live in, and the spaces we find ourselves in. It is an intellectual exercise in reading that will appeal to any lover of fiction. It is different. it is challenging, yet it is rewarding. All along, the truth about truth and lies, and the spaces we live in, are not truly defined until the book arrives at its final words. There is a strength there, and it is waiting for you. Finding it will rake all of your emotions. But there is a triumph in that. It is a tale for all ages. It's waiting there in this easy to read, page turner that mirrors the experience of spending time in an art museum with your favorite paintings.




Norma


Book Description

Vincenzo Bellini's Norma, first produced at La Scala, Milan, in 1831, is widely regarded as the greatest achievement of the bel canto era. Its title role, sung at the premiere by Giuditta Pasta, has been undertaken in more recent times by Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland and Monserrat Caballe and remains one of the supremely challenging soprano parts in the operatic repertory. The opera tells of the conflicting loyalties of the High Priestess of the Druids, Norma, who is torn between her duty to her people and her love for the father of her two children, the proconsul of the occupying Roman forces in Gaul.The guide contains articles on the background to the opera and the development of bel canto, a detailed examination of its musical structure and a survey of its performance history, dealing in particular with the approaches of some of the many distinguished singers who have appeared in its principal roles. There is also a discussion of the contentious issue of which voice-types should more appropriately be singing each of the two leading female characters. The guide includes the full libretto with English translation, sixteen pages of illustrations, a musical thematic guide, a discography, a bibliography, and DVD and website guides.Contains:The Genesis of Norma, Susan RutherfordNorma's Musical Journey, Roger ParkerNorma: A Selective Performance History, John AllisonWeep, Shudder, Die: Vincenzo Bellini, Norma and Their Admirers, Gary KahnNorma: Libretto by Felice Romani after Alexandre Soumet's verse tragedy NormaNorma: English translation by Kenneth Chalmers




Norma


Book Description

From the internationally best-selling author of Purge and When the Doves Disappeared, a spellbinding new novel set in present-day Helsinki, about a young woman with a fantastical secret who is trying to solve the mystery of her mother's death. When Anita Naakka jumps in front of an oncoming train, her daughter, Norma, is left alone with the secret they have spent their lives hiding: Norma has supernatural hair, sensitive to the slightest changes in her mood--and the moods of those around her--moving of its own accord, corkscrewing when danger is near. And so it is her hair that alerts her, while she talks with a strange man at her mother's funeral, that her mother may not have taken her own life. Setting out to reconstruct Anita's final months--sifting through puzzling cell phone records, bank statements, video files--Norma begins to realize that her mother knew more about her hair's powers than she let on: a sinister truth beyond Norma's imagining. As Sofi Oksanen leads us ever more deeply into Norma's world, weaving together past and present, she gives us a dark family drama that is a searing portrait of both the exploitation of women's bodies and the extremes to which people will go for the sake of beauty.




Vincenzo Bellini: Norma


Book Description

Norma is by common consent the finest of the ten operas composed during Vincenzo Bellini's short career, representing his genius more comprehensively than is usually the case with any single work by an operatic composer. This 1998 handbook provides the biographical and cultural context of the opera. It gives a full synopsis and an examination of the music and poetry, which is rooted in the aesthetics of early nineteenth-century Italian opera. Professor Kimbell suggests something of the impression Norma has made on our imaginations and sensibilities in the 165 years since it was first produced in Milan in December 1831. He considers the great interpretations of the eponymous leading role. His discussion also embraces Bellini's work more generally by presenting some of the critical reactions to his music.




Bellini's Norma


Book Description




Norma Jean


Book Description

Marilyn Monroe remains the most provocative female legend of the twentieth century. What you may have known about her before was only the tip of the iceberg. For twenty years, the men and women who knew Marilyn best saw what they knew suppressed because certain important people were still living, and the tenor of the times prohibited frankness. Instead, rumors ballooned. This book finally sets the record straight. Fred Guiles—whom Norman Mailer acknowledges as the chief source of fact about Marilyn—has written the life behind the legend. He reveals what really happened in the careening career of the pretty waif named Norma Jean Mortensen, who married the boy next door, became a model, an actress, movie star, married an incompatible legend named Joe DiMaggio, sought to improve the mind that came with her near-perfect body, married playwright Arthur Miller, lent herself to the Svengalilike ministrations of Paula and Lee Strasberg, became the mistress of John and then Robert Kennedy when they ran the country, kept camera crews and studios waiting—but not death, which took her under the most unusual circumstances by the age of thirty-six. A legend, by definition, is unaltered by fact, but the enthralled reader will find the revelations in this book no deterrent to the love of Marilyn Monroe by understanding at last what happened to the Queen of Need. Among the people interviewed for this book are Arthur Miller; James E. Dougherty, her first husband; Frank Taylor, the producer of The Misfits; Lee Strasberg; Otto Preminger; Billy Wilder; Joshua Logan and John Huston.




Beyond Norma Rae


Book Description

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources—union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories—Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism. While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.