Historias de Puerto Rico


Book Description

This selection of 16 legends illustrates the diverse history of Puerto Rico, for intermediate level learners of Spanish. The stories are presented here with the English translation in parallel'




The Spanish Love Deception


Book Description

A wedding. A trip to Spain. The most infuriating man. And three days of pretending. Or in other words, a plan that will never work. Catalina Martín, finally, not single. Her family is happy to announce that she will bring her American boyfriend to her sister's wedding. Everyone is invited to come and witness the most magical event of the year. That would certainly be tomorrow's headline in the local newspaper of the small Spanish town I came from. Or the epitaph on my tombstone, seeing the turn my life had taken in the span of a phone call. Four weeks wasn't a lot of time to find someone willing to cross the Atlantic-from NYC and all the way to Spain-for a wedding. Let alone, someone eager to play along with my charade. But that didn't mean I was desperate enough to bring the 6'4 blue eyed pain in my ass standing before me, Aaron Blackford. The man whose main occupation was making my blood boil had just offered himself to be my date. Right after inserting his nose in my business, calling me delusional, and calling himself my best option. See? Outrageous. Aggravating. Blood boiling. And much to my total despair, also right. Which left me with a surly and extra large dilemma in my hands. Was it worth the suffering to bring my colleague and bane of my existence as my fake boyfriend to my sister's wedding? Or was I better off coming clean and facing the consequences of my panic induced lie? Like my abuela would say, que dios nos pille confesados.The Spanish Love Deception is an enemies-to-lovers, fake-dating.




Do You Speak American?


Book Description

Is American English in decline? Are regional dialects dying out? Is there a difference between men and women in how they adapt to linguistic variations? These questions, and more, about our language catapulted Robert MacNeil and William Cran—the authors (with Robert McCrum) of the language classic The Story of English—across the country in search of the answers. Do You Speak American? is the tale of their discoveries, which provocatively show how the standard for American English—if a standard exists—is changing quickly and dramatically. On a journey that takes them from the Northeast, through Appalachia and the Deep South, and west to California, the authors observe everyday verbal interactions and in a host of interviews with native speakers glean the linguistic quirks and traditions characteristic of each area. While examining the histories and controversies surrounding both written and spoken American English, they address anxieties and assumptions that, when explored, are highly emotional, such as the growing influence of Spanish as a threat to American English and the special treatment of African-American vernacular English. And, challenging the purists who think grammatical standards are in serious deterioration and that media saturation of our culture is homogenizing our speech, they surprise us with unpredictable responses. With insight and wit, MacNeil and Cran bring us a compelling book that is at once a celebration and a potent study of our singular language. Each wave of immigration has brought new words to enrich the American language. Do you recognize the origin of 1. blunderbuss, sleigh, stoop, coleslaw, boss, waffle? Or 2. dumb, ouch, shyster, check, kaput, scram, bummer? Or 3. phooey, pastrami, glitch, kibbitz, schnozzle? Or 4. broccoli, espresso, pizza, pasta, macaroni, radio? Or 5. smithereens, lollapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan? Or 6. vamoose, chaps, stampede, mustang, ranch, corral? 1. Dutch 2. German 3. Yiddish 4. Italian 5. Irish 6. Spanish




U.S. Mexican Spanish West of the Mississippi


Book Description

U.S. Mexican Spanish West of the Mississippi proposes a macro-dialect of the most widely spoken Spanish variety in the western United States from a number of social and linguistic angles. This book is unique in its focus on this one variety of Spanish, which allows for a closer investigation of the social context and linguistic features through a number of different topics. Comprised of 13 chapters divided into two sections, this textbook provides insight into the history, demographics, migration, and social issues of US Mexican Spanish in the first section and its lexicography, phonology, and structure in the second. Useful for scholars interested in Spanish in the United States, dialectology, and sociolinguistics, this is also an ideal resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Spanish.




Tristessa


Book Description

Based on Jack Kerouac's own real-life love affair in Mexico City, this is the story of a man's ill-fated relationship with a woman he portrays with tenderness and dignity, even as her life spirals out of control "Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight. "This entire short novel Tristessa's a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuaha dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums." —Allen Ginsberg




The Hill of the Ravens


Book Description

It is morning in America, many years in the future. As the 22nd century approaches, the United States and Canada have been shattered by war and upheaval and have broken up into separate ethnic, racial, and political enclaves. On the east coast a crumbling, bankrupt and tottering United States government still holds a weak and impotent sway over a ragged collection of tattered states and cities, but life is chaotic and plagued with poverty, violence, and desperation. The entire Southwest, beginning with Texas and extending westward to southern California and north as far as Utah, has become the Spanish-speaking Mexican state of Aztlan. And in the Pacific Northwest, from northern California on up to Alaska, a brutal fascist and white supremacist dictatorship rules the Northwest American Republic. Colonel Donald Redmond of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) is one of the Northwest Republic’s most ruthless and skillful political policemen. Then on a bright October morning he is called into the office of the State President, where he is given a top-secret assignment. A skeleton from the bloody and treacherous days of the revolution against America is about to emerge from the closet, and one of the most carefully guarded and suppressed mysteries of that revolution may become public knowledge. That long hidden truth may undermine the very moral and political foundations of the white supremacist state. A woman’s life hangs in the balance, but possibly even the fate a of a continent as well, as Donald Redmond and his partner Sergeant Nel plunge into the past and seek for the answer: who betrayed the Olympic Flying Column, and why? In The Hill of the Ravens, underground cult novelist H. A. Covington offers us a grim and chilling view of a future that may yet come to be.




Body Facts


Book Description

Body Facts tells the story of a speaker who is Korean, American, woman, and body. It weaves together Korean history and aesthetics, the speaker’s childhood and family stories, U.S. foreign policy with North Korea, and the things we do and shouldn’t do to our bodies.




Taboo in Discourse


Book Description

Through a selection of empirical studies anchored in analyses of authentic and contextualized language data, Taboo in Discourse explores the complex interplay between taboo and language in a range of social contexts, cultural settings and real-world discourse types from a broad and multidisciplinary perspective.




Laughing in the Dark


Book Description

Girlfriends are the best medicine. Franny, Jude, and Anna go on their annual lake camp-out in Northern California to eat and drink, skinny dip and whoop into the night when the subject turns to death. What do you want to do before you die? What will you wear to your funeral? Who will do your makeup? It gets darker back home as Jude fears she's developing her mother's dementia and starts to stash pills, research suicide and withdraw from her friends. Before the next camping trip each woman's life is turned upside down, along with her faith in the future and her friends in a year of suspicions, infidelity, the latest in California dying styles, the politics of assisted suicide along with debates on why breasts are not boobs and what wine to have with your last meal. Because, what better way to deal with the absurdity and certainty of mortality than to cry and laugh with your best friends?




When Kids Call the Shots


Book Description

If you want to fix your rebellious and disrespectful child, you need to start by fixing yourself. Are your kids pummeling you with demands and bossing you around with impunity? Have your once-precious preschoolers become rebellious, entitled, and disrespectful to authority? While there are plenty of so-called experts who might try to validate your convictions that you have done all you can to “fix” your “difficult” children, the hard truth is, they’re not doing you any favors by placing the responsibility solely on your children. Parenting struggles rarely originate from just one side. Instead, they erupt at the volatile intersection of a child's personality with a parent's own insecurities and behaviors. In When Kids Call the Shots, therapist and parenting expert Sean Grover untangles the forces driving family dysfunction, and helps parents assume their leadership roles once again. Parents will discover: Three common bullying styles used by kids Parenting styles that contribute to power balances Critical testing periods in a child’s development Coping mechanisms that backfire Personalized plans for calmly exerting authority in any scenario The solution to any problem begins with learning to control what you can control. In parenting, you’ve already learned how impossible it is to control your kids. Begin by controlling you!