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Showing 1 - 6 of 6 matches in All Departments
An eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women
Because my love's American,
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 'At heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies ... [A] valuable, discomforting book' The New York Times Book Review Seven years in the making, Amity and Prosperity tells the story of the energy boom's impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and of one woman's transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist. Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking boom comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. Intrigued by reports of lucrative natural gas leases in her neighbours' mailboxes, she strikes a deal with a Texas-based energy company. Soon trucks begin rumbling past her small farm, a fenced-off drill site rises on an adjacent hilltop, and domestic animals and pets start to die. When mysterious sicknesses begin to afflict her children, she appeals to the company for help. Its representatives insist that nothing is wrong. Alarmed by her children's illnesses, Haney joins with neighbours and a committed husband-and-wife legal team to investigate what's really in the water and air. Against local opposition, Haney and her allies doggedly pursue their case in court and begin to expose the damage that's being done to the land her family has lived on for centuries. Drawing on seven years of immersive reporting, prizewinning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold reveals what happens when an imperilled town faces a crisis of values, and a family wagers everything on an improbable quest for justice.
The chairs have come in and the crisp yellow thwock of the ball being hit says somehow, now that it's fall, I'm a memory of myself. My whole old life--I mourn you sometimes in places you would have been.""" ""--October" The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds--the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places-- and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in "Wideawake Field "sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.
"The Gifts of the State and Other Stories: New Writing from
Afghanistan" radically reshapes our idea of Afghanistan as a place
of unquestioning religiosity, brutal sexism, and anti-American and
Russian resistance. Rather, employing stark naturalism and
surrealistic and genre elements, these writers bravely depict
Western-styled women in former Russian apartments and men obsessed
with fantasies based on Mickey Spillane novels. "Though it is set in a place we think we know (Afghanistan),
this continuously startling and often very moving book opens up a
new country, a fresh and diverse landscape of human striving and
disappointment. With grace, melancholy and wit, it describes the
joys and sadnesses of ordinary life obscured by the last decade of
shrill headlines. Everyone should read it."--Pankaj Mishra "Very little of what is written in English can describe the grip
of Afghanistan's "normal emergency" as can these beautiful,
remarkable stories. They are heartbreaking and violent tales,
excerpts from the minds of orphans who mourn not so much mere
parents as ancestry itself - the ancestry of history and wisdom -
and there is rarely any redemption to the grief save only the
lyricism of storytelling. But this lyricism is rich, one that
brings into fluid English the poignant harmonies of other
literatures and tongues, and it carries with it a faith greater
than those of warring forces." --Rana Dasgupta, author of "Tokyo
Canceled" and "Solo" "I was extremely impressed by this collection of stories by
Afghan writers under thirty. From the elemental simplicity of Abdul
Shakoor Jawad's story of retribution and reconciliation, 'The
Hasher', to the acid wit of Hosai Wardak's exposure of collective
mysogyny, 'Ice Cream', to the complex horrors of Khalid Ahmad
Atif's extraordinary war story, 'The Sea Floor', the work on
display here is not only gripping and beautifully executed, but
also possessed of a rare cultural and political urgency. I
recommend it very highly."--James Lasdun Adam Klein is the author of story collection "The Medicine
Burns," the novel "Tiny Ladies," and the artist monograph "Jerome:
After the Pageant." His work has appeared in "Bomb," the "New York
Times At War Blog," and the "Huffington Post."
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