Seasons in Hippoland
Author: Wanjiku Wa Ngugi
Publisher:
Published: 2022-08
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9780645103090
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Wanjiku Wa Ngugi
Publisher:
Published: 2022-08
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9780645103090
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Wanjiku Wa Ngugi
Publisher:
Published: 2021-10-15
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780857428943
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An enchanting novel of magical realism from a new voice, Kenyan author Wanjikũ Wa Ngũgĩ. Victoriana is a country ruled by an Emperor-for-Life who is dying from an illness not officially acknowledged in a land where truth and facts are decided by the Emperor. The elite goes along with the charade. Their children are conditioned to conform. It is a land of truthful lies, where reality has uncertain meaning. Mumbi, a rebellious child from the capital of Westville, and her brother are sent to live in rural Hippoland. But what was meant to be a punishment turns out to be a glorious discovery of the magic of the land, best captured in the stories their eccentric aunt Sara tells them. Most captivating to the children is the tale of a porcelain bowl supposed to possess healing powers. Returning to Westville as an adult, Mumbi spreads the story throughout the city and to the entire country. Exhausted by years of endless bleak lies, the people are fascinated by the mystery of the porcelain bowl. When word of its healing powers reaches the Emperor himself, he commands Mumbi to find it for him--with dramatic consequences for everyone in Victoriana. Captivating and enchanting, Seasons in Hippoland plays with the tradition of magic realism. Every image in this novel is a story, and every story is a call for resistance to anyone who tries to confine our imagination or corrupt our humanity.
Author: Wanjiku wa Ngugi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2014-02-25
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 1476714932
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this “taut, smart international thriller” (Tananarive Due, American Book Award winner), a Kenyan expat finds her American dream marred by child trafficking, scandal, and a problematic past that will force an end to her life of privilege. Mugure and Zack seem to have the picture-perfect family: a young, healthy son, a beautiful home in Riverdale, New York, and a bright future. But one night, as Mugure is rummaging through an old drawer, she comes across a piece of paper with a note scrawled on it—a note that calls into question everything she’s ever believed about her husband… A wandering curiosity may have gotten the best of Mugure this time as she heads down a dangerous road that takes her back to Kenya, where new discoveries threaten to undo her idyllic life. She wonders if she ever really knew the man she married and begins to piece together the signs that were there since the beginning. Who was that suspicious man who trailed Zack and Mugure on their first date at a New York nightclub? What about the closing of the agency that facilitated the adoption of their son? Through a striking, beautifully rendered story, The Fall of Saints tackles realistic political and ethical issues head-on. This “fast-paced and urgent read that forces us to consider one of the worst human rights violations of our time” (asha bandele, author of The Prisoner’s Wife) will tug at your heart and keep it racing until the end.
Author: Gwendolyn Zepeda
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2019-05-07
Total Pages: 189
ISBN-13: 1617757233
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Brooklyn Noir came first in 2004, and now, 15 years later, Houston Noir--14 stories of intrigue, betrayal and death set from Tanglewood to Third Ward penned by current or former Houston authors--goes on sale." --Houston Chronicle "Akashic Books's long-running Noir Series tasks writers with imagining the dark sides of their communities, spinning gritty, shocking tales atop the local landscape. Recently the publisher tapped writer and former Houston poet laureate Gwendolyn Zepeda to serve as editor on a collection of stories about her native Bayou City. The end result is Houston Noir, out this month, whose 14 entries explore the murder, betrayal, and brujería lurking everywhere from River Oaks to the Ship Channel to a trailer park off FM 1960." --Houstonia Magazine "Houston is a city on the rise when it comes to crime fiction--something about all those lonely highways, gravity-defying overpasses, and drastic urban sprawl (and of course, the crime rate) make Houston a perfect setting for noir. This port city of close to five million residents is ready for a new reputation as a world capital of literature, and we're here to support Akashic's new collection of noir tales from Texas's most complex city." --CrimeReads, included in The Best New Crime Fiction of May 2019 "With sprawl and serial killers, Houston Noir packs a mean punch...Houston Noir is a welcome addition to the city's slowly filling bookcase." --Texas Observer "Editor Gwendolyn Zepeda has cannily divided the collection into four separate areas of the city, which only serves to multiply a reader's certainty: Like the sodden sheet covering a much-lacerated corpse, all of Houston is pretty much dripping with crime. Best to experience it, we suggest, only between the covers of this new paperback." --Austin Chronicle Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Tom Abrahams, Robert Boswell, Sarah Cortez, Anton DiSclafani, Stephanie Jaye Evans, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Adrienne Perry, Pia Pico, Reyes Ramirez, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Sehba Sarwar, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Larry Watts, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. From the introduction by Gwendolyn Zepeda: In a 2004 essay, Hunter S. Thompson described Houston as a "cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West--which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch." For what it's worth, that quote is now posted on a banner somewhere downtown and regularly, gleefully repeated by our local feature writers. Houston is a port city on top of a swamp and, yes, it has no zoning laws. And that means it's culturally diverse, internally incongruous, and ever-changing. At any intersection here, I might look out my car window and see a horse idly munching St. Augustine grass. And, within spitting distance of that horse, I might see a "spa" that's an obvious brothel, a house turned drug den, or a swiftly rising bayou that might overtake a car if the rain doesn't let up...Overall, this collection represents the very worst our city has to offer, for residents and visitors alike. But it also presents some of our best voices, veteran and emerging, to any reader lucky enough to pick up this book.
Author: Lewis A. Grossman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-09-21
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 0190612770
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A comprehensive history of the concept of freedom of therapeutic choice in the United States that presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American policy and law from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States. In Choose Your Medicine, Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. He vividly describes how activists and lawyers have resisted a wide variety of legal constraints on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA limitations on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. Grossman also considers the relationship between these campaigns for desired treatments and widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures such as vaccines and face masks. From the streets of San Francisco to the US Supreme Court, Choose Your Medicine examines an underexplored theme of American history, politics, and law that is more relevant today than ever.
Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2020-02-04
Total Pages: 179
ISBN-13: 1617757756
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this anthology, fourteen authors explore dark mysteries in the concrete jungle capital of Kenya, dealing with topics of race, religion, and corruption. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Stanley Gazemba, Ngumi Kibera, Peter Kimani, Winfred Kiunga, Kinyanjui Kombani, Caroline Mose, Kevin Mwachiro, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, Faith Oneya, Makena Onjerika, Troy Onyango, J.E. Sibi-Okumu, and Rasna Warah. Praise for Nairobi Noir “Nairobi Noir takes readers into the enigmas that haunt Kenya’s most populous city through the deft storytelling of a stellar cast of writers, which includes Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Stanley Gazemba, Makena Onjerika, Troy Onyango, and others.” —Brittle Paper, One of 50 Notable African Books of 2020 “Nairobi is a city of 3 million souls, so it makes sense as a setting Akashic Books’ famed noir series. 14 new stories fill a collection with Nairobi old and new; authors range in age from 24 to 81, and many layers of the city and its complex subcultures will be revealed as the reader makes their way through. Perfect for the armchair traveler!” —CrimeReads, included in CrimeReads’ Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020 “Crime fiction fans have much to savor.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: Elias Rodriques
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-06-22
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 0393540804
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Former high school classmates reckon with the death of a friend in this stunning debut novel. Along the Intracoastal waterways of North Florida, Daniel and Aubrey navigated adolescence with the electric intensity that radiates from young people defined by otherness: Aubrey, a self-identified "Southern cracker" and Daniel, the mixed-race son of Jamaican immigrants. When the news of Aubrey’s death reaches Daniel in New York, years after they’d lost contact, he is left to grapple with the legacy of his precious and imperfect love for her. At ease now in his own queerness, he is nonetheless drawn back to the muggy haze of his Palm Coast upbringing, tinged by racism and poverty, to find out what happened to Aubrey. Along the way, he reconsiders his and his family’s history, both in Jamaica and in this place he once called home. Buoyed by his teenage track-team buddies—Twig, a long-distance runner; Desmond, a sprinter; Egypt, Des’s girlfriend; and Jess, a chef—Daniel begins a frantic search for meaning in Aubrey’s death, recklessly confronting the drunken country boy he believes may have killed her. Sensitive to the complexities of class, race, and sexuality both in the American South and in Jamaica, All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running is a novel of uncommon tenderness, grief, and joy. All the while, it evokes the beauty and threat of the place Daniel calls home—where the river meets the ocean.
Author: Jung Yun
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2021-11-09
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 1250274338
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A New York Times Editors' Choice Book From the critically-acclaimed author of Shelter, an unflinching portrayal of a woman trying to come to terms with the ghosts of her past and the tortured realities of a deeply divided America. Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former model, is struggling to reinvent herself as a freelance writer when she receives an unexpected assignment. Her mentor from grad school offers her a chance to write for a prestigious magazine about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota. Elinor grew up near the Bakken, raised by an overbearing father and a distant Korean mother who met and married when he was stationed overseas. After decades away from home, Elinor returns to a landscape she hardly recognizes, overrun by tens of thousands of newcomers. Surrounded by roughnecks seeking their fortunes in oil and long-time residents worried about their changing community, Elinor experiences a profound sense of alienation and grief. She rages at the unrelenting male gaze, the locals who still see her as a foreigner, and the memories of her family’s estrangement after her mother decided to escape her unhappy marriage, leaving Elinor and her sister behind. The longer she pursues this potentially career-altering assignment, the more her past intertwines with the story she’s trying to tell, revealing disturbing new realities that will forever change her and the way she looks at the world. With spare and graceful prose, Jung Yun's O Beautiful presents an immersive portrait of a community rife with tensions and competing interests, and one woman’s attempts to reconcile her anger with her love of a beautiful, but troubled land.
Author: Yelena Moskovich
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 2021-05-18
Total Pages: 151
ISBN-13: 1953387039
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"A Door Behind a Door is loose, dreamy, and symbol-packed... The resurfacing of characters from Olga’s past in her new city speaks to the theme of immigration in the novel, of new homes and the passage from old to new—a passage that is perhaps not ever fully complete in the sense that the past cannot be shaken." —Marta Balcewicz, Ploughshares In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of ’91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.
Author: Genevieve Hudson
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Published: 2020-05-19
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1631496301
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A “soul-stirring debut,” Boys of Alabama tells the “bewitching” (Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine) tale of sixteen-year-old Max’s first year in America. “Daring, unusual . . . and startlingly fresh” (Don Noble, Alabama Public Radio), Boys of Alabama announced Genevieve Hudson’s place in the canon of the southern gothic alongside Donna Tartt and Harper Lee. Newly arrived in Alabama, Max falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. Although his German parents don’t know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives after being taken in by the football team. But when he meets fishnet-wearing Pan in physics class, they embark on a quixotic, consuming relationship. Writing in “prose that is always imaginative and sensual” (Sarah Neilson, Believer), Hudson offers a complex portrait of masculinity, religion, immigration, and the adolescent pressures that require total conformity.