The Winged Histories

The Winged Histories PDF

Author: Sofia Samatar

Publisher: Small Beer Press

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1618731157

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Four women — a soldier, a scholar, a poet, and a socialite — are caught up on opposing sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their loyalties and agendas and ideologies come into conflict, the four fear their lives may pass unrecorded. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history. Here is the much-anticipated companion novel to Sofia Samatar’s World Fantasy Award-winning debut, A Stranger in Olondria. The Winged Histories is the saga of an empire — and a family: their friendships, their enduring love, their arcane and deadly secrets. Samatar asks who makes history, who endures it, and how the turbulence of historical change sweeps over every aspect of a life and over everyone, no matter whether or not they choose to seek it out. Sofia Samatar is the author of the Crawford, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria. She also received the John W. Campbell Award. She has written for the Guardian, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and many other publications. She is working on a collection of stories. Her website is sofiasamatar.com.

A Stranger in Olondria

A Stranger in Olondria PDF

Author: Sofia Samatar

Publisher: Small Beer Press

Published: 2013-04-12

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1931520771

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Time Magazine: 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time · World Fantasy, British Fantasy, & Crawford Award winner Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl. In desperation, Jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most powerful cults. Yet even as the country shimmers on the cusp of war, he must face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of becoming free by setting her free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that seductive necromancy, reading. A Stranger in Olondria is a skillful and immersive debut fantasy novel that pulls the reader in deeper and deeper with twists and turns reminiscent of George R. R. Martin and Joe Hill.

Tender

Tender PDF

Author: Sofia Samatar

Publisher: Small Beer Press

Published: 2017-04-17

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1618731270

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The first collection of short fiction from a rising star whose stories have been anthologized in the first two volumes of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards. Some of Samatar’s weird and tender fabulations spring from her life and her literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void. Praise for Sofia Samatar’s Books: “The excerpt from Sofia Samatar’s compelling novel A Stranger in Olondria should be enough to make you run out and buy the book. Just don’t overlook her short ‘Selkie Stories Are for Losers,’ the best story about loss and love and selkies I’ve read in years.” —K. Tempest Bradford, NPR “An imaginative, poetic, and dark meditation on how history gets made.” —Hello Beautiful “Pleasantly startling and unexpected. Her prose is by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. . . . There are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Like an alchemist, Sofia Samatar spins golden landscapes and dazzling sentences.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review) “Beauty, wonder, and a soaring paean to the power of story.”—Jason Heller, NPR “Highly recommended.” —N. K. Jemisin, New York Times Book Review Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories. She has written for the Guardian, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld, among others, and has won the John W. Campbell Award, the Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She lives in Virginia.

Monster Portraits

Monster Portraits PDF

Author: Sofia Samatar

Publisher: Rose Metal Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781941628102

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two—texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday —Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts."--Amazon.com.

History Wars

History Wars PDF

Author: Tom Engelhardt

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Published: 1996-08-15

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1429936770

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From the "taming of the West" to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the portrayal of the past has become a battleground at the heart of American politics. What kind of history Americans should read, see, or fund is no longer merely a matter of professional interest to teachers, historians, and museum curators. Everywhere now, history is increasingly being held hostage, but to what end and why? In History Wars, eight prominent historians consider the angry swirl of emotions that now surrounds public memory. Included are trenchant essays by Paul Boyer, John W. Dower, Tom Engelhardt, Richard H. Kohn, Edward Linenthal, Micahel S. Sherry, Marilyn B. Young, and Mike Wallace.

Roma

Roma PDF

Author: Steven Saylor

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2007-03-06

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 1429917067

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Spanning a thousand years, and following the shifting fortunes of two families though the ages, this is the epic saga of Rome, the city and its people. Weaving history, legend, and new archaeological discoveries into a spellbinding narrative, critically acclaimed novelist Steven Saylor gives new life to the drama of the city's first thousand years — from the founding of the city by the ill-fated twins Romulus and Remus, through Rome's astonishing ascent to become the capitol of the most powerful empire in history. Roma recounts the tragedy of the hero-traitor Coriolanus, the capture of the city by the Gauls, the invasion of Hannibal, the bitter political struggles of the patricians and plebeians, and the ultimate death of Rome's republic with the triumph, and assassination, of Julius Caesar. Witnessing this history, and sometimes playing key roles, are the descendents of two of Rome's first families, the Potitius and Pinarius clans: One is the confidant of Romulus. One is born a slave and tempts a Vestal virgin to break her vows. One becomes a mass murderer. And one becomes the heir of Julius Caesar. Linking the generations is a mysterious talisman as ancient as the city itself. Epic in every sense of the word, Roma is a panoramic historical saga and Saylor's finest achievement to date.

The White Mosque

The White Mosque PDF

Author: Sofia Samatar

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2023-12-05

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1646222032

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years. In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a fifteenth-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveler of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs, and Samatar’s own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of color in America. A secular pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, The White Mosque traces the porous and ever-expanding borders of identity, asking: How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of the tissue of life, with its weird incidents, buried archives, and startling connections, does a person construct a self?

A Little History of Dragons

A Little History of Dragons PDF

Author: Joyce Hargreaves

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2009-11-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780802718020

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Why are dragons recognised in almost all cultures on Earth? What is the mysterious geomantic gold they secretly guard? Could dragons be a folk memory of something which once hunted us? In this beautiful little book Joyce Hargreaves tells the story of these extraordinary animals through examples drawn from all over the world. Richly illustrated, and with detailed appendices of noteable dragon sites around the United Kingdom, this is an essential and timeless book.

Black Wings

Black Wings PDF

Author: Von Hardesty

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2008-01-22

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0061261386

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Colin Powell once observed that "a dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work." This sentiment is mirrored dramatically in the story of African Americans in aerospace history. The invention of the airplane in the first decade of the twentieth century sparked a revolution in modern technology. Aviation in the popular mind became associated with adventure and heroism. For African Americans, however, this new realm of human flight remained off-limits, a consequence of racial discrimination. Many African Americans displayed a keen interest in the new air age, but found themselves routinely barred from gaining training as pilots or mechanics. Beginning in the 1920s, a small and widely scattered group of black air enthusiasts challenged this prevailing pattern of racial discrimination. With no small amount of effort—and against formidable odds—they gained their pilot licenses and acquired the technical skills to become aircraft mechanics. Over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, African Americans have expanded their participation in both military and civilian aviation and space flight, from the early pioneers and barnstormers through the Tuskegee airmen to Shuttle astronauts. Featuring approximately two hundred historic and contemporary photographs and a lively narrative that spans eight decades of U.S. history, Black Wings offers a compelling overview of this extraordinary and inspiring saga.