![]() ![]() His plays have been awarded numerous prizes. In Mda’s style, the African oral narrative tradition is interwoven with elements of the Xhosa Intsomi Theatre, with magical realism and the European Theatre of the Absurd. ![]() Beginning with the early drama »We Shall Sing for the Fatherland« (1977) many of his around thirty plays have repeated the premonition that a new government, being as corrupt and craving for power as the old one, would betray the ideals of resistance. During the 1970’s and 80’s, the theatre was Mda’s foremost interest. He is currently a literary consultant at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University in the US. After thirty two years in exile, he decided to return to South Africa where he worked as a Professor of Drama at the University of the Witwatersrand, and later became a full-time writer, painter and film maker. from the University of Cape Town in 1990. Later on, he went to the USA, studied drama and mass communication at Ohio University, and received his Ph.D. Zakes Mda finished his schooling in exile in Lesotho. In the 1960’s, his father was imprisoned and the family had to leave South Africa. Mda, was an anti-Apartheid activist, a founding member and president of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League. ![]() ![]() Zakes Mda, full name Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, was born in Herschel, Eastern Cape, South Africa, in 1948. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Rule by and Taking Chances by were both originally published in 2012, but have been updated with these beautiful new covers! I mean if you look at the original covers they were def due for a little makeover! □ Thank you, Partner for these #giftedbooks ! If you are looking for steamy romances with a plot and character development, then these two books need to be added to your TBR! I’m seriously obsessed with Rule, and I will be starting Taking Chances soon. #rule #jaycrownover #read #markedmenseries #takingchances #mollymcadams #bookmail #denver #booktok #booksta #stanley #books #flowersandbooks". #qotd What was the last movie adaptation that you loved? Thank you, Partner, for the gifted bookmail. I’m extra excited because the story takes place in Denver! I wonder if they need extras □ I’m off to read it before the movie comes out. #rule #jaycrownover #read #markedmenseries #takingchances #mollymcadams #bookmail #denver #booktok #booksta #stanley #books #flowersandbooksĢ8 Likes, TikTok video from MusingsofRu □ "□ Rule by Jay Crownover Look what I found in my mailbox!!! It’s being turned into a movie called Marked Men. ![]() ![]() ![]() □ Rule by Jay Crownover Look what I found in my mailbox!!! It’s being turned into a movie called Marked Men. ![]() ![]() After six months in Madrid, Isabel Allende moved her daughter to a clinic in California. "Ever since Paula became ill," she writes, "a dark curtain has separated me from the fantasy world in which I used to move so freely reality has become intractable" (Allende 260). As a fiction writer used to inventing and controlling the lives of her characters, Allende was humbled by the world of treatment and disease. The uncertainty of Paula's future triggered a sense of powerlessness and fear in the author. Paula, who was twenty-eight years old and recently married, was treated in the intensive care unit of a public hospital in Madrid where she and her husband were living at the time. (3) Due to a misdiagnosis for a seizure, she received a massive dose of sedatives that pushed her into a coma from which she never emerged. This book, which can also be read as a biographical pathography, is a loving tribute to her late daughter, Paula Frias Allende, who in 1991 became gravely ill with porphyria, a rare, genetic disease that she inherited from her father. THE Chilean novelist, Isabel Allende (1942-), creates meaning from the experience of suffering through her daughter's illness and from bereavement in an autobiographical narrative entitled Paula (1994). It is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. You don't have anything If you don't have the stories. ![]() ![]() They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. ![]() ![]() ![]() Streets of Lahore, the landscapes of Grasse, the world of deghs and petals, the fragrance of distilleries and the delicate choreography of calligraphy: the author transports us into a looking glass with both images and imagery. Spread over half a century, it acquires a luminous tinge owing to its verdant vocabulary, unique language and poignant overtones. ![]() Mounted lavishly amid sweeping landscapes, lush language and intricate detailing, The Book of Everlasting Things is a larger-than-life ode to love. Set in Lahore, Paris and Grasse, the book charts the journey of two young lovers, Perfumer Samir and Calligrapher Firdaus. ![]() ![]() This is a novel that has partition as one of the landscapes, just like it speaks of World War I and World War 2, post war Europe and the subject of multiple migrations.” “This is not a partition novel.” she insists and adds, “I don’t want people to think that I only write about that considering that I’m already pigeonholed into that subject matter. After two acclaimed books on partition and its lingering effects in the acclaimed Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory and In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition, the author is back with her debut novel, The Book of Everlasting Things. I thought I would work on something lighter.” answers author and historian Aanchal Malhotra when asked about her shift from non-fiction to fiction. “It is incredibly difficult to carry on the sadness of others. ![]() ![]() Oluo is asking us to evaluate the myths America tells itself about itself, see the violence within, be honest about the perpetrators and the victims, and then tell different stories. "A conversational call to action, an urging to rewrite our definition of White manhood and diminish the power it holds…. “Wide-ranging in the cultural history it provides, Mediocre illuminates the various ways white men work to maintain racial power.”- New York Times ![]() Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism.Īs provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness. Through the last 150 years of American history - from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics - Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments? From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, an “illuminating” ( New York Times Book Review) history of white male identity. ![]() ![]() ![]() Her journey began when she discovered that like most parents, hers happen to also be compulsive liars. I’m so excited to have author Kimberly Mullican visiting today! Here’s a little bit about Kim: (*If you’d like to ask “Dear Abbey” a question, please send it to my mom: soespo (at) with a picture of your pet.) What was the silliest thing you’ve ever dressed your pet up in? How did they react? So, there you have it, Gia! I give your butt five woofs! The scoop is we just see two primary colors (blue & yellow) instead of three (red, blue & yellow). ![]() ![]() (My mom needs to share those treats she eats in front of me at night.) Anyway, humans think we’re color blind but we’re not. A much easier technique than all that yappin’ humans do.) I think you look positively woofy but, my mom says she wouldn’t be caught dead with flower patterns on her hieny at the dog park. (That’s how we find out about each other’s temperament to see if we can be friends, ya know. “Gia would like to ask Abbey if this vest makes her butt look big?”Ībbey says: Woof! Hey, mom…this screen isn’t scratch and sniff? (Mom says: No!) Well, Gia, I think your butt looks mucho inviting. I have two human brothers who like to wrestle on the floor, one canine sister (who gets a bit grumpy with all my puppy energy), a dad who is the head of the pack and a mom who lets me sneak on the couch when he’s not home. My family rescued me when I was only 5 weeks old. Greeting humans! I’m Abbey and my mom says I’m so smart I should have my own guest blog to answer questions from you or your pets! First a bit about me: ![]() ![]() The memo is one of more than 130 newly declassified CIA documents that detail the agency’s secret involvement in the printing of “Doctor Zhivago” - an audacious plan that helped deliver the book into the hands of Soviet citizens who later passed it friend to friend, allowing it to circulate in Moscow and other cities in the Eastern Bloc. “This book has great propaganda value,” a CIA memo to all branch chiefs of the agency’s Soviet Russia Division stated, “not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication: we have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.” The idea immediately gained traction in Washington. ![]() The British were suggesting that the CIA get copies of the novel behind the Iron Curtain. ![]() The book, by poet Boris Pasternak, had been banned from publication in the Soviet Union. Inside were two rolls of film from British intelligence - pictures of the pages of a Russian-language novel titled “ Doctor Zhivago.” ![]() MILKS/ASSOCIATED PRESS)Ī secret package arrived at CIA headquarters in January 1958. Soviet writer and poet Boris Pasternak near his home in the countryside outside Moscow on Oct. ![]() ![]() ![]() The term "Planet Earth," so familiar to us today, would have been nonsensical.Īrt by Scriven Bolton. ![]() Indeed, the word "planet" comes from the Greek word planete, meaning "wanderer." While today we use the word to mean any solid, spherical body circling a star, 500 years ago it meant one of the five bright stars that were not "fixed" in the heavens. ![]() The planets were merely a special class of bright stars that wandered among the other "fixed" stars. The stars, while some were brighter than others, were nevertheless thought to be at more or less the same distance from the earth - though just what that distance might be was a matter for debate. It was certainly not thought of as a world in its own right. Second, there needed to be a realistic means of leaving the earth.īefore the seventeenth century, little was known of the moon. Two things were needed to change fantasy into reality.įirst, there needed to be solid, scientific knowledge about the actual conditions that existed beyond the earth's atmosphere and on the moon and other planets. ![]() Before the publication of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1869), literary journeys to the moon and planets were almost exclusively limited to allegory, fantasy or satire. ![]() ![]() ![]() As they leave, the frames slowly fade to white, as the rising water begins to destroy the castle. After construction is completed, and after temporarily stopping the sea from eroding the castle away, the two decide to go on a journey to discover the cause behind the rising sea level. The woman notes that the sea (visible on the right side of the frame) is rising. "Time" begins with two stick figures, a woman and a man, building a sand castle complex on a beach. ![]() In 2014, it won the Hugo Award in the Best Graphic Story category. Described by Glen Tickle of Geekosystem as Munroe's " magnum opus", "Time" attracted significant attention and was well received online several projects, wikis and web communities were built about it. By the end of the story, the characters return home to save their people. The strip's story, set 11,000 years in the future in the basin of the Mediterranean Sea during a supposed recurrence of the Zanclean flood, features two characters journeying uphill to discover where the rising water is originating. Each image represented a single frame in a larger story. ![]() Beginning with a single frame published at midnight on March 25, 2013, the image was updated every 30 minutes until March 30, 2013, and then every hour for 118 days (123 days in total), ending on July 26 with a total of 3,102 unique images. " Time" is the 1,190th strip of Randall Munroe's webcomic xkcd. ![]() ![]() ![]() These will be going on my ‘to read’ list. Robin Jarvis ‘Deptford Mice’ Trilogy – absolutely loved these when I was younger, I also have several others by Robin Jarvis and see he has more I haven’t read.Roald Dahl, but particularly ‘James and the Giant Peach’ – just brilliant is all I have to say about Roald Dahl.Some of my most memorable childhood favourites include: Andy Stanton’s ‘Mr Gum’ series – Really funny, they made me do actual ‘LOL’s’!.See reviews page for more detailed thoughts. In an abandoned old house known as the Skirtings in the London borough of Deptford, a colony of gentle mice lead tidy, sheltered lives, follow their ancient traditions and worship the Green. Jacqueline Wilson’s ‘Four Children and IT’ and ‘Hetty Feather’ – easy to read and they really get you thinking. ![]() Haunters is longer and more serious and Dan is shorter and more amusing/humorous. Thomas Taylor’s ‘Haunters’ and ‘Dan and the Dead’ – mystery, history, intrigue and ghosts.I have the rest of this series and some others by Philip Reeve waiting to be read. Philip Reeve’s ‘Mortal Engines’ – absolutely brilliant and like nothing I’ve ever read.Trenton Lee Stewart’s ‘Mysterious Benedict Society’ series – clever stories that are interwoven, hard to put down!.A few of my most recent favourites include: I’ve been doing a lot of reading this week and it got me thinking about books I’ve really enjoyed (as a child and an adult). ![]() |