![]() ![]() ![]() This novel is exciting, fast-paced, full of intricate characters, and set in a deeply complicated world. As they flee, they struggle with the complications of their relationship and the constant pursuit of Knox’s father, head of the city’s SecuriTech company. But before Syd’s sentence can be carried out, the proxy and his patron are on the run, rushing to escape the high-tech city and its system of debt. Syd only has two years left before he is free of his debt, but Knox’s actions result in his death sentence. In Alex London’s young adult novel Proxy, Mountain City is divided into the Upper City, filled with people living in luxury, and the Lower City, where people live in slums and struggle to repay their debts. Knox is a rich patron, and Syd is the indebted proxy who receives punishment in Knox’s place. Publisher: Philomel Books/Speak (June 2013)Īfter Knox Brindle kills someone in a car accident, Sydney Carton is sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. Genre: Young adult, sci-fi, LGBTQ, dystopian ![]() ![]() 100-Character Breakdown: A thriller sci-fi novel with a gay hero, intensely intricate characters, and a complex setting. ![]()
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![]() ![]() I will not stand up for you, you are not part of me. You changed your gender, you want to be called they. ![]() How could a person wearing a turban or a scarf or a yarmulke be like me? After all, I wear a baseball cap with a Dallas Cowboys Star or a cowboy hat, or a John Deere hat. You know, that person who quietly checked out books, worked in the cubicle next to you, and lived in your neighborhood is really evil incarnate. ![]() Be Careful, Your Neighbor May be a Devil. Librarians are seen as people who want to fill children’s minds with porn and make them question their own sexual identity. Transgender people are called groomers and pedophiles. People in State Legislatures across the United States see almost everyone that does not look like them as strangers who perform awful actions. Valarie Kaur defines deep solidarity as showing up and seeing no Stranger. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Dine’ philosophy embodied Father Sky and Mother Earth as the parents of all and gave no individual absolute title to a piece of the sky or the earth. Use-rights were established by anyone who used and needed the land. In this red earth country of monoliths, buttes, and bridges of rock made by erosion of time, the Dine’ had no concept of real ownership of land but instead one of communal property. ![]() colorful, beautiful to look at, but hard to make a living from.”1 The Navajos live “in severely eroded plateau country. This relationship justifies to them permanent ties and absolute use-fights to the native land that is bounded by four sacred mountains: the Blanca Peaks in New Mexico on the east, Mount Taylor in New Mexico on the south, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona on the west, and the Hesperus Peaks in Colorado on the north. The Dine’ mention their strong relationship to their Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, in their mythology and ceremonies. 1300, even though the Dine’ (“the People”) themselves do not attest to this. It is generally agreed that the Navajos, the largest Indian tribe in the United States, came into the Southwest sometime after A.D. ![]() ![]() His books are often on themes of history, biography and social issues. Japanese rituals perform a powerful role in helping people deal with nature, time, seasons, aging and death - bringing a bit of everyday magic into everyday lives.Ībout the Author Sean Michael Wilson is a writer living in Scotland and Japan. Many of these cultural practices are seen as mundane or normal, but they each express something sublime and numinous. ![]() to respecting the dead ancestors via giving them offerings while chasing away demons. to smiling at the rebirth of the sun and nature in spring festivals of admiring new blossoms. ![]() ![]() If we look closer, we find that 'magic' is very much a part of life in Japan! Japan is alive with magical festivals, practices and rituals - from marking the liminal time of new year with the burning of last year's objects. ![]() Japan is sometimes called a 'non-religious' country, but this is only half-true. Book Synopsis The Spirit of Japan is an accessible introduction to Japanese spiritual practice, perfect for those who are curious about spirituality or Japanese culture and would like to know more. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, received two theatrical adaptations and a limited Netflix series that was more remix than remake (read all about the journey from page to screen here).Īnd then there’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a 2018 film based on what is widely considered Jackson’s masterpiece and the final novel published in her lifetime (1962, three years before her sudden death). ![]() There’s a 1969 short film based on “The Lottery” that many probably saw in middle or high school as a supplement to the reading of the story (and also a staple on numerous YouTube channels). Kruger and Passon’s film more or less recreates this narrative for the screen, and in many places they do capture Jackson’s illusory storytelling style.īecause of this more ephemeral, less tangible aspect to Jackson’s writing - and because the critical reappraisal of her oeuvre is sadly more of a modern phenomena - we have seen scant film adaptations of her work. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() With bumptious skill, Jensen builds her plot around Gabrielle and Bethany's cat-and-mouse relationship, gradually revealing that much more is going on in Bethany Krall's tortured little mind and body than anyone around her seems capable of understanding. Maddening though she is, she is the only character who never participates in the collective delusion that everything will turn out all right. We Need to Talk About Kevin: She is an ingeniously intractable youth, razor sharp in her ability to emotionally wound and uncannily prescient and perceptive beneath her adolescent, middle-finger-to-the-world rage. Bethany's character is well drawn and engaging, a little reminiscent of Lionel Shriver's angry adolescent murderer in The girl's father, Leonard Krall, a famous preacher in a fundamentalist Christian movement sweeping Britain, has disowned her. She is assigned Bethany Krall, who murdered her mother by stabbing her repeatedly with a screwdriver. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Book isn't quite The Divine Comedy in four bumper parts instead of only three. So let us call it The Book for short, and spend some time in praise of the new Dante. ![]() For The Book of the New Sun, all 400,000 grave and polished words of it, is far greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe now we can forget The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator and The Sword of the Lictor (all separately reviewed in Book World over the past three years), and forget this title, which is confusingly interchangeable with those that misrepresent its three predecessors, and from now on think only of the novel as a whole, under the continuing subtitle which defines it as such. WITH The Citadel of the Autarch, we have the fourth and and final volume of Gene Wolfe's superb long science fiction novel, The Book of the New Sun. ![]() ![]() ![]() I came to see in Green Eggs and Ham a very sophisticated theology of incarnational nondual spirituality, with the book acting as a modern re-telling of great spiritual texts like The Bhagavad Gita. I hadn’t read it in years prior to reading it with her but the more times we read it I started to discern a deeper underlying message and pattern. Some friends of ours kindly gave a copy of the book to my daughter for her second birthday last year and she and I have been reading it frequently ever since. Like a great bluesmen, the ability to work with so few words and such repetitive rhythm brought out of Seuss a classic for the ages. ![]() The book was the product of a bet with his publisher 1 as to whether he could write a book using only 50 words. Seuss published his classic text Green Eggs and Ham. ![]() Seuss, "Green Eggs and Ham" through the eyes of Google Deep Dream ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is the possibility that these things may come to pass in some form that draws us in – will we make it, is there hope? This explanation makes sense to me we look to fiction such as this in order to view possible outcomes at a safe distance. Hyong-Jun Moon (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) states that “.the extreme versions of future catastrophe in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives might function as a psychological buffer, through which strive to accustom themselves to the coming realities of harshness, insufficiency, and antagonism.” (241). Unimaginable loss of life and the complete breakdown of technological comforts and common social behavior are not the things we look for to inspire levity. Why are so many of us drawn to tales that outline the destruction of life as we know it? These are not light things. ![]() ![]() ![]() Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years. ‘Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.’ New YorkerĪn extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. ![]() Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First CollectionĪ Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year ![]() |