The Besieged City

Download or read book The Besieged City written by Clarice Lispector and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' Colm Tóibín 'She suddenly leaned toward the mirror and sought the loveliest way to see herself' Lucrécia Neves is vain, unreflective, insolently superficial, almost mute. She may have no inner life at all. As she morphs from small-town girl to worldly wife of a rich man, and her small home town surrenders to the forces of progress, Lucrécia seeks perfection: to be an object, serene, smooth, beyond the burden of words or even thought itself. A book that obsessed its author, The Besieged City is unlike any other work in Lispector's canon: a story of transformation, of what it means to see and to be seen.

Download or read book Memos from the Besieged City written by Djelal Kadir and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a historical and critical reassessment of the field of comparative literature—the study of cultures and their literary posterity across national borders and historical frontiers—at a moment when notions of literacy and culture are under inordinate pressure by predatory globalization and militaristic realpolitik.

Download or read book Besieged written by and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-07-16 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated by Mahmood Farooqui, with notes on the Mutiny Papers and governance in Delhi 1857 by the translator When Delhi lay under siege for five harrowing months in the summer of 1857, the people of the city described the events as ghadar: a time of turbulence. Resources within the besieged city fell dangerously low and locals found the rebelling sepoys presence and the increased levies insufferable. Nonetheless, an extraordinary effort was launched by the government of Bahadur Shah Zafar to fight the British. Thousands of labourers and tonnes of materials were mobilized, funds were gathered, the police monitored food prices and a functioning bureaucracy was vigilantly maintained right until the walled city s fall. Then, as Delhi was transformed by the victorious British, these everyday sacrifices and the efforts of thousands of people to save their country were lost forever. In this groundbreaking work, Mahmood Farooqui presents the first extensive translations into English of the Mutiny Papers documents dating from Delhi s 1857 siege, originally written in Persian and Shikastah Urdu. The translations include such fascinating pieces as the constitution of the Court of Mutineers, letters from soldiers threatening to leave Delhi if they were not paid their salaries, complaints to the police about unruly soldiers, and reports of troublesome courtesans, spies, faqirs, doctors, volunteers and harassed policemen. Shifting focus away from the conventional understanding of the events of 1857, these translations return ordinary and anonymous men and women back into the history of 1857. Besieged offers a view of how the rebel government of Delhi organized the essential requirements of war food and labour, soldiers salaries, arms and ammunition but more than that, this deeply evocative book reveals the hopes, beliefs and failures of a people who lived through the tragic end of an era.

Download or read book Fortress Besieged (New Directions Classic) written by Qian Zhongshu and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2004-02-17 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century, Fortress Besieged is a classic of world literature, a masterpiece of parodic fiction that plays with Western literary traditions, philosophy, and middle-class Chinese society in the Republican era. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien (á la Emma Bovary), with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake American university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.

Download or read book An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures written by Clarice Lispector and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

Download or read book Letters from Sarajevo written by Anna Cataldi and published by Element Books, Limited. This book was released on 1994 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighty letters of victems of the bombardment and be- sieged city of Sarajevo.

Download or read book The City Besieged written by Israel Eph'al and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the military, legal, social and literary aspects of ancient warfare, this study examines the multifaceted nature of the siege phenomenon in the Ancient Near East. The book is based on Akkadian and biblical (and, to lesser degree, Greek, Aramaic, Egyptian, Hittite and Ugaritic) sources as well as on the depictions on reliefs from Assyrian palaces and Egyptian temples. The analysis incorporates lexical study and military thinking and focuses on the technology of warfare and human behavior in a state of emergency. This volume is a co-publication between Brill and The Hebrew University Magnes Press. "...this book serves as an excellent overview of siege practices and their result as seen from the biblical and Mesopotamian perspective." Michael G. Hasel, Institute of Archaeology–Southern Adventist University