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“The universe exploded with pain, a big bang that began in Yuri’s ganglia and expanded forever, launching galaxies of light behind his eyes.”
Yuri is a physics prodigy from Russia who has been recruited to help NASA in a seventeen-day mission to deflect and destroy an asteroid heading toward California. His unpublished work on antimatter is not only likely to win him a Nobel prize, but Yuri believes it’s the key to avoiding a global catastrophe. Unfortunately, the more experienced scientists disregard his claims, in part because of his age, and in part because he comes across as socially awkward and conceited.
James Joyce is known as one of the most iconic and important authors of the 20th century. However, for many, his literature can often be difficult to untangle and interpret. Struggling to understand the complicated and eloquent prose of Joyce can be a turn off to some, but others still want the chance to read and understand his work.
Are you someone who would like to delve into Joyce’s literature? A great place to start will be attending a reading event at Prospect Heights Brainery in Brooklyn.
On Friday, June 16th, at 6:30 PM, a class will be lead to
squinting eyes
behind curtains netted
faces onto the street
to snare a fresh gossip
smeared by a bad mind
carelessly harming
him or her
play – staged a small street
a clean name…linen hall
and let me watch you
unfold
like the tongue
of a butterfly.
Probe my pistils
and my stamen.
I am
the rarest flower,
the chocolate orchid;
“What comes out of my mouth is driven by anger: at my righteous mother who refuses to look out the window and see there is no bright dawn on the horizon; at my black-hearted country that inspired her, forged her into steel, and deceived her.”
Elena Gorokhova’s first memoir A Mountain of Crumbs provides readers with a fascinating look at what it was like to grow up in Soviet Russia during the 1960s. Her mother, a doctor, raises Elena and her sister, Marina, in a traditional, monochromatic Russian household. Gorokhova provides insight into the complexity of the government and the fear its citizens face under economic and social oppression.
“And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”
In a genre-bending tale of innocence and the inevitable loss thereof, Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro delivers a haunting and emotional account of a dystopian society that fans of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will devour.
In light of the long-anticipated release of Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, what better time to look back on her stunning debut, The God of Small Things? Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize,
Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, The God of Small Things was an instant, immense, and international success. After its publication, Roy deliberately distanced herself from fiction writing, turning her attention instead to political activism, in reaction to rising social conflict in India.
Finally, after twenty long years and a book over ten years in the making, she has once again decided to grace the fiction world with her genius. To better understand her writing and her evolution as an artist, let’s rediscover the gem that is The God of Small Things.
“If you want to make it, all you have to do is try.”
These words apply not only to physical inventions but to life in general. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an exalting tale of a William Kamkwamba who fought to overcome the many obstacles that faced him in his rural African community in the heart of Malawi. He and Bryan Mealer tell the tale of Kamkwamba’s imaginative childhood turned dark by famine and how he was determined to create a solution that he could make from nothing.
While blood is thicker than water, beeswax and honey keep people together.
Sue Monk Kidd’s auspicious debut novel revolves around young and petulant Lily Owens as she navigates life on her abusive father’s peach farm with the blurred memory of her mother’s accidental death. Set in South Carolina in a time of overt racial tension, her black housekeeper and nearest hope to motherly-love, Rosaleen, scandalizes the town by registering to vote. Lily springs Rosaleen from the hospital she’s kept at and the two go on a quest to uncover her mother’s past, which eventually leads them to three motherly sisters, The Boatwright’s, who own a honey farm. Lily and Rosaleen are introduced to their memorable world of bees, honey, female divinity, and womanhood.
Before we met I knew
That somehow, some way,
You were mine.
Through foggy, disjointed
Sleeping images
Your hand touched mine
And I felt the heat.
