Decades ago Massachusetts salesman Ellis Hock spent four years in Africa - and the continent has never left him. So when his wife walks out and his business goes belly up, Ellis turns back to the one place in which he briefly found happiness. Yet returning to the village of Malabo shocks him. The school he built is a ruin.
¿Por qué ser feliz cuando puedes ser normal?, preguntó la señora Winterson a su hija Jeanette cuando ella, recién cumplidos los dieciséis años, le confesó haberse enamorado de otra chica. Extraña pregunta, pero poco más podía esperarse de una mujer que había adoptado a una niña para hacer de ella una aliada en su misión religiosa, y en cambio se las tuvo que ver con un ser extraño que pedía a gritos su porción de felicidad. Armada con dos juegos de dentadura postiza y una pistola escondida bajo los trapos de cocina, la señora Winterson hizo lo que pudo para disciplinar a Jeanette: en casa los libros estaban prohibidos, las amistades eran mal vistas, los besos y abrazos eran gestos extravagantes, y cualquier falta se castigaba con noches enteras al raso, pero de nada sirvió. Esa chica pelirroja que parecía hija del mismo diablo se rebeló, buscando el placer en la piel de otras mujeres y encontrando en la biblioteca del barrio novelas y poemas que la ayudaran a crecer. Eso y mucho más es lo que ofrecen estas páginas excepcionales, donde alegría y rabia andan de la mano: un libro de memorias destinado a convertirse en un clásico de la literatura contemporánea.
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.
To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run. "The PowerBook" is twenty-first century fiction that uses past, present and future as shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. The story is simple. An e-writer called Ali or Alix will write to order anything you like, provided that you are prepared to enter the story as yourself and take the risk of leaving it as someone else. You can be the hero of your own life. You can have freedom just for one night. But there is a price. Ali discovers that she too will have to pay it. Death can take the body but not the heart. Set in London, Paris, Capri and Cyberspace, this is a book that reinvents itself as it travels. Using cover-versions, fairy tales, contemporary myths and popular culture, "The PowerBook" works at the intersection between the real and the imagined. Its territory is you.
In this, her first collection of short stories, Winterson reveals all the facets of her extraordinary imagination. In prose that is full of imagery and word-play, she creates physical and psychological worlds that are at once familiar and yet shockingly s
De levens van en de driehoeksverhouding tussen een Engelse vrouwelijke natuurkundige en een Amerikaanse natuurkundige en zijn vrouw worden verbonden met theorieën en ideeën over ruimte, tijd en materie.