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Author : Albert Galvany Publisher : State University of New York Press Page : 291 pages File Size : 49,9 Mb Release : 2023-07-01 Category : History ISBN : 9781438493770
The Craft of Oblivion is an innovative and groundbreaking volume that aims to study, for the first time, the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization. Oblivion has tended to be relegated to a marginal position, often conceived as the mere destructive or undesirable opposite of memory, even though it performs an essential function in our lives. Forgetting and memory, far from being autonomous and mutually exclusive spheres, should be seen as interdependent phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from history, philosophy, literature, and religion, and examining both transmitted texts and excavated materials, the contributors to this volume analyze various ways of understanding oblivion and its complex and fertile relations with memory in ancient China.
Shaara is running out of friends. The sacrifices she and Warden made two years ago bought the League time, not victory. The war against the Undying has left them exhausted, drained of everything but hope—and precious little of that. The simple fact is that the Undying are going to win. Warden knows it, Shaara knows it. The Undying sure as hell know it. Until, out of the black, the Eternal comes to Shaara with an offer she can’t refuse, however much she’d like to. The threat he warned her about two years ago is real, and now it’s come calling. It cares nothing for their little war. All life in the galaxy, Undying or not, will end if it spreads unchecked. Shaara and the Eternal have little choice but to work together to destroy it . . . At least, for now. But people on both sides aren’t happy with an alliance, however temporary. Some of them are willing to risk all that lives just for a shot at power—and revenge. If Shaara can’t find a way to defeat them, she and the few friends she has left will lose more than their lives. They’ll lose everything.
First Lieutenant Shaara was dead this morning. Her captain is furious at her. She wasted company resources getting herself killed, and it’s coming out of her paycheck. Now, she’s sitting across from the first other human being she’s seen in six years. His name is Adnan. He claims to come from Earth—but that’s impossible. Earth died a long time ago. If Adnan’s telling the truth, he and the decaying ship the captain pulled him off are nearly a thousand years old. Wherever he’s from, he’s Shaara’s responsibility now. Which is the last thing she needs. But it’s either that, or the captain sells Adnan into slavery. Shaara knows what that would mean. Most humans do. And something inside her won’t let her abandon Adnan to it: revenant memories, stabbed awake by the look in his eyes. Facing those memories won’t be easy. It’d be far easier to ignore the feeling driving her forward. Far easier to let it all go to hell, and drift back to sleep. Until a shadowy new faction starts stoking the fires of war. They’re looking for Adnan; Earth’s last survivor holds the key to unleash a terrible, indiscriminate vengeance on the galaxy that wronged them. Who they are is a mystery—to everyone but Shaara. Hard as she’s tried to forget, she knows them all too well. Which means she’s the only one who can stop them. The question is: does she want to? Maybe the galaxy’s earned a little vengeance.
Shaara never asked to be in charge. Since taking command of the mysterious AI warship Warden, and the eccentric mercenary company that calls him home, she’s only accepted jobs that let her conscience sleep at night. The trouble is, those jobs don’t pay too well. After more than a year of fighting for the downtrodden, the exploited, and the oppressed, the Wardens’ coffers are running dry. So when they get a suspicious but lucrative offer from a pariah republic on the fringe of galactic politics, Shaara ignores the warning voice in her head and accepts. Of course, the voice is right—it usually is. The contract takes the Wardens to the edges of explored space; there, in the vast darkness beyond the galactic core, a great and terrible force is gathering—a foe far deadlier than they’ve ever fought. The galaxy’s not ready to face it. Has Shaara saved them all from Gaeus Nemesis just to die another day? What’s more, this new enemy holds the key to another mystery. As they fight for their lives, Shaara and Corax are forced to ask themselves a question they hoped they’d never have to: How much do they really know about Warden? And can they trust him?
Two colonies set out from Earth. One would travel the solar system and return in fifty years. The other, by design, would never come back. The crew of the returning ship, however, finds that during its absence, it missed a rather crucial planetary event: the Apocalypse. Soon the last remaining humans--those in the second, wandering colony--are about to be thrust into a final battle for souls between the forces of good and evil. Evil is much better prepared for the fight, though. The futures of both mankind and the afterlife depend upon the actions of all the humans caught in the struggles. Even though the forces they are up against are no less powerful than deity, humans with enough willpower can sometimes do amazing things...
Magic that shouldn't exist. A secret war. The courage to save an empire. As one of the empire's most skilled soldiers, Brandt is no stranger to combat. After he and his fellow wolfblades fight a merciless warrior armed with unbelievable powers, Brandt is left shattered. Searching for answers, Brandt stumbles upon a secret war, fought by a very few, that threatens the land he calls home. Alena is a gifted student studying for university exams. She moonlights as a thief and spy, searching for a purpose beyond the walls of her small town. When she steals a powerful artifact she becomes the most wanted thief in the empire, sending her fleeing across the continent for safety. Their quest for answers uncovers lies buried for generations. Lies at the heart of their empire. As a mysterious and powerful enemy prepares their assault, Brandt and Alena must race to find the truth and save their home. Before the Gate Beyond Oblivion summons them both. The Oblivion's Gate Trilogy collects for the first time the complete epic fantasy series!
Forgetting is usually juxtaposed with memory as its opposite in a negative way: it is seen as the loss of the ability to remember, or, ironically, as the inevitable process of distortion or dissolution that accompanies attempts to commemorate the past. The civic emphasis on the crucial importance of preserving lessons from the past to prevent us from repeating mistakes that led to violence and injustice, invoked most poignantly in the call of “Never again” from Holocaust survivors, tends to promote a view of forgetting as verging on sin or irresponsibility. In this book, Bradford Vivian hopes to put a much more positive spin on forgetting by elucidating its constitutive role in the formation and transformation of public memory. Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates how, contrary to conventional wisdom, communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment concerning the lessons and responsibilities of their shared past.
Eden is still working on freeing herself from the control of her evil overlords, but it’s proving to be harder than she’d hoped. The prediction Madam Quilla foretold for her future still hasn’t come true. She is drawn to the disturbingly sexy master vampire who keeps turning up to rescue her, but he doesn’t seem to be the answer to her problems. Sebastian has tried to forget about the woman who has ensnared him with her beauty. She is a distraction from his goal to seek revenge on his nemesis, yet he can’t get her out of his mind. His only choice is to seduce her so he can get her out of his system, then focus on his mission to find a suitable partner to become bonded to. Eden resorts to seeking out an exiled fairy for assistance. She discovers the spell Lord Dallinar cast on her is going to be harder to destroy than she’d figured. She will need someone who can use black magic to dispel it. That means she’ll have to deal with someone who is just as evil as the fae lord who bound her power. The assassin will do whatever she has to in order to be free, even if it means teaming up with a creature no sane person would trust.
There nEver was a sunset so sumptuous as the first, when creation birthed the grand fire that dashed its light out upon the solar system, exploding into a brilliant blue across Earth's vast sky. There nEver was a girl so pretty and perfect as the girl next door, who would thief your heart with a stolen glance and make you dream of angels and futures and love found in your very own backyard. There nEver was a peach, so ripe and full of juices that the mound positively erupted in your mouth, overtaking every sense until you were slave to each bite, and all that was and ever would be again was that fuzzy fruit. There nEver was a day so perfect that you would enjoy every second, savor each moment as if time itself were joy unbound, and to reach the midnight hour and the closing of the day would be like unto death itself. There nEver was a love so grand that it defeated all time and space, not bound by the laws of physics but transcending all rules and crushing them under love's heel, defining its grandness by mocking all the barriers of science and faith, existing not only forever, but beyond even the meek words that bind its August majesty. There nEver was a tale told as thus . . .
From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a beautifully realized collection of poems about childhood, love, marriage, children, and honoring the dead. Larry Lewis say, “The Dead and the Living is an unignorable book, something truly rare. The feeling behind it is painful, but exquisitely so. Pain made into art or what, in another time, people called ‘beauty.’” It is an achievement of a poet writing in the full measure of her powers. The Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.
Heroes of the Metal Underground by Alexandros Anesiadis,Yiannis Scarpelos Pdf
The only encyclopedic and definitive book on American indie metal! If all you know about metal music was what was heard on commercial radio, then you don’t know metal at all. Heroes of the Underground profiles 600 American bands from every town and city in the United States who ever released a record. Metal bands exploded during the 1980s. Influenced by the heavy sounds coming out of Britain via Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, young guitar shredders turned the amps up and played harder and faster. American record companies scooped up a few bands and signed them to major label recording deals (Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax), but that left hundreds of bands—and their fans—trying to get their songs heard. These intrepid metal bands borrowed a page from punk’s DIY handbook and did it themselves. Regional favorites. Hometown heroes. Tour van veterans. Bands who invested their life savings into recording and pressing their songs onto albums for a shot at immortality on vinyl. Fans remember these bands with joy. Collectors seek these records like the Holy Grail. And in Heroes of the Metal Underground, author Alex Anesiadis compiles the details of these bands and their records. Whether you’re a true or baby metalhead, Heroes of the Metal Underground will become your guide to all things metal.
"The starting point is a question," Alberto Manguel writes in the introduction to The Library at Night: since few can doubt that the universe is ultimately meaningless and purposeless, why do we try to give it order? After all, our efforts are surely doomed to failure. It’s hard to think of a more profound or serious subject to start with – but The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel says, is by no means a systematic answer. Rather, it is the story of the search for one. In the tradition of A History of Reading, this book is an account of Manguel’s astonishment at the variety, beauty and persistence of our efforts to shape the world and our lives, most notably through something almost as old as reading itself: libraries. The result is both intimately personal and incredibly wide-ranging: it is a fascinating study of the mysteries of libraries, a thorough analysis of their history throughout the world and an esoteric, enchanting celebration of reading. It is, perhaps most of all, a book that only Alberto Manguel could have written. The Library at Night begins with the design and construction of Alberto Manguel’s own library at his house in western France – a process that raises puzzling questions about his past and his reading habits, as well as broader ones about the nature of categories, catalogues, architecture and identity. Exploring these themes with a deliberately unsystematic brilliance, Manguel takes us to the great Library at Alexandria, and Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence; we sit with Jorge Luis Borges in his office at the National Library in Argentina, travel with donkeys carrying books into the Colombian hinterland, and discover the Fihrist, a chaotic and delightful bibliographic record of medieval Arab knowledge. There seem to be no limits to Manguel’s learning, or his ability to illuminate his investigations with magical, telling details from the past. Thematically organized and beautifully illustrated, this book considers libraries as treasure troves and architectural spaces; it looks on them as autobiographies of their owners and as statements of national identity. It examines small personal libraries and libraries that started as philanthropic ventures, and analyzes the unending promise – and defects – of virtual ones. It compares different methods of categorization (and what they imply) and libraries that have built up by chance as opposed to by conscious direction. Although it is encyclopedic (and discusses encyclopedias assembled by Diderot and fifteenth-century Chinese scholars alike) and full of concrete historical analysis (including a brief investigation of the prejudices underlying the Dewey Decimal System) this book is animated throughout by a gentle, even playful sensibility: it is governed by the browser’s logic of association and pleasure, rather than the rigid lines of scholarly theory. After all, everything in a library is connected: "As the librarians of Alexandria perhaps discovered, any single literary moment necessarily implies all others." In part this is because this is about the library at night, not during the day: this book takes in what happens after the lights go out, when the world is sleeping, when books become the rightful owners of the library and the reader is the interloper. Then all daytime order is upended: one book calls to another across the shelves, and new alliances are created across time and space. And so, as well as the best design for a reading room and the makeup of Robinson Crusoe’s library, this book dwells on more "nocturnal" subjects: fictional libraries like those carried by Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster; shadow libraries of lost and censored books; imaginary libraries of books not yet written. The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through the mind of one our most beloved men of letters. It is an invitation into his memory and vast knowledge of books and civilizations, and throughout – though mostly implicitly – it is also a passionate defence of literacy, of the unique pleasures of reading, of the importance of the book. As much as anything else, The Library at Night reminds us of what a library stands for: the possibility of illumination, of a better path for our society and for us as individuals. That hope too, at the close, is replaced by something that fits this personal and eclectic book even better: something more fragile, and evanescent than illumination, though just as important. The starting point is a question. Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we’d like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure. Why then do we do it? Though I knew from the start that the question would most likely remain unanswered, the quest seemed worthwhile for its own sake. This book is the story of that quest. –from The Library at Night