Nadja

"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

A Vogue Best Book of the Year "What Ferrante did for female friends—exploring the tumult and complexity their relationships could hold—Spiegelman sets out to do for mothers and daughters. She’s essentially written My Brilliant Mom." —Slate A memoir of mothers and daughters—and mothers as daughters—traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers—French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly—exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja’s body changed and “began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand,” their relationship grew tense. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother’s past, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told. Then, after college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. The weight of the difficult stories she told her daughter shifted the balance between them. It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother’s memories contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own. Nadja emerged with a deeper understanding of how each generation reshapes the past in order to forge ahead, their narratives both weapon and defense, eternally in conflict. Every reader will recognize herself and her family in I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This, a gorgeous and heartbreaking memoir that helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most.

Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Young Adult. In the heart of Scarborough sits the Nap-Away Motel, a hunched building providing hidden worlds for its occupants. Within its derelict walls, Suleiman longs to rebuild his broken family, Tiffany creates a fantasy world to escape from her mother's neglect and Ori plans a search for their run-away twin brother. While they grapple with the challenges of mental health, addiction, and grief, the three dwellers manage to forge a friendship over a litter of stray kittens. Together, they find joy in ruin, and hope when everything seems lost.

?Bombs are exploding all over the city. I hide my feelings from everyone, but I am drowning in despair. When will this war end? For how long will my life consist of the dead space between two explosions?? --- June 6, 1995 On the first day of the siege of Sarajevo, 12-year-old Nadja Halilbegovich's life changed forever. In the face of constant tank and sniper fire, daily life in this beautiful, mountain-ringed city was suddenly full of fear. Without reliable electricity, water or medical supplies, the blockaded city ground to a halt. Nadja and her fellow citizens tried desperately to live normal lives while forced to scrounge for even the most basic necessities. My Childhood Under Fire is Nadja's diary of the years 1992-95. It is her personal account of becoming a teenager during wartime. It is also a monument to the thousands killed during the siege of Sarajevo and to the millions of children around the world who still live --- and die --- under fire.

Unlock the more straightforward side of Nadja with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Nadja by André Breton, which tells the story of the author’s encounters with the titular character over a period of several days. The book stands out for its highly original style: it combines autobiographical and novelistic elements, incorporates a series of photographs and drawings alongside the text, and uses language in a highly unusual and inventive way. Nadja was first published in 1928 and is one of the most influential works of the French Surrealist movement, of which Breton was the leading figure. This movement flourished in the aftermath of the First World War, and sought to challenge conventions and conformism in literature, film, music and the visual arts. André Breton was a poet, novelist and essayist, and wrote dozens of books and essays, including The Surrealist Manifesto and The Magnetic Fields. Find out everything you need to know about Nadja in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

The protagonists of this story are Franco and Nadja, whose relationship begins as a chance, lunchtime encounter in a bar not far from the small hilltop town of Montelorenzo in southern Tuscany. Franco comes from an established, artisan family in the town and, although university educated, follows in his father’s footsteps as a cabinet maker. Nadja is a spirited and determined but anxious young woman with an ever-present phobia. Since her mother died giving birth to her, she was brought up by her father, a fervent Communist who named her Nadja after the wives of both Lenin and Stalin. Nadja is short for Nadezhda, which means ‘Hope’ in Russian. The story illustrates the legacy of history and the lasting effect it has on all our lives. Nadja becomes, both literally and metaphorically, Franco’s Hope, until the Three Fates of Greek mythology intervene.

Poems that reach towards the lost or the might have been. In her debut collection, Susan Elmslie delves into the life and mental illness of the real person behind Andr Bretons surrealist romance, Nadja, recovering the story of a flesh and blood woman who became a symbol for the unknowability of the feminine and the irrational side of the human psyche. Ultimately, I, Nadjais about many women as Elmslie?s lyrically astute, confident lines move into the daily world of motherhood, adolescent memories and heroines like Marie Curie and George Sand. With her great fury of a voice, Elmslie?s poems are forthright and daring, fearlessly rhapsodic, as "they sing/your shape through doorways,? sing/the whole house awake." I can get perfect distance between us?maybe language is what washes the sheets eventually, snapping on the line, telling us how neat things must be. Like irony: a man spent eighteen years building a plane, only to have it crash on its maiden flight, killing him completely. Some throw themselves in to the role of the timeless lover, believing only in their own ability to endure, endure, and prepare for that chance meeting at an airport bar. You look at me and I know I have blown my cover. When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. from "Four Postcards" "What range and abundance! A catalogue of trench coats, a daughters first hunger, the stories of George Sand, Marie Curie, and, of course, Breton?s love, the unforgettable, unknowable Nadja. Each of these poems is fully felt, finely formed, astonishingly different from the next. Susan Elmslie compels you to linger with admiration?but also to keep turning the pages, breathless for the next discovery." ? Stephanie Bolster "If for no other reason, buy this book for the 'I, Nadja' poems. They are brilliant. But there is another reason?the book itself?all of it." ? P.K. Page Susan Elmslie?s poetry has appeared in several Canadian journals, anthologies, and in a prize-winning chapbook, When Your Body Takes to Trembling (Cranberry Tree). She received a PhD in English with a specialization in Canadian literature from McGill University, and has been a poetry Fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. She lives in Montreal.