Parallel Narratives

Withdrawing from a family party to the solitude of her tree house, 16-year-old Laurel Nicolson witnesses a shocking murder that throughout a subsequent half century shapes her beliefs, her acting career and the lives of three strangers from vastly different cultures. By the best-selling author of The Distant Hours. Reprint. 200,000 first printing.

In 1989, the memorable year when the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his early morning run finds a corpse lying on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This classic police-procedural scene opens an extraordinary novel, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans - Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies - across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary richly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Peter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny, reverberating parallels that link them across time and space. Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to dark secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s, Ágost Lippay-Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary's different political régimes for decades, and Andras Rott, who has his own dark record of dark activities abroad. They are friends in Budapest when we eventually meet them in the spring of 1961, a pivotal time in the postwar epoch and in their clandestine careers. But the richly detailed, dramatic memories and actions of these men, like those of their friends, lovers and family members, range from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, across Hungary. The ever-daring, ever-original episodes of Parallel Lives explore the most intimate, most difficult human experiences in a prose glowing with uncommon clarity and also with mysterious uncertainty - as is characteristic of Nadas's subtle, spirited art. The web of extended dramas in Parallel Stories reaches not just forward to the transformative year of 1989 but back to the spring of 1939, with Europe trembling on the edge of war; to the bestial times of 1944-45, when Budapest was besieged, the final solution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the war came to an end; and to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. But there is much more to Parallel Stories than that: it is a daring, demanding, and very moving exploration of humanity at its most constrained and its most free.

This book is the result of an on-going undergraduate assignment that Natalia Ilyin and Elisabeth Patterson give in their co-taught, Junior-level course, Parallel Narratives, a class exploring the current state of design history and criticism. This class unearths and examines stories of design that did not gain entrance into the current, commonly-taught "canon" of design history.

A dual-language edition of Chinese stories—many appearing in English for the first time This new volume of eight short stories offers students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature from the world’s most spoken language, without having to constantly to refer back to a dictionary. The stories—many of which appear here in English for the first time—are by well-known writers as well as emerging voices. From a story by Li Rui about the honest simplicity of a Shanxi farmer to one by Ma Yuan exposing the seamy underside of contemporary urban society, they are infused with both rural dialect and urban slang and feature a wide range of styles and points of view. Complete with notes, the stories make excellent reading in either language. Note: For each short story in this eBook edition, the full English translation is followed by its original Chinese text.

Comprehension of texts and understanding of questions is a cornerstone of successful human communication. Whilst reading comprehension has been thoroughly investigated in the last decade, there is surprisingly little research on children’s comprehension of picture stories, particularly for bilinguals. This can be partially explained by the lack of cross-culturally robust, cross-linguistic instruments targeting early narration. This book presents an inference-based model of narrative comprehension and a tool that grew out of a large-scale European project on multilingualism. Covering a range of language settings, the book uses the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives to answer the question which narrative comprehension skills (bilingual) children can be expected to master at a certain age, and explores how such comprehension is affected (or not affected) by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Linking theory to method, the book will appeal to researchers in linguistics and psychology and graduate students interested in narrative, multilingualism, and language acquisition.

In 2000, a group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers gathered to address what to many people seemed an unbridgeable gulf between the two societies. Struck by how different the standard Israeli and Palestinian textbook histories of the same events were from one another, they began to explore how to "disarm" the teaching of the history of the Middle East in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms. The result is a riveting "dual narrative" of Israeli and Palestinian history. Side by Side comprises the history of two peoples, in separate narratives set literally side-by-side, so that readers can track each against the other, noting both where they differ as well as where they correspond. The unique and fascinating presentation has been translated into English and is now available to American audiences for the first time. An eye-opening--and inspiring--new approach to thinking about one of the world's most deeply entrenched conflicts, Side by Side is a breakthrough book that will spark a new public discussion about the bridge to peace in the Middle East.

This is an all new version of the popular PARALLEL TEXT series, containing eight pieces of contemporary fiction in the original French and in English translation. Including stories by Bolanger, Cotnoir, Le Clezio and Germain, this volume gives afascinating insight into French culture and literature as well as providing an invaluable educational tool.