Sorrows Of An Exile

Affirmation. Both directly and, as befitted the Roman Callimachus, allusively, Ovid repeatedly asserts, often with a wit and irony that borders on defiance, his conviction of the injustice of his sentence and of the pre-eminence of the eternal values of poetry over the ephemeral dictates of an earthly power. These elegies are throughout informed by Ovid's awareness of a continuing pride in his poetic identity and mission. In technical skill and inventiveness, they rank.

The loss of a child takes mythological, magical casts--distortions that allow us to see the contours of grief more clearly.

Two women meet in a small Karoo village after the funeral of David, the man they both loved. One is white and was his wife. The other is black and the mother of his child. David, who was driven into exile because of his political activism against apartheid, reappears in the searing memories of the women. During a hot afternoon of truth and reconciliation, treaties of love are painfully hammered out. The young confront the old, and what is hope for these individuals is hope for the new South Africa. 

In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei--one of the world's most famous artists and activists--tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. Hailed as "the most important artist working today" by the Financial Times and as "an eloquent and unsilenceable voice of freedom" by The New York Times, Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir that presents a remarkable history of China over the last 100 years while illuminating his artistic process. Once an intimate of Mao Zedong, Ai Weiwei's father was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as "Little Siberia," where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist--and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. Ai Weiwei's sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his own life story and that of his father, whose own creativity was stifled. At once ambitious and intimate, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.

In this book, fourteen mesmerizing fables - and the etchings they inspired - draw us back to our origins in a garden of sorrow and exile, death and renewal, beauty and melancholy. John Hughes re-imagines a series of fables in which Australian animals take on human qualities, as thief and actor, warrior and poet, farmer and merchant. These are reverse fables - in the way that the Antipodes reverse Northern Hemisphere logic - that cast us back to the flux at the beginning of the world: inchoate nature, the world in a state of formation, the garden, and the inferno. Accompanied by artist Marco Luccio's darkly wry etchings, this collaboration between two artists is as unique as the stories it contains.

Special Sorrows carefully delineates the centrality of Jewish, Polish and Irish supporters in the United States to national liberation movements abroad and details how such movements shaped immigrant life in the United States.