The Phoenix And The Albatross

All stories present simple plots until they reach their end. In romance stories, love culminates after the happily ever after and there is no greater proof that shows the commitment of a relationship than an engagement ring. But lo and behold, the love of my life, my adored albatross, Can Divit, has given me an engagement ring and I cannot enjoy it and receive it with a clear conscience.

The most beautiful love story ever told. A story where our protagonist will fight to find his beloved albatross.

The most beautiful love story ever told. A story in which our protagonist will fight to find his beloved albatross.

"One of the most delightful natural history studies in decades." —The Boston Globe Eye of the Albatross takes us soaring to locales where whales, sea turtles, penguins, and shearwaters flourish in their own quotidian rhythms. Carl Safina's guide and inspiration is an albatross he calls Amelia, whose life and far-flung flights he describes in fascinating detail. Interwoven with recollections of whalers and famous explorers, Eye of the Albatross probes the unmistakable environmental impact of the encounters between man and marine life. Safina's perceptive and authoritative portrait results in a transforming ride to the ends of the Earth for the reader, as well as an eye-opening look at the health of our oceans.

A fiery spirit dances from the pages of the Great Book. She brings the aroma of scorched sand and ozone. She has a story to tell.... The Book of Phoenix is a unique work of magical futurism. A prequel to the highly acclaimed, World Fantasy Award-winning novel, Who Fears Death, it features the rise of another of Nnedi Okorafor’s powerful, memorable, superhuman women. Phoenix was grown and raised among other genetic experiments in New York’s Tower 7. She is an “accelerated woman”—only two years old but with the body and mind of an adult, Phoenix’s abilities far exceed those of a normal human. Still innocent and inexperienced in the ways of the world, she is content living in her room speed reading e-books, running on her treadmill, and basking in the love of Saeed, another biologically altered human of Tower 7. Then one evening, Saeed witnesses something so terrible that he takes his own life. Devastated by his death and Tower 7’s refusal to answer her questions, Phoenix finally begins to realize that her home is really her prison, and she becomes desperate to escape. But Phoenix’s escape, and her destruction of Tower 7, is just the beginning of her story. Before her story ends, Phoenix will travel from the United States to Africa and back, changing the entire course of humanity’s future.

“At length did cross an Albatross, / Through the fog it came; / As if it had been a Christian soul, / We hailed it in God’s name.” The introduction of the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” remains one of the most well-known references to this majestic seabird in Western culture. In Albatross, Graham Barwell goes beyond Coleridge to examine the role the bird plays in the lives of a wide variety of peoples and societies, from the early views of north Atlantic mariners to modern encounters by writers, artists, and filmmakers. Exploring how the bird has been celebrated in proverbs, folk stories, art, and ceremonies, Barwell shows how people marvel at the way the albatross soars through the air, covering awe-inspiring distances with little effort thanks to its impressive wingspan. He surveys the many approaches people have taken to thinking about the albatross over the past two hundred years—from those who devoted their lives to these birds to those who hunted them for food and sport—and discusses its place in the human imagination. Concluding with a reflection on the bird’s changing significance in the modern world, Barwell considers threats to its continued existence and its prospects for the future. With one hundred illustrations from nature, film, and popular culture, Albatross is an absorbing look at these beautiful birds.

Roadrunners are known from cartoons. Ravens are known to poetry lovers. Eagles are known as figures in ancient mythology and as modern national symbols. Birds have fascinated people throughout history. This captivating collection of 99 essays offers a well-researched but easy-to-read look at birds as familiar as the sparrow and as seldom-seen as the albatross, from dancing varieties (crane) to sacred ones (ibis) to those associated with practical jokes and assassinations (snipe). Alphabetically arranged by type of bird, the essays combine the author's extensive field experience with reflections drawn from biology, ecology, literature, music, history, linguistics, politics, sports, entertainment, and other areas. References range from Homer's description of a cormorant in flight to mentions of birds in Monty Python sketches; from the filmmaking of Alfred Hitchcock to the music of Robyn Hitchcock. No previous knowledge of birds is necessary to appreciate the book, which is illustrated with classic images from John James Audubon's The Birds of America.

We often think of Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers' Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience - thus transforming a little-read "e;highbrow"e; movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from "e;high"e; to "e;low"e;) but also spatial - since publisher's series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language - a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism will be of interest to all those who want to know how the new literature became a global commercial hit.