Two Stories Of Everything

Scholars and preachers have been approaching Islam and Christianity for centuries as two religions. But what if we set that approach aside and try something new? What if we look at the stories that Islam and Christianity tell? In this book we do exactly that: we go back to the beginning of the stories - Creation - and work our way forward to humanity, Israel, the founders (Jesus and Muhammad), why they founded their communities (the Church and the Umma), what those communities are doing in the world today, and then look down the road to the end of the two stories of everything with their different accounts of the final judgment. Approaching Islam and Christianity as two stories of everything, or metanarratives, produces fresh new insights relevant to any person - whether Christian, Muslim, or of no religion - concerned with the question of how Islam, Christianity, and modernity interact and sometimes clash with each other.

Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.

Colum McCann's Everything in This Country Must, a writer of fierce originality and haunting lyricism, turns to the troubles in Northern Ireland and reveals the reverberations of political tragedy in the most intimate lives of men and women, parents and children. In the title story, a teenage girl must choose between allegiance to her Catholic father and gratitude to the British soldiers who have saved the family's horse. The young hero of Hunger Strike, a novella, tries to replicate the experience of his uncle, an IRA prisoner on hunger strike. And in Wood, a small boy does his part for the Protestant marches, concealing his involvement from his blind father. Writing in a new form, but with the skill and force and sparkling poetry that have brought him international acclaim, Colum McCann has delivered masterful, memorable short fiction.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

These two stories by Koos Rozemond, with English translations by Aart van den End, manage to be both droll and comedic, subtle and sophisticated. In each story, the narrator creates a central character as a foil for his rich imagination. Can you continue a conversation-game after an interruption of more than two decades? In Spring in Prague the narrator and his Moslem friend Shyam, the publisher of Progressive Islam and a conspirator in an Indonesian coup, meet in Prague after 25 years of silence. Shyam cannot guess that an unusual verbal surprise awaits him. Riks, the perpetual defendant of Riks, is, we learn, vulnerable to questionable company, which causes the narrator to observe, That alone is not so bad, but if youOCOre in the wrong social class itOCOll ruin you.OCO For an author bio and photo, reviews, and a reading sample, visit bosonbooks.com."

From the celebrated, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and War and Peace a lavish, masterfully rendered volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time. Chekhov's genius left an indelible impact on every literary form in which he wrote, but none more so than short fiction. Now, renowned translators and longtime house authors Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us their peerless renderings of fifty-two Chekhov stories--a full deck These stories, which span the full arc of his career, reveal the extraordinary variety and unexpectedness of his work, from the farcically comic to the darkly complex, showing that there is no one type of "Chekhov story." They are populated by a remarkable range of characters who come from all parts of Russia, all walks of life, and who, taken together, have democratized the short story. Included here are a number of never-before-translated stories, including "Reading" and "An Educated Blockhead." Here is a collection that promises profound delight.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • "Unforgettable tales of families and lovers—from Haiti to Miami, Brooklyn, and beyond—often struggling with grief, loss, and missed connections.” —Vanity Fair • A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick! A romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends. A marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences. A young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival. Two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives. A baby’s christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new. A man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity. At once wide in scope and intimate, Everything Inside explores with quiet power and elegance the forces that pull us together or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.

A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. “Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses,” Danticat notes in her introduction. “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.” The book moves outward from the shock of her mother’s diagnosis and sifts through Danticat’s writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison’s Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat’s mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.