Vintage Book Of Fathers

Ideal fathers, cruel fathers, puffed-up-with-pride fathers, horribly and humanly flawed fathers: this wonderful anthology contains a whole range of experience from the amazed joy of new fatherhood, to the pains of bereavement, from the comic and eccentric Papa to the sinister and silent Dad. Louise Guinness has collected irresistible extracts spanning nearly three thousand years, from Homer and the Bible to present day, from Chaucer to Beatrix Potter, Rabelais to Seamus Heaney.

Babar, the King of the Elephants, sets out to find Father Christmas and bring him back to visit the children of the elephant's country.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman

Did your dad used to be cool? Wondering what happened to his rock band playing, skateboarding days? This funny and relatable story shows children how their parents are still cool after all, even if it's not in quite the same way!Parents and children will both enjoy engaging with this book, presented in Negley's unique style where words are minimal and the emotive illustrations really carry the story along.

When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticizing the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away traditional values of contemporary Russian society. Turgenev's depiction of the conflict between generations and their ideals stunned readers when Fathers and Sons was first published in 1862. But many could also sympathize with Arkady's fascination with its nihilist hero whose story vividly captures the hopes and regrets of a changing Russia.

The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom . . . a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it . . . Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."

For centuries women have been marginalized and overlooked in American literary history. That injustice is corrected in this entertaining and provocative collection of 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women. From Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet to Margaret Fuller to Harriet Beecher Stowe, readers will encounter scores of lesser-known and forgotten writers who fully deserve to be rediscovered and enjoyed by new generations. Our famous women writers, including contemporary stars like Annie Proux and Jhumpa Lahiri, are showcased in their full literary context, offering an epic overview of the canon in one monumental, dazzling volume. This landmark anthology features the best work of our best American women, and was inspired and informed by the author's groundbreaking history celebrating women writers, A Jury of Her Peers.

A groundbreaking volume from Lamda Award-winning editors Naomi Holoch and Joan Nestle, The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction presents a range of literary voices--from twenty-seven countries spanning six continents--and offers glimpses of lesbian life in unfamilar, often exotic climes. We follow an Irish woman as she travels through time in search of a wronged maiden, and anticipate the harrowing fate of a married Indian woman who pursues pleasure with her female lover under the shadow of her husbands suspicious rage. We meet a teacher in Barcelona who locks herself up in her grandmother's house with her young Columbian student, and witness a Slovenian woman's rendezvous with her long dead lover. This collection includes the work of familiar writers, as well as a number never before published in English. From the West Indies to Eastern Europe, the Middle East to Southeast Asia, Latin America to South Africa, the distinctive stories found in these pages evoke the diverse political, cultural, emotional, and sexual landscapes of each writer's life. A groundbreaking volume from the Lamda Award-winning editors Naomi Holoch and Joan Nestle, who also wrote the introduction, this collections evokes the universal urgency of persistent desire. Table of Contents: Mary Dorcey, Ireland from A Noise from the WoodshedMakeda Sivera, JamaicaCaribbean ChameleonMireille Best, FranceStéphanie's BookChristina Peri Rossi, UruguayFinal Judgement and Singing in the DesertShani Mootoo, India-Trinidad-CanadaLemon ScentMarguerite Yourcenar, BelgiumSappho or SuicideEmma Donoghue, IrelandLooking for PetronillaSylvia Molloy, Argentinafrom Certificate of AbsenceDale Gunthorp, South AfricaGypsophilaKaren Williams, South AfricaThe Came at DawnCynthia Price, South AfricaLesbian BedroomsAlifa Rifaat, EgyptMy World of the UnknownYasmin V. Tambiah, Sri LankaThe Civil War, Sandalwood, Transl(iter)ation I, and Transl(iter)ation II (for Aruna and Giti)Dionne Brand, TrinidadMadame Alaird's BreastsViolette Leduc, Francefrom L'AphyxieAnchee Min, ChinafromRed AzaleaGerd Brantenberg, Norwayfrom Four WindsEsther Tusquets, Spainfrom The Same Sea as Every SummerKaren-Susan Fessel, GermanyLost FacesMar$ía Eugenia Alegría Nuñez, CubaThe Girl Typist Who Worked for a Provincial Ministry of CultureNgahuia Te Awekatuku, Aotearoa/New ZealandParetipua, Old Man Tuna, andWatching the Big GirlsDacia Maraini, ItalyfromLetters to MarinaRosamaría Roffiel, MexicoForever Lasts Only a Full MoonAnna Blaman, Hollandfrom Lonely AdventureChrista Winsloe, Germanyfrom The Child ManuelaAchy Obejas, CubaWatersNicole Brossard, CanadafromMauve DesertGila Svirsky, IsraelMeeting NataliaMaureen Duffy, EnglandfromThe MicrocosmJeanne D'Arc Jutras, Canadafrom GeorgieSuzana Tratnik, SloveniaUnder the Ironwood TreesElena Georgiou, CyprusAphrodite's VisionEtel Adnan, Lebanonfrom In the Heart of the Heart of Another CountryGina Schein, AustraliaMinnie Gets Married