n doar opt ani, Peggy Guggenheim a schimbat faa artei secolului XX; iar viaa sa, cea public i cea privat, a fost la fel de radical precum colecia pe care a deinut o. --The IndependentPatroan a artelor nc din anii 1930, Peggy Guggenheim ne ofer, ntr un autoportret plin de sinceritate, o perspectiv din interior asupra nceputului artei moderne, fcnd mrturisiri revelatoare despre familia sa bogat i excentric, despre relaiile sale personale i oferindu ne portrete adesea surprinztoare ale artitilor nii.Confesiunile unei dependente de art imortalizeaz un capitol nsemnat din istoria artei moderne, precum i personalitatea uneia dintre cele mai fervente susintoare a ei.Ar trebui s ne mulumim, deocamdat, cu ceea ce a produs secolul XX — Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Braque, Gris, Ernst, Miró, Brncui, Arp, Giacometti, Lipchitz, Calder, Pevsner, Moore i Pollock. Astzi este vremea colecionrii, nu a creaiei.Haidei cel puin s conservm i s le oferim oamenilor toate marile comori pe care le avem. -- Peggy Guggenheimntlnirea cu frumosul ne modific. Arta, n toate formele ei de exprimare, ne vorbete despre frumuseea acestei lumi, indiferent ct de sublim sau atroce este ea.Prin Colecia StArt pe care o inaugureaz odat cu apariia Confesiunilor lui Peggy Guggenheim, Editura Pandora M i propune s familiarizeze cititorii cu arta modern a secolului XX i cu fabuloasa lume din spatele cortinelor care ascund de multe ori poveti extraordinare i viziuni inedite. Colecia StArt este un loc de ntlnire ntre cei care au curiozitatea de a citi viaa prin alt fel de lentile dect cele obinuite i cei mai importani actori ai scenei de art, fie c este vorba despre artiti, curatori, galeriti, colecionari, critici sau istorici.

Un demers hermeneutic grav, efectuat ?n profunzimile operei ionesciene, ?i demonstr?nd cu asupra de m?sur? c? ??n prima pies? a lui Ionesco, Engleze?te f?r? profesor, comunicarea este repetitiv? ?i alienant?. Recurenta cli?eelor limbii de lemn burgheze este efectul (cauz?) unei existen?e osificate. Alienarea ?ncepe prin a fi pa?nic? ?i sf?r?e?te ?n agresiune. La ?nceput, b?tr?nii so?i Smith se afund? ?n banalitatea comunic?rii. Tinerii so?i Martin fac la fel, potrivit psihologiei v?rstei lor. Primii au o ?n?elepciune senil?. Ultimii, o vitalitate copil?reasc?. Pe parcurs (in)comunicarea se ad?nce?te, cuvintele ??i ?ndep?rteaz? tot mai mult sensurile, p?n? la a le abandona ori livra unei anamneze enun?iative. Sensul, p?r?nd genetic absent, ??i caut? identitatea ontologic? fictiv?, ?ntr-o deriv? total?. Noile contexte generate de un astfel de tip de enun?are creeaz? spa?ii retorice ale (?n)comunic?rii, inabitual proliferante, sf?r?ind adesea, cum s-a observat, ?ntr-un joc de-a masacrul logocratic, rupt de comandamentele – instan?ele – enun??rii. Personajele rostesc replicile automat, ?ntr-un ritm tot mai accentuat“.

Poemele dense, pline de miez ale lui Andrei Fischof curg unul dup altul. Fr ostentaie. Firesc, aa cum ploaia se scurge din orbitele zeilor fr nume, aa cum iarba poate fi numit iarb numai dac este pscut, din timp in timp, de pegaii morilor tineri. nfurat n toga marelui frig, poetul refuz zgomotul, nvlmeala, furtunile agitaiilor zadarnice, optnd mereu pentru ipostaza martorului tcut, marcat de o sensibilitate atent, ochiul su, da, cel triunghiular, din frunte, nregistrnd totul, aproape totul. Poemele-peisaje contureaz o lume a sfritului ntunecat, a degenerescentei, a decadenei i pierderii reperelor. E o lume de comar, o lume nurubat n albia apocalipsei care se inventa, clipa de clipa, provocnd martorul – adunat, strns n el nsui, atent la forurile-i luntrice i la vocea creia i se supune necondiionat – s imagineze discret, evaziv, surpat n uimirea de a fi el nsui: o ans de salvare. i martorul rspunde provocrii, aa cum un copil, fiind, pe malul mrii, harponat spre orizonturile mirabile ale dorinei de a fi, deseneaz, cu un beior, pe nisip, o uria corabie fantastic...“ – Aura Christi.

Parodicul nu este doar unul dintre modurile comice; el este rezultatul variatelor ncercri pe care literatura le face spre a se rennoi prin autonegare. Asumndu-i acest rol, literatura parodic are luciditatea de a-i etala mecanismul auto-producerii, analizndu-i exagerrile, dar i constitutivele convenii. Aceast ntoarcere spre literaritatea literaturii pe care mizeaz orice demers parodic este camuflat prin aparena orientare spre diferii autori, texte sau stiluri. Orice parodist este, simultan, explorator prin textele altora, dar i autorul ce-i analizeaz lucid teritoriul propriului text. Una dintre aceste dou dimensiuni poate fi dominant ntr-o parodie, oscilaiile fiind generate att de parodist, ct i de contextul estetic cruia acesta i aparine. Dac, n mod normal, principiile critice urmeaz dezvoltrii formelor literare, discursul parodic este un discurs critic contient deghizat n form literar sau un discurs literar cu finalitate critic. Vorbim de parodia studiat estetic i nu de parodia ca simpl deformare, comis din ignoran.“ O fenomenologie a parodicului din Evul Mediu, epoc modern i postmodern, aceast carte ofer i analiza parodicului n operele unor scriitori ca Urmuz, Caragiale, Crtrescu .a.

The Portuguese visual artist Paula Rego has inspired this trilogy of plays. Her paintings Crivelli’s Garden, The Prey and Breaking China became the catalyst for writing by theatre maker Fiona Graham. Commissioned by Theatre Centre and Komedia, these three new plays were developed for specific audiences through a series of artist/audience residencies and collaborations. These works have toured Britain and been re-staged in Portugal and Singapore. Crivellis’s Garden was created for a 16+ audience and explores rites of passage as two young women decide whether they should stay or leave their fishing village to go to university in Portugal. Between Friends is for 7 -11 year olds and examines the politics of friendship between three young people when they are shipwrecked and abandoned in a lighthouse. Breaking China is for 4-8 year olds and shows the importance of creative play and storytelling when making sense of change and adversity. About the authorDR FIONA GRAHAMFiona teaches dramaturgy at Goldsmiths University. Previously she spent over a decade in New Zealand writing and teaching at Auckland University. Her plays include: Passage (The Herald Theatre, Auckland 2010), Breaking China (Theatre Centre, 2002 and Singapore’s International Festival, 2004) and Legacy (for Massive Theatre Company, 1998). Most recently she worked as dramaturge with Otago University and Talking House Theatre Company on Be/Longing and Hush, with Red Leap Theatre Company on Paper Sky and Sea, with playwright Mei-Lin Hansen on The Mooncake And The Kumara, with Winning Productions on I Wanna Be -- Ponsonby and Carol Brown on 1000 Lovers and the Pah Collective. Her book Catalyst For Change: The Interventions of the Dramaturge was published in New Zealand in 2017. Reviews: ‘Graham’s poetically eloquent script flows like molten silver and should give students, teachers and other theatregoers much to think about’ (on Crivelli’s Garden) – The Stage ‘A prime example of how an excellent script innovatively directed and beautifully performed can be applied to a wide age range. This joyful production provides much food for thought.’ (on Breaking China) – The Stage

"I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, here and here, I am still a free woman."During a period of four hundred years, European slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the Americas, teaching a slave to read and write was a criminal offense. When the last slaves gained their freedom in Brazil, barely a thousand of them were literate. Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived.This novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories, one story of a possible 12 million or more.Lawrence Hill created another in The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows my Name in the U.S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in Homegoing. Ama occupies center stage throughout this novel. As the story opens, she is sixteen. Distant drums announce the death of her grandfather. Her family departs to attend the funeral, leaving her alone to tend her ailing baby brother. It is 1775. Asante has conquered its northern neighbor and exacted an annual tribute of 500 slaves. The ruler of Dagbon dispatches a raiding party into the lands of the neighboring Bekpokpam. They capture Ama. That night, her lover, Itsho, leads an attack on the raiders’ camp. The rescue bid fails. Sent to collect water from a stream, Ama comes across Itsho’s mangled corpse. For the rest of her life she will call upon his spirit in time of need. In Kumase, the Asante capital, Ama is given as a gift to the Queen-mother. When the adolescent monarch, Osei Kwame, conceives a passion for her, the regents dispatch her to the coast for sale to the Dutch at Elmina Castle. There the governor, Pieter de Bruyn, selects her as his concubine, dressing her in the elegant clothes of his late Dutch wife and instructing the obese chaplain to teach her to read and write English. De Bruyn plans to marry Ama and take her with him to Europe. He makes a last trip to the Dutch coastal outstations and returns infected with yellow fever. On his death, his successor rapes Ama and sends her back to the female dungeon. Traumatized, her mind goes blank. She comes to her senses in the canoe which takes her and other women out to the slave ship, The Love of Liberty. Before the ship leaves the coast of Africa, Ama instigates a slave rebellion. It fails and a brutal whipping leaves her blind in one eye. The ship is becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Then a fierce storm cripples it and drives it into the port of Salvador, capital of Brazil. Ama finds herself working in the fields and the mill on a sugar estate. She is absorbed into slave society and begins to adapt, learning Portuguese. Years pass. Ama is now totally blind. Clutching the cloth which is her only material link with Africa, she reminisces, dozes, falls asleep. A short epilogue brings the story up to date. The consequences of the slave trade and slavery are still with us. Brazilians of African descent remain entrenched in the lower reaches of society, enmeshed in poverty. “This is story telling on a grand scale,” writes Tony Sim?es da Silva. “In Ama, Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. By focusing on the brutalization of Ama's body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatizes the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman. Ama echoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers of the African diaspora who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilization.” Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book.

Man’s evident failure to make the most out of his material life suggests a study of the elements in each citizen that make him of value to his age and community. What are the measurements of mankind, and why is it that daily some add new treasures to the storehouse of civilization, while others take from and waste the store already accumulated?

Lucien Chardon, the son of a lower middle-class father and an impoverished mother of remote aristocratic descent, is the pivotal figure of the entire work. Living at Angouleme, he is impoverished, impatient, handsome and ambitious. His widowed mother, his sister Eve and his best friend, David Sechard, do nothing to lessen his high opinion of his own talents, for it is an opinion they share.

The Archdeacon, although allowing that Grace is a lady, doesn't think her of high enough rank or wealth for his widowed son; his position is strengthened by the Reverend Mr Crawley's apparent crime. Almost broken by poverty and trouble, the Reverend Mr Crawley hardly knows himself if he is guilty or not; fortunately, the mystery is resolved just as Major Grantly's determination and Grace Crawley's own merit force the Archdeacon to overcome his prejudice against her as a daughter-in-law.

We follow Professor Challenger to a South American plateau in the Amazon basin where dinosaurs and other extinct creatures still survive. A legendary work of science fiction which sparked the Lost World genre.

Four Faultless Felons includes The Moderate Murderer, The Honest Quack, The Ecstatic Thief, and The Loyal Traitor. Chesterton's protagonist's faultless crimes include: murder, fraud, theft, and treason. They are motivated by good intentions of course, by altruism and virtues.

The story tells of a prince who wants to marry a princess, but is having difficulty finding a suitable wife. One stormy night a young woman drenched with rain seeks shelter in the prince's castle. She claims to be a princess, so the prince's mother decides to test their unexpected guest by placing a pea in the bed she is offered for the night. The Princess and The Pea is one of the twenty stories featured in this timeless collection of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen.

In one of those beautiful valleys, through which the Thames not yet polluted by the tide, the scouring of cities, or even the minor defilement of the sandy streams of Surrey rolls a clear flood through flowery meadows, under the shade of old beech woods, and the smooth mossy greensward of the chalk hills which pour into it their tributary rivulets, as pure and pellucid as the fountain of Bandusium, or the wells of Scamander, by which the wives and daughters of the Trojans washed their splendid garments in the days of peace, before the coming of the Greeks...

Troilus and Cressida is set during the later years of the Trojan War, faithfully following the plotline of the Iliad from Achilles' refusal to participate in battle to Hector's death. Troilus, a Trojan prince (son of Priam), woos Cressida, another Trojan. They have sex, professing their undying love, before Cressida is exchanged for a Trojan prisoner of war. As he attempts to visit her in the Greek camp, Troilus glimpses Diomedes flirting with his beloved Cressida, and decides to avenge her perfidy.

Sandy Arbuthnot's friend John Blenkiron discovers that a charismatic industrial tycoon is plotting to rule the world from his base in the small South American country of Olifa. Sandy decides to lead a revolution to scuttle the plot and allow the Olifans to decide their own fate.

Set in a future England where the Temperance movement has allowed a bizarre form of Progressive Islam to dominate the political and social life of the country. Because of this, alcohol sales to the poor are effectively prohibited, while the rich can get alcoholic drinks under a medical certificate.

The aim of this book is to assist towards the removal of nervous irritants, which are not only the cause of much physical disease, but materially interfere with the best possibilities of usefulness and pleasure in everyday life.

It was approaching nightfall. The sexton, Savely Gykin, was lying in his huge bed in the hut adjoining the church. He was not asleep, though it was his habit to go to sleep at the same time as the hens. His coarse red hair peeped from under one end of the greasy patchwork quilt, made up of coloured rags, while his big unwashed feet stuck out from the other. He was listening. His hut adjoined the wall that encircled the church and the solitary window in it looked out upon the open country. And out there a regular battle was going on. It was hard to say who was being wiped off the face of the earth, and for the sake of whose destruction nature was being churned up into such a ferment; but, judging from the unceasing malignant roar, someone was getting it very hot.

Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of his physical energy. La Peau de chagrin belongs to the Etudes philosophiques group of Balzac's sequence of novels.

A sequel to Daniel Defoe's legendary Robinson Crusoe story of his adventures and survival on a remote tropical island. In this volume we follow Crusoe's return to his island, his voyages to Brazil, Southeast Asia, China, Madagascar, Siberia, and his adventures with the local tribes.

Moby-Dick, one of the Great American Novels and a treasure of world literature, follows the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and Captain Ahab who seeks out Moby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white sperm whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off his leg, which now drives Ahab to take revenge.