Foreign Soil
Download Foreign Soil PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Foreign Soil book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Foreign Soil
Winner of ABIA Literary Fiction of the Year Award 2015 Winner of the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction 2015 Winner of the Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award 2013 In Melbourne's western suburbs, in a dilapidated block of flats overhanging the rattling Footscray train lines, a young black mother is working on a collection of stories. The book is called Foreign Soil. Inside its covers, a desperate asylum seeker is pacing the hallways of Sydney's notorious Villawood detention centre, a seven-year-old Sudanese boy has found solace in a patchwork bike, an enraged black militant is on the warpath through the rebel squats of 1960s Brixton, a Mississippi housewife decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to save her son from small-town ignorance, a young woman leaves rural Jamaica in search of her destiny, and a Sydney schoolgirl loses her way. The young mother keeps writing, the rejection letters keep arriving . . . In this collection of award-winning stories, Melbourne writer Maxine Beneba Clarke has given a voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, the downtrodden and the mistreated. It will challenge you, it will have you by the heartstrings. 'Maxine Beneba Clarke is a powerful and fearless storyteller, and this collection - written with exquisite sensitivity and yet uncompromising - will stay with you with the force of elemental truth. Clarke is the real deal, and will, if we're lucky, be an essential voice in world literature for years to come.' - Dave Eggers bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 'Foreign Soil is a collection of outstanding literary quality and promise. Clarke is a confident and highly skilled writer.' - Hannah Kent, bestselling author of Burial Rites 'An assured and skilful debut' - Weekend Australian
The Patchwork Bike
Author: Maxine Beneba Clarke
language: en
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Release Date: 2021-02-23
“The words and images in this snapshot story pulse with resourceful ingenuity, joyful exuberance, and layered meanings.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) When you live in a village at the edge of the no-go desert, you need to make your own fun. That's when you and your brothers get inventive and build a bike from scratch, using everyday items like an old milk pot (maybe Mum is still using it, maybe not) and a used flour sack. You can even make a license plate from bark if you want. The end result is a spectacular bike, perfect for whooping and laughing as you bumpetty bump over sand hills, past your fed-up mum and right through your mud-for-walls home. A Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner, this joyous story from Maxine Beneba Clarke, beautifully illustrated by street artist Van Thanh Rudd, is now available as an ebook.
Notes on a Foreign Country
Pulitzer Prize Finalist: “Hansen’s principal injunction to Americans to understand how others view them and their country’s policies is timely and urgent.” —The Washington Post Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award A New York Times Notable Book Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. She arrived with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . a one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil. “Her fascinating insider’s view of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise upends Western simplicities.” —The Atlantic “Vividly captures the disorientation we experience when our preconceived notions collide with uncomfortable discoveries . . . Rare and refreshing.” —The Washington Post “A deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world.” —The New York Times Book Review “A fluid amalgam of memoir, journalism and political critique—and a very readable challenge to American exceptionalism.” —The Financial Times