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  Valkyrie

  LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZEValkyries: the female supernatural beings that choose who dies and who lives on the battlefield. They protect some, but guide spears, arrows and sword blades into the bodies of others. Viking myths about valkyries attempt to elevate the banality of war - to make the pain and suffering, the lost limbs and deformities, the piles of lifeless bodies of young men, glorious and worthwhile. Rather than their death being futile, it is their destiny and good fortune, determined by divine beings. The women in these stories take full part in the power struggles and upheavals in their communities, for better or worse.Drawing on the latest historical and archaeological evidence, Valkyrie introduces readers to the dramatic and fascinating texts recorded in medieval Iceland, a culture able to imagine women in all kinds of roles carrying power, not just in this world, but pulling the strings in the other-world, too. In the process, this fascinating book uncovers the reality behind the myths and legends to reveal the dynamic, diverse lives of Viking women.

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  Swollening (eBook, ePUB)

  Jason Purcell's debut collection of poems rests at the intersection of queerness and illness, staking a place for the queer body that has been made sick through living in this world. Part poetic experiment and part memoir, Swollening attempts to diagnose what has been undiagnosable, tracing an uneven path from a lifetime of swallowing bad feelings-homophobia in its external and internalized manifestations, heteronormativity, anxiety surrounding desire, aversion to sex-to a body in revolt. In poems that speak using the grammar and logics of sickness, Purcell offers a dizzying collision of word and image that is the language of pain alongside the banality of living on. Beginning by reading his own life and body closely and slowly zooming out to read illness in the world, Purcell comes to ask: how might a sick, queer body forgive itself for a natural reaction to living in a sick world and go on toward hope? In Swollening, Purcell coughs up his own poetics of illness, his own aesthetics of pain, to form a tender collection that lands straight in the gut.

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  Sons of Sorrow (eBook, ePUB)

  SOME THINGS ARE BETTER LEFT ALONE Henk has been living a relatively carefree life in the city since fleeing the horrors of the town of Sorrow with his brother, Dave. Never would he have dreamt of returning. Not even for her.But time and banality have a funny way of eroding the memory of even the worst experiences, bringing only the better times to the forefront of recall, so when he receives a wedding invitation from the third part of their old monster-fighting trio, he finds himself unable to turn it down.Sorrow has changed drastically from the place it once was, with the murders and suicides that once plagued the town being used as a selling point by wealthy investors to turn it into a morbid attraction for dark tourists.Beneath the costumed mascots and smiling families, is all really as it seems? Or by returning, have Henk and Dave inadvertently awoken an ancient evil far deadlier than anything they've faced before?Sons of Sorrow is the latest bizarre horror from the mind of Matthew A. Clarke.

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  We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 664min

  Last resort has become first resort. Courage has become cowardice. Black ops have become standard operating procedure. An intelligence agency is now a killing machine. Self-defense has become naked aggression. Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt has become possible future potential for guilt. Voices of dissent have been irrevocably silenced. Patriots have been replaced by mercenaries. Human rights have been eclipsed by concern with the protection of soldiers’ lives. The US war on terrorism has been carried out using terrorist tactics, with formal military states emulating asymmetrical factional killers. Wars of necessity have been supplanted by ever-proliferating wars of choice.In We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, Laurie Calhoun examines the 21st-century practice of remote-control killing of suspects located in third-world countries and challenges listeners to reflect upon the long-range implications - moral, political, psychological, and cultural - of this new form of "warfare". Through the use of provocative analogies and examples, We Kill Because We Can clarifies and criticizes targeted killing as incompatible with the values and principles of modern Western democratic societies.Table of contents:Foreword to the Paperback edition (2016) Preface IntroductionPart I: Find Chapter 1: Drone Nation Chapter 2: From Black-Ops to Standard Operating Procedure Chapter 3: The Logic of Targeted Killing Chapter 4: Lethal CreepPart II: Fix Chapter 5: Strike First, Suppress Questions Later Chapter 6: The New Banality of Killing Chapter 7: The Operators Chapter 8: From Conscience to OblivionPart III: Finish Chapter 9: Death and Politics Chapter 10: Death and Taxes Chapter 11: The Death of Military Virtue Chapter 12: Tyra ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Laurie Calhoun. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/139942/bk_acx0_139942_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  The Edge of the Earth: A Novel , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 501min

  In 1898, a woman forsakes the comfort of home and family for a love that takes her to a remote lighthouse on the wild coast of California. What she finds at the edge of the earth, hidden between the sea and the fog, will change her life irrevocably. Trudy, who can argue Kant over dinner and play a respectable portion of Mozart's Serenade in G major, has been raised to marry her childhood friend and assume a life of bourgeois comfort in Milwaukee. She knows she should be pleased, but she's restless instead, yearning for something she lacks even the vocabulary to articulate. When she falls in love with enigmatic and ambitious Oskar, she believes she's found her escape from the banality of her preordained life. But escape turns out to be more fraught than Trudy had imagined. Alienated from family and friends, the couple moves across the country to take a job at a lighthouse at Point Lucia, California - an unnervingly isolated outcropping, trapped between the ocean and hundreds of miles of inaccessible wilderness. There they meet the light station's only inhabitants - the formidable and guarded Crawleys. In this unfamiliar place, Trudy will find that nothing is as she might have predicted, especially after she discovers what hides among the rocks. Gorgeously detailed, swiftly paced, and anchored in the dramatic geography of the remote and eternally mesmerizing Big Sur, The Edge of the Earth is a magical story of secrets and self-transformation, ruses and rebirths. Christina Schwarz, celebrated for her rich evocation of place and vivid, unpredictable characters, has spun another haunting and unforgettable tale. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Candace Thaxton. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/sans/006333/bk_sans_006333_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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  Paris, Novembre

  On the night of 13 November 2015, Paris was convulsed by a series of coordinated attacks. Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, not far from the strikes, did not consider taking photographs, weighed on not only by the difficulty of depicting a city already so exhaustively pictured, but more so by the impossibility of representing such tragedy. The next day Leong, wandering the city in the aftermath of the events, turned his camera downward to the ground, focusing on an aspect of the city we repeatedly look at yet largely do not notice. The resulting photos render a seemingly known city strange and unfamiliar. At first appearing to be abstractions or even aerials or views of the cosmos, they reveal specific details we would otherwise miss and which contain gravity in their apparent banality-from cigarettes left on the asphalt by mourners, to the footprints and broken glass of the night before, and the sawdust scattered on the sidewalks soaking up blood. Paris, Novembre is a portrait of a city at a traumatic moment in its history and an exploration of how that history leaves its marks on the city's ground. Leong's series is a gesture of mourning and contemplation, seemingly of nothing and the reluctance to look, yet at the same time of looking closely and intently.

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  Pulp and Paper , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 379min

  I glanced out the window as my train pulled into the station and saw the girl who killed my son. So begins Josh Rolnick's powerful debut collection of eight stories (winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award), which utilizes a richly focused narrative style accenting the unavoidable tragedies of life while revealing the grace and dignity with which people learn to deal with them. The stories - four set in New Jersey and four in New York - span the wide geographic tapestry of the area and demonstrate the interconnectedness of both the neighboring states and the residents who inhabit them. In "Funnyboy", a grief-stricken Levi Stern struggles to come to terms with the banality of his son's accidental death at the hands of Missy Jones, high school cheerleader. In "Pulp and Paper", two neighbors, Gail Denny and Avery Mayberry, attempt to escape a toxic spill resulting from a train derailment when a moment of compassion alters both their futures forever. "Innkeeping" features a teenager's simmering resentment toward the burgeoning relationship between his widowed mother and a longterm hotel guest. "The Herald" introduces us to Dale, a devoted reporter on a small-town newspaper, desperately striving to break a big-time story to salvage his career and his ego. A teenager deals with the inconceivable results of his innocent act before an ice hockey game in "Big Lake". And in "The Carousel", a Coney Island carousel operator confronts the fading memories of a world that once overflowed with grandeur and promise. Throughout, Rolnick's characters search for a firm footing while wrestling with life's hardships, finding hope and redemption in the simple yet uncommon willingness to act. Pulp and Paper captures lightning in a bottle, excavating the smallest steps people take to move beyond grief, heartbreak, and failure - conjuring the subtle, fragile moments when people are not yet whole, but no longer quite as broken. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Robert Fass. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/003935/bk_acx0_003935_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  In Gratitude , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 474min

  The future flashed before my eyes in all its preordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness. I got a joke in. 'So - we'd better get cooking the meth,' I said to the poet. In August 2014 Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given 'two or three years' to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, laden with cliché. Being a writer, she decided to write about it (grappling with the unoriginality even of this) and to tell a story she had not yet told: that of being taken in, aged 15, by the author Doris Lessing and the subsequent 50 years of their complex relationship. In September 2014 Jenny Diski began writing in the London Review of Books, describing her experience of living with terminal cancer, examining her life and history with Doris Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue from 'the bin' as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family and the influence this had on her. Swooping from one memory to the next - alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, stacking shelves in Banbury and the drug-taking 20-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals - Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers: Lessing and herself. From one of our most original voices comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death. From the acclaimed author of Skating to Antarctica comes a breathtakingly honest and original memoir about living with terminal cancer and her relationship with Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning author who adopted her as a teenager. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Kim Hicks. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/adbl/027223/bk_adbl_027223_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  World War 3.0: Microsoft, the US Government, and the Battle for the New Economy, Hörbuch, Digital, 361min

  The Internet Revolution, like all great industrial changes, has made the world's elephantine media companies tremble that their competitors - whether small and nimble mice or fellow elephants - will get to new terrain first and seize its commanding heights. In a climate in which fear and insecurity are considered healthy emotions, corporate violence becomes commonplace. In the blink of an eye - or the time it has taken slogans such as "The Internet changes everything" to go from hyperbole to banality - "creative destruction" has wracked the global economy on an epic scale. No one has been more powerful or felt more fear or reacted more violently than Bill Gates and Microsoft. Afraid that any number of competitors might outflank them - whether Netscape or Sony or AOL Time Warner or Sun or AT&T or Linux-based companies that champion the open-source movement or some college student hacking in his dorm room - Microsoft has waged holy war on all foes, leveraging its imposing strengths. In World War 3.0, Ken Auletta chronicles this fierce conflict from the vantage of its most important theater of operations: the devastating second front opened up against Bill Gates's empire by the United States government. The book's narrative spine is United States v. Microsoft, the government's massive civil suit against Microsoft for allegedly stifling competition and innovation on a broad scale. With his superb writerly gifts and extraordinary access to all the principal parties, Ken Auletta crafts this landmark confrontation into a tight, character - and incident-filled courtroom drama featuring the best legal minds of our time, including David Boies and Judge Richard Posner. And with the wisdom gleaned from covering the converging media, software, and communications industries for The New Yorker for the better part of a decade, Auletta uses this pivotal battle to shape a magisterial reckoning with the larger war and the agendas, pers Language: English. Narrator: Robert O'Keefe. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/rhau/000028/bk_rhau_000028_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  How to Be an Antiracist Family: 25 Inspiring Tales About Racism to Be Read Together with the Kids , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 119min

  Are you looking for a constructive way to talk about racism to your kids without being pedantic or corny? Then, keep reading! Today, we are surrounded by terrible episodes of social racism, from the school environment to politics. Social injustices have become too frequent to stand by: movements like "Black Lives Matter" are born from the desire to overturn an obsolete system. It has, therefore, become essential to raise one's children through healthy and correct values. You know, it is always difficult to talk to your family about important subjects without falling into banality and without having any support or example to help you.So, how to deal with the issue of racism on a daily basis without being too repetitive with your children and giving the family moments of healthy discussion?How to Become an Antiracist Family will help you in this!By listening to this book, you will have the opportunity to introduce to your family, step by step and in moderate doses, the theme of race difference. It will undoubtedly be a way to reunite the family at various times of the day: during a meal, during the commute to school, before going to bed, etc.In the book, you will find 25 short stories from everyday life, which deal with the themes of racism in various situations: racism at school, at home, with friends, at work, on the road, in history, and much more. Each story contains an appreciable message from both adults and children. The purpose of each story is to convey a teaching that can be deepened all together in a conversation between parents and children.It is important to get your children in touch with this current topic as soon as possible and to grow in them the responsibility and awareness that in the world, we are all different and that beauty lies precisely in this. So, give yourself and your family a chance to grow together and live the experience this book can give you!Scroll to the top and ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Alaura Howery. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/235224/bk_acx0_235224_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

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