The tiny, fictional island of Outermark sits thirty miles off the coast in the waters between Maine and Nova Scotia. When Corson Wills, one of the last people to have lived on the island, is asked to recount its history, he begins by describing it as "a rock in the ocean where no one lives anymore." Corson's tale, and those of his ancestors who also lived there, ferry the reader between the 1980s, when lobster fishing is the only remaining industry, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, days of great sailing ships to the East Indies but also of conflicts between the earliest Native residents and newly arrived colonial settlers.
"A granular, meditative, and beautiful portrait of a fascinating life."--Booklist"Put this beautiful book on your shelf between Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life."--William Giraldi, author of The Hero's Body"Of all the memoirs and autobiographies I've ever read--literary or otherwise--Dark-Land is among the very best . . . [A] genuinely astonishing achievement."--John Wilson, The Washington ExaminerNamed BOOK OF THE YEAR by First Things magazineThis powerful memoir from poet Kevin Hart traces his difficult childhood as a "backward boy" in a poor part of London, a disorienting move to tropical Australia, and the secrets he and his family kept from one another.Dark-Land is Kevin Hart's searing, yet at times hilarious, narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery, and it passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to a new and bewildering life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan's evocation of "Dark-Land" in Pilgrim's Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart's hidden inner life, his family's penchant for keeping secrets, and their illusions about the nature of their shared past. We see Hart grow from being the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school to experiencing a "conversion" in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic.Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity.
"Drawing on the remarkable events of her own life, ... author and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck tells the story of Ditke, a young Jewish girl living in Hungary during World War II"--Page 4 of cover.
"At the heart of every essay in Elisabeth Sharp McKetta's lively and luminous collection is a question: how does one grow up without losing oneself? McKetta braids the deceptively simple stories of her own life with the rich undercurrent of familiar childhood tales to reveal something both personal and universal, and as close to the truth as possible. Whether she is spending sleepless nights watching the sumo wrestler Asashoryu with her also-awake father or settling into a new life in a fishing hamlet in Cornwall, struggling with a beloved and ultimately untrainable corgi named Goblin or trying to resist her mother's gifts and with them the implications of who she should be, McKetta's essays sparkle with life and twist round and about: funny and insightful and compelling"--
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
