Search results for ""Author Maya""

In these dense and startling stories, Maya Sonenberg telescopes seasons, decades, and generations in candid depictions of women’s family lives. What happens when the urge to ditch your family outpaces the desire to love them? The stories in Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, attempt to answer this question, heading straight for the messiness of domestic relationships and the constraints society places on women as they navigate their obligations. Daughters desert their rheumy-eyed elders in dusty museums, steal a mother’s favorite teacup, or consider throwing their dead parents’ nostalgia-riddled belongings out the window. Mothers conclude that they love one child more than their others. Fathers puzzle over a wife’s inability to balance family and career or accuse a partner of blaming their child for her own misdeeds. Women mourn the children they decided not to have and fret over the legacy they’ll leave the children they do have. But sometimes the generations reconcile or siblings manage to rescue each other. Love tears these people apart, but it mends them too. The emotions expressed in these stories are combustible, both fraught and nuanced, uncontrollable and common, but above all often ignored or hushed because we’re not supposed to be bored by our children or annoyed with our aged parents, even as we love them. The careful shapes of these stories adapted from fairy tales, verse, letters, or newspaper announcements, the surprise of their wordplay, and the blaze of their lyrical sentences allow them to dig into and contain all those messy emotions at the same time. In these works, constraint creates both understanding and fire.

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This dazzling Christmas poem by Maya Angelou is powerful and inspiring for people of all faiths.In this beautiful, deeply moving poem, Maya Angelou inspires us to embrace the peace and promise of Christmas, so that hope and love can once again light up our holidays and the world. “Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers, look heavenward,” she writes, “and speak the word aloud. Peace.” Read by the poet at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree at the White House on December 1, 2005, Maya Angelou’ s celebration of the “Glad Season” is a radiant affirmation of the goodness of life.

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The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester explores healing in the aftermath of trauma and the fullness of queer joy. In this queer contemporary YA mystery, a nonbinary autistic teen realizes they must not only solve a 30-year-old mystery but also face the demons lurking in their past in order to live a satisfying life. Sam Sylvester has long collected stories of half-lived lives—of kids who died before they turned nineteen. Sam was almost one of those kids. Now, as Sam’s own nineteenth birthday approaches, their recent near-death experience haunts them. They’re certain they don’t have much time left. . . . But Sam's life seems to be on the upswing after meeting several new friends and a potential love interest in Shep, their next-door neighbour. Yet the past keeps roaring back—in Sam’s memories and in the form of a thirty-year-old suspicious death that took place in Sam’s new home. Sam can’t resist trying to find out more about the kid who died and who now seems to guide their investigation. When Sam starts receiving threatening notes, they know they’re on the path to uncovering a murderer. But are they digging through the past or digging their own future grave? “Look no further for your next favourite read, because The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester has it all: a gripping murder mystery that will keep you turning pages, ghosts, romance, and a treasure trove of queer characters with depth and heart. Here’s something rare—a suspenseful story that also feels like a hug.” —Sarah Glenn Marsh, author of the Reign of the Fallen series

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Editor of the award-winning site Feministing.com, Maya Dusenbery brings together scientific and sociological research, interviews with doctors and researchers, and personal stories from women across the country to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today. In Doing Harm, Dusenbery explores the deep, systemic problems that underlie women’s experiences of feeling dismissed by the medical system. Women have been discharged from the emergency room mid-heart attack with a prescription for anti-anxiety meds, while others with autoimmune diseases have been labeled “chronic complainers” for years before being properly diagnosed. Women with endometriosis have been told they are just overreacting to “normal” menstrual cramps, while still others have “contested” illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia that, dogged by psychosomatic suspicions, have yet to be fully accepted as “real” diseases by the whole of the profession.An eye-opening read for patients and health care providers alike, Doing Harm shows how women suffer because the medical community knows relatively less about their diseases and bodies and too often doesn’t trust their reports of their symptoms. The research community has neglected conditions that disproportionately affect women and paid little attention to biological differences between the sexes in everything from drug metabolism to the disease factors—even the symptoms of a heart attack. Meanwhile, a long history of viewing women as especially prone to “hysteria” reverberates to the present day, leaving women battling against a stereotype that they’re hypochondriacs whose ailments are likely to be “all in their heads.” Offering a clear-eyed explanation of the root causes of this insidious and entrenched bias and laying out its sometimes catastrophic consequences, Doing Harm is a rallying wake-up call that will change the way we look at health care for women.

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A THIEF MADE A LORD. A PRINCE MADE A VILLAIN. A DEADLY GAME FOR POWER.The exhilarating sequel to the LatinX Sunday Times bestseller Nocturna, about a face-changing thief and a risk-taking prince who must reunite when a deadly enemy threatens their kingdom's chance at establishing a global peace.After joining forces to save Castallan from an ancient magical evil, Alfie and Finn haven't seen each other in months. Alfie is finally stepping up to his role as heir and preparing for an International Peace Summit, while Finn is traveling and reveling in her newfound freedom from Ignacio.That is, until she's unexpectedly installed as the new leader of one of Castallan's powerful crime families. Now one of the four Thief Lords of Castallan, she's forced to preside over the illegal underground Oculta competition, which coincides with the summit and boasts a legendary prize.Just when Finn finds herself back in San Cristobal, Alfie's plans are also derailed. Los Toros, the mysterious syndicate responsible for his brother's murder, has resurfaced-and their newest target is the summit. And when these events all unexpectedly converge, Finn and Alfie are once again forced to work together to follow the assassins' trail and preserve Castallan's hopes for peace with Englass. But will they be able to stop these sinister foes before a new war threatens their kingdom?

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'Why does he write those ghastly plays that the whole of Paris flocks to see? And why does he paint such lifelike portraits that everyone recognizes themselves?' Moliere, The Impromptu at Versailles This volume brings together four of Moliere's greatest verse comedies covering the best years of his prolific writing career. Actor, director, and playwright, Moliere (1622-73) was one of the finest and most influential French dramatists, adept at portraying human foibles and puncturing pomposity. The School for Wives was his first great success; Tartuffe, condemned and banned for five years, his most controversial play. The Misanthrope is his acknowledged masterpiece, and The Clever Women his last, and perhaps best-constructed, verse piece. In addition this collection includes a spirited attack on his enemies and a defence of his theatre, in the form of two sparkling short plays, The School for Wives Criticized and The Impromptu at Versailles. Moliere's prose plays are available in a complementary Oxford World's Classics edition, Don Juan and Other Plays. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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A fairy tale of big waves and even bigger courage, inspired by the personal story of professional surfer Maya Gabeira, who smashed records and gender stereotypesYoung Maya is shy and often feels fragile and scared because of her asthma, except when she's in the water—it's the one place where she feels strong. While everyone else in her town is scared of "the Beast," the giant wave heard all around the world as it crashes into the shoreline, Maya finds the noise comforting, the curves of the wave soothing. If she could only tame it, then everyone could see all the beauty it has to offer. With a pink surfboard and a determined heart, Maya will be the first girl to meet the Beast head-on. Professional surfer Maya Gabeira, known for surfing Guinness World Record–breaking big waves, shares her story of resilience, defying expectations of women in sports, and daring to achieve the impossible. Beautifully illustrated by Ramona Kaulitzki, Maya and the Beast is an empowering reminder that every fear can be conquered and every Beast can be tamed.

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Chris, Ikem and Beatrice are like-minded friends working under the military regime of His Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated President of Kangan. In the pressurized atmosphere of oppression and intimidation they are simply trying to live and love - and remain friends. But in a world where each day brings a new betrayal, hope is hard to cling on to. Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Achebe's candid vision of contemporary African politics, is a powerful fusion of angry voices. It continues the journey that Achebe began with his earlier novels, tracing the history of modern Africa through colonialism and beyond, and is a work ultimately filled with hope.

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What does it mean to be Mi’kmaq? And if Swift Fox can’t find the answer, will she ever feel like part of her family? When Swift Fox’s father picks her up to go visit her aunties, uncles, and cousins, her belly is already full of butterflies. And when he tells her that today is the day that she’ll learn how to be Mi’kmaq, the butterflies grow even bigger. Though her father reassures her that Mi’kmaq is who she is from her eyes to her toes, Swift Fox doesn’t understand what that means. Her family welcomes her with smiles and hugs, but when it’s time to smudge and everyone else knows how, Swift Fox feels even more like she doesn’t belong. Then she meets her cousin Sully and realizes that she’s not the only one who’s unsure—and she may even be the one to teach him something about what being Mi’kmaq means. Based on the author’s own experience, with striking illustrations by Maya McKibbin, Swift Fox All Along is a poignant story about identity and belonging that is at once personal and universally resonant.

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The arduous, confusing and fraught journey that immigrants take through immigration court Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved through immigration court. With a national backlog surpassing one million cases, court hearings take years and most migrants will eventually be ordered deported. The Slow Violence of Immigration Court sheds light on the experiences of migrants from the “Northern Triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as they navigate legal processes, deportation proceedings, immigration court, and the immigration system writ large. Grounded in the illuminating stories of people facing deportation, the family members who support them, and the attorneys who defend them, The Slow Violence of Immigration Court invites readers to question matters of fairness and justice and the fear of living with the threat of deportation. Although the spectacle of violence created by family separation and deportation is perceived as extreme and unprecedented, these long legal proceedings are masked in the mundane and are often overlooked, ignored, and excused. In an urgent call to action, Maya Pagni Barak deftly demonstrates that deportation and family separation are not abhorrent anomalies, but are a routine, slow form of violence at the heart of the U.S. immigration system.

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In the American imagination, the Soviet Union was a drab cultural wasteland, a place where playful creative work and individualism was heavily regulated and censored. Yet despite state control, some cultural industries flourished in the Soviet era, including animation. Drawing the Iron Curtain tells the story of the golden age of Soviet animation and the Jewish artists who enabled it to thrive. Art historian Maya Balakirsky Katz reveals how the state-run animation studio Soyuzmultfilm brought together Jewish creative personnel from every corner of the Soviet Union and served as an unlikely haven for dissidents who were banned from working in other industries. Surveying a wide range of Soviet animation produced between 1919 and 1989, from cutting-edge art films like Tale of Tales to cartoons featuring “Soviet Mickey Mouse” Cheburashka, she finds that these works played a key role in articulating a cosmopolitan sensibility and a multicultural vision for the Soviet Union. Furthermore, she considers how Jewish filmmakers used animation to depict distinctive elements of their heritage and ethnic identity, whether producing films about the Holocaust or using fellow Jews as models for character drawings. Providing a copiously illustrated introduction to many of Soyuzmultfilm’s key artistic achievements, while revealing the tumultuous social and political conditions in which these films were produced, Drawing the Iron Curtain has something to offer animation fans and students of Cold War history alike.

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Why has the large income gap between blacks and whites persisted for decades after the passage of civil rights legislation? More specifically, why do African Americans remain substantially under-represented in the highest-paying professions, such as science, engineering, information technology, and finance? A sophisticated study of racial disparity, "Opting Out" examines why some talented black undergraduates pursue lower-paying, lower-status careers despite being amply qualified for more prosperous ones. To explore these issues, Maya A. Beasley conducted in-depth interviews with black and white juniors at two of the nation's most elite universities, one public and one private. Beasley identifies a set of complex factors behind these students' career aspirations, including the anticipation of discrimination in particular fields; the racial composition of classes, student groups, and teaching staff; student values; and, the availability of opportunities to network. Ironically, Beasley also discovers, campus policies designed to enhance the academic and career potential of black students often reduce the diversity of their choices. Shedding new light on the root causes of racial inequality, "Opting Out" will be essential reading for parents, educators, students, scholars, and policy makers.

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Food is our most powerful medicine. This outstanding book introduces and teaches us how to apply the ancient wisdom and traditions of the healing that comes through food according to Chinese medicine. You'll be introduced to a new way of not only thinking about yourself but what you need to eat to achieve balance and ultimately improve your health. Ellen provides a keen and comprehensive understanding behind the basic principles of Chinese medicine so they can be easily applied to our day-to-day lives. She then takes these same concepts, expands on them and applies to the food we should be eating in order to maximize the tenets of Chinese dietary therapy. Eating well is essential to good health and Chinese medicine believes that food truly is medicine. In an easy-to-understand and straightforward manner, Ellen explains how and which combination of foods and flavours act upon the body to move qi (which is energy) and how they act on the body to warm or cool. Many of the modern day chronic health problems caused by lifestyle, genetics and stress can be helped by distinctive and long lasting changes in the way we eat. 150 enticing recipes organized by season help you easily put the theory of Chinese medicine into practice. You'll be able to put together meals that are appropriate for each season from breakfast to dinner and including beverages and desserts. All the recipes are super straightforward, easy to assemble and easily adapted to met your needs, desires and tastes. You'll soon be on your way to utilizing the principles you've learned and applying where they count most - in your kitchen.

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"Fear is always experienced individually, and few experiences are as personal. There can be no collective fear without individual fear preceding it. A society's fear is born out of the convergence of individual experiences, when dozens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of people are afraid of the same thing at the same time." This is a story about postwar Polish society and its emotions. This is a story of heroes: soldiers, deserters, orphans, and beggars. Now available in English for the first time, Entangled in Fear reveals the broken society where bandits, hunger, bombs, Russia, and countless other threats had an immense influence on Poles as they struggled through the wreckage caused by World War II. Journalist and historian Marcin Zaremba uses sociology, psychology, and history to explore collective fear in official documents and the personal papers of those who were left to survive in postwar Poland. In doing so, he reveals how fear of famine and epidemics, sexual violence and looting, joblessness and invasion led directly to collective action on the part of Poles. A groundbreaking work, Entangled in Fear challenges the reader to consider how emotions have shaped human history and how a more serious engagement with emotions is key to a fuller understanding of the past.

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Up to ninety percent of humanity's traditional languages and cultures are at risk and may disappear this century. While language endangerment has not achieved the publicity surrounding environmental change and biodiversity loss, it is just as serious, disastrously reducing the variety of human knowledge and thought. This book shows why it matters, why and how it happens, and what communities and scholars can do about it. David and Maya Bradley provide a new framework for investigating and documenting linguistic, social and other factors which contribute to languages shifting away from their cultural heritage. Illustrated with practical in-depth case studies and examples from the authors' own work in Asia and elsewhere, the book encourages communities to maintain or reclaim their traditional languages and cultures.

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AN OPENCANADA SUMMER READ 2019 In the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina lies Mostar, a medieval town on the banks of the emerald Neretva, which flows from the “valley of sugared trees” through sunny hills to reach the Adriatic Sea. This idyllic locale is the scene of Maya Ombasic’s childhood—until civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia and the bombs begin to fall. Her family is exiled to Switzerland, and after a brief return, they leave again for Canada. While Maya adapts to their new home, her father never does, refusing even to learn the language of his new country. A portmanteau of Mostar and nostalgia, Mostarghia evokes Ombasic’s yearning for a place that no longer exists: the city before the civil war, when its many ethnicities interacted in a spirit of civility and in harmony. It refers as well to Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Nostalghia, the viewing of which illuminated the author’s often explosive relationship with her father, a larger-than-life figure who was both influence and psychological burden: he inspired her interest, and eventual career, in philosophy, and she was his translator, his support, his obsession. Along with this portrait of a man described by turns as passionate, endearing, maddening, and suffocating, Ombasic deftly constructs a moving personal account of what it means to be a refugee and how a generation learns to thrive despite the struggles of its predecessors.

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Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences examines contemporary media use within Asia, where over half of the world’s population resides. The book addresses media use and practices by looking at the transnational exchanges of ideas, narratives, images, techniques, and values and how they influence media consumption and production throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran and many others. The book’s contributors are especially interested in investigating media and their intersections with narrative, medium, technologies, and culture through the lenses that are particularly Asian by turning to Asian sociopolitical and cultural milieus as the meaningful interpretive framework to understand media. This timely and cutting-edge research is essential reading for those interested in transnational and global media studies.

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