Search results for ""Author Peter Constantine""

Based on a true story set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, The Purchased Bride tells the tale of Maria, a Greek girl who was bought at age fifteen by a much older, wealthy Ottoman man. As the Ottoman Empire falls and insurgents torch their Greek village in the Caucasus, Maria and her parents flee and find shelter in a refugee camp across the border in Ottoman territory. Cholera and plague are impending, and the priest running the camp takes a desperate measure, arranging to marry Maria off to a wealthy Ottoman Turk in the capital. She and her best friend, Lita, then travel toward the Black Sea coast through a fascinating world of ancient and forgotten Ottoman mountain communities. They encounter escalating violence, sniper attacks, and marauding troops amid the Empire’s collapse, as breakaway provinces declare themselves independent caliphates in defiance of the Sultan. And when Lita escapes, Maria is left to face her fate alone. A story of war, struggle, and ultimate success, based on the life of Constantine’s grandmother, The Purchased Bride sheds light on a turbulent and dangerous part of history.

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Winner of the State Prize for Poetry in Cyprus, these experimental linked poem-threads move across time, linking a young Cypriot to ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants through striking, disparate polyphony. In this bilingual collection of linked poems, Kefala creates a tapestry of motifs that transcend time and identity across early 20th Century Cyprus, 16th Century Scotland, a sailor on Christopher Columbus’ ship La Pinta, and more. As the poem threads draw together, it is as if the protagonist, in his travels through the twentieth century, encounters Odysseus, Cervantes, Columbus, Rembrandt, and others, all moving in multidimensional synchronicity. In this way, the readers take part in the production of meaning by pulling the threads together, stitching together their own reading of the story. Through the reading of these threads, time remains fluid, creating a masterful declaration about the function of poetry: perhaps history is nothing more than the presence of innumerable human voices, some more and some less powerful, coexisting in an eternal present.

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Machiavelli’s highly influential treatise on political power 'It is far safer to be feared than loved...' The Prince shocked Europe on publication with its advocacy of ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. Niccoló Machiavelli drew on his own experience of office under the turbulent Florentine republic, rejecting traditional values of political theory and recognising the complicated, transient nature of political life. Machiavelli made his name notorious for centuries with The Prince, his clever and cynical work about power relationships. The key themes of this influential, and ever timely, writer are that adaptability is the key to success and that effective leadership is sometimes only possible at the expense of moral standards.'Everyone should have a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince, whose original purpose may have been to counsel Renaissance rulers in the art of statecraft but is still applicable to and, indeed, acted on by modern politicians and power-brokers' Guardian

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Finally in paperback, this "monumental collection; gathers all of Babel's deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material, from never-before-translated stories to plays and film scripts" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). Reviewing the work in The New Republic, James Woods wrote that this groundbreaking volume "represents a triumph of translating, editing, and publishing. Beautiful to hold, scholarly and also popularly accessible, it is an enactment of love." Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel has left his mark on a generation of readers and writers. This book will stand as Babel's final, most enduring legacy. Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award; A New York Times Notable Book, a and Library Journal Best Book, a Washington Post Book World Rave, a Village Voice Favorite Book of the Year.

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28 June 1389, the Field of the Blackbirds. A Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians confront an Ottoman army. In ten hours the battle is over, and the Muslims possess the field; an outcome that has haunted the vanquished ever since. 28 June 1989, the Serb Leader Slobodan Milosevic launches his campaign for a fresh massacre of the Albanians, the majority population of Kosovo.In three short narratives Kadare shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century.

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Russian Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures—and perhaps the most important writer—of the last century. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, the first English translation of his memoir of the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 1, is being published. Fast-paced, absorbing, and as compelling as the earlier installments of his memoir The Oak and the Calf (1975), Between Two Millstones begins on February 13, 1974, when Solzhenitsyn found himself forcibly expelled to Frankfurt, West Germany, as a result of the publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn moved to Zurich, Switzerland, for a time and was considered the most famous man in the world, hounded by journalists and reporters. During this period, he found himself untethered and unable to work while he tried to acclimate to his new surroundings. Between Two Millstones contains vivid descriptions of Solzhenitsyn's journeys to various European countries and North American locales, where he and his wife Natalia (“Alya”) searched for a location to settle their young family. There are fascinating descriptions of one-on-one meetings with prominent individuals, detailed accounts of public speeches such as the 1978 Harvard University commencement, comments on his television appearances, accounts of his struggles with unscrupulous publishers and agents who mishandled the Western editions of his books, and the KGB disinformation efforts to besmirch his name. There are also passages on Solzhenitsyn's family and their property in Cavendish, Vermont, whose forested hillsides and harsh winters evoked his Russian homeland, and where he could finally work undisturbed on his ten-volume dramatized history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel. Stories include the efforts made to assure a proper education for the writer's three sons, their desire to return one day to their home in Russia, and descriptions of his extraordinary wife, editor, literary advisor, and director of the Russian Social Fund, Alya, who successfully arranged, at great peril to herself and to her family, to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's invaluable archive out of the Soviet Union. Between Two Millstones is a literary event of the first magnitude. The book dramatically reflects the pain of Solzhenitsyn's separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western society.

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Translated by Peter ConstantineEdited and with a new introduction by Leo Damrosch'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains' is the dramatic opening line of The Social Contract, published in 1762. Quoted by politicians and philosophers alike, the power of this sentence continues to resonate. It laid the groundwork for both the American and French Revolutions, and is considered a foundational text in the development of the modern principles of human rights. Rousseau was an extraordinary visionary and a revolutionary thinker. The Essential Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau collects his best and most indispensable work. The book includes: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men and The Social Contract in full, plus selections from Émile, a treatise on education, the autobiographical Reveries of the Solitary Walker and Julie, or the New Héloïse,an epistolary novel.

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Russian Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures—and perhaps the most important writer—of the last century. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, the first English translation of his memoir of the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 1, is being published. Fast-paced, absorbing, and as compelling as the earlier installments of his memoir The Oak and the Calf (1975), Between Two Millstones begins on February 13, 1974, when Solzhenitsyn found himself forcibly expelled to Frankfurt, West Germany, as a result of the publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn moved to Zurich, Switzerland, for a time and was considered the most famous man in the world, hounded by journalists and reporters. During this period, he found himself untethered and unable to work while he tried to acclimate to his new surroundings. Between Two Millstones contains vivid descriptions of Solzhenitsyn's journeys to various European countries and North American locales, where he and his wife Natalia (“Alya”) searched for a location to settle their young family. There are fascinating descriptions of one-on-one meetings with prominent individuals, detailed accounts of public speeches such as the 1978 Harvard University commencement, comments on his television appearances, accounts of his struggles with unscrupulous publishers and agents who mishandled the Western editions of his books, and the KGB disinformation efforts to besmirch his name. There are also passages on Solzhenitsyn's family and their property in Cavendish, Vermont, whose forested hillsides and harsh winters evoked his Russian homeland, and where he could finally work undisturbed on his ten-volume dramatized history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel. Stories include the efforts made to assure a proper education for the writer's three sons, their desire to return one day to their home in Russia, and descriptions of his extraordinary wife, editor, literary advisor, and director of the Russian Social Fund, Alya, who successfully arranged, at great peril to herself and to her family, to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's invaluable archive out of the Soviet Union. Between Two Millstones is a literary event of the first magnitude. The book dramatically reflects the pain of Solzhenitsyn's separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western society.

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No modern, well-versed literature lover can call their education complete without having read Augustine’s Confessions. One of the most original works of world literature, it is the first autobiography ever written, influencing writers from Montaigne to Rousseau, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Greenblatt. It is here that we learn how one of the greatest saints in Christendom overcame a wild and reckless past. Yet English translators have emphasised the ecclesiastical virtues of this masterpiece, at the expense of its passion and literary vigour. Restoring the lyricism of Augustine’s original language, Peter Constantine offers a masterful and elegant translation of Confessions.

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No modern, well-versed literature lover can call their education complete without having read Augustine’s Confessions. One of the most original works of world literature, it is the first autobiography ever written, influencing writers from Montaigne to Rousseau, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Greenblatt. It is here that we learn how one of the greatest saints in Christendom overcame a wild and reckless past. Yet English translators have emphasised the ecclesiastical virtues of this masterpiece, at the expense of its passion and literary vigour. Restoring the lyricism of Augustine’s original language, Peter Constantine offers a masterful and elegant translation of Confessions.

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Making Out in Korean is a fun, accessible and thorough Korean phrasebook and guide to the Korean language as it's spoken in real-life.Nan neoga joa michigesseo! Uri tto mannalkka?—(I'm crazy about you! Shall we meet again?) Answer this correctly in Korean, and you may be going on a hot date. Incorrectly, and you could be hurting someone's feelings or getting a slap! Korean classes and textbooks tend to spend a lot of time rehearsing for the same fictitious scenarios, but chances are while in Korea you will spend a lot more time trying to make new friends or start new romances—something you may not be prepared for. If you are a student, businessman or tourist traveling to South Korea or North Korea and would like to have an authentic and meaningful experience, the key is being able to speak like a local. This friendly and easy-to-use Korean phrase book makes this possible. Making out in Korean has been carefully designed to act as a guide to modern colloquial Korean for use in everyday informal interactions—giving access to the sort of catchy Korean expressions that aren't covered in traditional language materials. As well as the Romanized forms (romanji), each expression is given in authentic Korean script (hangul), so that in the case of difficulties the book can be shown to a native Korean-speaker. In addition, easy-to-use phonetic spellings of all Korean words and phrases are given. For example "How are you?"—annyeonghaseyo? is also written as anh-nyawng-hah-seyo? This Korean phrasebook includes: A guide to pronouncing Korean words correctly. Explanations of basic Korean grammar, such as, word order, questions, and formal vs. informal tenses. Complete Korean translations including Korean Script (hangul). Useful and interesting notes on Korean language and culture. Lots of colorful, fun and useful expressions not covered in other phrasebooks. Titles in this unique series of bestselling phrase books include: Making Out in Chinese, Making Out in Indonesian, Making Out in Thai, Making Out in Korean, Making Out in Hindi, Making Out in Japanese, Making Out in Vietnamese, Making out in Burmese, Making Out in Tagalog, Making Out in Hindi, Making Out in Arabic, Making Out in English, More Making Out in Korean, and More Making Out in Japanese.

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