Search results for ""Author Richard Seaver""

Soraya M.’s husband, Ghorban-Ali, couldn’t afford to marry another woman. Rather than returning Soraya’s dowry, as custom required before taking a second wife, he plotted with four friends and a counterfeit mullah to dispose of her. Together, they accused Soraya of adultery. Her only crime was cooking for a friend’s widowed husband. Exhausted by a lifetime of abuse and hardship, Soraya said nothing, and the makeshift tribunal took her silence as a confession of guilt. They sentenced her to death by stoning: a punishment prohibited by Islam but widely practiced. Day by day—sometimes minute by minute—Sahebjam deftly recounts these horrendous events, tracing Soraya’s life with searing immediacy, from her arranged marriage and the births of her children to her husband’s increasing cruelty and her horrifying execution, where, by tradition, her father, husband, and sons hurled the first stones. A stark look at the intersection between culture and justice, this is one woman’s story, but it stands for the stories of thousands of women who suffered—and continue to suffer—the same fate. It is a story that must be told.

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A distressed young man murders the woman he loves in a cafe, watched by a large crowd. Fascinated by the crime she has witnessed, Anne Desbaresdes returns several times to the scene, forming a relationship with a man who also saw the murder, and drinking through the afternoon with him as he patiently answers her eager questions. Slowly, they find themselves being taken over by forces which threaten their own stability. Moderato Cantabile is a carefully woven tapestry of emotion, in which the characters' inner lives are reflected by the story's spaces and landscapes.

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The extraordinary rags-to-riches tale of Olivier Baussan and the roadside soap stand that became L’Occitane, one of the world’s most successful purveyors of natural fragrances. Founded in 1976 by Olivier Baussan, the now world-renowned fragrance company L’Occitane, “a woman of Provence” in Old French, was inspired by the essences of lavender and honeysuckle, rosemary, sage, and thyme indigenous to his childhood home in the south of France. In fact, it had been since the mid-1950s that Provence had been working its magic on the Baussan family, who left their urban life for a farm in Ganagobie when their son Olivier was only six months old.Blessed with a wonderfully acute sense of smell, Olivier eventually grew up to realize that he’d been born to distill and disseminate the many and varied perfumes of the region. His epiphany came when, at twenty-two, he found an abandoned still on the side of the road and bought it for a song. Using the countryside’s natural ingredients, he began manufacturing shampoos, colognes, bath essences, and soaps. Starting with five employees—including Olivier’s wife and mother-in-law—his fledgling company grew into a major business. Today, with hundreds of stores and thousands of employees worldwide, L’Occitane ranks as one of the world’s most successful businesses—encapsulating a bit of paradise.

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Presents the essential ideas of the founder of French surrealism.

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