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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less