Living Things follows four recent graduates – Munir, G, Ernesto and Álex – who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don't go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living on a campsite, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration and the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist's thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling. A genre-bending and dystopian eco-thriller, Living Things is a punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, heralding an exciting new voice in international fiction.
Legimi.pl
The novel tells the story of John Clayton III. John and Alice (Rutherford) Clayton, Viscount and Viscountess Greystoke from England, are marooned in the western coastal jungles of equatorial Africa in 1888. In September 1889, their son John Clayton III is born. At one year old, his mother dies, and soon thereafter his father is killed by the savage king ape Kerchak. The infant is then adopted by the she-ape Kala. Clayton is named "Tarzan" ("White Skin" in the ape language) and raised in ignorance of his human heritage. As a boy, feeling alienated from his peers due to their physical differences, he discovers his true parents' cabin, where he first learns of others like himself in their books. Using basic primers with pictures, over many years he teaches himself to read English, but having never heard it, cannot speak it...
Legimi.pl
Two months have passed since the conclusion of the previous novel, Tarzan the Untamed, in which Tarzan spent many months wandering about Africa wreaking vengeance upon those who he believed brutally murdered Jane. At the end of that novel Tarzan learns that her death was a ruse, that she had not been killed at all. In attempting to track Jane, Tarzan has come to a hidden valley called Pal-ul-don filled with dinosaurs, notably the savage Triceratops-like Gryfs, which, unlike their prehistoric counterparts, are omnivorous and stand 20 feet tall at the shoulder. The lost valley is also home to two different adversarial races of tailed human-looking creatures: the hairless and white skinned, city-dwelling Ho-don and the hairy and black-skinned, hill-dwelling Waz-don. Tarzan befriends a Ho-don warrior, and the Waz-don chief, actuating some uncustomary relations. In this new world Tarzan becomes a captive but so impresses his captors with his accomplishments and skills that they name him "Tarzan-Jad-Guru" (Tarzan the Terrible)...
Legimi.pl
A young Cambridge University professor, Horace Holly, is visited by a colleague, Vincey, who reveals that he will soon die. Vincey proceeds to tell Holly a fantastical tale of his family heritage. He charges Holly with the task of raising his young son, Leo (whom he has never seen) and gives Holly a locked iron box, with instructions that it is not to be opened until Leo turns 25. Holly agrees, and indeed Vincey is found dead the next day. Holly raises the boy as his own; when the box is opened on Leo's 25th birthday they discover the ancient and mysterious "Sherd of Amenartas", which seems to corroborate Leo's father's story. Holly, Leo and their servant, Job, follow instructions on the Sherd and travel to eastern Africa but are shipwrecked. They alone survive, together with their Arab captain, Mahomed; after a perilous journey into an uncharted region of the African interior, they are captured by the savage Amahagger people. The adventurers learn that the natives are ruled by a fearsome white queen, who is worshipped as Hiya or "She-who-must-be-obeyed". The Amahagger are curious about the white-skinned interlopers, having been warned of their coming by the mysterious queen...
Legimi.pl
SOME men are renowned in history on account of the extraordinary powers and capacities which they exhibited in the course of their career, or the intrinsic greatness of the deeds which they performed. Others, without having really achieved any thing in itself very great or wonderful, have become widely known to mankind by reason of the vast consequences which, in the subsequent course of events, resulted from their doings. Men of this latter class are conspicuous rather than great. From among thousands of other men equally exalted in character with themselves, they are brought out prominently to the notice of mankind only in consequence of the strong light reflected, by great events subsequently occurring, back upon the position where they happened to stand. The celebrity of Romulus seems to be of this latter kind. He founded a city. A thousand other men have founded cities; and in doing their work have evinced perhaps as much courage, sagacity, and mental power as Romulus displayed. The city of Romulus, however, became in the end the queen and mistress of the world. It rose to so exalted a position of influence and power, and retained its ascendency so long, that now for twenty centuries every civilized nation in the western world have felt a strong interest in every thing pertaining to its history, and have been accustomed to look back with special curiosity to the circumstances of its origin. In consequence of this it has happened that though Romulus, in his actual day, performed no very great exploits, and enjoyed no pre-eminence above the thousand other half-savage chieftains of his class, whose names have been long forgotten, and very probably while he lived never dreamed of any extended fame, yet so brilliant is the illumination which the subsequent events of history have shed upon his position and his doings, that his name and the incidents of his life have been brought out very conspicuously to view, and attract very strongly the attention of mankind...
Legimi.pl
Far from the world of his white parents, the sixteen-year-old youth, Jan, was raised in a cage under the watchful eye of half-crazed Dr. Bracken. Guided by his foster mother, Chicma the Chimpanzee, Jan was destined to execute the doctor's fanatical plot for revenge against Jan's real mother. A monster with the mind of an ape and the body of a man, that was his part in Bracken's twisted scheme. But just on the eve of the intended onslaught, Jan and Chicma escaped to the jungle and emerged near the Lost Empire of Mu. There, Jan must do battle with the gigantic puma, the grotesque thunder bird, and the god-monster Sebek. With all his fighting skill, there remained only one challenge to Jan: trace his origins and locate his man-parents.
Legimi.pl
A blistering, brutal novel of the South African frontier from a major new literary voice Winner of four major South African prizes At the end of the eighteenth century, a giant strides the Cape Colony frontier. Coenraad de Buys is a legend, a polygamist, a swindler and a big talker; a rebel who fights with Xhosa chieftains against the Boers and British; the fierce patriarch of a sprawling mixed-race family with a veritable tribe of followers; a savage enemy and a loyal ally. Like the wild dogs who are always at his heels, he roams the shifting landscape of southern Africa, hungry and spoiling for a fight. This is his story; the story of his country, and of our blood-soaked history. Red Dog is a brilliant, fiercely powerful novel-a wild, epic tale of Africa in a time before boundaries between cultures and peoples were fixed. Willem Anker was born in Citrusdal in the Western Cape in 1979 and lectures in creative writing at Stellenbosch University. His first novel, Siegfried, was published in 2007. Red Dog was published in Afrikaans in 2014 and won six major literary prizes in South Africa. It is his first novel to be translated into English.
Legimi.pl
What are man's earliest ideas of a soul and a God, and of his own origin and destiny? Why do we find certain myths, such as of a creation, a flood, an after-world; certain symbols, as the bird, the serpent, the cross; certain numbers, as the three, the four, the seven-intimately associated with these ideas by every race? What are the laws of growth of natural religions? How do they acquire such an influence, and is this influence for good or evil? Such are some of the universally interesting questions which the author attempts to solve by an analysis of the simple faiths of a savage race. Contents: Chapter I. General Considerations On The Red Race. Chapter II. The Idea Of God. Chapter III. The Sacred Number, Its Origin And Applications. Chapter IV. The Symbols Of The Bird And The Serpent. Chapter V. The Myths Of Water, Fire, And The Thunder-Storm. Chapter VI. The Supreme Gods Of The Red Race. Chapter VII. The Myths Of The Creation, The Deluge, The Epochs Of Nature, And The Last Day. Chapter VIII. The Origin Of Man. Chapter IX. The Soul And Its Destiny. Chapter X. The Native Priesthood. Chapter XI. The Influence Of The Native Religions On The Moral And Social Life Of The Race.
Legimi.pl