"The Scarlet Letter", "The House of the Seven Gables", "Young Goodman Brown," and "Rappaccini's Daughter" are staples of high school English classes across the country. Nathaniel Hawthorne's works and characters have left a lasting impression on writers, scholars, and readers around the world. "Critical Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne" offers critical entries on Hawthorne's novels, short stories, travel writing, criticism, and other works, as well as portraits of characters, including Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth.
This extraordinary first collection of short stories covers the landscape of dysfunctional childhood, urban angst, and human disconnection with a wit and insight that keep you riveted to the page. The characters here have rich and imaginative interior lives, but grave difficulty relating to the outside world. The beginning story, "Ducklings," introduces the over-weight and over-enthusiastic Marjorie, the last twelve-year-old you would want babysitting your toddler. In "Wanted" we meet Eleanor, a single girl living in Chicago who may or may not be dating a serial killer. "Another Cancer Story" is an unsentimental account of two sisters whose beloved mother just won't seem to die, and "The Last Dead Boyfriend" gives us a recovering addict who keeps encountering her recently deceased boyfriend, an unpleasant man she wished she'd broken up with before he died. Always funny, often dark, and wholly satisfying, these stories explore the longing for connection among characters who are frequently stricken with anxiety. Each story is rendered in a way that is surreal, vivid, and entirely convincing.
A three-level communicative listening and speaking series for 3 to 6 year-olds. The course provides a simple but steady development of new language through a carefully graded syllabus with built-in review. The characters, themes, and situations are relevant and appealing to very young children. Each Student Book unit opens with the main characters featured storybook style in a familiar daily situation. This is followed by a focus on vocabulary items and a short Pattern Practice of the language structure. The unit concludes with a sticker activity. Songs by Carolyn Graham, well-known songwriter and creator of Jazz Chants, appear in every lesson. At each level all the components except for the Teacher's Books are split into manageable A and B sections. SIZE REDUCED PDF by Pumukl
Added by: otherwordly | Karma: 222.42 | Fiction literature | 26 October 2008
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What we get with Dostoyevsky is dramatic tension, detailed and believable human characters, and brilliant insight into human nature. Early in the novel our hero meets and has a lengthy conversation with Marmeladov, a drunkard. This conversation is never uninteresting and ultimately becomes pathetic and heartbreaking, but I kept wondering why so much time was spent on it. As I got deeper into the book, I understood why this conversation was so important, and realized that I was in the hands of a master storyteller. This is also indicative of the way in which the story reveals itself. Nothing is hurried. These people speak the way we actually speak to one another in real life, and more importantly, Dostoyevsky is able to flesh out his characters into whole, three-dimensional human beings.
