52 books match the query 'Tale' and 8 start with t

cover of Tale of a Criminal Mind Gone Good

Tale of a Criminal Mind Gone Good

Nathan Lefler

St. Augustine's Press, 2021

In this concise and creative book, Nathan Lefler places G. K. Chesterton and René Girard in conversation on the art of being deceived. The campaign to get rid of (or mythicize) the Judaic and the Christian is not progress, it is a fog. Girard noted early on that returning preeminent status to the Judeo-Christian influence would have the (paradoxical) effect of clearing the air, such that humans might actually breathe and reason well again. 

Entrée G. K. Chesterton. If Girard recognizes the talent certain literary figures have for observing what celebrated philosophers fail to see, Chesterton is one of these men of real vision. Lefler in his match-making is interested in “Romance and the romantic,” and placing Girard and Chesterton in a kind of dialogue he draws a clearer concept of Romanticism.  Who is the Romatic hero? And why do we so badly need to know? If what Lefler sees in Chesterton and Girard requires “special pleading” on the part of the reader for the author to make himself more clear, Lefler obliges. He takes a sharp turn into the Father Brown stories and points the reader to Chesterton’s famous villain: Flambeau, the “colossus of crime”. The moral transition from sinner to saint in Flambeau is strikingly anti-Romantic and, with Girard in mind, also very much anti-mimetic. Or is it? Lefler argues that even Girard would have “inclined his own regal forehead in delight and awe” at Chesterton’s portrayal of the crowning Romantic quality and unlikely machete in an overgrown jungle of the self-intoxicated modern imagination––namely, humility. 

Lefler makes his mark in several places with this new study. As literary critic, both Chesterton and Girard are honored. As philosopher, Lefler speaks as if somehow he managed to find a pocket of unpolluted air to breath. As theologian, he betrays that he also loves what Chesterton and Girard loved. And as special service to the reader, the full text of Chesterton’s The Queer Feet is provided. 
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cover of The Businessman: A Tale of Terror

The Businessman

A Tale of Terror

Thomas M. Disch

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

The Businessman presents the sinister tale of Bob Glandier, a morally repulsive Twin Cities executive who murders his estranged wife and attempts to go back to business as usual, until she returns sets about arranging his divine retribution. With help from her dead mother and the ghost of poet John Berryman-thoroughly bored of suburban séances and all too eager to lend a hand-Giselle undertakes the elaborate, righteous, and wickedly amusing haunting of her husband. There is justice in the afterlife after all-at least in Minnesota.
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cover of The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens

The Little Bulbs

A Tale of Two Gardens

Elizabeth A. Lawrence

Duke University Press, 1986

“A beautifully written book.”—The Garden Journal

“A few garden writers offer prose that goes beyond how to spade and spray to convey the experience and pleasures of gardening. The late Elizabeth Lawrence was such a writer.”—Southern Living

“First published in 1957 and out-of-print for many years, this is a delightfully written and enormously informative introduction to the fascinating variety of little bulbs available to the gardener. The author discusses a wide variety of plants, both familiar and little-known, including crocuses, species daffodils, hardy cyclamen and lily-family members such as Brodiaea, Bessera, and Calochortus.”—American Horticulturist

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cover of The Road to Wildcat: A Tale of Mountain Alabama

The Road to Wildcat

A Tale of Mountain Alabama

Eleanor Risley

University of Alabama Press, 2004

A remarkable chronicle of southern mountain life in the early 20th century

The Road to Wildcat recounts the travels in North Alabama in the mid-1920s of Eleanor Risley (suffering from diabetes), her asthmatic husband, Pierre, their dog, John, and a Chinese wheelbarrow named Sisyphus that held their travel goods. Advised to make the walking tour for improvement of their health, the group left Fairhope in south Alabama and walked hundreds of miles in the southern Appalachians for months, sleeping out under the stars at night, or in a canvas tent or an abandoned building, cooking their fresh-caught foods over campfires, and accepting the generosity and advice of the mountain people they met, some of them moonshiners and outlaws.
 
During their sojourn across the rural wilderness, they enjoyed fiddlin’ dances in rickety halls, joined Sacred Harp singers, learned about the grapevine telegraph, saw the dreadful effects of inbreeding, and attended “Snake Night” at Posey Holler (a religious revival that included snake handling). Published in segments in the Atlantic Monthly in 1928 and 1929 and then reorganized into book form, the travelogue is a colorful record of the culture, customs, and dialect of the southern mountaineers of that era.
 

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cover of The Sheltered Quarter: A Tale of a Boyhood in Mecca

The Sheltered Quarter

A Tale of a Boyhood in Mecca

By Hamza Bogary

University of Texas Press, 1991

Hamza Bogary describes a bygone way of life that has now irreversibly disappeared. He speaks of life in Mecca before the advent of oil. Only partly autobiographical, the memoir is nevertheless rich in remembered detail based on Bogary's early observations of life in Mecca. He has transformed his knowledge into art through his sense of humor, empathy, and remarkable understanding of human nature. This work not only entertains; it also informs its readers about the Arabia of the first half of the twentieth century in a graphic and fascinating way. The narrator, young Muhaisin, deals with various aspects of Arabian culture, including education, pilgrimages, styles of clothing, slavery, public executions, the status of women, and religion. Muhaisin is frank in his language and vivid in his humor. The reader quickly comes to love the charming and mischievous boy in this universal tale.

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cover of The Tale of Matsura: Fujiwara Teika’s Experiment in Fiction

The Tale of Matsura

Fujiwara Teika’s Experiment in Fiction

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Wayne P. Lammers

University of Michigan Press, 1992

Fujiwara Teika is known as the premier poet and literary scholar of the early 13th century. It is not so widely known that he also tried his hand at fiction: Mumyōzōshi (Untitled Leaves; ca. 1201) refers to “several works” by Teika and then names Matsura no miya monogatari (The Tale of Matsura; ca. 1190) as the only one that can be considered successful. The work is here translated in full, with annotation.
Set in the pre-Nara period, The Tale of Matsura is the story of a young Japanese courtier, Ujitada, who is sent to China with an embassy and has a number of supernatural experiences while there. Affairs of the heart dominate The Tale of Matsura, as is standard for courtly tales. Several of its other features break the usual mold, however: its time and setting; the military episode that would seem to belong instead in a war tale; scenes depicting the sovereign’s daily audiences, in which formal court business is conducted; a substantial degree of specificity in referring to things Chinese; a heavy reliance on fantastic and supernatural elements; an obvious effort to avoid imitating The Tale of Genji as other late-Heian tales had done; and a most inventive ending. The discussion in the introduction briefly touches upon each of these features, and then focuses at some length on how characteristics associated with the poetic ideal of yōen inform the tale. Evidence relating to the date and authorship of the tale is explored in two appendixes.
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cover of The Tale of the Missing Man: A Novel

The Tale of the Missing Man

A Novel

Manzoor Ahtesham, translated from the Hindi by Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Winner of the Global Humanities Translation Prize

The Tale of the Missing Man (Dastan-e Lapata) is a milestone in Indo-Muslim literature. A refreshingly playful novel, it explores modern Muslim life in the wake of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Zamir Ahmad Khan suffers from a mix of alienation, guilt, and postmodern anxiety that defies diagnosis. His wife abandons him to his reflections about his childhood, writing, ill-fated affairs, and his hometown, Bhopal, as he attempts to unravel the lies that brought him to his current state (while weaving new ones).

A novel of a heroic quest gone awry, The Tale of the Missing Man artfully twists the conventions of the Urdu romance, or dastan, tradition, where heroes chase brave exploits that are invariably rewarded by love. The hero of Ahtesham’s tale, living in the fast-changing city of Bhopal during the 1970s and ’80s, suffers an identity crisis of epic proportions: he is lost, missing, and unknown both to himself and to others. The result is a twofold quest in which the fate of protagonist and writer become inextricably and ironically linked. The lost hero sets out in search of himself, while the author goes in search of the lost hero, his fictionalized alter ego.

New York magazine cited the book as one of “the world's best untranslated novels.” In addition to raising important questions about Muslim identity, Ahtesham offers a very funny and thoroughly self-reflective commentary on the modern author’s difficulties in writing autobiography.

The Global Humanities Translation Prize is awarded annually to a previously unpublished translation that strikes the delicate balance between scholarly rigor, aesthetic grace, and general readability, as judged by a rotating committee of Northwestern faculty, distinguished international scholars, writers, and public intellectuals. The Prize is organized by the Global Humanities Initiative, which is jointly supported by Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies and Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

 
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cover of Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South

Troubled Ground

A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South

Claude A. Clegg III

University of Illinois Press, 2010

In Troubled Ground, Claude A. Clegg III revisits a violent episode in his hometown's history that made national headlines in the early twentieth century but disappeared from public consciousness over the decades. Moving swiftly between memory and history, between the personal and the political, Clegg offers insights into southern history, mob violence, and the formation of American race ideology while coming to terms on a personal level with the violence of the past. Three black men were killed in front of a crowd of thousands in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1906, following the ax murder of a local white family for whom the men had worked. One of the lynchers was prosecuted for his role in the execution, the first conviction of its kind in North Carolina and one of the earliest in the country. Yet Clegg, an academic historian who grew up in Salisbury, had never heard of the case until 2002 and could not find anyone else familiar with the case. In this book, Clegg mines newspaper accounts and government records and links the victims of the 1906 case to a double-lynching in 1902, suggesting a complex history of lynching in the area while revealing the determination of the city to rid its history of a shameful and shocking chapter. The result is a multi-layered, deeply personal exploration of lynching and lynching prosecutions in the United States.
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