We Are Iran

History

Nasrin Alavi

Asia

Portobello Books

Gina Ochsner's award-winning, highly acclaimed stories have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. In her eagerly anticipated new collection, Ochsner deftly examines the harrowing moments after a life or love slips away and discovers that the human heart can be large enough for anything. A Russian couple come to accept their infertility by bidding farewell tot he ghosts of the children they never had. A disgruntled husband buys a talking bird that he hopes will restore love to his marriage. Twin sisters learn to prepare bodies for burial in their Hungarian parents' funeral home, but when faced with a death of their own, they must learn to prepare the soul. Glowing with warmth and sparkling with imagination, these stories are rendered with a deep understanding of human resilience as well as an unerring belief in small, daily miracles.

People I Wanted to Be

Ochsner, Gina

Literature & Fiction

gina-ochsner

Contemporary

This is the most exciting and compellingly original novel to come out of Scandinavia since Miss Smilla's "Feeling for Snow" - it combines timelessly powerful storytelling with a searching enquiry into the relations between Man, God and the angels. It starts in the Garden of Eden and soars right through to the present day via Renaissance Italy and all along the way angels are to be found, if sought...It's the 1560s and Antinous Bellori, a boy of 11, is exploring the woods above his home in the mountains in the north of Italy. Done fishing, he happens upon an anthill and begins, systematically and sinfully, to torture the ants and destory their home. Night falls quickly and he is so carried away by the havoc he is wreaking that he loses his sense of time and route home. Fearful, he wanders the woods blindly, sensing danger at every turn, eventually coming upon a clearing, unseen, in which stand two glowing beings, one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch...This event is decisive in Bellori's life and he thereafter devotes himself to the study of angels, and engages with the writings of the great Christian thinkers in his own On the Nature of Angels. Bellori revisits, expands and renews the key stories from the Bible in which angels - the intermediaries between the human and the divine - loom large: the expulsion from the garden; life in the land of Nod; Cain and Abel; Lot in Sodom; Noah's isolation and his brother's death and sister's elopement before the Flood; Ezekiel's prophesying; and the death of Christ. Through the majestic resurrection of these stories the question is asked: Can the nature of the divine undergo change?

A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven

Karl Ove Knausgård

It's the 1560s and Antinous Bellori, a boy of 11, is exploring the woods above his home in the north Italian mountains when night falls. Suddenly fearful, the boy wanders blindly through the trees, sensing danger at every turn, until he comes, unseen, upon a clearing in which there stand two glowing beings, one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch: angels - this event is decisive in Bellori's life, just as encounters with angels have been for others throughout history. Beginning in the Garden of Eden and soaring right through to the present day, we revisit key moments when men have come face to face with these intermediaries of the divine: Cain and Abel cultivating their differences murderously; Lot's shame in Sodom; Noah's isolation before the Flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying fiercely; and the death of Christ. Alighting upon these dramatic scenes - from the Bible and beyond - Knausgaard's imagination takes flight: the result is a dazzling display of storytelling at its majestic, spellbinding best.

Harbor

Adams, Lorraine

Eternity Is Temporary. Bill Broady

Broady, Bill

We have all seen the grim pictures of dying Africans on the news, or been momentarily shocked by the statistics; we may think we?ve heard all we need to know ? or can bear to know ? about the story of Aids in Africa.  But look beyond the harrowing dispatches and the noisy headlines and something else emerges: not just a single sad story featuring countless, voiceless victims, but many different stories that haven?t been told, stories of courage, determination and dignity, and each one with an individual human face.  In 28, you?ll meet the doctor dodging bullets as she runs a makeshift clinic in war-torn Congo, hear why Nelson Mandela decided to go public about the cause of his son?s death, encounter the trucker who has spent a lifetime picking up prostitutes on the lonely highways of East Africa, and have an audience with the Botswanan beauty queen proud to be crowned ?Miss HIV Stigma-free?.  Stephanie Nolen?s eloquent and sympathetic book paints a fresh and inspiring portrait of this continent in crisis, making it impossible for us to ignore and impossible to forget.

Stephanie Nolan

Africa

Growing up queer in a communist state, queens Patricia and Lucretia spent the 70s and 80s underground, finding glamour in the squalor, strutting their stuff in parks and public toilets, seducing hard Soviet soldiers, preying on drunks, and seeing their friends die of AIDS. Today they're about to hit Lovetown, a homo-haven, populated by a younger generation of emancipated gays, who are out and proud in their post-communist paradise: suntanned, sculpted and vigorously spending the pink euro. This is the story of the clash between old and new gays - the clapped out queens and the flashy fags - as they meet in a place where anything goes, but some things have also been lost.

Lovetown

Witkowski, Michal

A Human Being Died That Night

Pumla Gobodo-Madikize

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