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Apartment Women A Novel [electronic resource] : by Byeong-mo, Gu.aut; cloudLibrary;
*INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER* From the New York Times Notable author of The Old Woman with the Knife comes a bracingly original story of family, marriage and the cultural expectations of motherhood, about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a government-run apartment complex outside Seoul When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she’s ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years. Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked against them from the start? A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women’s parenting labor, challenging the age-old assumption that “it takes a village” to raise a child.General adult.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Literary; Contemporary Women;
© 2024., Hanover Square Press,
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I'll tell you when I'm home : a memoir / by Alyan, Hala,1986-author.;
"After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman -- the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn -- to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling -- a husband who wants to leave; the cost of past traumas and addictions threatening to resurface; the city of her youth, Beirut, on the brink of crisis. She turns to family stories and communal myths: of grandmothers mapping their lives through Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men that left and women that stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood, and adolescence in various Arab cities. Meanwhile, as the baby grows from the size of a poppyseed to a grain of rice, then a lime, and beyond, Hala gathers the stories that are her legacy, setting down the ones that confine, holding close those that liberate. It is emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are higher: how to honor ancestors and future generations alike in the midst of displacement? How to impart love for those who are no longer here, for places one can no longer touch?"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Alyan, Hala, 1986-; Families; Generational trauma.; Inheritance of acquired characters.; Love.; Miscarriage.; Motherhood.; Palestinian American women; Surrogate mothers.; Women authors, American; Authors, American;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Thirst : a novel / by Bajaj, Varsha.;
"Minni lives in the poorest part of Mumbai, where access to water is limited to a few hours a day and the communal taps have long lines. Lately, though, even that access is threatened by severe water shortages and thieves who are stealing this precious commodity<U+2014>an act that Minni accidentally witnesses one night. Meanwhile, in the high-rise building where she just started to work, she discovers that water streams out of every faucet and there's even a rooftop swimming pool. What Minni also discovers there is one of the water mafia bosses. Now she must decide whether to expose him and risk her job and maybe her life. How did something as simple as access to water get so complicated?"--Publisher.Ages 10 and up.Grades 4-6.LSC
Subjects: Water security; Social justice; Social change; Water security; Poverty; Political corruption; Social classes;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The Morningside : a novel / by Obreht, Téa,author.;
"When Silvia and her mother finally land in a place called Island City, after being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-too-distant future, they end up living and working at The Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower where Silvia's aunt, Ena, has been serving as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about the family's past. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give a young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland in the Old World, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's new home. As Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities, she becomes obsessed with the mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside, with three massive Rottweilers who may or may not be more than they appear. Silvia's mission to unravel the truth about this woman's life, and her own haunted past, will transform her own life in the most unexpected of ways"--
Subjects: Dystopian fiction.; Magic realist fiction.; Novels.; Aunts; Belonging (Social psychology); Family secrets; High-rise apartment buildings; Magic; Mothers and daughters;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The Morningside [sound recording] : a novel / by Obreht, Téa,author.; Brentan, Carlotta,narrator.; Random House Audio Publishing,publisher.;
Read by Carlotta Brentan."When Silvia and her mother finally land in a place called Island City, after being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-too-distant future, they end up living and working at The Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower where Silvia's aunt, Ena, has been serving as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about the family's past. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give a young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland in the Old World, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's new home. As Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities, she becomes obsessed with the mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside, with three massive Rottweilers who may or may not be more than they appear. Silvia's mission to unravel the truth about this woman's life, and her own haunted past, will transform her own life in the most unexpected of ways"--
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Dystopian fiction.; Magic realist fiction.; Novels.; Aunts; Belonging (Social psychology); Family secrets; High-rise apartment buildings; Magic; Mothers and daughters;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The garden against time : in search of a common paradise / by Laing, Olivia,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-312)."In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden." --
Subjects: Laing, Olivia; Gardening; Gardens; Gardens; Gardens; Historic gardens;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Vanishing world : a novel / by Murata, Sayaka,1979-author.; Takemori, Ginny Tapley,translator.; translation of:Murata, Sayaka,1979-Shōmetsu sekai.English.;
"As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents "copulated" in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange "system" by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage-sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest-Amane and her husband Saku ultimately decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only "Kodomo-chan." Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?"--
Subjects: Dystopian fiction.; Novels.; Artificial insemination, Human; Man-woman relationships; Marriage; Married women; Reproduction; Sex;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The girl from the Metropol Hotel : growing up in communist Russia / by Petrushevskai͡a︡, Li͡u︡dmila.;
Introduction: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's War / by Anna Summers -- The Girl from the Metropol Hotel -- Family Circumstances : The Vegers -- The War -- Kuibyshev -- Kuibyshev : Survival Strategies -- How I Was Rescued -- The Durov Theater -- Searching for Food -- Dolls -- Victory Night -- The Officers' Club -- The Courtiers' Language -- The Bolshoi Theater -- Down the Ladder -- Literary Sleep-Ins -- My Performances : Green Sweater -- The Portrait -- The Story of a Little Sailor -- My New Life -- The Hotel Metropol -- Mumsy -- Summer Camp -- Chekhov Street : Grandpa Kolya -- Trying to Fit In -- Children's Home -- I Want to Live! -- Snowdrop -- The Wild Berries -- Gorilla -- Dying Swan -- Sanych -- Foundling."The prizewinning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age and finding her voice amid the hardships of Stalinist Russia. Like a young Edith Piaf, wandering the streets singing for alms, and like Oliver Twist, living by his wits, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up watchful and hungry, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation, made more acute by the awareness that her family of Bolshevik intellectuals, now reduced to waiting in bread lines, once lived large across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing--of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the kitchen tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food--we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the more than two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged"--Provided by publisher.LSC
Subjects: Petrushevskai͡a︡, Li͡u︡dmila; Petrushevskai͡a︡, Li͡u︡dmila; Petrushevskai͡a︡, Li͡u︡dmila; Hotel Metropol (Moscow, Russia); Authors, Russian; Communism; Coming of age;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Vanishing World A Novel [electronic resource] : by Murata, Sayaka.aut; Wu, Nancy.nrt; CloudLibrary;
From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination. Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of listeners worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata&#x2019;s universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own. As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated” in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-20th century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system” by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage&#x2014;sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest&#x2014;Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only “Kodomo-chan.” Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Literary; Absurdist;
© 2025., Simon & Schuster,
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Book of queens : the true story of the Middle Eastern horsewomen who fought the War on Terror / by Mahdavi, Pardis,1978-author.;
Includes bibliographical references."Book of Queens reaches back centuries to the Persian Empire and a woman disguised as a man, facing an invading army, protected only by light armor and the stallion she sat astride. Mahdavi draws a thread from past to present: from her fearless Iranian grandmother, who guided survivors of domestic violence to independent mountain colonies in Afghanistan where the women, led by a general named Mina, became their country's first line of defense from marauding warlords. To the female warriors who helped train and breed the horses used by US Green Berets when they touched down in October 2001, with a mission but insufficient intelligence on the ground--women whose contributions were then forgotten. Pardis Mahdavi chases the legacy of Caspian horses and the women whose lives are saved by them, drawing on decades of research, newly-discovered diaries, and exclusive military sources. Among those intersecting stories is that of American Louise Firouz, who helped bring the breed back from the brink of extinction, connecting Virginia traders to British royals to the son of the Shah. Firouz's life is forever changed when she meets Mahdavi's own family, who run an unusual smuggling operation in addition to raising horses in a wild bid for freedom. Book of Queens is an epic tale of hidden women whose communal knowledge was instrumental in saving an animal as ancient as civilization, and who were the genesis of their own liberation"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Firouz, Louise.; Caspian horse; Horsemen and horsewomen; War horses; War on Terrorism, 2001-2009; Women soldiers;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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