![]() ![]() There were 13 of us in a four-bedroom house, and it was one of the happiest times of my life, surrounded by so many people who I loved. ![]() For three or so years, my family lived in my grandmother’s house, which is the house my mom grew up in. I grew up in a lot of different homes when I was younger: my parents rented trailers and small, boxy houses set high on cement block pillars. Place is important to my writing I believe that if a reader gets a clear picture of the place where a character is from, then they can understand what motivates the character, what limits him or her. ![]() Did you draw on sounds and smells of the home you grew up in? ![]() There are few physical descriptions of the family home at the centre of Sing, Unburied, Sing, yet a strong sense of it comes across. It is told chiefly through the eyes of Leonie, a drug-taking mother, and her watchful teenage son, Jojo, and unsentimentally conveys the pain of bereavement and the risks of life on the edge of survival. Her latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, has been nominated for the National Book award and the Kirkus prize. Her novel Salvage the Bones and her memoir Men We Reaped have both won prizes, while the collection of essays she edited and contributed to, The Fire This Time, is a US bestseller and is published in theUK next April. Jesmyn Ward, 40, who grew up and lives in Mississippi, has been hailed as a tough yet poetic new literary voice. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The author’s diehard fans will appreciate this. While Winter’s digressive interior monologue can be hard to follow, Souljah’s saga is conceptually imaginative. When she meets the souls of unborn children, they tell her she must reflect on her life if she wants to leave the underworld. After a black drug dealer goes to jail in Brooklyn, his ruthless 17. ![]() She begins to think back on her past with her father, whom she adores, and is able to observe the life of her first love, who is now married with a family. Physical Desc: 337 pages 25 cm, Also issued online. ![]() In a series of strange and winding events, Winter becomes romantically involved with a number of biblically and Quran-inspired men-who, just like she’d experienced in her past life, end up mistreating her. Winter ends up in the underworld, otherwise named the Last Stop Before the Drop, where she lives a twisted version of the life she’d led before ending up in prison. ![]() Her release is captured on a reality TV show developed for her, as is her murder she is shot by friend-turned-nemesis Simone, after Simone finds out how much Winter would profit from the show compared to her and other women from the neighborhood. Souljah’s mystical, uneven sequel to The Coldest Winter Ever picks up with Winter Santiaga leaving prison after 15 years, having taken the fall for a hustler boyfriend’s drug dealing. ![]() ![]() ![]() Seeing an opportunity to right the wrongs of his past, Derek sets out on a journey to find the rest of the amulet, along with his friends, Jared and Arabelle. Haunted by the memories of his past, Derek comes across a piece of a mythical amulet, said to hold the power to grant wishes once all three pieces are brought together. ![]() They are the keepers of the peace and they have a unique ability-they can turn into dragons.ĭerek Draco is one of them. The Guardians are the protectors of Aloseria. If you want some more information about BBNYA, check out the BBNYA Website or take a peek over on Twitter BBNYA is brought to you in association with the (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group Self-Published BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 10 finalists and one overall winner. ![]() This year, the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA) is celebrating the 50 books that made it into Round Two with a mini spotlight blitz tour for each title. Today I’m helping to Spotlight BBNYA Semi-Finalist Amulet of Wishes by Rita A. ![]() ![]() ![]() While the plays, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry IV Part I and II, King Lear, Othello, As You Like It, and Antony and Cleopatra, are considered by the author to be Shakespeare's masterpieces, many other plays have characters of a nearly similar quality. Actually, this claim is based largely on the famous characters Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, Edmund, Edgar, Lear, Rosalind and Cleopatra, who appear in a total of 8 plays. ![]() The author, Harold Bloom begins this monumental book with the thesis that Shakespeare with his plays invented the modern notion of human personality. Contemporaries of Shakespeare include the playwrights Ben Jonson, a critic of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, a playwright who had much influence on Shakespeare. Some of the best known romantic critics are Hazlitt, W. Many authors have published critiques of the plays of Shakespeare. ![]() ![]() These are stories that are dear to my heart and important to me. ![]() "I've been a fan of superhero stories my whole life. Walschots talked to CBC Books about writing Hench. Paul Sun-Hyung Lee is championing Hench on Canada Reads 2021.Ĭanada Reads will take place March 8-11. The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem and on CBC Books. ![]() She formulates a plan to weaponize data and take down the so-called heroes once and for all. That is until a life-altering injury she suffers at the hands of the world's most beloved superhero sets her down a path to even the score. ![]() Her debut novel, Hench, follows Anna Tromedlov, a low-level henchwoman who does administrative work for supervillains. Natalie Zina Walschots is a freelance writer and community manager from Toronto. ![]() ![]() ![]() In the Viking Age, stories often came in the form of an entertainer performing them as a song or poem. That disregards the fact that these poems probably lived long before they were ever written down, or performed by poets. However, when we are trying to understand the age of any given poem, it is basically based on the words and grammar used. This was shortly before the separate poems came to be a collection. The latest poems were likely written in the 11th or 12th centuries. Some of the older poems are believed to have been written in the 9th or 10th century, or possibly even earlier. They were written by different poets, possibly hundreds of years apart as well as from different parts of Scandinavia and Iceland. The different poems making up the collection we often perceive as a whole were originally separate poems. Maybe the most important thing to understand about the Poetic Edda is that it was never one book. Gilwellian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The fire, as well as the days of mourning and reflection that it provoked, led Borrus to immediately pick up Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris” (or “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” in English), and begin to read it for the first time. “When I first heard about the fire I was shocked and horrified,” she says. Kathy Borrus, author of the newly-published book, “Notre Dame de Paris: A Celebration of the Cathedral,” watched the night’s events unfold on television from Washington D.C., where she lives. Tourists and Parisians alike watched helplessly as an orange glow enveloped the structure and firefighters attempted to douse the flames with water from the nearby Seine river. The news of a fire at Notre Dame de Paris on the night of Apsent shockwaves around the world. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Lydia has viewed Javier as gentle and smart, yet Javier is to blame for countless murders, including sixteen members of her own family. The stereotype of cartel leaders is challenged. He is a frequent visitor to Lydia's bookstore and the two have become good friends. The twist comes in the fact that Javier is bookish. This has dramatic and tragic consequences. Her husband, Sebastian is a journalist about to expose a cartel leader, Javier Crespo. Lydia, the protagonist, is a bookstore owner. Next we are given some of the context about why this particular family has been targeted. The opening is tense, frightening and focuses on the emotions of a young boy and his mum hiding in the shower and thus avoiding murder. American Dirt begins by describing a shoot out at a barbeque where a woman's entire family, other than her son, are murdered by a cartel. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The book’s preface states this belief clearly: “As our cities grow, leaders and the people they serve cannot accept dysfunctional streets they must fight to change them.” Sadik-Khan also encourages this paradigm shift for the reader, claiming that the “book deconstructs, reassembles, and reinvents the street,” inviting the reader “to review something you experience every day in ways that might never have imagined.” ![]() It also continues her mission: changings streets changes cities. The book draws from her experience as Commissioner from 2007 to 2013 under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, weaving together New York City transportation history, street design, her past work with the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), and her current work at the consultancy Bloomberg Associates. This continues the pace set forth by former transportation officials Sam Schwartz and Gabe Klein, who both published books last year. Three years after her tenure, she and co-author Seth Solomonow (her former press director) have released a new book, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution. If you haven’t heard of former New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, then you may know some of her projects: the protected bike lanes in Manhattan, the Citibike bikeshare program launched in 2013, or the redesign of Times Square in 2009. ![]() Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution ![]() ![]() ![]() The EDA process is a crucial step prior to building a model in order to unravel various insights that later become important in developing a robust algorithmic model. ![]() It’s first in the order of operations that a data analyst will perform when handed a new data source and problem statement.Įxploratory Data Analysis is an approach to analyzing data sets by summarizing their main characteristics with visualizations. Data analysis can be applied to almost any aspect of a business if one understands the tools available to process information.Įxploratory Data Analysis - EDA - plays a critical role in understanding the what, why, and how of the problem statement. ![]() For example, an e-commerce company might be interested in analyzing customer attributes in order to display targeted ads for improving sales. The programming language Python, with its English commands and easy-to-follow syntax, offers an amazingly powerful (and free!) open-source alternative to traditional techniques and applications.ĭata analytics allow businesses to understand their efficiency and performance, and ultimately helps the business make more informed decisions. ![]() While much of the world’s data is processed using Excel or (manually!), new data analysis and visualization programs allow for reaching even deeper understanding. Modern businesses and academics alike collect vast amounts of data on myriad processes and phenomena. ![]() |