Showing results for "Catastrophes" in World Literature

Set amid the backdrop of the massacre of Greeks and Armenians after World War I, a deeply affecting family story of love and survival infused with the rich historical detail and emotional power of Sisters of the Resistance and The Women in the Castle. It is 1908 and Smyrna is the most...

The Full Catastrophe is the story of Charlie Minkoff, a thirteen-year-old boy born with intersex traits, and his grandfather, Oscar, a ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor and Charlie’s best friend and confidante. Because the Nazis disrupted Oscar’s opportunity for a bar mitzvah, Charlie decides to right the historical wrong and arrange for a joint bar mitzvah for himself and his zeide.

Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.

Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe explores the role of earthquakes in shaping the deep timeframes and multi-hemispheric geographies of American literary history. Spanning the ancient world to the futuristic continents of speculative fiction, the earthquake stories assembled here together reveal the emergence of a broadly Western cultural syndrome that became an acute national fantasy: elsewhere catastrophe, an unspoken but widely prevalent sense that catastrophe is somehow "un-American." 

American Book Award Winner Finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature A NPR, Boston Globe, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and...