Author: Kristen Wright File Type: pdf span orphans 2 widows 2Monsters have taken many forms across time and cultures, yet within these variations, monsters often evoke the same paradoxical response disgust and desire. We simultaneously fear monsters and take pleasure in seeing them, and their role in human culture helps to explain this apparent contradiction. Monsters are created in order to delineate where the acceptable boundaries of action and emotion exist. However, while killing the monster allows us to cast out socially unacceptable desires, the prevalence of monsters in both history and fiction reveals humanitys desire to see and experience the forbidden. We seek, write about, and display monsters as both a warning and wish fulfilment, and monsters, therefore, reveal that the line between desire and disgust is often thin. Looking across genres, subjects, and periods, this book examines what our conflicted reaction to the monster tells us about human culture.span

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie File Type: epub From Publishers WeeklyAdichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) stays on familiar turf in her deflated first story collection. The tension between Nigerians and Nigerian-Americans, and the question of what it means to be middle-class in each country, feeds most of these dozen stories. Best known are Cell One, and The Headstrong Historian, which have both appeared in the New Yorker and are the collections finest works. Cell One, in particular, about the appropriation of American ghetto culture by Nigerian university students, is both emotionally and intellectually fulfilling. Most of the other stories in this collection, while brimming with pathos and rich in character, are limited. The expansive canvas of the novel suits Adichies work best here, she fixates mostly on romantic relationships. Each storys observations illuminate once read in succession, they take on a repetitive slice-of-life quality, where assimilation and gender roles become ready stand-ins for what could be more probing work. (June) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From Bookmarks MagazineA country famously known to the West for its e-mail scams, Nigeria is indebted to Adichie for these graceful and evocative stories that portray it as the rich and diverse nation it truly is. They also demonstrate her keen insight into the rough terrain of human nature beset by external demands and pressures. Adichie, compared to a hostess (San Francisco Chronicle) who invites her achingly believable characters fully formed into her stories, treats her protagonists -- mostly women -- with respect and compassion. A few minor complaints included less-convincing American characters and some awkward endings, but all critics recognized Adichie as an accomplished storyteller whose careful study of her native land illuminates its foreignness as well as the similarities between us all.