The moving memoir of an Inuit girl who emerges from a residential school with her spirit intact. Eight-year-old Margaret Pokiak has set her sights on... learning to read, even though it means leaving her village in the high Arctic. Faced with unceasing pressure, her father finally agrees to let her make the five-day journey to attend school, but he warns Margaret of the terrors of residential schools. At school Margaret soon encounters the Raven, a black-cloaked nun with a hooked nose and bony fingers that resemble claws. She immediately dislikes the strong-willed young Margaret. Intending to humiliate her, the heartless Raven gives gray stockings to all the girls -- all except Margaret, who gets red ones. In an instant Margaret is the laughingstock of the entire school. In the face of such cruelty, Margaret refuses to be intimidated and bravely gets rid of the stockings. Although a sympathetic nun stands up for Margaret, in the end it is this brave young girl who gives the Raven a lesson in the power of human dignity. Complemented by archival photos from Margaret Pokiak-Fenton's collection and striking artwork from Liz Amini-Holmes, this inspiring first-person account of a plucky girl's determination to confront her tormentor will linger with young readers. (20100810)

In 1989, the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant visited Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi. His visit spurred him to write a... revelatory book about the work of one of our greatest but still least-understood American writers."A fascinating way to read Faulkner. . . .[Glissant's] case is nothing less than that, no matter how Faulkner's personal Furies twisted his public speech, Faulkner was a great, world-beating multiculturalist."—Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review"A sharp, challenging, and wholly unique tour of Yoknapatawpha County." —Kirkus Reviews"Passionate. . . . Glissant's prose sometimes vies with Faulkner's for intricacy and evocative nuance." —Scott McLemee, Newsday"Glissant tries to engage Faulkner on many fronts simultaneously, positioning himself as a critic, a fellow artist and as a descendant of slaves. . . He makes a convincing case that Faulkner is not just another 'dead white male author.'"—Scott Yarbrough, Raleigh News & Observer"[An] ambitious and, at times, rambunctious expedition into Yoknapatawpha County." —Christine Schwartz Hartley, New York Times Book Review

A hard-hitting novel that breaks open the gritty world of teen relationship abuseSeventeen-year-old Becky Martin dreams of being a stand-up comic. She... also craves the affection of a boyfriend. When attractive Kip, a rising star in the San Francisco comedy club scene, comes into Becky's life, she thinks she's found her soul mate. But she soon discovers that Kip has a dark side, and control and jealousy appear to be the price she must pay for his love. Will Becky find the strength and courage to get help?In this powerful novel, Janet Tashjian tackles the difficult subject of teen relationship abuse from the viewpoints of both the victim and the perpetrator.

A hard-hitting novel that breaks open the gritty world of teen relationship abuse, by the author of The Gospel According to Larry"Unlike Abby, I hadn't... had a boyfriend since Peter last year, and even that was stretching the definition of boyfriend way past anything Webster would recognize. I had better luck holding the attention of a roomful of people in a comedy club than a guy-I couldn't decide if that was good or just plain pathetic."Seventeen-year-old Becky Martin-smart, funny, ambitious-aspires to be a stand-up comic. While setting out to make her goal a reality, she meets Kip Costello, a rising star in the San Francisco comedy-club scene. And what could be better than an intense boyfriend who cares about every detail of her life? But Becky soon discovers a darker side to Kip, where emotional and physical abuse grow hand-in-hand. As the relationship goes from loving to controlling, Becky must find the courage to get help before it's too late.In this powerful novel, Janet Tashjian tackles the difficult and complex subject of teen relationship abuse from the viewpoints of both the victim and the perpetrator, showing that there are no easy answers for either-but many brave survivors.

Sol is a highly gifted six-year-old; his adoring mother believes he is destined for greatness. Yet he is also unsettling, chillingly un-childlike. He... bears the same birthmark as his father, grandmother and great-grandmother had before him. When Sol and his family make an unexpected trip to Germany, terrible secrets start to emerge.Narrated by children in each generation of the family, "Fault Lines" traces their history back through the years, from California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto and Munich. As dormant family secrets are awakened, shock waves reverberate from a hidden past into a fragile present.Domestic in focus and epic in scope, "Fault Lines" is a vibrant, richly drawn and captivating piece of storytelling. It shows what can happen when past and present collide. Birthmarks are not all that can be passed down through a family line...

Passionate, fierce, and lyrical, Meena Alexander’s memoir traces her evolution as a postcolonial writer from a privileged childhood in India to a... turbulent adolescence in the Sudan and then to England and New York City. In this tenth-anniversary edition of Fault Lines, this Alexander challenges the assumptions of life as a South Asian American woman writer in a post-9-11 world. With poetic insight and an honesty that will galvanize readers—both familiar and new—Alexander reveals her difficult recovery from a long-buried childhood trauma that revolutionizes the entire landscape of her memory: of her family, of her writing process and the meaning of memoir, and of her very self, now and before.Meena Alexander is a poet and professor of English and creative writing at Hunter College and the City University of New York.

How can a movement like Surrealism be transferred, transplanted, or transported from one culture to another, one language to another? This book traces... the creative dialogue between France and Japan in the early twentieth century, focusing on Surrealist and avant-garde writings. It opens a theoretical treatment of cultural memory, influence, visuality, writing, nostalgia, and nation to suggest a new perspective for the reading of modern Japanese culture and cross-cultural interactions. The author argues that the problem of literary influences should be recast as a problem of cultural memory, where analysis of causes and effects gives way to a deeper analysis of displacements and aftershocks, which she calls cultural “fault lines.”The book analyzes the writings of Takiguchi Shuzo, Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Kitasono Katsue, and others whose work was associated explicitly with the Surrealist movement in Japan. It also incorporates readings of other experimental works and postwar performances that reflect the wider impact of these avant-garde ideas. The author argues that a vision of alterity, a foreign space located somewhere beyond, plays a crucial role in formulations of avant-garde praxis in both the Japanese and French contexts. Here exploration of Japanese notions of the Surreal, calling for a rereading of received notions about French avant-gardes, leads to a reconfiguration of this period, written less as a narrative history of literature than as the nonlinear route of a multivalent dialogue.Japanese Surrealism is important both for the specific questions it raises and for its exemplary place as an encounter between cultures, literary movements, and languages. As a movement that challenges and breaks apart clear and bounded conceptions of language, poetry, and the transmissibility of meaning, Japanese Surrealism reframes the relation between content and consciousness and is thus a particularly strong and revealing case of cultural interaction. What this avant-garde encounter makes apparent is that inherent discontinuities and fragmentations within individual cultures can also become crucial opportunities for productive intersections between distant realities and distant cultures.

This brief, debate-style reader engages students in today’s political debates.In each chapter, two or more readings present opposing perspectives on... contemporary political issues. Most of the readings are new, and most address current issues such as healthcare reform and economic policy. Headnotes in every chapter put the readings into a broader political context, and each chapter concludes with discussion questions that encourage students to think critically about the readings and the issues they raise.

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's... tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed. Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world. In Fault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.

South Africa has experienced one of the world's most dramatic political transformations. David Goodman, a journalist and activist who has witnessed... South Africa's struggles since the darkest days of apartheid, chronicles the historic transition from apartheid to democracy. This compelling story is told through the lives of four pairs of South Africans who have experienced apartheid from opposite sides of the racial and political divide. Taken together, these profiles provide the first in-depth look at the social dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa.Part social history and part personal drama, Fault Lines is an account of what happens to real people when their country is reinvented around them. The struggle to reconcile past evils is captured in the stories of a former police assassin and his intended victim. The rise and fall of South African racism is portrayed through the lives of the late Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd--the notorious "architect of apartheid"--and his grandson, now a member of the ruling African National Congress. The battle to break out of poverty is detailed in the story of two black women: one an impoverished domestic worker and new city councilor, the other a Mercedes-driving member of South Africa's new black elite. The struggle for the land is told through the eyes of two neighbors: a black farmer who was evicted from his lands in the 1980s and has returned to start over, and a conservative white farmer who participated in the eviction and now does business with the man whose life he nearly destroyed. These powerful stories are accompanied by the photography of award-winning South African documentary photographer Paul Weinberg.

Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology... reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation.Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.