Download Free The Quetzal Bird And Other Stories Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Quetzal Bird And Other Stories and write the review.

Sofia travels back to her birthplace in Guatemala and learns more about her family's culture with the help of a quetzal bird.
"This unusual book looks at the quetzal from many points of view: as the ancient Aztec god Quetzalcoatl; as a source of valuable feathers throughout Mesoamerican history; as a rainforest bird of striking beauty and intriguing habits; and as an endangered animal today....The writing weaves the many strands of myth, lore, art, and natural history into a coherent narrative....Drawings add their own sense of wonder and mystery. Well researched and handsomely presented, this book offers a many-faceted study of the quetzal."--Booklist. Bibliography, index, maps.
Stories on the people of the Southwest. Silviana strides to her chicken coop, triggering a "feathered pandemonium" as chickens smell death in the air, Mamacita embroiders, "wondering what in the world it feels like to be kissed," and people who buy tortillas at the market "might as well move to Los Angeles, for they have already lost their souls."
Beautifully illustrated with color plates and line drawings, this comprehensive review of trogons and quetzals -- the first to be published in more than 150 years -- covers all thirty-nine extant species. This up-to-date survey will serve as a valuable reference for ornithologists, conservationists, aviculturalists, and birdwatchers worldwide.
Dancing Girls is Margaret Atwood’s highly praised first collection of short fiction. In it she explores the dark intricacies of the mind, the complexities of human relationships, and the clashes between cultures. In the stories, the mundane and the bizarre intersect in unexpected ways: ex-wives indulge in an odd feast at a psychiatrist’s funeral; a young student is pursued by an obsessed immigrant; an old woman stores up supplies against an impending cataclysm. The fourteen stories range in setting from Canada to England, from Mexico to the United States, and portray characters who touch us and arouse in us compassion and understanding. In this astonishing collection, Margaret Atwood maps human motivation we scarcely know we have.
Kyarra, a novice Singer, seeks to destroy evil and learn the truth about her mother and father, in the conclusion to the Echorium Sequence Trilogy. Reprint.
In 1983 Maslow traveled to Guatemala to locate the endangered quetzal, considered sacred and one of the most beautiful birds on earth. Following the bird's trail, he confronts the horrors of a war-torn nation, where 10,000 people disappear each year.
In this intriguing collection, Esther Pasztory, explores the interweaving of the intellect and the imagination with the daily life inside a traditional marriage and the gifts each has to give to the other. The readers' many transitions between the two worlds, reflective of Ms. Pasztory's own life, are easy, as both worlds are attractive, and yet, it is Pasztory's imaginative apparitions and musings that are most illuminating.When Quetzalcoatl's pre-Columbian baritone in "Conversations with Quetzalcoatl," forces open the quiet in Anna's twenty-first-century study, and he appropriates the most comfortable piece of furniture in the room, a love seat, readers know they are in for a love story. However, this is not only a love story of an inspired female intellect searching for the true identity of Quetzalcoatl (is he pre-Columbian because he dreams in Nahuatl or Colonial Mexican, the greatest god in Mesoamerica?) but also the tale of a tender twenty-first-century marriage between Anna and her husband, Roy, one in which the couple eat by candlelight, wait for each other in bed, love their children and grandchildren. Quetzalcoatl offers Anna a world beyond the clouds. Roy offers her a Friday fish fry dinner down at the Dockyard Café to celebrate a beautiful late summer's day in Maine.In "The Brave," Ms. Pasztory contrasts the powers of a Lenni Lenape Indian ghost and a practical wife to affect the destiny of a depressed Pennsylvania man recovering from a triple bypass operation, while in "The Lover," Pasztory explores the fatal appearances of forces from beyond in the ancient antiquities and festivals of Mexico.In "The Gentleman in the Elevator," two women of Hungarian parentage, one still in Budapest and the other in a large American city, write to each other of their lives. One details the cascading horrors of her daily life; the other tells of her creation and manipulation of the ghosts in hers. The hyperbole is deft and the black humor farcical.This group of five stories is anchored by the final and longest short story, "My Jo," yet in this most interesting search for identity, told the in first person, nothing is anchored. Two Hungarian expatriates, refugees from the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union, have found each other and live compatibly together in a marriage that has lasted almost forty years. While Margo, the geneticist wife, is still engaged in her search for square tomatoes that will pack and travel well, the narrator, a designer, has arranged to leave his work and ruminate on the American character formed by birthright. The narrator begins to write a novel and creates a companion for this search, Jo, a multi-generation American, born on an island off the coast of Maine. She becomes an uncomplaining companion and a great foil for this Hungarian's disquisition on the American character. The reader passes in and out of the narrator's novel, which will never be finished, and the actual peripatetic adventures from coast to coast, south to north, even unto Alaska, as through a kaleidoscope of pontificating and yearning. On these picaresque journeys with a stranger in a strange land, much is learned through the ruminations of a gifted first-generation American.Ms. Pasztory's five stories, at once humorous and haunting, bring the reader to a knowledge of both her intellectual accomplishment and her rich inner life. They create an immense space for the reader's intellect and tenderness.—From the Foreword by Nancy B. Hodermarsky
• Winner of the 1996 Drue Heinz Literature Prize When asked to describe her short stories, Edith Pearlman replied that they are stories about people in peculiar circumstances aching to Do The Right Thing. She elaborated with the same wit and intimacy that make her stories a delight to read:"Before I was a writer I was a reader; and reading remains a necessary activity, occupying several joyous hours of every day. I like novels, essays, and biographies; but most of all I like the short story: narrative at its most confiding. "My own work, and particularly the stories in Vaquita, aims at a similar intimacy between writer and reader. My imagined reader wants to know who loves whom, who drinks what, and, mostly, who answers to what summons. Thank Heavens for Spike Lee! Before his movies writers and critics had to natter about moral stances; now I can say with a more tripping tongue that my characters are people in peculiar circumstances, aching to Do The Right Thing if only they can figure out what The Right Thing is. If not, they'll at least Do Their Own Right Thing Right. "And I'm drawn to heat: sweltering Central American cities; a steamy soup kitchen; Jerusalem in midsummer; the rekindled passion of an old historian; the steady fire of terminal pain. I like solitaires, oddities, charlatans, and children. My characters are secretive; in almost every story somebody harbors a hidden love, dread, regret, or the memory of an insult awaiting revenge. "When I stop writing stories I plan to write letters, short and then shorter. My mother could put three sentences onto a postcard and make the recipient think he'd read a novel. I'm working towards a similar compression."