Showing 3371 - 3380 of 3439 annotations

Aghwee the Sky Monster

Oe, Kenzaburo

Last Updated: Mar-18-1996
Annotated by:
Taylor, Nancy

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

A college student takes a job as companion to a young composer who is considered crazy. The composer believes the ghost (Aghwee the Sky Monster) of his son visits him because his soul cannot rest; it cannot because the father allowed the child to die by agreeing to have it fed only sugar water. The composer dies when he thinks he's saving his son from being struck by a truck. The narrator, ten years later, recounts the composer's story because he connects it in his mind with an important event in his own life.

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Geezers

LeGuin, Ursula

Last Updated: Feb-20-1996
Annotated by:
Dittrich, Lisa

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

A middle-aged businessman goes to a small coastal town to have a relaxing weekend. That weekend, the "Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood, A Christian Community" are also visiting, and the protagonist is quite disconcerted by being constantly mistaken (by waitresses, the seniors themselves, etc.) for a member of this group.

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Deadwater

Bloch, Chana

Last Updated: Feb-15-1996
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

The "muck" stirred up in the deadwater of a murky lake is a metaphor for the stirring up of old hostilities between a mother and her now adult child. This subtle poem strikingly evokes the psychological history of a difficult family relationship and the precariousness of an adult truce, "a cloud of silt endlessly / raining itself out."

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The English Patient

Ondaatje, Michael

Last Updated: Dec-15-1995
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction — Secondary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In the waning days of World War II, Hana, a Canadian nurse, refuses to leave the temporary hospital in a Tuscan villa where she cares for her mysterious English patient, a soldier burned and bandaged beyond recognition. The patient is haunted by the memory of a love affair in North Africa. Hana is joined by Kip, a Sikh bomb-disposal expert, who becomes her lover, and by Caravaggio, a friend of her father and sometime-criminal-turned spy. The three establish a loose pattern of precarious existence in a ravaged world and form a bond of love around the dying man whose identity they try to uncover.

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Parish Doctor

Brown, Sterling

Last Updated: Dec-15-1995
Annotated by:
Squier, Harriet

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

An African-American physician from Louisiana provides care to patients whose ideas of traditional healing conflict with those of Western medicine. An observer describes how this Parish Doctor negotiates a compromise between his formal training and the beliefs and expectations of his patients. He accepts their black hens and claims to have "conjuh knowledge" while providing competent care.

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In the Land of the Body

Bloch, Chana

Last Updated: Nov-16-1995
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poems (Sequence)

Summary:

Chana Bloch's series of eight cancer poems, collectively entitled “In the Land of the Body,” focuses on the experience of ovarian cancer, from diagnosis to surgery and beyond. The poems provide a loose narrative of illness and treatment, but each of them represents a slightly different approach to the inner life of illness. They are episodic; several evoke scenes--in the doctor's office before the X-ray machine, at home, watching her children color, in the hospital before surgery, and finally out of doors among the pines, released as “cured,” reveling in the qualified hope that they got it all.

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In Terror of Hospital Bills

Wright, James

Last Updated: Nov-08-1995
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

The speaker is poor, homeless, and desperate. The place is Minnesota, the season winter. He cries out, "I am a full-blooded Sioux Indian." He is about to go hungry and "to leap barefoot through gas-fire veils of shame . . . . " Yet, the man acknowledges, "my life was never so precious / To me as now." He will learn anything, do anything, be anything, for the sake of his precious "secret, / My life."

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The River Styx Runs Upstream

Simmons, Dan

Last Updated: Nov-08-1995
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

A young boy's mother has just died, and out of grief and love, the father has her "resurrected." The family is told to think of the returned mother as having had a mild stroke, but, in fact, she wanders about the house like an inexpressive automaton. Her return from the dead leads to the destruction of the family: the eventual suicides of the boy's older brother and father. The boy, now a young man, becomes a Resurrectionist himself. He narrates the story with a direct, simple tone, which belies the eerie conclusion: he returns to the home of his youth, where his "family" awaits him.

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Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity

Ammons, A. R.

Last Updated: Sep-13-1995
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

This poem is essentially a list of the splendid variety of shit in the world. It begins: "You'll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are . . ." and continues the catalog for 45 lines, from gosling shit, through cricket and mandrell shit, ending with "the shit of the wasteful gallinule."

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Mother and Child

Axelrod, David

Last Updated: Jun-26-1995
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

A man speaks to his six-months pregnant wife. He says she lures him "to our conjugal bed / to use each other gently . . . . " He imagines "eyes staring at me from / deep inside" that "say we are captured . . . . " He concludes "We are / too sure we need each other / to let go."

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