The Green Age of Asher Witherow is the debut novel of M. Allen Cunningham, published in 2004. It is the story of Asher Witherow, a boy born in the coal mining town of Nortonville, California in 1863. The story is framed as a memoir, penned by the elderly Witherow in the spring of 1950, long after the book's events occurred, and many years after the community of Nortonville ceased to exist. Witherow, a mysterious and haunted old man of 86, shares the troubling story of his life from birth to age 20, when he left Nortonville. Central to the tale is the image of the 4,000 foot Mount Diablo, which assumes a symbolic presence for Witherow. The book's title is inspired by the poem "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" by Dylan Thomas, which begins:
"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer."
The poem's central themes of mortality, biological decay, and ecological interdependence are explored in the novel.
Brian Wilson Aldiss was an English writer, artist and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s.
John Edward Masefield was an English poet and writer, and Poet Laureate from 1930 until 1967. Among his best known works are the children's novels The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, and the poems The Everlasting Mercy and "Sea-Fever".
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a novel published on 27 December 1871 by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, University of Oxford, and the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just like a reflection, everything is reversed, including logic.
Chaim Potok was an American author, novelist, playwright, editor and rabbi. Of the more than dozen novels he authored, his first book The Chosen (1967), was listed on The New York Times’ best seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3,400,000 copies and which was adapted into a well-received 1981 feature film by the same title.
The Wandering Jew is a mythical immortal man whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. In the original legend, a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion was then cursed to walk the Earth until the Second Coming. The exact nature of the wanderer's indiscretion varies in different versions of the tale, as do aspects of his character; sometimes he is said to be a shoemaker or other tradesman, while sometimes he is the doorman at the estate of Pontius Pilate.
Nortonville is a home rule-class city in Hopkins County, Kentucky, in the United States. The population was 1,204 as of the 2010 census.
The Hyperion Cantos is a series of science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. The title was originally used for the collection of the first pair of books in the series, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, and later came to refer to the overall storyline, including Endymion, The Rise of Endymion, and a number of short stories. More narrowly, inside the fictional storyline, after the first volume, the Hyperion Cantos is an epic poem written by the character Martin Silenus covering in verse form the events of the first two books.
Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991, Okri won the Booker Prize with his novel The Famished Road. He received a knighthood in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
Steven Billy Mitchell, usually known by the pseudonym and pen-name of Andy McNab, is a novelist and former British Army infantry soldier.
Cleo Virginia Andrews, better known as V. C. Andrews or Virginia C. Andrews, was an American novelist.
My Name Is Asher Lev is a novel by Chaim Potok, an American author and rabbi. The book's protagonist is Asher Lev, a Hasidic Jewish boy in New York City. Asher is a loner with artistic inclinations. His art, however, causes conflicts with his family and other members of his community. The book follows Asher's maturity as both an artist and a Jew.
Garry Douglas Kilworth is a British science fiction, fantasy and historical novelist, and a former Royal Air Force cryptographer.
A Dirty Job is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 2006. While reflecting the author's absurdist tendencies, the content of the novel draws significantly from his own experiences in tending to the needs of close family and friends in the stages of dying.
Lost Son is a novel by M. Allen Cunningham, published in May 2007 by Unbridled Books. It is about Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the famous poet of the Duino Elegies and author of Letters to a Young Poet.
Mark Allen Cunningham is an American author based in Portland, Oregon. His first novel, The Green Age of Asher Witherow, is the story of a young boy growing up in a California coal mining town in the 19th century. The Green Age of Asher Witherow was selected as a number one Book Sense pick in 2004, and was shortlisted for the Booksense Book of the Year Award in 2005. It was published in German translation by Atrium Verlag and released in an audio edition by Audible.com.
A blue flower was a central symbol of inspiration for the Romanticism movement, and remains an enduring motif in Western art today. It stands for desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable. It symbolizes hope and the beauty of things.
Julianna Baggott is a novelist, essayist, and poet who also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. She is an associate professor at Florida State University's College of Motion Picture Arts. She is a 2013 recipient of the Alex Awards.
"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" is a poem by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas— the poem that "made Thomas famous." Written in 1933, it was first published in his 1934 collection 18 Poems.
18 Poems is a book of poetry written by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, published in 1934 as the winner of a contest sponsored by Sunday Referee. His first book, 18 Poems, introduced Thomas's new and distinctive style of poetry. This was characterised by tightly metered, rhyming verse and an impassioned tone. Written in his "womb- tomb period", the poems explore dark themes of love, death and birth, employing a rich combination of sexual connotations and religious symbolism. The lyricism and intensity of the poems in the book contrasted with the emotional restraint shown in the poetry of the successful modernist poets that worked as his contemporaries. The book received critical acclaim, but was not initially commercially successful.
Ronald Eaton Asher was a British linguist and educator specialised in Dravidian languages. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1964), a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1991), and an honorary fellow of the Sahitya Akademi.
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