Free Downloads

From A To X: A Story In Letters

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A’ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A’ida’s letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the town is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity assume for A’ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them.

Paperback: 198 pages

Publisher: Verso; Reprint edition (April 14, 2009)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1844673618

ISBN-13: 978-1844673612

Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 7.8 inches

Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #588,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #119 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Epistolary #1788 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Political #31600 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

This is a "novel" in the form of a discontinuous, out-of-order series of letters from A'ida, an activist, to her imprisoned lover Xavier. The letters are arranged, as the book's conceit is explained in a brief introduction by Berger (who has "found" or "been given" them), as they have been found in Xavier's cell after he departed, in a few bundles. They are interspersed with little fragments of writing by Xavier -- the only words of his we read, as his replies to A'ida are not printed -- which are mostly political reflections, sometimes quoted from figures like Eduardo Galeano and Subcomandante Marcos, and which in the main sound suspiciously like interjections from Berger himself, though this is not at all obtrusive or disruptive to the reader's experience. The letters from A'ida retell little incidents of life and political resistance, from a neighbor's jelly-making to her work at a pharmacy to a night of protest, ringed by occupiers' tanks. While the setting is deliberately fictionalized and the place names are drawn from ancient Assyria, there are still some details that make it seem likely the characters are Palestinians; but their experience is meant to be an allegory of activist life anywhere rather than a depiction of a specific place or a single historical moment. (Xavier's situation clearly evokes that of Nazim Hikmet or Antonio Gramsci, for instance.

The Screwtape Letters Study Guide: A Bible Study on the C.S. Lewis Book The Screwtape Letters Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 (Library of America) The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2, 1923-1925 (The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway) Knock 'em Dead Cover Letters: Cover Letters and Strategies to Get the Job You Want How to Write Better Résumés and Cover Letters (How to Write Better Resumes and Cover Letters) Letters of John Keats (Oxford Letters & Memoirs) Basil: The Letters, Volume I, Letters 1-58 (Loeb Classical Library No. 190) The Screwtape Letters: Complete and Unabridged: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil Last Letters from Attu: The True Story of Etta Jones, Alaska Pioneer and Japanese POW The Lost Letters of Pergamum: A Story from the New Testament World From A to X: A Story in Letters Letters from a Slave Boy: The Story of Joseph Jacobs Letters from a Slave Girl: The Story of Harriet Jacobs 66 Love Letters: A Conversation with God That Invites You into His Story An Eames Anthology: Articles, Film Scripts, Interviews, Letters, Notes, and Speeches The World Needs More Love Letters All-in-One Stationery and Envelopes Zenspirations: Letters & Patterning Letters to Live By: An Inspirational Adult Coloring Book Ashen Sky: The Letters of Pliny The Younger on the Eruption of Vesuvius The ABC of Custom Lettering: A Practical Guide to Drawing Letters