Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Accidental Indies

The Accidental Indies

Finley, Robert

Paperback

Historical Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773535519
ISBN13: 9780773535510
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Apr 1 2009
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.41 Width: 5.94 Depth: 8.46
Language: English

At once moving and lyrical, The Accidental Indies is a tale in which we join Christopher Columbus on a fantastical voyage through western seas and Western imagination. Robert Finley imagines, sings, charts, and paints the story of Columbus's problematic 1492 expedition to the Caribbean, creating a world that is as vivid and compelling as the explorer's own voyage to the misnamed Indies.

It is a journey through wondrous words that begins with Columbus's earliest explorations when he first tests the heft and roundness of this earth against his infant head by stepping from the edge of his rocking cradle to come up short on the boards of the nursery floor. Finley charts a course for us through the days at sea, through the voyage itself, its records and commentaries, into the fraught territory of Columbus' imaginary Indies and the representation of this New World on his return to Spain.

This incisive and luminescent story, scrupulously grounded in sixteenth-century sources, illuminates the power that naming has to create a world - in this case a world still haunted by being the accidental Indies. It is a book about how we perceive and represent the world around us, about the creative and destructive power of language. Through its elaboration of the rich and lively ironies of the Columbus story, The Accidental Indies looks at the nature of storytelling itself.

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