Download or read book A Kind of Solitude written by Dariel Suarez and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Cuba, largely after the fall of the Soviet Union, these eleven stories explore themes of isolation and preservation in the face of widespread poverty and sociopolitical oppression. From a chronically ill santero refusing medical care to a female-fronted heavy-metal band risking it all to emerge from Havana's underground, Dariel Suarez, in his daring debut, portrays the harsh reality, inherent humor, and resilient heart of a people whose stories should be known.
Download or read book Absolute Solitude written by Dulce Maria Loynaz and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first comprehensive selection and translation of Dulce María Loynaz's poetry, James O'Connor invites us to hear the haunting voice of Cuba's celebrated poet, whom the Nobel Laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez terms in his Foreword, "archaic and new...tender, weightless, rich in abandon." Widely published in Spain during the 1950s, Loynaz's poetry was almost forgotten in Cuba after the Revolution. International recognition came to her late: at the age of ninety she was living in seclusion in Havana when the Royal Spanish Academy awarded her the 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest literary accolade in the Spanish language. The first English publication of her work, Absolute Solitude contains a selection of poems from each of Loynaz's books, including the acclaimed prose poems from Poems with No Names, a selection of posthumously published work. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book A Kind of Solitude written by Jamie Howison and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six months into a deep personal crisis occasioned by the unexpected end of his marriage, Jamie Howison traveled halfway across the continent to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to engage in a unique and intense five-week contemplative retreat served in the context of the chapel community of the University of King's College. Immersed in the liturgies of the Canadian Book of Common Prayer, mentored in the writing of an Orthodox icon of Christ Pantocrator, challenged to confront the hard truths behind his brokenness, and laid bare by the hours of silence and solitude, Howison discovered something of the power of the ancient spiritual traditions in the restoration of a twenty-first-century soul. A Kind of Solitude tells that story.
Download or read book The Fortress of Solitude written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-08-24 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review EDITORS' CHOICE. From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, comes the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. "A tour de force.... Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Walker in the City, and Call it Sleep." --The New York Times Magazine "One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings it to a story worth telling." --Time
Download or read book The Art of Solitude written by Stephen Batchelor and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time of social distancing and isolation, a meditation on the beauty of solitude from renowned Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor “Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it. A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.”—Kirkus Reviews “Elegant and formally ingenious.”—Geoff Wisner, Wall Street Journal When world renowned Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor turned sixty, he took a sabbatical from his teaching and turned his attention to solitude, a practice integral to the meditative traditions he has long studied and taught. He aimed to venture more deeply into solitude, discovering its full extent and depth. This beautiful literary collage documents his multifaceted explorations. Spending time in remote places, appreciating and making art, practicing meditation and participating in retreats, drinking peyote and ayahuasca, and training himself to keep an open, questioning mind have all contributed to Batchelor’s ability to be simultaneously alone and at ease. Mixed in with his personal narrative are inspiring stories from solitude’s devoted practitioners, from the Buddha to Montaigne, from Vermeer to Agnes Martin. In a hyperconnected world that is at the same time plagued by social isolation, this book shows how to enjoy the inescapable solitude that is at the heart of human life.
Download or read book One Hundred Years of Solitude written by Gabriel García Márquez and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.
Download or read book Seek You written by Kristen Radtke and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This—a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society. There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns. In Seek You, Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels impossible to share. Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage with each other, and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally-charged drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments, and asks how we might keep the spaces between us from splitting entirely.
Download or read book Kinder Than Solitude written by Yiyun Li and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound mystery is at the heart of this magnificent new novel by Yiyun Li, “one of America’s best young novelists” (Newsweek) and the celebrated author of The Vagrants, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Moving back and forth in time, between America today and China in the 1990s, Kinder Than Solitude is the story of three people whose lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed. As one of the three observes, “Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.” When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious incident in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all three are haunted by what really happened in their youth, and by doubt about themselves. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, avoiding entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude. In Beijing, Boyang struggles to deal with an inability to love, and with the outcome of what happened among the three friends twenty years before. Brilliantly written, a breathtaking page-turner, Kinder Than Solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and life. In mesmerizing prose, and with profound insight, Yiyun Li unfolds this remarkable story, even as she explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person’s present and future. Praise for Kinder Than Solitude “This is an exceptional novel, and Yiyun Li has grown into one of our major novelists.”—Salman Rushdie “Yiyun Li infuses the traditional form with a fresh, rigorous beauty and a sense of permanence and increasing value.”—Mona Simpson, author of My Hollywood “[A] sleek, powerful novel about the weight of memory, the brunt of loss and the myriad ways the past can crimp the soul . . . Li gives us gifts of gorgeous prose. . . . Rarely are ordinary humans given such eloquent witness.”—The Washington Post “What makes [Kinder Than Solitude] so vivid is its humanity. . . . It is an inquiry into how the past scars us, shaping present and future, and some deeds, once committed, can never be undone.”—Los Angeles Times “[Li’s] true gift . . . is old-fashioned storytelling [and] a sense that a life, a whole life, can be captured on pages.”—The Boston Globe “A stunning, dark, and beautiful book . . . Yiyun Li writes with characteristic genius.”—Paul Harding, author of Tinkers and Enon
Download or read book The Caiplie Caves written by Karen Solie and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray [. . .] – she is the one by whom the language lives’. – Michael Hofmann, LRB The Canadian Karen Solie is rapidly establishing a reputation as one of the most important poets at work today. Her fifth book of poetry, The Caiplie Caves, is a profound and timely consideration of the nature of crisis: at its heart is the figure of St Ethernan, a seventh-century Irish missionary to Scotland who retreated to the caves of the Fife coast in order to decide whether to establish a priory on May Island or pursue a life of solitude. His decision would have been informed by realities of war, misinformation and power; Solie imagines this crisis also complicated by grief, confusion – and a faith placed under extreme duress. Woven through Ethernan’s story are poems that orbit the caves’ geographical location, and range through the recurring violences of history and myth, of personal and public record. In poems of the utmost lyric subtlety and argumentative strength, Solie addresses how we might distinguish self-delusion from belief, belief from knowledge – and how, in the frailty of our responses, we can find the courage to move forward.
Download or read book Too Loud a Solitude written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by HMH. This book was released on 1992-04-27 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this “irresistibly eccentric romp,” the author Milan Kundera has called “our very best writer today” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word (The New York Times Book Review).
Download or read book Solitude written by Anthony Storr and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lonely City written by Olivia Laing and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. This roving cultural history of urban loneliness centers on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Laing travels deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists in a celebration of the state of loneliness.
Download or read book The Point of Vanishing written by Howard Axelrod and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Into the Wild meets Walden—a lyrical memoir for nature lovers and for anyone who has wondered what it would be like to disconnect from our hyper-connected culture and seek more meaningful connections After losing vision in one eye and becoming estranged from his family and friends, a young man spent two years searching for identity in self-imposed solitude in the backwoods of northern Vermont, where he embarked on a project of stripping away facades and all social ties--and learned to face himself. On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy’s finger hooked behind Axelrod’s eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the same dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Desperate for a sense of orientation he could trust, he retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He needed to find a more lasting sense of meaning away from society’s pressures and rush. Named one of the best books of the year by Slate, Chicago Tribune, Entropy Magazine, and named one of the top 10 memoirs by Library Journal
Download or read book Pond written by Claire-Louise Bennett and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review "Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.
Download or read book Solitude written by Michael Harris and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘An elegant, thoughtful book . . . beautifully expresses the importance and experience of liberation from the battery-hen life of constant connection and crowds.’ Daily Mail ‘A compelling study of the subtle ways in which modern life and technologies have transformed our behaviour and sense of self.’ Times Literary Supplement In a world of social media and smartphones, true solitude has become increasingly hard to find. In this timely and important book, award-winning writer Michael Harris reveals why our hyper-connected society makes time alone more crucial than ever. He delves into the latest neuroscience to examine the way innovations like Google Maps and Facebook are eroding our ability to be by ourselves. He tells the stories of the remarkable people – from pioneering computer scientists to great nineteenth-century novelists – who managed to find solitude in the most unexpected of places. And he explores how solitude can bring clarity and creativity to each of our inner lives. Urgent, eloquent and beautifully argued, Solitude might just change the way you think about being alone. ‘Speaks to a long-overdue conversation we still haven’t properly had in our society.’ Vice ‘A timely, elegant provocation to daydream and wander.’ Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall ‘The leading thinker about technology’s corrupting influence on our collective psyche.’ Newsweek ‘A poetic, contemplative journey into the benefits of solo sojourning.’ Elle
Download or read book The Distant Marvels written by Chantel Acevedo and published by Europa Editions UK. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a lifetime told in the eye of a hurricane. Maria Sirena tells stories. She does it for money—she was a favorite in the cigar factory where she worked as a lettora—and for love, spinning gossamer tales out of her own past for the benefit of friends and family. But now, like a modern-day Scheherazade, she will be asked to tell a story so that eight women can keep both hope and themselves alive. Cuba, 1963. Hurricane Flora, one of the deadliest hurricanes in recorded history, is bearing down on the island. Seven women have been evacuated from their homes and herded into the former governor's mansion, where they are watched over by another woman, a young soldier of Castro's new Cuba named Ofelia. Outside the storm is raging and the floodwaters are rising. In a single room on the top floor of the governor's mansion, Maria Sirena begins to tell the incredible story of her childhood during Cuba's Third War of Independence; of her father Augustin, a ferocious rebel; of her mother, Lulu, an astonishing woman who fought, loved, dreamed, and suffered as fiercely as her husband. Stories, however, have a way of taking on a life of their own, and, swept up by her story's momentum, Maria Sirena will reveal more about herself than she or anyone ever expected. Chantel Acevedo's The Distant Marvels has the epic scope of a contemporary Gone with the Wind and a faith in the power of storytelling equal to Martel's Life of Pi. It is a family saga, a love story, a stunning historical account of the struggle against oppressors, and a long tender plea for forgiveness. The Distant Marvels is, finally, a life-affirming novel about love that lasts a lifetime and the very art of storytelling itself.
Download or read book The Well of Loneliness written by Radclyffe Hall and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.
