Download or read book The Situation and the Story written by Vivian Gornick and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-10-11 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras. This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.
Download or read book Narratives of Parental Death Dying and Bereavement written by Caroline Pearce and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection shows what happens when facing the inevitable and sometimes expected death of a parent, and how such an ordinary part of life as parental death might connect with the children left behind. In many ways, individual deaths are extraordinary and leave a unique legacy – a kind of haunting. The authors' accounts seek to make sense of death through witnessing its enactment and recording its detail. All the authors are experienced researchers in the field of death studies, and their collective expertise encompasses ethnography, psychology, sociology and anthropology. The individual descriptions of death and grief capture the everyday practicalities of managing death and dying, including, for example, the difficulties of caring responsibilities and the realities of dealing with strained family relationships. These accounts show the raw detail of death; they are deeply personal observations framed within critical theories. As established scholars and practitioners that have researched and worked in end-of-life and bereavement care, the authors in this anthology offer a unique perspective on how identity is shaped by a close bereavement. The book employs a strong editorial narrative that blends memoir with theoretical engagement, and will be of interest to death studies scholars, as well as practitioners involved in end-of-life care and bereavement care and anyone who has experienced the death of a parent.
Download or read book The Long Goodbye written by Meghan O'Rourke and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-04-14 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anguished, beautifully written... The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of drama as old as life." -- The New York Times Book Review From one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. O'Rourke's story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.
Download or read book Gone West written by J. S. M. Ward and published by Health Research Books. This book was released on 1996-09 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1920 Three narratives of after-death experiences communicated through the mediumship of J. S. M. Ward.
Download or read book What Happens After Death written by Migene González-Wippler and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A text which poses the question; what does modern science and the world's religions tell us about the mystery of life after death? This book explores these issues, enabling readers to experience one soul's journey through the afterlife.
Download or read book The Language of Life and Death written by William Labov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labov extends his widely used framework for narrative analysis to matters of greatest human concern: accounts of the danger of death, violence, premonitions, and large-scale community conflicts. This book provides a rich range of narratives that grip the reader's attention together with an analysis of how it is done.
Download or read book Then We Came to the End written by Joshua Ferris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award, this debut novel is "as funny as The Office, as sad as an abandoned stapler . . . that rare comedy that feels blisteringly urgent." (TIME) No one knows us in quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the Chicago ad agency depicted in Joshua Ferris's exuberantly acclaimed first novel is family at its best and worst, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells an emotionally true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment—the one we pretend is normal five days a week. One of the Best Books of the Year Boston Globe * Christian Science Monitor * New York Magazine * New York Times Book Review * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * Time magazine * Salon
Download or read book The Art of Death written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. “Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses,” Danticat notes in her introduction. “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.” The book moves outward from the shock of her mother’s diagnosis and sifts through Danticat’s writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison’s Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat’s mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.
Download or read book Loafing Along Death Valley Trails written by William Caruthers and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1926, on the advice of his doctor, former newspaperman William Caruthers, whose writings appeared in most Western magazines during a career spanning more than 25 years, retired to an orange grove near Ontario, California. Once there, he would go on to spend much of his time during the next 25 years in the Death Valley region, witnessing the transition of Death Valley from a prospector’s hunting ground to a mecca for winter tourists. This book, which was first published in 1951, is William Caruthers’ personal narrative of the old days in Death Valley—”of people and places in Panamint Valley, the Amargosa Desert and the big sink at the bottom of America.” A wonderful read.
Download or read book Notes on Grief written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.
Download or read book Curriculum Personal Narrative and the Social Future written by Ivor F. Goodson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent writing on education and social change, and a growing number of new governmental initiatives across Western societies have proceeded in denial or ignorance of the personal missions and biographical trajectories of key public sector personnel. This book stems from an underpinning belief that we have to understand the personal biographical if we are to understand the fate of social and political initiatives. In education a pattern has emerged in many countries around the world. Each new government enshrines targets and tests to ensure that teachers at the frontline delivery are ‘more accountable’. Whilst this often provides evidence of symbolic action to the electorate or professional audiences, the evidence at the level of service delivery is often far less impressive. Targets, tests and tables may win wide support from the public, but there are often negligible or even contradictory effects at the point of delivery, enforced by the ignorance or denial of personal missions and biographical mandates. This book locates most of its analysis and discussion at the point of culture clash between centralised dictates, and individual and collective life missions. Whilst the early part of the book considers a range of issues related to school curriculum, the focus on the biographical and life narrative becomes increasingly important as the analysis proceeds. Curriculum, Personal Narrative and the Social Future will be of key interest to practising teachers, educational researchers and students on teacher training courses, postgraduate courses and doctoral courses.
Download or read book There Is Life After Death written by Roy Abraham Varghese and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is death the end? Or, to put it another way, do we survive bodily death? Some shrug their shoulders and declare we simply can’t know. Others just say “No.” And a few, flying their philosophical colors, pretentiously profess to not even understand the question. Curiously, the overwhelming majority of human beings throughout the course of history have taken it for granted that death is not the end, that there is a life after death. This striking and seemingly instinctive belief has been embodied in the religious traditions and philosophical reflections of most cultures. There is Life After Death is the first of its kind in that it assembles and analyzes a comprehensive range of data on life after death and then provides a framework to understand the data. No previous book has given a concrete structure of the afterlife that is based on the accounts of “eye”-witnesses, as well as on data from diverse sources. Above all, the book provides exciting and compelling answers to the urgent question: what lies on the other side?
Download or read book Folk Stories and Personal Narratives in Palestinian Spoken Arabic written by N. Sirhan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By analysing the folk stories and personal narratives of a cross-section of Palestinians, Sirhan offers a detailed study of how content and sociolinguistic variables affect a narrator's language use and linguistic behaviour. This book will be of interest to anyone engaged with narrative discourse, gender discourse, Arabic studies and linguistics.
Download or read book After Death written by William Thomas Stead and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Teaching Powerful Personal Narratives written by Mary Jane Reed and published by Maupin House Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2004 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author divides the components of good narrative writing into chapters that teachers can use a la carte to develop the skills their students need. Though tailored for teachers with students working on college-application essays, this text can bolster any students narrative writing. Includes a CD-ROM of supplemental material.
Download or read book My Diaries Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888 1914 written by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Heart of Miracles written by Karen Henson Jones and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the vein of Eat, Pray, Love, this powerful memoir chronicles a woman's search for meaning following a paradigm-shifting near-death experience Karen Henson Jones was on the conventional path to success in the corporate world when a sudden cardiac event at the age of 30 took her to the brink of death. During an otherworldly near-death experience, she was presented with a choice to leave her body or to return to Earth. When her request to live was granted, Karen was forced to come to terms with the life she had been living. With warmth, wonder, and wit, Heart of Miracles follows Karen on an inspirational journey through India, Italy, Bhutan, and the Holy Land of Israel in search of a more meaningful life. Exploring the power of meditation, Western medical science, the transformative doctrines of reincarnation, and the teachings of Jesus, Karen encourages us to embrace the full possibilities of our spiritual selves.