Download or read book On Earth We re Briefly Gorgeous written by Ocean Vuong and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times Bestseller • Nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!

Download or read book Call Us What We Carry written by Amanda Gorman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-01-23 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller, now available in paperback and with bonus content! This luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Now in paperback and featuring an interview with the author and a discussion guide, Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.

Download or read book Black Panther written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Marvel Entertainment. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects Black Panther (2016) #5-8, Jungle Action #6-7. Counting down the final days of the kingdom of Wakanda! As Zenzi and The People poison Wakanda’s citizens against the Black Panther, a cabal of nation-breakers is assembled. And Ayo and Aneka, the Midnight Angels, are courted to raise their land to new glory! His allies dwindling, T’Challa must rely on his elite secret police, the Hatut Zeraze, and fellow Avenger Eden Fesi, a.k.a. Manifold! And with T’Challa’s back truly against the wall, some old friends lend a hand: Luke Cage, Misty Knight and Storm! But Wakanda may be too far gone for this all-new, all-different crew — and there’s one job the Panther must handle alone. Only he can voyage into the Djalia! Getting there is hard enough, but can he even find his sister Shuri inside Wakanda’s collective memory?

Download or read book Carl Sandburg written by Penelope Niven and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2003 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the life of the American poet, journalist, and historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Download or read book How the Word Is Passed written by Clint Smith and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021

Download or read book Can Poetry Matter written by Dana Gioia and published by . This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can Poetry Matter? is an important book, and anyone who professes to care about the state of American poetry will have to take it into account. --World Literature Today.

Download or read book The Swimmers written by Julie Otsuka and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BEST SELLER • From the best-selling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine comes a novel about what happens to a group of obsessed recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool. This searing, intimate story of mothers and daughters—and the sorrows of implacable loss—is the most commanding and unforgettable work yet from a modern master. The swimmers are unknown to one another except through their private routines (slow lane, medium lane, fast lane) and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief. One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. For Alice, the pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese American incarceration camp in which she spent the war. Alice's estranged daughter, reentering her mother's life too late, witnesses her stark and devastating decline.

Download or read book Atlantic Poets written by Maria Irene Ramalho Sousa Santos and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2003 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important new reading of Portugal's greatest poet.

Download or read book Memories of the Future written by Siri Hustvedt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination from the internationally bestselling and prizewinning author of The Blazing World. A young woman, S.H., moves to New York City in 1978 to look for adventure and write her first novel, but finds herself distracted by her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite. As S.H. listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, she carefully transcribes the woman’s bizarre monologues about her daughter’s violent death and her need to punish the killer. Forty years later, S.H. stumbles upon the journal she kept that year and writes a memoir, Memories of the Future, in which she juxtaposes the notebook’s texts, drafts from her unfinished comic novel, and her commentaries on them to create a dialogue among selves over the decades. She remembers. She misremembers. She forgets. Events of the past take on new meanings. She works to reframe her traumatic memory of a sexual assault. She celebrates the legacy of the wild and rebellious Dada artist-poet, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. As the book unfolds, you witness S.H. write her way through vengeance and into freedom. Smart, funny, angry, and poignant, Hustvedt’s seventh novel brings together the themes that have made her one of the most celebrated novelists working today: the strangeness of time, the brutality of patriarchy, and the power of the imagination to remake the past.

Download or read book Romance Diaspora and Black Atlantic Literature written by Yogita Goyal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature offers a rich, interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, showing how debates over Africa in the works of major black writers generated productive models for imagining political agency. Yogita Goyal analyzes the tensions between romance and realism in the literature of the African diaspora, examining a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips. Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space. Drawing on literature, political history and postcolonial theory, this significant addition to the cross-cultural study of literatures will be of interest to scholars of African American studies, African studies and American literary studies.

Download or read book The City The City written by China Miéville and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE SEATTLE TIMES, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities. BONUS: This edition contains a The City & The City discussion guide and excerpts from China Miéville's Kraken and Embassytown.

Download or read book The Making of Poetry written by Adam Nicolson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brimming with poetry, art, and nature writing—Wordsworth and Coleridge as you've never seen them before June 1797 to September 1798 is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan,” as well as his unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, and William Wordsworth’s revolutionary songs in Lyrical Ballads along with “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth's paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicolson embeds himself in the reality of this unique moment, exploring the idea that these poems came from this particular place and time, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood. The poetry Wordsworth and Coleridge made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they embarked, thinking of poetry as a challenge to all received ideas, stripping away the dead matter, looking to shed consciousness and so change the world. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures seen not as literary monuments but as young men, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths toward it. The artist Tom Hammick accompanied Nicolson for much of the year, making woodcuts from the fallen timber in the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworths lived. Interspersed throughout the book, his images bridge the centuries, depicting lives at the source of our modern sensibility: a psychic landscape of doubt and possibility, full of beauty and thick with desire for a kind of connectedness that seems permanently at hand and yet always out of reach.

Download or read book Sea Monsters written by Chloe Aridjis and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating story of a teenage girl who trades her a middle–class upbringing for a quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is “a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments” (Los Angeles Review of Books). One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen–year–old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking―recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa’s surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will “promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery.” It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the “Beach of the Dead.” Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Set to a pulsing soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us. "Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends meaning below every surface. Like Sebald’s or Cusk’s, her haunted writing patrols its own omissions . . . The figure of the shipwreck looms large for Aridjis. It becomes a useful lens through which to see this book, which is self–contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea." ―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

Download or read book 100 Selected Poems written by e. e. cummings and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: e.e. cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

Download or read book Elephant Rocks written by Kay Ryan and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The former US Poet Laureate shares “fine poems that inspire us with poetry’s greatest gifts: the music of language and the force of wisdom” (Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize–winning author). Elephant Rocks, Kay Ryan’s third book of verse, shows a virtuoso practitioner at the top of her form. Engaging and secretive, provocative and profound, Ryan’s poems have generated growing excitement with their appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Sometimes gaudily ornamental, sometimes Shaker-plain, here is verse that is compact on the page and expansive in the mind. “Kay Ryan makes it all fresh again with her highly original vision, her elegant, quirky craft. These poems look easy, but the deeper one delves, the more they astonish and astound.” —May Sarton, New York Times–bestselling author of At Eighty-Two “Kay Ryan works toward an exciting art, much less sparse than it looks. This is natural history seen from an angle of vision that Emerson and Dickinson would have approved. It refreshes me to find poems that require and reward rereading as much as these do.” —Harold Bloom, literary critic and author of The Bright Book of Life “The music of these poems is every bit as seductive as their reasoning. Her thinking flaunts the plush, irresistible textures of organic growth . . . Marvelous.” —Boston Review “These poems show a poet who is terribly sly in her reckoning of our world.” —David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems “So original, so astute, so pleasurable are the poems in this book, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they’re still being read long after current critical fashions are dated.” —Poetry

Download or read book Sunday Poems written by Raph Koster and published by Altered Tuning Press. This book was released on 2015-11-07 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting in 2005, game designer Raph Koster decided to post a poem to his popular blog every Sunday. Ten years later, this is a selection of eighty of those poems, accompanied by gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations and illuminating endnotes. These are verses written to an audience that didn't necessarily care about poetry; verses about whatever was happening that week. They comment on the news, on his children's homework, on books he was reading or music he heard. In them we voyage across the world, or deep inside apples; we see a toddler become a pterodactyl, and clouds become mundane water vapor. We see sonnets written in computer code. These are poems for everyday people about ordinary things made extraordinary. " In these engaging poems, which tease the conventions of formal verse, Raph Koster shines a curiosity laser on topics ranging from the building of the Globe Theatre to the BASIC programming language. Koster memorializes far-flung journeys through such locales as mountainous Afghanistan, exurban China, Las Vegas casinos, and a very real-seeming Seoni jungle visited not IRL but through Kipling and gaming. -Tarin Towers, author of Sorry, We're Close On a stormy night in Tuscaloosa, reading Raph Koster's collection of poems: I congratulate you on the sustained and sustaining enthusiasm, joy, play, and wit at work in these poems. In your poems - as in the gaming world - you've created a richly varied world saturated with myth and stories. -Hank Lazer, poet, author of The New Spirit and N18 (complete) "

Download or read book Evolution written by Eileen Myles and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Chelsea Girls reads like “an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer” (Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review). The first all-new collection of poems from Eileen Myles since 2011’s Snowflake/different streets, Evolution follows the author’s critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir), as well as a volume of selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice. In these new poems, we find the eminent, exuberant writer at the forefront of American literature, upending genre in a new vernacular that radiates insight, purpose, and risk while channeling of Quakers, Fresca, and cell phones. This long-awaited new collection “lopes forward in the strutting style of the witnessing and sincere, but gorgeously nonaustere, poet in New York…The gift of Evolution is its bold depiction of the textually-rendered ‘I’-Eileen” (Kenyon Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice