Download or read book Blueprints of the Afterlife written by Ryan Boudinot and published by Black Cat. This book was released on 2012 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a future world that has been decimated by a sentient glacier and corrupt nanotechnology, a film archivist, a former mercenary and a virtuoso dishwasher are manipulated by a man who is overseeing the construction of a Manhattan replica in Puget Sound.
Download or read book Sum written by David Eagleman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-10 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives—each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves in the here and now. In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with annoying versions of who you could have been. With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.
Download or read book Blueprints of the Afterlife written by Ryan Boudinot and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2012-01-03 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tour de force novel from the “wickedly talented” (The Boston Globe) and “darkly funny” author of Misconception (The New York Times Book Review). Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award It is the afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called “the Age of Fucked Up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked. Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympic medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time—climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age—Blueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring. “Duct-tape yourself to the front of this roller coaster and enjoy the ride.” —The New York Times “Challenging, messy and funny fiction for readers looking for something way beyond space operas and swordplay.” —Kirkus Reviews “The absurdities are cleverly crafted and highly entertaining. Imaginative [and] heartfelt.” —Hannah Calkins, Shelf Awareness “Ingenious . . . Frenzied, hilarious, and paranoid . . . A bracing dystopian romp through contemporary dread.” —Publishers Weekly “Probably the strangest post-apocalyptic novel in ages.” —io9 “What an inspired mindfuck of a book!” —City Paper (Baltimore)
Download or read book Blueprints for a Sparkling Tomorrow written by Nathan Robinson and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book of utopian prophecies, the problems of contemporary human society are theorized and textually rectified. The authors expose the dysfunctions embedded in modern life, from shoddy architecture to the existence of police. Featuring over 125 chapters, countless footnotes, an extended bibliography, four appendices, and a full index, this revised and expanded edition of Blueprints for a Sparkling Tomorrow promises to restore the prospects for a civilization gone mad.
Download or read book The Death of Things written by Sarah Wasserman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature—and its relevance to the twenty-first century “Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture. Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation. The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.
Download or read book The Dead Do Not Improve written by Jay Caspian Kang and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as The Awl’s 2012’s novel to anticipate, this glorious debut stars hippie detectives, a singular city, and an MFA student on the run. On a residential Bay Area block struggling with the collision of gentrifier condos and longtime residents, stymied recent MFA grad Philip Kim is sleeping the night away when bullets fly through a window in his apartment building and end up killing one of his neighbors. Philip only learns about the murder the next day when bored and Googling himself. But when he gets caught up in the investigation and becomes the focus of an elaborate, violent scheme, he will learn far more than he ever wanted to about his former four-eggs-at-a-time borrowing neighbor Dolores Stone, aka “The Grey Beaver,” and her shocking connections to an underworld only a city like this one could create. Siddhartha “Sid” Finch, a homicide detective bitter about everything except his gorgeous wife, and his phlegmatic, pock-marked partner Jim Kim, land the case. Sid and Jim race after Philip through a menacing, unknowable San Francisco fending off militant surfers, vaguely European cafes, and aggressive Advanced Creative Writing students as they all try to figure out just who’s causing trouble in this city they love to hate. Exceedingly unique, pulsing with vigor and heart, and loaded with fierce, fresh language, The Dead Do Not Improve confirms Jay Caspian Kang as a true American original as obsessed with surfing and surviving as with the power of unforgettable storytelling.
Download or read book Wake Me Up written by Lyn Ragan and published by Hour Glass Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Chip Oney's ongoing after-life communications with his fiance Lyn Ragan after his violent murder.
Download or read book The Complete Works of Fante Bukowski written by Noah Van Sciver and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects all three volumes of the Eisner Award-nominated graphic novels series, which skewers a self-important male literary poser. Living in a beat-up motel and consorting with the downtrodden as well as the mid-level literati, Fante Bukowski must overcome great obstacles ― a love interest turned rival, ghostwriting a teen celebrity's memoirs, no actual talent ― to gain the respect and adoration from critics and, more importantly, his father. Van Sciver has created a scathing, hilarious, and empathetic character study of a self-styled author determined that he's just one more poem (or drink) away from success. The book includes a foreward by novelist Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife), a facsimile reproduction of Bukowski's literary debut, 6 Poems (thought lost to time in the wake of a motel fire that destroyed the entire original print run), a "Works Cited" section, and a selection of "visual tributes" by over two dozen cartoonists including Nina Bunjevac, Simon Hanselmann, Jesse Jacobs, Ed Piskor, Leslie Stein, and others.
Download or read book Haunted Houses written by Corinne May Botz and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “When I was between the ages of five and eight, my sister and I slept in a large attic bedroom. At nightfall the room was filled with gypsies who glided around in clusters. They wore colorful thin flowing dresses and rummaged greedily through my drawers and books as if they would steal everything. I lay in bed as stiff as a board, trying to will myself invisible, praying they would not notice me looking . . . Daylight obliterated the gypsies, rendering them as thoroughly insubstantial as they had been real in the dark. I had a vague understanding that my vision was private, so I never told my family what I saw.” So began Corinne May Botz’s fascination with the invisible, a phenomenon that has profoundly influenced her approach to photography in style and subject matter. For more than ten years, she searched for ghost stories in buildings across the United States. She ventured into these haunted places with both camera and tape recorder in hand; her photographs, accompanied by first-person narratives, reveal a rare glimpse into American interiors, both physical and psychological. This book includes more than eighty haunted buildings, from the legendary to the ordinary, including Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore, a New Jersey tavern, and a Massachusetts farmhouse, a log cabin in Kentucky, and a number of private residences. The text includes ghost stories told to the author by those who lived through the moving rugs, creaking floors, apparitions, disappearing—and reappearing—objects, cries in the night, mysteriously burning candles, and other unexplained occurrences.
Download or read book Nothing Ever Dies written by Viet Thanh Nguyen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review “The Year in Reading” Selection All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations. “[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War—and which Vietnamese call the American War...As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift—wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity—to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.” —Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times “In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war...[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths.” —Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review “Ultimately, Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
Download or read book The Core of the Sun written by Johanna Sinisalo and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Finnish author of Troll: A Love Story delivers a work of “scathing satire . . . that sits somewhere between Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut” (NPR). The Core of the Sun further cements Finlandia Award–winning author Johanna Sinisalo’s reputation as a master of literary speculative fiction and of her country’s unique take on it, dubbed “Finnish weird.” In an alternative historical present, The Eusistocratic Republic of Finland has bred a new human sub-species of receptive, submissive women, called eloi, for sex and procreation, while intelligent, independent women are relegated to menial labor and sterilized so that they do not carry on their “defective” line. Vanna, raised as an eloi but secretly intelligent, needs money to find her sister, who has disappeared. Vanna forms a friendship with a man named Jare, and they become involved in buying and selling a stimulant known to the Health Authority to be extremely dangerous: chili peppers. Then Jare comes across a strange religious cult in possession of the Core of the Sun, a chili so hot that it is rumored to cause hallucinations—a temptation so enticing that it just might divert the addicted Vanna from her quest . . . “A chilling tale reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale . . . A fascinating story centered on gender politics.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book Blueprints Surgery written by Seth J. Karp and published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the Blueprints series, Blueprints Surgery provides a concise review of what students need to know in their surgery rotations or the Boards. Each chapter is brief and includes pedagogical features such as bolded key words, tables, figures, and key points boxes. This edition has been thoroughly updated and significantly expanded, with more detail and depth of coverage, additional tables and figures, and case studies. A question-and-answer section at the end of the book includes 100 board-format questions with complete rationales for each answer choice. A companion website includes a question bank containing an additional 50 questions and fully searchable text.
Download or read book The Afterlife Interviews written by Jeffrey Marks and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with a list of 52 questions regarding the nature of life on the Other Side, the author went directly to the spirits for answers. Volume I covers the first 23 questions: the nature of the dying process itself; the life review; the new spirtiual body; new knowledge acquired after passing; how language is facilitated; how spirits exist in the framework of time; siritual evolution and levels; reincarnation; the nature of evil; and more.--Publisher.
Download or read book Journey of Souls written by Michael Newton and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When reincarnating, do we have a short spell in a disembodied phase? Hypnosis reveals what goes on.
Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Witch Wife written by Kiki Petrosino and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2019-04-03 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one’s given body. In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history’s ghosts—the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft—and sings them to life.
Download or read book The Shape of Reality to Come written by Ryan Boudinot and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual reality and artificial intelligence are already changing what it means to be an artist, an entrepreneur, and a human. In this appropriately strange and delightful book, Ryan Boudinot charts the course of this cultural shift through essays, musings, and even leadership principles. The world will be different by the time you finish reading it, and so will you. This visionary essay collection will teach you how to engineer a renaissance, it will provide new terms and concepts for thinking about collaboration and narrative in VR, it will show you the shape of reality to come, and how you can affect that shape. Drawing on the rise of grunge and the ascendance of Amazon, Boudinot unpacks and clarifies what's really at stake in our current media revolution and springboards from there into the far future, where perhaps artificial intelligence will take the spore of human life and spread it to the stars.
