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 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 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 The Eternal Blueprint written by Bryan Kessler and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2019-06-28 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is God's ultimate intention? Ask most Christians this question, and you'll likely hear something like this: To save us, to glorify Himself, or to make disciples of Jesus in the nations.But what if there is something deeper? What if God has a master plan, a blueprint from which He operates, that has been hidden from many believers for centuries? The apostle Paul unveiled this mysterious plan almost 2,000 years ago in the book of Ephesians, but unfortunately, it has become a mystery once again in the church. If you've ever felt a sense of unrest over the often-shallow, man-centered modern approach to Christianity, you know there must be more. And there is. God has an ultimate intention, an original plan and purpose from which we've strayed . . . and we need to find our way back.As you will see in The Eternal Blueprint, the way back begins with rediscovering God's eternal purpose, which has driven the ages of history and will drive the eternal ages to come. Before creation, before the garden, and before the fall, the triune God had a vision for the world-a vision that includes you. What's the purpose of life? Where do you fit into God's plans for the world? For eternity? When you discover God's original intention, you will find your true purpose and meaning in life. When you understand the magnificent plan that God established before the foundation of the world, you will know the reason why you were created.As The Eternal Blueprint explains, God has issued you the invitation of a lifetime . . . literally. You were created to be the Father's, the Son's, and the Spirit's eternal inheritance. Once you understand this life-transforming truth, which is at the center of God's eternal purpose, you will never be the same.
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 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 312 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 First Life written by David Deamer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The origin of life may have happened an inconceivably long time ago, but scientists like David Deamer are making major advances in understanding how the first microbes began to seethe on our planet, ultimately giving rise to all species alive today. In First Life, Deamer offers a delightful synthesis of research into life's dawn with his own vision for how it came to be."—Carl Zimmer, author of The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution "No living scientist has had a greater impact on our understanding of life’s origins than Dave Deamer. In First Life, his remarkably engaging, constantly lucid, and delightfully personal narrative, Deamer takes us behind the scenes of origins research as no one else could. What a story!”—Robert M. Hazen, Senior Staff Scientist, Carnegie Institution, and author of Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins "David Deamer has written a truly wonderful book. A preeminent scientist in the origin of life field, he has produced a synoptic, wise, and warmly human discussion. Anyone interested in how we came to exist in our universe had best read this book.”—Stuart Kauffman, author of At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity and Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
Download or read book Quiet Dell written by Jayne Anne Phillips and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Night Watch, a spectacularly riveting novel based on a real-life crime by a con man who preyed on widows: “a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction” (Stephen King). In Chicago in 1931, Asta Eicher, a lonely mother of three, is desperate for money after the sudden death of her husband. She begins to receive seductive letters from a chivalrous, elegant man named Harry Powers, who promises to cherish and protect her, ultimately to marry her and to care for her and her children. Weeks later, Asta and her three children are dead. Emily Thornhill, one of the few women journalists in the Chicago press, wants to understand what happened to this beautiful family, particularly to the youngest child, Annabel, an enchanting girl with a precocious imagination and sense of magic. Determined, Emily travels to West Virginia to cover the murder trial and to investigate the story herself, accompanied by a charming and unconventional photographer equally drawn to the case. These heroic characters, driven by secrets of their own, will stop at nothing to ensure Powers is convicted. A tragedy, a love story, and a tour de force of obsession, Jayne Anne Phillips’s Quiet Dell “hauntingly imagines the victims’ hopes, dreams, and terror” (O, The Oprah Magazine). It is a mesmerizing and deeply moving novel from one of America’s most celebrated writers.
Download or read book Four New Messages written by Joshua Cohen and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quartet of audacious fictions that capture the pathos and absurdity of life in the age of the internet *A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice* * One of Flavorwire's "50 Books That Define the Past Five Years in Literature" A spectacularly talented young writer has returned from the present with Four New Messages, urgent and visionary dispatches that seek to save art, sex, and even alienation from corporatism and technology run rampant. In "Emission," a hapless drug dealer in Princeton is humiliated when a cruel co-ed exposes him exposing himself on a blog gone viral. "McDonald's" tells of a frustrated pharmaceutical copywriter whose imaginative flights fail to bring solace because of a certain word he cannot put down on paper. In "The College Borough" a father visiting NYU with his daughter remembers a former writing teacher, a New Yorker exiled to the Midwest who refuses to read his students' stories, asking them instead to build a replica of the Flatiron Building. "Sent" begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who've starred in all the internet porn he's ever enjoyed. Highbrow and low-down, these four intensely felt stories explain what happens when the virtual begins to colonize the real -- they harness the torrential power and verbal dexterity that have established Cohen as one of America's most brilliant younger writers.
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 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 Handbook to the Afterlife written by Pamela Rae Heath and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two seasoned experts with decades of experience working with channeled material describe the various stages of life after death Just as life itself has different stages of growth and development, so does the afterlife. In this useful handbook, authors Pamela Rae and Jon Klimo demonstrate how dying and rebirth are, much like life, continuous processes. Beginning with the moment of death itself, progressing through different transitional stages, and ending with the return of spirits to the physical plane, they define the purposes and pitfalls of each stage. They look at the kinds of adjustment problems that occur in each phase, and how spirits can be helped to move forward. Questions of pain and emotional state at the time of death, karma, and reincarnation are sensitively addressed. The book includes practical techniques for opening communication with those who have passed on to the other side. While of interest to anyone seeking a general overview of the subject, Handbook to the Afterlife is particularly useful for those dealing with spirits who have not moved on, such as ghosts.
Download or read book Dad Was a Carpenter written by Kenny Kemp and published by . This book was released on 1999-05 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the day before Christmas, Kenny Kemp raised his father's heavy garage door and began going through 40 years of accumulated materials and belongings. It was four months after his father's death from Lou Gehrig's disease, a painful, troubled time for which there seemed to be no answers.As Kenny sorted and cleaned, a greater understanding of his loss slowly came to him. Remembrances of his father's love, strength, and quiet courage emerged from carefully preserved mayonnaise jars full of straightened nails; overstuffed, weathered work-bench drawers; time-tested tools; and a venerable 30-year-old piece of plywood. Precious relics, each telling in silent eloquence stories about the greatness of a man who had the gift to see something new and useful inside something old and worn.Beautifully written, these poignant stories provide a unique perspective on life's fleeting moments and disregarded details. Each chapter begins with one of his father's truisms, which taken together provide the blueprints for a meaningful life. Dad Was a Carpenter is a remarkable book that asks us to think about all of our relationships in a different way. Fathers and children of all ages everywhere will cherish this gift for years to come.
Download or read book Misconception written by Ryan Boudinot and published by Grove Press, Black Cat. This book was released on 2009 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cedar Rivers has come to upstate New York, to help Kat Daniels, by vetting her memoir, an account of the summer they were sweethearts.
Download or read book Animals and the Afterlife written by Kim Sheridan and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-04-25 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kim Sheridan grew up with animals as her constant companions. Each time she faced the death of a beloved animal, along with the pain came the same questions, to which she could find no answers. Then, mysterious things began to happen that she couldn't explain, which led her on an incredible journey to uncover the truth. Along with her own extraordinary experiences, she compiled heartwarming and meaningful true stories of everyday people around the world, and discovered compelling evidence that forever erased her own doubts about an afterlife for animals. This book provides enormous comfort and reassurance to anyone who has ever cherished an animal, and food for thought for anyone who has ever questioned the place of these beloved creatures in the larger scheme of things, both here on Earth and beyond.
