Download or read book Castle Faggot written by Derek Mccormack and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark satire about an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney could imagine: a playland for gay men called Faggotland. Castle Faggot is Derek McCormack's darkest and most delicious book yet, a satire of sugary cereals and Saturday morning cartoons set in an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney dreamed up. At the heart of the park is Faggotland, a playland for gay men, and Castle Faggot, the darkest dark ride in the world. Home to a cartoon Dracula called Count Choc-o-log, the castle is decorated with the corpses of gays—some were killed, some killed themselves, all ended up as décor. The book includes a map of Faggotland, a photobook of the castle, the instructions for a castle-shaped dollhouse, and the novelization of a TV puppet show about Count Choc-o-log and his friends—reminiscent of the classic stop-motion special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but even gayer and more grotesque. As scatological as Sade but with a Hanna-Barbera vibe, Castle Faggot transmutes McCormack's love of the lurid and the childlike, of funhouses and sickhouses, into something furiously funny: as Edmund White says, “the mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe.”

Download or read book The Show That Smells Little House on the Bowery written by Derek McCormack and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Derek McCormack's most compelling work yet is his second selection in Dennis Cooper's groundbreaking Little House on the Bowery fiction series. “[Derek McCormack is] a whiz at fashion and other often-freaky stuff that the popular imagination latches onto . . .” —Toronto Star McCormack begins his quirky Tod Browning–inspired tale with a disclaimer: “This book is a work of fiction. It is a parody. It is a phantasmagoria . . . Elsa Schiaparelli was never a vampire. Shocking! by Schiaparelli never contained blood.” The work of Schiaparelli, a 1930s Italian fashion designer, was influenced by Surrealist Salvador Dalí, and the same spirit permeates The Show that Smells, which is set in a maze of mirrors. Schiaparelli dresses introduced playfulness and a sense of “anything goes” to the fashion industry. She branched into perfume and became designer to a number of film stars. In addition to Schiaparelli, this tale is about Jimmie Rodgers, a country music–singer dying of tuberculosis, and his wife, Carrie, who tries to save him by selling her soul to a devil who designs haute couture clothing. Starring a host of Hollywood’s brightest stars, including Schiaparelli’s real-life rival Coco Chanel, character actor Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, and the Carter Family (as red state vampire hunters, no less), The Show that Smells is a thrilling tale of hillbillies, high fashion, and horror. An invitation to adults to make-believe, it is sure to please fashion connoisseurs, fans of classic and cult cinema, and freaks everywhere. In McCormack’s world, the power of death can be bottled and sold, and it certainly smells.

Download or read book Autonomous written by Annalee Newitz and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet."—Neal Stephenson "Something genuinely and thrillingly new in the naturalistic, subjective, paradoxically humanistic but non-anthropomorphic depiction of bot-POV—and all in the service of vivid, solid storytelling."—William Gibson When anything can be owned, how can we be free Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane. Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack’s drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand. And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?

Download or read book Street Legal written by Rafi Zabor and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A righteously satisfying read of a thriller, metaphysical novel, and screwball comedy, from the author of The Bear Comes Home. With the twists, turns, and smash-ups of a thriller, the sudden depths of a metaphysical novel, and the fizz of a screwball comedy, Street Legal is high entertainment and a righteously satisfying read, from the author of the greatest novel ever written about a saxophone-playing bear. Street Legal features an old-time skunk dealer, sniffing the new breezes, wants to open an Old-Time Grass Business Theme Park with rides and a disco. His foot soldier, a strapping, confused kid who might be on the spectrum. A frustrated cop who isn't allowed to collar anyone important because the town needs the business who consoles himself by trying to make a last-chance bust and grab some of the action. A slick, unsettling stranger buying up properties under cover for a major tobacco company but really out for himself. A Tibetan Buddhist lama from New Jersey who sounds like Tony Soprano when discoursing on the dharma who finds his disciple, a wry, reticently sexy earth mother wracked with concern for the wayward young man who is her son.

Download or read book An Arab Melancholia written by Abdellah Taïa and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... —An Arab Melancholia Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.

Download or read book My Dead Book written by Nate Lippens and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-10-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rumination on survival, queer aging, and estrangement that was a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. My dead friends are back. I lie in bed at night and see them. Haunted by insomnia and the past as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, the narrator of My Dead Book flips through scenes of his youth and memories of dozens of friends who are no longer with him. Living alone and working odd jobs in Wisconsin, he ruminates on survival, queer aging, his years as a teenage throwaway, and estrangement, wondering whether he has outlived his place in the world. First published in 2021, Lippens’s debut novel was hailed as “a brutally acerbic novel of queer pessimism” (Donna Marcus, AnOther Magazine). As Lindsay Lerman observed in Southwest Review, “My Dead Book is not transgressive because it follows a gay man as he struggles to survive on the fringes of multiple worlds. … It is continually transgressing. It’s a living book (a living dead book), moving around in time, making tangential connections.” This new edition includes an introduction by LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer, Eileen Myles.

Download or read book Redeployment written by Phil Klay and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction "Redeployment is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. It’s the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.” —Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book Review Selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post Book World, Amazon, and more Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn't commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains—of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier's daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier's homecoming. Redeployment has become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.

Download or read book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil written by John Berendt and published by Random House. This book was released on 1994-01-13 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic of true crime, set in a most beguiling Southern city—now in a 30th anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author “Elegant and wicked . . . might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.”—The New York Times Book Review Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. In this sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative, John Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case. It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman’s Card Club; the turbulent young gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the “soul of pampered self-absorption”; the uproariously funny drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young people dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience.

Download or read book The Spider King s Daughter written by Chibundu Onuzo and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of a Betty Trask Award Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize Longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize The Spider King's Daughter is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet set against the backdrop of a changing Lagos, a city torn between tradition and modernity, corruption and truth, love and family loyalty. Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards and ferried everywhere in a huge black jeep. But being her father's favourite comes with uncomfortable duties, and she is often lonely behind the high walls of her house. A world away from Abike's mansion, in the city's slums, lives a seventeen-year-old hawker struggling to make sense of the world. His family lost everything after his father's death and now he runs after cars on the roadside selling ice cream to support his mother and sister. When Abike buys ice cream from the hawker one day, they strike up an unlikely and tentative romance, defying the prejudices of Nigerian society. But as they grow closer, revelations from the past threaten their relationship and both Abike and the hawker must decide where their loyalties lie.

Download or read book The Letters of Mina Harker written by Dodie Bellamy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bellamy's debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s. Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm "only psychic." ... The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso ... --Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s--a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy's narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.

Download or read book The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles written by Ella S. Armitage and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lark Rise to Candleford written by Flora Thompson and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 2009 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flora Thompson (1876 to 947) wrote what may be the quintessential distillation of English country life at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1945, the three books Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943) were published together in one elegant volume, and this new omnibus Nonpareil edition, complete with charming wood engravings, should be a cause for real rejoicing. The books have inspired two plays that ran in London, and the trilogy has been adapted into a multi-part, long-running television drama series by the BBC. The first series of ten episodes is scheduled to be syndicated on various PBS stations throughout the United States. A second series of twelve episodes, currently being broadcast in the United Kingdom, will follow in the United States shortly after.

Download or read book Bee Reaved written by Dodie Bellamy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment. So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart. --Dodie Bellamy, "Hoarding as Ecriture" This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When The Sick Rule The World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.

Download or read book The Riders written by Tim Winton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-08-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of marriage and the rich relationship that can exist between father and daughter, The Riders is a gorgeously wrought novel from the award-winning author Tim Winton. After traveling through Europe for two years, Scully and his wife Jennifer wind up in Ireland, and on a mystical whim of Jennifer's, buy an old farmhouse which stands in the shadow of a castle. While Scully spends weeks alone renovating the old house, Jennifer returns to Australia to liquidate their assets. When Scully arrives at Shannon Airport to pick up Jennifer and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, it is Billie who emerges—alone. There is no note, no explanation, not so much as a word from Jennifer, and the shock has left Billie speechless. In that instant, Scully's life falls to pieces. The Riders is a superbly written and a darkly haunting story of a lovesick man in a vain search for a vanished woman. It is a powerfully accurate account of marriage today, of the demons that trouble relationships, of resurrection found in the will to keep going, in the refusal to hold on, to stand still. The Riders is also a moving story about the relationship between a loving man and his tough, bright daughter.

Download or read book Dirty White Boys written by Stephen Hunter and published by Dell. This book was released on 2011-01-05 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary--three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them.... Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys. With a lion in his soul, he roars--for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose.... Odell is Lamar's cousin, a hulking manchild with unfeeling eyes. He lives for daddy Lamar. Surely he will die for him.... Richard's survival hangs on a sketch: a crude drawing of a lion and a half-naked woman. For this Lamar has let Richard live... Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of terror across the Southwest, and pushed one good cop into a crisis of honor and conscience. Trooper Bud Pewtie should have died once at Lamar's hands. Now they're about to meet again. And this time, only one of them will walk away....

Download or read book Beyond Face Value written by Rajée Rajindra Narinesingh and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-11 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You can never see yourself as the world does. No matter how many mirrors you look into, you won't see what everyone else does. Beyond Face Value is not just a lesson Rajée had to learn, but it is an ethos she now lives her life by. Have you ever believed you were destined for a path that was totally different from where you started, or felt that life was directing you against the normal, the expected and the accepted, and that every challenge you faced was due to a higher power guiding you to a greater place? Rajée's story is both inspiring and devastating in equal measure. An outcast literally from birth, Rajée has had to fight racism, prejudice and ignorance her entire life. Through a series of events that would have broken even the strongest man, Rajée emerged as a butterfly does from a cocoon into a beautiful spirit, yet the cruelty of life has deprived her of the traditional facial value. Her story to the global stage after word of her horrendous and painful botched silicone injections came to light in Florida. Quickly, the damage inflicted on her by Oneal Morris (a.k.a. "Duchess") had attracted the media, both nationally and internationally, within a matter of weeks. At the age of 44 she finally had a platform to speak out about injustice and cruelty. She appeared with CNN's Anderson Cooper and Dr. Phil, as well as on German, Japanese, Spanish, and British television. This attention and the positive reaction to her plight, gave her the extra strength to tell the whole story that led her to, essentially, a back alley for facial injections of "fix-a-flat." Rajée's story is about one transgendered woman's incredible journey to truly understanding beauty, but it has touched millions, not just through understanding the plight of a transgendered woman, but because everyone has experienced, at some point in their lives, the disapproval of their parents, bullying at the hands of ignorance, discrimination, and events that change lives for the good, even though the idea they could, or that a future is even possible, in incredulous. Inner beauty is a lovely cliché, but after a life of tragedy, through spiritual enlightenment and prayer, Rajée has beaten the odds and reached a point in her life where she knows happiness and acceptance is truly Beyond Face Value.

Download or read book A Danish Jew in West Africa written by Winsnes, Selena Axelrod and published by Sub-Saharan Publishers. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wulff's life history is of considerable interest in itself. In her biographical essay (Part I) Selena Axelrod Winsnes portrays him as a 'marginal man': being a Jew in Denmark at the beginning of the 19th century was to some extent an uphill struggle for those who sought public recognition, and Wulff did not escape discrimination in his administrative career at Christiansborg either, although special circumstances allowed him to hold important positions, and yet, only for the short term. Paradoxically, on his arrival to the Gold Coast Wulff - as a Jew - was placed in a middle position in the racial hierarchy dominating the mind-set of his superiors in Copenhagen ñ between Africans and Europeans. In many respects he shared the fate of Euro-Africans, straddling two worlds and being 'sealed off' from the top echelons of the European establishments on the Coast. This book comprises two parts. The first is a biographical presentation of Wulff Joseph Wulff , a Danish Jew. It is an essay concerning the last six years of his life, spent on the Gold Coast of West Africa, based on letters he wrote to his family in Denmark. Those letters were published in 1917 as Da Guinea var Dansk [When Guinea was Danish], by Carl Behrens, a member of his family in Denmark. The second part of the book is an edited translation of the letters from Danish into English.