Download or read book Demands of the Dead written by Katy Ryan and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first work to combine literary criticism with other forms of death penalty–abolitionist writing, Demands of the Dead demonstrates the active importance of literature and literary criticism to the struggle for greater justice in the United States. Gathering personal essays, scholarly articles, and creative writings on the death penalty in American culture, this striking collection brings human voices and literary perspectives to a subject that is often overburdened by statistics and angry polemics. Contributors include death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars. Highlighting collaborations between writers inside and outside prison, all within the context of the history of state killing laws and foundational concepts that perpetuate a culture of violent death, Demands of the Dead opens with a pamphlet dictated by Willie Francis, a teenager who survived a first execution attempt in Louisiana’s electric chair before he was subsequently killed by the state in 1947. Writers are a conspicuous part of U.S. death-penalty history, composing a vibrant literary record of resistance to state killing. This multigenre collection both recalls and contributes to this tradition through discussions of such writers as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Gertrude Atherton, Ernest Gaines, Sonia Sanchez, Kia Corthron, and Sherman Alexie. A major contribution to literary studies and American prison studies, Demands of the Dead asserts the relevance of storytelling to ethical questions and matters of public policy. Contributors Sherman Alexie John Cyril Barton Steve Champion Kia Corthron Thomas Dutoit Willie Francis H. Bruce Franklin Tom Kerr David Kieran Jennifer Leigh Lieberman Jill McDonough Anthony Ross Katy Ryan Elizabeth Ann Stein Rick Stetter Matthew Stratton Jason Stupp Delbert Tibbs
Download or read book Demands of the Dead written by Katy Ryan and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection by death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars provides literary perspectives on the subject of the death penalty.
Download or read book The Work of the Dead written by Thomas W. Laqueur and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The meaning of our concern for mortal remains—from antiquity through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.
Download or read book Stories I Forgot to Tell You written by Dorothy Gallagher and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delicate and darkly witty reflection on loss, marriage, writing, and life in New York from an acclaimed biographer and memoirist. Dorothy Gallagher’s husband, Ben Sonnenberg, died in 2010. He had suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years and was almost completely paralyzed, but his wonderful, playful mind remained quite undimmed. In the ten sections of Stories I Forgot to Tell You, Gallagher moves freely and intuitively between the present and the past to evoke the life they made together and her life after his death, alone and yet at the same time never without thoughts of him, in a present that is haunted but also comforted by the recollection of their common past. She talks—the whole book is written conversationally, confidingly, unpretentiously—about small things, such as moving into a new apartment and setting it up, growing tomatoes on a new deck, and as she does she recalls her missing husband’s elegant clothes and British affectations, what she knew about him and didn’t know, the devastating toll of his disease and the ways they found to deal with it. She talks about their two dogs and their cat, Bones, and the role that a photograph she never took had in bringing her together with her husband. Her mother, eventually succumbing to dementia, is also here, along with friends, an old typewriter, episodes from a writing life, and her husband’s last days. The stories Gallagher has to tell, as quirky as they are profound, could not be more ordinary, and yet her glancing, wry approach to memory and life gives them an extraordinary resonance that makes the reader feel both the logic and the mystery of a couple’s common existence. Her prose is perfectly pitched and her eye for detail unerring. This slim book about irremediable loss and unending love distills the essence of a lifetime.
Download or read book Here We Are written by Benjamin Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend. I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement. So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend. Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.
Download or read book Summer of the Dead written by Julia Keller and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High summer in Acker's Gap, West Virginia—but no one's enjoying the rugged natural landscape. Not while a killer stalks the small town and its hard-luck inhabitants. County prosecutor Bell Elkins and Sheriff Nick Fogelsong are stymied by a murderer who seems to come and go like smoke on the mountain. At the same time, Bell must deal with the return from prison of her sister, Shirley—who, like Bell, carries the indelible scars of a savage past. In Summer of the Dead, the third Julia Keller mystery chronicling the journey of Bell Elkins and her return to her Appalachian hometown, we also meet Lindy Crabtree—a coal miner's daughter with dark secrets of her own, secrets that threaten to explode into even more violence. Acker's Gap is a place of loveliness and brutality, of isolation and fierce attachments—a place where the dead rub shoulders with the living, and demand their due.
Download or read book Dead Man Walking written by Helen Prejean and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-02 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment and an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty • "Stunning moral clarity.” —The Washington Post Book World • Basis for the award-winning major motion picture starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn "Sister Prejean is an excellent writer, direct and honest and unsentimental. . . . She almost palpably extends a hand to her readers.” —The New York Times Book Review In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier’s death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying. She also came to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute—men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing. Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment. Here Sister Helen confronts both the plight of the condemned and the rage of the bereaved, the fears of a society shattered by violence and the Christian imperative of love. On its original publication in 1993, Dead Man Walking emerged as an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty. Now, some two decades later, this story—which has inspired a film, a stage play, an opera and a musical album—is more gut-wrenching than ever, stirring deep and life-changing reflection in all who encounter it.
Download or read book As Lie the Dead written by Kelly Meding and published by Dell. This book was released on 2010-07-27 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evangeline Stone, a rogue bounty hunter, never asked for a world divided between darkness and light . . . . . . or the power to die and live again in someone else’s borrowed body. After a murder plot meant to take her out leaves an entire race of shapeshifters nearly extinct, Evy is gnawed by guilt. So when one of the few survivors of the slaughter enlists her aid, she feels duty-bound to help—even though protecting a frail, pregnant shifter is the last thing Evy needs, especially with the world going to hell around her. Amid weres, Halfies, gremlins, vamps—and increasingly outgunned humans—a war for supremacy is brewing. With shifters demanding justice, her superiors desperate to control her, and an assassin on her trail, Evy discovers a horrifying conspiracy. And she may be the only person in the world who can stop it—unless, of course, her own side gets her first.
Download or read book Print Is Dead written by Jeff Gomez and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2008 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contends that printed books will be replaced by digital books and that book distributors and readers should actively support the transformation by encouraging digital book creation and the standards required for storage and delivery.
Download or read book Book of the Dead written by Patricia Daniels Cornwell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relocating to Charleston after a particularly grueling case, Dr. Kay Scarpetta opens a private forensic pathology practice but is quickly targeted by local politics and a covert saboteur before a series of violent deaths bring her skills into high view. 1,500,000 first printing. BOMC, Lit Guild, Doubleday, & Mystery Guild Main.
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 April Fool Dead written by Carolyn Hart and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Someone is playing a rather nasty April Fool's prank on mystery bookstore owner Annie Darling. A felonious forger on the idyllic -- if rarely tranquil -- South Carolina island of Broward's Rock has made it appear as if Annie is accusing some of her neighbors of murder. In the wink of a bloodshot eye, the Darling name is mud . . . and then the Broward's Rock body count starts mysteriously increasing. And now it's up to Annie to follow the well-hidden trail of the vicious trickster -- or a secret slayer's next lethal "joke" may very well be on her!
Download or read book Dead A Lot written by Howard Odentz and published by Bell Bridge Books. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last Friday night, the world changed--and not for the better. Zombies are among us. School's out for the foreseeable future, and with Mom and Dad at the lake house, my twin and I are on our own in this mess. Which is fine as long as we can avoid being on the menu. Tripp Light's teenage world is suddenly filled with "poxers"--the infected ones, the ones that have the Necropoxy virus. In an entire world gone mad and bad, Tripp's only hope of survival is to clear a path through zombie land with his sister and head for the hills (aka his aunt's farm) to rendezvous with his parents. Success clearly favors the fittest and the fastest. Survival demands the twins make hard, ruthless decisions, but that all changes when Tripp and his twin hear a distress call via the radio. Prianka Patel, a girl Tripp loves to hate, is trapped and surrounded in a bakery. Soon, the twins have quite a collection of misfits and survivors and miles to go before anyone can sleep safely again. No matter where Tripp looks, everyone everywhere is dead. Like really dead . . . a lot. Howard Odentz is a life-long resident of Western Massachusetts, where he divides his time between writing and tending a small farm. His love of animals, along with the lore of the region, often finds its way into his stories. The supernatural plays a major role in Mr. Odentz's writing. He is endlessly fascinated by the psychological aspects of those who are thrown into otherworldly circumstances. In addition to Dead (A Lot), he has penned two full length musical comedies, including "Piecemeal," which tells the backstory of Victor Frankenstein's Hollywood-created protégé, Igor.
Download or read book Breaking Bread with the Dead written by Alan Jacobs and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Spectator Book of the Year It's fashionable to think of the writers of the past as irredeemably tarnished by prejudice. Aristotle despised women. John Milton, the great champion of free speech, wouldn't have granted it to Catholics. Edith Wharton's imaginative sympathies stopped short of her Jewish characters. But what if it is only through the works of such individuals that we can achieve a necessary perspective on the troubles of the present? Join literary scholar Alan Jacobs for a truly nourishing feast of learning. Discover what Homer can teach us about force, what Machiavelli has to say about reading and what Charlotte Brontë reveals about race. Not all the guests are people you might want to invite into your home, but they all bring something precious to the table. In Breaking Bread with the Dead, an omnivorous reader draws us into close and sympathetic engagement with minds across the ages, from Horace to Donna Haraway.
Download or read book Crazy Love You written by Lisa Unger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enjoying a successful career with his best friend Priss, a destructive friend who helped him escape bullies in childhood, Ian fears for his life when she becomes irrationally angry about Ian's new relationship.
Download or read book Writing the Dead written by Armando Petrucci and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the world's leading paleographers, this book reconstructs the ways Western cultures have used writing—on tombstones, monuments, scrolls, books, posters—to commemorate the dead from the tombs of ancient Egypt to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Download or read book The Dead Are Arising The Life of Malcolm X written by Les Payne and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic, award-winning biography of Malcolm X that draws on hundreds of hours of personal interviews and rewrites much of the known narrative. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to create an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic, National Book Award–winning biography, which interweaves previously unknown details of Malcolm X’s life—from harrowing Depression-era vignettes to a moment-by-moment retelling of the 1965 assassination—into an extraordinary account that contextualizes Malcolm X’s life against the wider currents of American history. Bookended by essays from Tamara Payne, Payne’s daughter and primary researcher, who heroically completed the biography after her father’s death in 2018, The Dead Are Arising affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.
