Download or read book Eternal Night at the Nature Museum written by Tyler Barton and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The characters in Eternal Night at the Nature Museum take refuge in strange, repurposed spaces. A middle-aged addict emcees at demolition derby, which transforms into a hostel—then a cult. An elderly folk-artist builds mailbox reproductions of her dream homes. A church congregates in an abandoned Hardee's. Octogenarians escape their nursing home. Unsupervised children sell knives to the neighborhood. In twenty vivid, rowdy, buoyant stories, Tyler Barton assembles a collection of places to crash, if only for the night.
Download or read book 100 Things We ve Lost to the Internet written by Pamela Paul and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed editor of The New York Times Book Review takes readers on a nostalgic tour of the pre-Internet age, offering powerful insights into both the profound and the seemingly trivial things we've lost. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS • “A deft blend of nostalgia, humor and devastating insights.”—People Remember all those ingrained habits, cherished ideas, beloved objects, and stubborn preferences from the pre-Internet age? They’re gone. To some of those things we can say good riddance. But many we miss terribly. Whatever our emotional response to this departed realm, we are faced with the fact that nearly every aspect of modern life now takes place in filtered, isolated corners of cyberspace—a space that has slowly subsumed our physical habitats, replacing or transforming the office, our local library, a favorite bar, the movie theater, and the coffee shop where people met one another’s gaze from across the room. Even as we’ve gained the ability to gather without leaving our house, many of the fundamentally human experiences that have sustained us have disappeared. In one hundred glimpses of that pre-Internet world, Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, presents a captivating record, enlivened with illustrations, of the world before cyberspace—from voicemails to blind dates to punctuation to civility. There are the small losses: postcards, the blessings of an adolescence largely spared of documentation, the Rolodex, and the genuine surprises at high school reunions. But there are larger repercussions, too: weaker memories, the inability to entertain oneself, and the utter demolition of privacy. 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet is at once an evocative swan song for a disappearing era and, perhaps, a guide to reclaiming just a little bit more of the world IRL.
Download or read book The Horror in the Museum written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-06-03 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This horror story has a man unable to distinguish between what is real and not real in a museum and finding out in a very horrific way. Stephen King said "H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."
Download or read book The Dead Fish Museum written by Charles D'Ambrosio and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-04-18 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In the fall, I went for walks and brought home bones. The best bones weren’t on trails—deer and moose don’t die conveniently—and soon I was wandering so far into the woods that I needed a map and compass to find my way home. When winter came and snow blew into the mountains, burying the bones, I continued to spend my days and often my nights in the woods. I vaguely understood that I was doing this because I could no longer think; I found relief in walking up hills. When the night temperatures dropped below zero, I felt visited by necessity, a baseline purpose, and I walked for miles, my only objective to remain upright, keep moving, preserve warmth. When I was lost, I told myself stories . . .” So Charles D’Ambrosio recounted his life in Philipsburg, Montana, the genesis of the brilliant stories collected here, six of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Each of these eight burnished, terrifying, masterfully crafted stories is set against a landscape that is both deeply American and unmistakably universal. A son confronts his father’s madness and his own hunger for connection on a misguided hike in the Pacific Northwest. A screenwriter fights for his sanity in the bleak corridors of a Manhattan psych ward while lusting after a ballerina who sets herself ablaze. A Thanksgiving hunting trip in Northern Michigan becomes the scene of a haunting reckoning with marital infidelity and desperation. And in the magnificent title story, carpenters building sets for a porn movie drift dreamily beneath a surface of sexual tension toward a racial violence they will never fully comprehend. Taking place in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations, the backloads of Iowa and the streets of Seattle, this collection of stories, as muscular and challenging as the best novels, is about people who have been orphaned, who have lost connection, and who have exhausted the ability to generate meaning in their lives. Yet in the midst of lacerating difficulty, the sensibility at work in these fictions boldly insists on the enduring power of love. D’Ambrosio conjures a world that is fearfully inhospitable, darkly humorous, and touched by glory; here are characters, tested by every kind of failure, who struggle to remain human, whose lives have been sharpened rather than numbed by adversity, whose apprehension of truth and beauty has been deepened rather than defeated by their troubles. Many writers speak of the abyss. Charles D’Ambrosio writes as if he is inside of it, gazing upward, and the gaze itself is redemptive, a great yearning ache, poignant and wondrous, equal parts grit and grace. A must read for everyone who cares about literary writing, The Dead Fish Museum belongs on the same shelf with the best American short fiction.
Download or read book All the Light We Cannot See written by Anthony Doerr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).
Download or read book Natural History written by Carlos Fonseca and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator’s fascination with the secrets of the animal kingdom—with camouflage and subterfuge—and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the designer’s death, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues about the true history of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles. As he follows this trail, the curator discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion. An aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed. Natural History is a portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, tragedy and farce. An urgent and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.
Download or read book Life on Mars written by Tracy K. Smith and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize * Poet Laureate of the United States * * A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * * A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose "lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What Would your life say if it could talk? —from "No Fly Zone" With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.
Download or read book African Exodus written by Chris Stringer and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Choice Outstanding Academic Book A Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Book A New York Times Notable Book Once in a generation a book such as African Exodus emerges to transform the way we see ourselves. This landmark book, which argues that our genes betray the secret of a single racial stock shared by all of modern humanity, has set off one of the most bitter debates in contemporary science. "We emerged out of Africa," the authors cont, "less than 100,000 years ago and replaced all other human populations." Employing persuasive fossil and genetic evidence (the proof is in the blood, not just the bones) and an exceptionally readable style, Stringer and McKie challenge long-held beliefs that suggest we evolved separately as different races with genetic roots reaching back two million years.
Download or read book Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrors written by Yayoi Kusama and published by Delmonico Books. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The 1000 Year Old Boy written by Ross Welford and published by Schwartz & Wade. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A heartstopping, poignant, epic adventure story about a boy destined to live forever, who only wants to grow up. Without death, life is just existence. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live forever? Well, Alfie Monk can tell you. He may seem like an ordinary eleven-year-old boy, but he's actually more than a thousand years old--and remembers the last Viking invasion of England, not to mention the French Revolution and both World Wars. Way back in the tenth century, he and his mother were given the alchemical secret to eternal life. But when everything Alfie knows is destroyed in a fire, and the modern world intrudes, he must embark on a mission--along with friends Aidan and Roxy--to find a way to reverse the process and grow up like a regular boy. This astonishing new novel from the author of Time Traveling with a Hamster, told in alternating perspectives by Alfie and Aidan, is a tour de force--a sweeping epic that takes you on an unforgettable, breathtaking adventure and asks big questions about the meaning of life.
Download or read book Wonder The Natural History Museum Poetry Book written by Ana Sampson and published by Macmillan Children's Books. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Anthology is a beautiful gift hardback collection of poetry with poems inspired by The Natural History Museum. It covers everything from the depths of space to the very centre of the earth - there are poems about the solar system, planet earth, oceans and rivers, birds, dinosaurs, fossils, wildlife, flowers, fungi, insects, explorers and palaeontologists. Each section includes an introduction an some footnotes about particularly interesting species. The museum has a collection of over eighty million objects and behind the scenes of its twenty-eight galleries crowd kilometres of preserved specimens, libraries of rare books and artworks, wonders gathered on some of the most famous voyages in history, rooms packed with pressed plants, warehouses teeming with stuffed animals and freezers full of DNA. As well as a museum, it is a state-of-the-art centre for discovery with over three hundred resident scientists and over ten thousand visiting researchers each year, investigating everything from dinosaurs to life on other planets. The collection is made up of brand new and classic poems and is illustrated with botanical drawings and engravings from the museum’s collections. This fantastic collection speaks of the wonder of nature and shows us why we need to look after our incredible planet.
Download or read book Seth Speaks A Seth Book written by Jane Roberts and published by Amber-Allen Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most powerful of the Seth Books, this essential guide to conscious living clearly and powerfully articulates the furthest reaches of human potential, and the concept that we all create our own reality according to our individual beliefs. Having withstood the test of time, it is still considered one of the most dynamic and brilliant maps of inner reality available today. “The Seth books present an alternate map of reality with a new diagram of the psyche . . . useful to all explorers of consciousness.” — Deepak Chopra “Seth was one of my first metaphysical teachers. He remains a constant source of knowledge and inspiration in my life.” — Marianne Williamson “I would like to see the Seth books as required reading for anyone on their spiritual pathway. The amazing in-depth information in the Seth books is as relevant today as it was in the early ’70s when Jane Roberts first channeled this material.” — Louise Hay
Download or read book Best Microfiction 2021 written by Meg Pokrass and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Short Stories. Edited by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke with guest editor Amber Sparks. THE BEST MICROFICTION anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass; and Flannery O'Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke; the anthology features Amber Sparks serving as final judge; and one hundred and five of the world's best very short short stories.
Download or read book The Quiet Part Loud written by Tyler Barton and published by . This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest, The Quiet Part Loud is a collection of eleven flash fictions diving into the lives of restless, often lawless youths on the rural East Coast during late-aughts. Whether having lost a home or feeling like home is slowly disappearing, these characters act out in ways familiar and strange. Runaways fight security guards, houses explode, theft is flagrant, sex abounds, mannequin arms bob from Buick windows, and all forms of communication get very loud before fully breaking down.
Download or read book The Horse written by Timothy C. Winegard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author of The Mosquito, the incredible story of how the horse shaped human history Timothy C. Winegard’s The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands. Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back. For millennia it was the primary mode of transportation, an essential farming machine, a steadfast companion, and a formidable weapon of war. Possessing a unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse dominated every facet of human life and shaped the very scope of human ambition. And we still live among its galloping shadows. Horses revolutionized the way we hunted, traded, traveled, farmed, fought, worshipped, and interacted. They fundamentally reshaped the human genome and the world’s linguistic map. They determined international borders, molded cultures, fueled economies, and built global superpowers. They decided the destinies of conquerors and empires. And they were vectors of lethal disease and contributed to lifesaving medical innovations. Horses even inspired architecture, invention, furniture, and fashion. From the thundering cavalry charges of Alexander the Great to the streets of New York during the Great Manure Crisis of 1894 and beyond, horses have shaped both the grand arc of history and our everyday lives. Driven by fascinating revelations and fast-paced storytelling, The Horse is a riveting narrative of this noble animal’s unrivaled and enduring reign across human history. To know the horse is to understand the world.
Download or read book The Still Life in the Fiction of A S Byatt written by Elizabeth Hicks and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which English writer A. S. Byatt’s visual still lifes (descriptions of real or imagined artworks) and what are termed “verbal still lifes” (scenes such as laid tables, rooms and market stalls) are informed by her veneration of both realism and writing. It examines Byatt’s adoption of the Barthesian concept of textual pleasure, showing how her ekphrastic descriptions involve consumption and take time to unfold for the reader, thereby highlighting the limitations of painting. It also investigates the ways in which Byatt’s still lifes demonstrate her debts to English modernist author Virginia Woolf, French writer Marcel Proust, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of nineteenth-century Britain. A number of Byatt’s verbal still lifes are read as semiotic markers of her characters, particularly with regard to economic status and class. Further, her descriptions uniting food and sexuality are perceived as part of her overall representation of pleasure. Finally, Byatt’s employment of vanitas iconography in many of her portrayals of death is discussed showing how her recurring motif of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” teases out the still life’s inherent tension between living passion and “cold” artwork.
Download or read book Pen and Pencil written by and published by . This book was released on 1853 with total page 844 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
