Download or read book Fat Time and Other Stories written by Jeffery Renard Allen and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fat Time and Other Stories , Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with them are characters of Allen's two teenagers in an unnamed big city who stumble through a down-low relationship; an African preacher visits a Christian religious retreat to speak on the evils of fornication in an Italian villa imported to America by Abraham Lincoln; and an albino revolutionary who struggles with leading his people into conflict. The two strands in this brilliant story collection speculative history and tender, painful depictions of Black life in urban America are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once. Here the natural and supernatural, the sacred and the profane, the real and fantastical, destruction and creation are held in delicate and tense balance. Allen's work has been said to extend the tradition of Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Henry Roth, and Ishmael Reed, but he is blazing his own path through American literature. Fat Time and Other Stories brilliantly shows the range and depth of his imagination.

Download or read book The Fat Artist and Other Stories written by Benjamin Hale and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from”​ (Los Angeles Times), the stories in The Fat Artist are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the voices in Benjamin Hale’s The Fat Artist and Other Stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a US congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives that form the vast tapestry of American life. “A steadily growing…talent” (Kirkus Reviews), Hale’s prize-winning fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling, earning accolades from writers such as novelist Jonathan Ames, who compared discovering his work to watching Mickey Mantle play ball for the first time; Washington Post critic Ron Charles, who declared him “fully evolved as a writer,” and bestselling author Jodi Picoult, who simply called him “brilliant.” Pairing absurdity with philosophical musings on the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation, “the audacious imagination evident in Hale’s acclaimed debut, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, shines again in this…provocative collection that takes a unique view of the human condition” (Booklist).

Download or read book Song of the Shank written by Jeffery Renard Allen and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom. Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother. As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.

Download or read book Fat City written by Leonard Gardner and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring -- the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger - their brief bout sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Ernie into the company of men and luring Tully back into training. In a dispassionate and composed voice, Gardner narrates their swings of fortune, and the plodding optimism of their manager Ruben Luna, as he watches the most promising boys one by one succumb to some undefined weakness; still, "There was always someone who wanted to fight."

Download or read book Orange World and Other Stories written by Karen Russell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In“Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.

Download or read book The Luminous Novel written by Mario Levrero and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book NOFX written by NOFX and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The candid, hilarious, shocking, occasionally horrifying, and surprisingly moving New York Times bestselling autobiography of punk legends NOFX, their own story in their own words NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories is the first tell-all autobiography from one of the world's most influential and controversial punk bands. Alongside hilarious anecdotes about pranks and drunkenness and teenage failures-featuring the trademark NOFX sense of humor-the book also shares the ugliness and horror the band members experienced on the road to becoming DIY millionaires. Fans and non-fans alike will be shocked by stories of murder, suicide, addiction, counterfeiting, riots, bondage, terminal illness, the Yakuza, and pee...lots and lots of pee. Told by each of the band members (and two former members), NOFX looks back at more than thirty years of comedy, tragedy, and completely inexplicable success.

Download or read book Body Stories written by Jill Andrews and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body stories capture a nuanced, interconnected, interactive, and complex telling of our understanding, perception, and experience of and through our bodies. Plenty has been published on body image but image suggests a static fixed body, unmitigated through our social interactions and varying times and spaces. This book is not a "how-to" guide for fat confidence. It's not a compendium of fat suffering. It's simply a collection of narratives about what it's like to survive in a weight-hating world. It resists the ways that marginalized bodies are being written and researched and put into other people's ideas about our existence. The stories in this book are celebratory and are painful. They look at intersections of race and queerness; they destabilize womanhood by presenting a range of possible female embodiments. They explore issues of disability and madness. The full range of possibilities that are collected here give a picture of what it means to live in a society with strong and powerful messages about size, about normalcy, about what a moral and healthy life and body look like. This book is a snapshot of its place and time, but these stories remind us that we're here to stay. The body stories will change but we will keep owning our own narratives. While story, especially written by women, is often seen as outside the academic canon, these stories, these creative offerings, are theory, are research, and are activism. They are nothing less than the blueprint for liberation. Writing about fat and about bodies outside of medicalized narratives, without ignoring the impact of race, sexuality, class, ability, gender, fashion, appearance, and beyond, is radical and rigorous. It is impossible to think about the future without wishing for liberation. Liberation can come in many forms. It can mean an awareness, the ability to confront. The stories in this book display the ways that liberation isn't a finish line or a thing we can complete—rather it is a million small actio

Download or read book The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore written by Benjamin Hale and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. His untimely outbursts ultimately cost Lydia her job, and send the unlikely pair on the road in what proves to be one of the most unforgettable journeys -- and most affecting love stories -- in recent literature. Like its protagonist, this novel is big, loud, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and amazingly accomplished. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human -- to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.

Download or read book Rails Under My Back written by Jeffery Renard Allen and published by Harvest Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling family saga that brilliantly reflects the reality of the African-American experience in the United States Hatch and Jesus Jones are cousins on their fathers' side and on their mothers' side, and you can't have a family much more bound than that. And family is the most important entity for these young men, even when family seems to be defined by abandonment. Rails Under My Back traces these two men from one form of bondage or freedom to another, from one job to another, as they face down danger and try to come to terms with their family's past. This ambitious novel, which has been hailed by critics nationwide as a rare achievement on the level of fiction by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, is the communal expression of a century of African-American life in America, with its imagery of exodus and exile, departure and destiny. It wields extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power, and announces the triumphant debut of a most powerful and utterly original voice.

Download or read book The Pacific and Other Stories written by Mark Helprin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-06-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling collection of short stories by Mark Helprin, bestselling author of Winter's Tale, which is now a major motion picture starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, William Hurt, and Jennifer Connelly The Pacific and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen stories that display the remarkable scope, incomparable wit, and deft prose that have come to be Mark Helprin's signature. A British paratrooper jumps into occupied territory; the 1958 New York Yankees gain an unexpected teammate in a puny, teenaged Hasidic Jew; a September 11th widow receives an astonishing gift from the contractor working on her new apartment—these and other stories exhibit the constantly changing variety of the ocean itself, the peaks and troughs of life. Lighthearted, glittering fables are met with starker tales that sound the depths of sacrifice and duty. The Pacific and Other Stories is a resplendent, powerful collection of lasting substance and emotional import.

Download or read book The Hidden Girl and Other Stories written by Ken Liu and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes stories featured in Pantheon—now an animated series on AMC+ “I know this is going to sound hyperbolic, but when I’m reading Ken Liu’s stories, I feel like I’m reading a once-in-a-generation talent. I’m in awe.” —Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author “Captivating.” —BuzzFeed “Extraordinary.” —The Washington Post “Brilliant.” —The Chicago Tribune With the release of The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu’s short fiction has resonated with a generation of readers. From stories about time-traveling assassins, to Black Mirror-esque tales of cryptocurrency and internet trolling, to heartbreaking narratives of parent-child relationships, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is a far-reaching work that explores topical themes from the present and a visionary look at humanity’s future. This collection includes a selection of Liu’s speculative fiction stories over the past five years—seventeen of his best—plus a new novelette. In addition, it also features an excerpt from The Veiled Throne, the third book in Liu’s epic fantasy series The Dandelion Dynasty. Stories include: Ghost Days; Maxwell's Demon; The Reborn; Thoughts and Prayers; Byzantine Empathy; The Gods Will Not Be Chained; Staying Behind; Real Artists; The Gods Will Not Be Slain; Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer; The Gods Have Not Died in Vain; Memories of My Mother; Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts; Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard; A Chase Beyond the Storms (an excerpt from The Veiled Throne, Book 3 of the Dandelion Dynasty); The Hidden Girl; Seven Birthdays; The Message; Cutting

Download or read book Empty Words written by Mario Levrero and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A writer begins keeping a notebook of handwriting exercises hoping that, if he is able to improve his penmanship, he himself will also improve. What begins as a mere physical exercise is filled involuntarily with humorous reflections and tender anecdotes about living, writing, and the sense—or nonsense—of existence.

Download or read book Heavy written by Kiese Laymon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times* *Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, BuzzFeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics* In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir—winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize—genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon “provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot” (Entertainment Weekly). In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. Heavy is a “gorgeous, gutting…generous” (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. “A book for people who appreciated Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family through years of haunting implosions and long reverberations. “You won’t be able to put [this memoir] down…It is packed with reminders of how black dreams get skewed and deferred, yet are also pregnant with the possibility that a kind of redemption may lie in intimate grappling with black realities” (The Atlantic).

Download or read book Low Fat Love written by Patricia Leavy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Low-Fat Love unfolds over three seasons as Prilly Greene and Janice Goldwyn, adversarial editors at a New York press, experience personal change relating to the men, and absence of women, in their lives. Ultimately, each woman is pushed to confront her own image of herself, exploring her insecurities, the stagnation in her life, and her reasons for having settled for low-fat love. Along with Prilly and Janice, the cast of characters’ stories are interwoven throughout the book. Low-Fat Love is underscored with a commentary about female identity-building and self-acceptance and how, too often, women become trapped in limited visions of themselves. Women’s media is used as a signpost throughout the book in order to make visible the context in which women come to think of themselves as well as the men and women in their lives. In this respect, Low-Fat Love offers a critical commentary about popular culture and the social construction of femininity. Grounded in a decade of interview research with young women and written in a fun, chick-lit voice, the novel can be read for pleasure or used as supplemental reading in a variety of courses in women’s/gender studies, sociology, psychology, popular culture, media studies, communication, qualitative research, and arts-based research. “Sometimes, when I read an especially wonderful book I say to myself, “I wish I had written that!” And that is how I feel about Low-Fat Love. To write a page-turner of a book that teaches about contemporary gender relationships is a major feat. Patricia Leavy has done that with Low-Fat Love. Brilliant!” Laurel Richardson, Ph.D., The Ohio State University “Patricia Leavy writes with passion, verve and skill. I will use this in my relational communication and women’s studies classes because it is beautiful, relatable, and offers smart critique of how pop-culture’s expectations for intimate relationships often lets us down. Leavy offers readers a way to think through their close relationships and demand better of themselves and others.” Sandra L. Faulkner, Ph.D., Bowling Green State University “I couldn’t put it down! Low-Fat Love is a remarkable novel that every women’s studies class and interpersonal class would do well to read. The title is indicative of the search for meaningful, deep, enriching relationships beyond the artificial, low-fat love that is all too pervasive in society today. I wholeheartedly recommend this book.” Robin Patric Clair, Ph.D., Purdue University “Low-Fat Love is absolutely brilliant. This new edition is a must-read for anyone who has lived, loved, dreamed, and at times, settled for less than what we deserve – in other words, this is a book for everyone.” Anne Harris, Ph.D., Monash University and Australian Research Fellow in Creativity and Arts in Education Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., is an internationally known independent scholar and novelist. She has published eighteen books including Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice and Fiction as a Research Practice. She was named the 2010 New England Sociologist of the Year by the New England Sociological Association and received the prestigious 2014 Special Achievement Award from the American Creativity Association. www.patricialeavy.com

Download or read book Fat Profits written by Bruce Bradley and published by Howling Hound Press. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the heart of Corporate America, Fat Profits is an action-packed thriller about a corrupt food company that will stop at nothing to fatten its profits and become a Wall Street darling.

Download or read book The Elephant in the Room written by Tommy Tomlinson and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 A “warm and funny and honest…genuinely unputdownable” (Curtis Sittenfeld) memoir chronicling what it’s like to live in today’s world as a fat man, from acclaimed journalist Tommy Tomlinson, who, as he neared the age of fifty, weighed 460 pounds and decided he had to change his life. When he was almost fifty years old, Tommy Tomlinson weighed an astonishing—and dangerous—460 pounds, at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, unable to climb a flight of stairs without having to catch his breath, or travel on an airplane without buying two seats. Raised in a family that loved food, he had been aware of the problem for years, seeing doctors and trying diets from the time he was a preteen. But nothing worked, and every time he tried to make a change, it didn’t go the way he planned—in fact, he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to change. In The Elephant in the Room, Tomlinson chronicles his lifelong battle with weight in a voice that combines the urgency of Roxane Gay’s Hunger with the intimacy of Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. He also hits the road to meet other members of the plus-sized tribe in an attempt to understand how, as a nation, we got to this point. From buying a Fitbit and setting exercise goals to contemplating the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, America’s “capital of food porn,” and modifying his own diet, Tomlinson brings us along on a candid and sometimes brutal look at the everyday experience of being constantly aware of your size. Over the course of the book, he confronts these issues head-on and chronicles the practical steps he has to take to lose weight by the end. “What could have been a wallow in memoir self-pity is raised to art by Tomlinson’s wit and prose” (Rolling Stone). Affecting and searingly honest, The Elephant in the Room is an “inspirational” (The New York Times) memoir that will resonate with anyone who has grappled with addiction, shame, or self-consciousness. “Add this to your reading list ASAP” (Charlotte Magazine).