Download or read book Grimmish written by Michael Winkler and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The strangest book you are likely to read this year.” – JM Coetzee SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD Pain was Joe Grim’s self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being. A superstar boxer who rarely won a fight, Grim distinguished himself for his extraordinary ability to withstand physical punishment. In this wild and expansive novel, Michael Winkler moves between the present day and Grim’s 1908–09 tour of Australia, bending genres and histories into a kaleidoscopic investigation of pain, masculinity, and narrative. Pain is often said to defy the limits of language. And yet Grimmish suggests that pain – physical and mental – is also the most familiar and universal human condition; and, perhaps, the secret source of our impulse to tell stories. “A powerful blast of literary ingenuity and originality.” – Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip "Grimmish meets a need I didn't even know I had. I lurched between bursts of wild laughter, shudders of horror, and gasps of awe at Winkler’s verbal command: the freshness and muscle of his verbs, the unstoppable flow of his images, the bizarre wit of the language of pugilism—and all the while, a moving subterranean glint of strange masculine tenderness." – Helen Garner ‍“All the makings of a cult classic. It’s grotesque and gorgeous, smart and searching.” – Beejay Silcox, The Guardian

Download or read book The Universal Sport written by Thomas Hauser and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers, writers, and critics alike look forward to each new collection of Thomas Hauser's articles about today’s boxing scene. Reviewing these books, Booklist has proclaimed, “Many journalists have written fine boxing pieces, but none has written as extensively or as memorably as Thomas Hauser. . . . Hauser remains the current champion of boxing. . . . He is a treasure.” Hauser’s newest collection meets this high standard. The Universal Sport features Hauser’s coverage of 2021 and 2022 in boxing. As always, Hauser chronicles the big fights and gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at boxing’s biggest stars. He offers a cogent look the rise of women’s boxing and shines a penetrating light on the murky world of illegal performance enhancing drugs and financial corruption at the sport’s highest levels. He explores how boxing has become a tool in the high-stakes world of “sportswashing” by Saudi Arabia and a flash point for discussions about Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The book culminates in a memorable four-part essay on the craft of writing coupled with reflections on Hauser’s own induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Download or read book Rebound written by Perry King and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARD NOMINEE From basketball hoops to cricket bats, the role community sports play in our cities and how crucial they are to diversity and inclusion. “The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.” For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It’s a story that plays out in sport after sport – team and individual, youth and adult, men's and women's. While the dazzle of pro athletes may command our attention, grassroots sports build the bridges that link city-dwellers together in ways that go well beyond the physical benefits. The pandemic and heightened awareness of racial exclusion reminded us of the importance of these pastimes and the public spaces where we play. In this closely reported exploration of the role of community sports in diverse cities, Toronto journalist Perry King makes an impassioned case for re-imagining neighbourhoods whose residents can be active, healthy, and connected. "I couldn’t stop reading Perry King’s Rebound. An evocative essay about the transformative and uniting power of local sports in a city with residents from every country in the world, the book is well researched, entertaining, and informative. It spoke to my own experiences as a young athlete fitting into a new city when I first came to Toronto – and to the importance our city government must place on local recreation and sports if our city is to help all residents reach their potential. A fantastic contribution to understanding Toronto – and to the power of local recreation in any major city." —David Miller, former mayor of Toronto

Download or read book Seconds Out written by Alison Dean and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kicking ass and taking notes—what it’s like to be a woman in the ring. Alison Dean teaches English literature. She also punches people. Hard. But despite several amateur fights under her belt, she knows she will never be taken as seriously as a male boxer. “You punch like a girl” still isn’t a compliment — women aren’t supposed to choose to participate in violence. Her unique perspective as a 30-something university lecturer turned amateur fighter allows Dean to articulately and with great insight delve into the ways martial arts can change a person’s — and particularly a woman’s — relationship to their body and to the world around them, and at the same time considers the ways in which women might change martial arts. Combining historical research, anecdotal experience, and interviews with coaches and fighters, Seconds Out explores our culture’s relationship with violence, and particularly with violence practiced by women. "An important addition to women’s martial arts scholarship, Dean provides personal insight into the radical space women occupy in sport fighting. Seconds Out is a must-read for all fighters looking for mentors in the complicated world of martial arts." —L.A. Jennings, author of Mixed Martial Arts: A History from Ancient Fighting Sports to the UFC "Dean brings a fresh new female voice to the topic of combat sports." —Trevor Wittman, renowned MMA trainer, UFC analyst, and founder of ONX Sports "Trained in the discipline and art of both fighting and literature, Dean combines both with style. She honors the fighters, writers, and historians who have come before her and definitively ends the idea of women fighters as a novelty. Seconds Out is a must-read for anyone who feels the call of the bell and reverence for a good fight." —Sue Jaye Johnson

Download or read book Secret Carnival Workers written by Paul Haines and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secret Carnival Workers is the first volume to bring together Paul Haines' poems, short fiction and music journalism - influenced by jazz, Dada and the Surrealists - in all its complex and creative breadth. Including uncollected fictions, epigrammatic poems and lyrics and writings on music composed between 1955 and 2002, this book finally places a major talent under the spotlight.

Download or read book Monsters and Borders in the Early Modern Imagination written by Jana Byars and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the axis where monstrosity and borderlands meet to reflect the tensions, apprehensions, and excitement over the radical changes of the early modern era. The book investigates the monstrous as it acts in liminal spaces in the Renaissance and the era of Enlightenment. Zones of interaction include chronological change – from the early New World encounters through the seventeenth century – and cultural and scientific changes, in the margins between national boundaries, and also cultural and intellectual boundaries.

Download or read book Avant Desire A Nicole Brossard Reader written by Nicole Brossard and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet. In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian. Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers. Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking. Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.

Download or read book Heady Bloom written by Andrew Faulkner and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A buddy-cop dramedy starring a bottle of Advil and a headache that won’t quit Imagine you’re standing in a room, and someone on the other side of the door won’t stop knocking – ever. Welcome to Andrew Faulkner’s world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil. Through direct address, sideways glances, lyrical interludes and deep consideration of what it means to overcome a condition when living is a part of the condition itself, these poems observe the speaker’s world as it crowds around him, coming into sharper and specific focus, from the hard wisdom of saints on suffering and a slightly unhinged Caravaggio on the metaphysics of painting, through to the deep meaning of a hot dog and a thoroughly botched retelling of a Norm Macdonald joke. Throughout it all, Advil whirls around like an unruly tornado of a sidekick, snapping Polaroids and “searching for a cloud that resembles a plausible end-of-life scenario.” Think of this collection as a meditation on how to deal with pain and uncertainty when life itself is an uncertain, painful mess. These are poems that acknowledge the shakiness of the ground we stand on. The opening poem wonders: “If you stay with the shakiness through its conjugations? Who knows.” But don’t worry. Advil’s on the case and aims to find out. "These wry poems cajole the reader into feverish attentiveness. Andrew Faulkner's Heady Bloom is that unusual collection of poems whose aim is generous and profound, but whose means are often comic and provocative, all jagged edges and elbows. Chaplinesque, perhaps, but Chaplin at an all-ages hardcore show, or having been to one and reflecting on it later, in tranquility." —Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City and Run the Red Lights "Among other issues, this book explores how the seizures, hallucinations, and excruciating pain caused by neurological conditions that are now treated clinically were once thought of as visions granted to and endured by saints. Faulkner does this in poems that are filled with seriousness but also humor, unlikely allusions, and exhilarating wordplay. A running conceit is the speaker’s ambivalent relationship—a kind of “bromance”—with Advil, modern medicine personified as his nemesis and doppelgänger, a taunting comedian but also a vital helpmate, a debased version of the saints’ archangelic protectors. Faulkner’s imagery and conceits surprise and delight. A strange and beautiful book. " —Geoffrey Nutter

Download or read book Train Lord written by Oliver Mol and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2022-07-21 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The astonishing true story of trust, pain, becoming lost, and finding a way back to yourself despite it all 'An intimate preservation of a moment in time, full of personality' THE TIMES __________ Life is beautiful - even in the dark . . . Oliver Mol was happily drifting through his twenties when the migraine exploded in his head. Suddenly, he could barely function. He felt marooned. Nothing helped. Yet he was desperate to save himself. Then he found the trains. The job of train guard has intense moments of strict, regimented activity in between periods of calm serenity. It was just what Oliver needed. Not only could he do this, but also it might be a way out. Train Lord is the story of Oliver's extraordinary recovery. A journey back into the light . . . __________ 'Tender, vital and quietly hopeful: a tale of remaking' Guardian 'Rude, raw, visceral, painful and wildly funny' Saga 'Intense and humble, Train Lord won my heart' Australian Book Review

Download or read book Uncle written by Cheryl Thompson and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From martyr to insult, how “Uncle Tom” has influenced two centuries of racial politics. Jackie Robinson, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Christopher Darden have all been accused of being an Uncle Tom during their careers. How, why, and with what consequences for our society did Uncle Tom morph first into a servile old man and then to a racial epithet hurled at African American men deemed, by other Black people, to have betrayed their race? Uncle Tom, the eponymous figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a loyal Christian who died a martyr’s death. But soon after the best-selling novel appeared, theatre troupes across North America and Europe transformed Stowe’s story into minstrel shows featuring white men in blackface. In Uncle, Cheryl Thompson traces Tom’s journey from literary character to racial trope. She explores how Uncle Tom came to be and exposes the relentless reworking of Uncle Tom into a nostalgic, racial metaphor with the power to shape how we see Black men, a distortion visible in everything from Uncle Ben and Rastus The Cream of Wheat chef to Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Bill Cosby. In Donald Trump’s post-truth America, where nostalgia is used as a political tool to rewrite history, Uncle makes the case for why understanding the production of racial stereotypes matters more than ever before.

Download or read book Monk written by Youssef Daoudi and published by First Second. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Read this invigorating graphic narrative, then—quickly, before the spell breaks!—play one of Monk's records." —Saul Williams She is Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a free-spirited baroness of the Rothschild family. He is Thelonious Sphere Monk, a musical genius fighting against the whims of his troubled mind. Their enduring friendship begins in 1954 and ends only with Monk’s death in 1982. Set against the backdrop of New York during the heyday of jazz, Monk! explores the rare alchemy between two brilliant beings separated by an ocean of social status, race, and culture, but united by an infinite love of music. This breathtaking graphic novel by Youssef Daoudi beautifully captures the life of the “the high priest of bop” in spontaneous, evocative pen and ink that seems to make visible jazz itself.

Download or read book Flight of the Budgerigar written by Penny Olsen and published by . This book was released on 2021-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Budgerigar is arguably Australia's best-known bird. At the same time, it is so ubiquitous that not everyone knows that it is Australian. Nor do many realise that the multicoloured bird that comes to mind--not to mention today's super-sized, extravagantly coiffed show budgie--is as different from the free-living original as a chihuahua from a wolf. Far from the cosy domestic lives our pet budgies live today, the native budgerigar has lived millennia of boom-bust cycles in the arid inland of Australia. Life was often short; if they were not fodder for predators, they starved or had to struggle their way to districts closer to the coast. For the Warlpiri and their Arrernte neighbours around Alice Springs, the Budgerigar (in its ancestral form) was a totem animal, featuring in art, ceremonies, songlines and legends. Since 1840, when ornithologist John Gould took living specimens to London, this little parrot has been on a remarkable journey. The Budgerigar was Australia's first mass export; its story includes British queens and nobles, Japanese princes and Hollywood stars. It has won the hearts of British spies and world leaders, including Churchill, Stalin and Kennedy. Taking the reader from the Dreamtime to the colonial live bird trade, the competitive culture of the showroom and today's thriving wild flocks, Flight of the Budgerigar is the authoritative history of the Budgerigar, written by respected ornithologist Dr Penny Olsen, and lavishly illustrated in full colour.

Download or read book Reasons to Live written by Amy Hempel and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1995-07-20 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hempel's now-classic collection of short fiction is peopled by complex characters who have discovered that their safety nets are not dependable and who must now learn to balance on the threads of wit, irony, and spirit.

Download or read book Where the Line Breaks written by Michael Burrows and published by Fremantle Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unknown Digger is Australia's answer to famous First World War poets, Brooke, Sassoon. But for decades, his identity has remained a mystery.Matthew Denton &– Australian PhD student at University College, London &– believes the unknown poet is one of Australia's greatest war heroes: Lieutenant Alan Lewis VC of the 10th Light Horse. Matt is starry-eyed and in love with Emily, a fellow student and assistant to Matt's supervisor, the nattily dressed Professor Alistair Fitzwilliam-Harding. But, as the footnotes to Matt's thesis reveal, not all is fair in love and war.Meanwhile, Alan Lewis, recently engaged to Rose Porter &– fights his way across the Middle East as part of the 10th Light Horse, the vision of the life he left behind disappearing, and the question of what makes a poet, a lover and a hero growing more ill-defined with every battle fought.

Download or read book The Well of the Unicorn written by Fletcher Pratt and published by . This book was released on 1948 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Eye of Argon written by Jim Theis and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is not a hoax. Jim Theis was a real person, who wrote The Eye of Argon in all seriousness as a teenager, and published it in a fanzine, Osfan in 1970. But the story did not pass into the oblivion that awaits most amateur fiction. Instead, a miracle happened, and transcribed and photocopied texts began to circulate in science fiction circles, gaining a wide and incredulous audience among both professionals and fans. It became the ultimate samizdat, an underground classic, and for more than thirty years it has been the subject of midnight readings at conventions, as thousands have come to appreciate the negative genius of this amazing Ed Wood of prose.

Download or read book Very Cold People written by Sarah Manguso and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The masterly debut novel from “an exquisitely astute writer” (The Boston Globe), about growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of small-town America. “Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”—The New York Times “Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend.”—The New Yorker ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping “My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.” For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield. As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.