Download or read book How the Dead Live written by Will Self and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will Self possesses one of the greatest literary imaginations of any writer working today. How the Dead Live is his most extraordinary book yet—a novel that will challenge, entertain, and truly astonish. Lily Bloom is an aging American transplanted to England who has lost her battle with cancer and lies wasting away at the Royal Ear Hospital. As her two daughters—lumpy Charlotte, who runs a hugely successful chain of stationery stores called Waste of Paper, and beautiful Natasha, a junkie—buzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, Lily slides in and out of the present, taking us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. A career girl in the 1940s, a sexed-up, tippling adulteress in the 1950s and ‘60s, a divorced PR flak in the 1970s and ‘80s, Lily presents us with a portrait of America and England over sixty years of riotous and unreal change. And then it’s over: Lily catches a cab with the aboriginal wizard Phar Lap Jones, her guide to the shockingly banal world of the dead. It’s a world that is surreal but familiar, where she again works in PR and rediscovers how great smoking is, where her cohabitants include Rude Boy, the son who died at age nine and now swears a blue streak, and three eyeless, murmuring wraiths, the Fats—composed of the pounds, literally the whole selves, she lost and gained over her lifetime. As Lily settles into her nonexistence, the most difficult challenge for this staunchly difficult woman is how to understand that she’s dead, and how to leave the rest behind. How the Dead Live is an unforgettable portrait of the human condition, the struggle with life and with death. It’s a novel that will disturb and provoke, the work, in the words of one British reviewer, “of a novelist writing at the height of his powers.”

Download or read book How to Live When You Could Be Dead written by Deborah James and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2022-09-26 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profoundly moving and inspiring personal memoir on how to turn your mind from a negative spiral into realistic and rebellious hope. "I was alive when I should have been dead. In another movie, I missed the sliding door and departed this wondrous life long ago. Like so many others, I had to learn to live not knowing if I have a tomorrow, because, statistically, I didn't. At the age of 35, I was blindsided by incurable bowel cancer—I was given less than an 8 percent chance of surviving five years. Five years later, my only option was to live in the now and to value one day at a time." When Deborah James was diagnosed with incurable bowel cancer at just 35, she learned a powerful lesson: the way we respond to any given situation empowers or destroys us. And with the right skills and approach, we can all face huge challenges and find strength and hope in the darkest of places. How to Live When You Could Be Dead, a Sunday Times bestseller, will show you how. It will awaken you to question your life as if you didn't have a tomorrow and live it in the way you want to today. By harnessing the power of positivity and valuing each day as though it could be your last, you'll find out, as Deborah did, that it is possible to live with joy and purpose, no matter what. Praise for How to Live When You Could Be Dead: "Deborah James has captured the heart of the nation." —The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge @KensingtonRoyal "Brave, bright, beautiful." —Lorraine Kelly "Deborah's ability to find positivity in the darkest of places is an inspiration to us all." —Davina McCall

Download or read book The Brief History of the Dead written by Kevin Brockmeier and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-02-14 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between. The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped in an Antarctic research station, her supplies are running low, her radio finds only static, and the power is failing. With little choice, Laura sets out across the ice to look for help, but time is running out. Kevin Brockmeier alternates these two storylines to create a lyrical and haunting story about love, loss and the power of memory.

Download or read book How the Dead Dream written by Lydia Millet and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newest novel from critically acclaimed Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream is a beautiful, heart-wrenching tale and a riveting commentary on community in the modern suburban landscape and how the lives of animals are affected by it.

Download or read book Great Apes written by Will Self and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some people lost their sense of proportion, others their sense of scale, but Simon Dykes, a middle-aged, successful London painter, has lost his sense of perspective in a most disturbing fashion. After a night of routine, pedestrian debauchery, traipsing from toilet to toilet, and imbibing a host of narcotics on the way, Simon wakes up cuddled in his girlfriend’s loving arms. Much to his dismay, however, his girlfriend has turned into a chimpanzee. To add insult to injury, the psychiatric crash team sent to deal with him as he flips his lid is also comprised of chimps. Indeed, the entire city is overrun by clever primates, who, when they are not jostling for position, grooming themselves, or mating some of the females, can be found driving Volvos, hanging out on street corners, and running the world. Nonetheless convinced that he is still a human, Simon is confined to the emergency psychiatric ward of Charing Cross Hospital, where he becomes the patient of Dr. Zack Busner, clinical psychologist, medical doctor, anti-psychiatrist, and former television personality—an expert at the height of his reign as alpha male. As Busner attempts to convince him that “everyone who is fully sentient in this world are chimpanzees,” Simon struggles with the horrifying delusion that he is really a human trapped in a chimp’s body. Written with the same brilliant satiric wit that has distinguised Self’s earlier fiction, Great Apes is a hilarious, often disturbing, and absolutely original take on man’s place in the evolutionary chain. In a strange and twisted tale that recalls Jonathan Swift and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Will Self’s comic genius is impossible to ignore.

Download or read book Earthly Immortalities written by Peter Moore and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking book, Peter Moore examines the often overlooked issues concerning human mortality, the fragile ways in which the dead can be said to “live on” in earthly terms: through their children, their work, the memories of others, their possessions, and even their bodies. Such earthly immortalities raise a host of fascinating questions about our attitudes toward life, and toward the world we leave behind us when we die. To what extent does the meaning we find in our lives depend upon the assumption there will always be a new generation to continue the human adventure? What would it be like if science were able to extend life indefinitely, and is this something already enshrined in the doctrine of reincarnation? Can we solve our anxieties about mortality by learning that life is worth living precisely because we do not live forever? In a generous and eloquent account, these and more are the questions Earthly Immortalities seeks to answer.

Download or read book Trying to Live with the Dead written by B. L. Brunnemer and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hi, I'm Alexis Delaney. I'm your average 17-year-old girl. Except I can see the dead. And talk to the dead. And push them away and, well, help them move on. So..okay, I'm not your average 17-year-old girl. For years I've been struggling to survive the souls still roaming around. The shitheads always seem to find me. Moving from town to town every few months never helped either. More dead just always find me. But things are changing for me now. I'm moving in with my uncle Rory and cousin Tara. I'm finally going to be able to do normal teenage stuff I've been missing out on. Right? Well, if this one bitch of a ghost could leave me alone on campus that would be great. Especially since I haven't told my new friends about my abilities. Can you believe this? Five good looking guys practically adopt me on my first day of school, and I still think they're a bit nuts for it. Now if I can only just keep my life with the dead from mixing with my normal life, everything would be great. Yeah...I don't see that happening either. But I'm going to give it a shot. Who knows? It might work.

Download or read book The Quick and the Dead written by Joy Williams and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood."

Download or read book Deeper Than the Dead written by Tami Hoag and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A serial killer terrorizes a small California town in this gripping thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Tami Hoag. California, 1985—Four children and young teacher Anne Navarre make a gruesome discovery: a partially buried female body, her eyes and mouth glued shut. A serial killer is at large, and the very bonds that hold their idyllic town together are about to be tested to the breaking point. Tasked with finding the killer, FBI investigator Vince Leone employs a new and controversial FBI technique called “profiling,” which plunges him into the lives of the four children—and the young teacher whose need to uncover the truth is as intense as his own. But as new victims are found and pressure from the media grows, Vince and Anne find themselves circling the same small group of local suspects, unsure if those who suffer most are the victims themselves—or those close to the killer, blissfully unaware that someone very near to them is a murderous psychopath…

Download or read book The Modern Book of the Dead written by Ptolemy Tompkins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern, all-encompassing exploration of what happens after death combines spirituality with philosophy, history, and science, all of which guide readers toward the timeless truth that human consciousness lives on after death.

Download or read book The Quantity Theory of Insanity written by Will Self and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is there is only a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because somebody has to? What if a mysterious tribe in the Amazon rainforest turn out to be the most boring people on earth? What if the afterlife is nothing more than a London suburb, where the dead get new flats, new jobs, and their own telephone directory? These are the sort of truths that emerge in this collection of stories by one of England's most gifted writers. In The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self tips over the banal surfaces of everyday existence to uncover the hideous, the hilarious, and the bizarre. Psychiatry, anthropology, theology—and literature—will never be the same.

Download or read book What the Dead Have Taught Me About Living Well written by Rebecca Rosen and published by Rodale. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we know if our departed loved ones are still with us? Can guidance from beyond help our daily lives run more smoothly and feel more purposeful? Spiritual medium and bestselling author Rebecca Rosen has answers. After serving as a spiritual medium for more than two decades, Rosen knows with absolute clarity that the spirit world is always trying to get our attention. Our departed loved ones and spirit guides intervene in our lives daily to let us know that our real-life struggles have a rhyme, a reason, and a purpose and that we're not alone to figure it all out. Rosen knows how easy it is to get caught up in the demands of life while juggling the responsibilities of family, friendships, work, health, and money. She strives to be the best working mother, partner, and friend she can be, and she has to actively work to find a healthy balance. What the Dead Have Taught Me about Living Well walks you through an equally ordinary and extraordinary day in Rosen's life and reveals how she tunes in to see, hear, and feel the presence of spirits to help support and guide her forward. Through personal insights and shared extraordinary stories from the Other Side, she answers the question she's asked most frequently: How can my departed loved ones help guide me to live my best life? In What the Dead Have Taught Me about Living Well, Rosen shares the daily practices and spiritual tools she relies on to recognize and interpret signs from beyond. Spend a day with her. You'll learn how to strengthen your own connection to something bigger. This new perspective will help you better understand and navigate your day-to-day world so that new opportunities and possibilities unfold in all aspects of your life.

Download or read book How the Dead Speak written by Val McDermid and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unmarked graves are found on the grounds of an old orphanage in this “riveting” British crime thriller by an Edgar Award finalist (Publishers Weekly, starred review). With profiler Tony Hill behind bars and Carol Jordan no longer with the police, he’s finding unexpected outlets for his talents in jail and she’s joined forces with a group of lawyers and forensics experts looking into suspected miscarriages of justice. But they’re doing it without each other; being in the same room at visiting hour is too painful to contemplate. Meanwhile, construction is suddenly halted on the redevelopment of an orphanage after dozens of skeletons are found buried at the site. Forensic examination reveals they date from between twenty and forty years ago, when the nuns were running their repressive regime. But then a different set of skeletons is discovered in a far corner—young men from as recent as ten years ago. When newly promoted DI Paula McIntyre discovers that one of the male skeletons is that of a killer who is supposedly alive and behind bars—and the subject of one of Carol’s miscarriage investigations—it brings Tony and Carol irresistibly into each other’s orbit once again in this masterfully plotted novel by “the queen of psychological thrillers” (Irish Independent).

Download or read book How To Read The Egyptian Book Of The Dead written by Barry Kemp and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Egyptians created a world of supernatural forces so vivid, powerful and inescapable that controlling one's destiny within it was a constant preoccupation. In life, supernatural forces manifested themselves through misfortune and illness,and after death were faced for eternity in the Otherworld, along with the divine gods who controlled the universe. The Book of the Dead empowered the reader to overcome the dangers lurking in the Otherworld and to become one with the gods who governed. Barry Kemp selects a number of spells to explore who and what the Egyptians feared and the kind of assistance that the Book offered them, revealing a relationship between the human individual and the divine quite unlike that found in the major faiths of the modern world.

Download or read book The American Book of the Dead written by Oliver Trager and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-12-04 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains over 750 alphabetically-arranged entries that provide information about the rock group Grateful Dead, featuring profiles of band members and associated musicians, filmmakers, photographers, composers, and others, and descriptions of the band's albums and solo releases.

Download or read book American Book of the Dead written by and published by Gateways Books & Tapes. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With over 120,000 copies sold, this unique contemporary work brings the timeless Tibetan Bardo teaching into current American culture and language, with 49 days of readings for someone who has died or who is preparing for the dying experience. This book has been and still remains an important tool for providing a spiritual service to a dying person as opposed to grieving, processing loss, or mourning for that person's passage. Front matter includes "Notes on the Labyrinth" (or the Bardo...) and other commentary by the author that provides insights for an American reader who wishes to provide this guiding service to a family member, spouse, friend, or anyone who is terminal. The reading instructions very clearly outline when and what to read, without any limitation of belief system--the practice is presented as non-denominational, not requiring Buddhist or Christian or Jewish prayers, but also not in conflict with any of these. A schedule of readings shows graphically how to carry out the full series of 49 days of readings, at approximately 10 to 20 minutes per reading. The book has been in use since 1974 in various editions, taught in university courses on Death & Dying and related subjects (it is referenced in a recent handbook of acting exercises, for example...), and used by hospice workers and nurses internationally. The American Book of the Dead is often referenced in discussions of the 1970's West Coast spiritual renaissance, and many of the baby boomer generation will recall it in circulation when they were in college or beginning their careers. Translated editions have appeared in Spanish and Greek languages, with editions in preparation in German, French, Italian, and Polish. There is a course available by correspondence and on the internet that gives additional training for readers who wish to pursue the practice of performing "Labyrinth Readings" or "Bardo guiding" as a service to others--beyond one's own family and personal network.

Download or read book Mostly Dead Things written by Kristen Arnett and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The celebrated New York Times Bestseller A Best Book of the Year pick at the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, TIME, Washington Post, Oprahmag.com, Thrillist, Shelf Awareness, Good Housekeeping and more. What does it take to come back to life? For Jessa-Lynn Morton, the question is not an abstract one. In the wake of her father’s suicide, Jessa has stepped up to manage his failing taxidermy business while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the taxidermy shop to make provocative animal art, while her brother, Milo, withdraws. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. It’s not until the Mortons reach a tipping point that a string of unexpected incidents begins to open up surprising possibilities and second chances. But will they be enough to salvage this family, to help them find their way back to one another? Kristen Arnett’s breakout bestseller is a darkly funny family portrait; a peculiar, bighearted look at love and loss and the ways we live through them together.