Download or read book Funeral Diva written by Pamela Sneed and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Funeral Diva is the Winner of the Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry! A poetic memoir about coming-of-age in the AIDS era, and its effects on life and art. "Sneed is an acclaimed reader of her own poetry, and the book has the feeling of live performance. . . . Its strength is in its abundance, its desire for language to stir body as well as mind."—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review "She is a writer for the future, in that she defies genre."—Hilton Als "This notable achievement, traveling from youth to adulthood, is a harrowing account of how Sneed transforms violence and pain into an artist's life."—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric "There's an eerie sense of timeliness to this book, which features prose and poetry by the writer and teacher Pamela Sneed and is largely — though not entirely — about mourning Black gay men killed too soon by a deadly virus."—Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed "OH MY GOODNESS, it was amazing. I was in tears by the end. What starts off as beautiful memoir evolves into incredibly moving poetry, painful and sweet and lovely."—Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY "Balancing and mixing, with rhyme and reason, love and anger, good and bad, memory and the created present, all to tell the story of a life, a memoir unrestrained, devoid of artificial forms. Honest. Free."—Anjanette Delgado, New York Journal of Books In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed’s poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears—like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde—whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts today's most pressing issues with acerbic wit and audacity. The collection closes with Sneed's reflections on the two pandemics of her time, AIDS and COVID-19, and the disproportionate impact of each on African American communities. "Riveting, personal, open-hearted, risky and wise."—Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse " . . . a tour de force about the collision between a coalescing 1980s 'Black lesbian and gay literary and poetic movement' in New York and the onslaught of AIDS."—Donna Seaman, Booklist "Pamela Sneed's Funeral Diva is deft, defiant, and devastating."—Tommy Pico, author of Feed "Funeral Diva is urgent and necessary reading to live by. This is writing at its finest. Keep this book close to your heart and soul."—Karen Finley, author of Shock Treatment "Reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s Zami, Pamela Sneed’s memoir is, in itself, a healing balm, affirming in its truths and honesty. I cannot remember ever reading a book that illustrates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on our community more poignantly than Funeral Diva."—Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy "Pamela Sneed takes enormous risks in this book. She tells the truth with fierce concentration and an abiding sense of purpose.”—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

Download or read book It Started With A Funeral written by Lyn D. Jackson and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detective Chief Inspector Bland was on sick leave and today he was attending a funeral in the drizzling rain, together with his wife Jean, his sergeant Darren Boyd and sergeant's girlfriend Amanda. Listening to the vicar drone on he noticed someone watching them discretely from a distance. It was Lady Isabella Trent, the owner of Redbridge Hall. She followed them back to the house and asked Bland to investigate a ghost at the hall. He said that he did not believe in ghosts and declined, but the others persueded him to spend just a couple of days there as he was suffering from boredom, from being confined to the house, after all what harm could it do? The first morning a member of staff was found murdered in the woods, followed by two more deaths, a shooting and a kidnapping, but this was only the start of the mayhem. Bland and Boyd realised it was not the ghost that they need be afraid of, but someone very much alive and ruthless, and so their next case began...........and it all started with a funeral.

Download or read book Confessions of a Funeral Director written by Caleb Wilde and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The blogger behind Confessions of a Funeral Director—what Time magazine called a "must read"—reflects on mortality and the powerful lessons death holds for every one of us in this compassionate and thoughtful spiritual memoir that combines the humor and insight of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with the poignancy and brevity of When Breath Becomes Air. We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and—when it can be avoided no longer—letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed: The family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial The act of embalming a little girl that offered a gift back to her grieving family The nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away The funeral that united a conflicted community Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde offers an intimate look into the business and a new perspective on living and dying

Download or read book The Doll Funeral written by Kate Hamer and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Evokes] both Jeanette Winterson and Ian McEwan . . . an elegiac and uplifting novel about the indissoluble bonds between mothers and daughters, and a reminder of how the imagination can set you free.” — The Guardian On Ruby’s thirteenth birthday, a wish she didn’t even know she had suddenly comes true: the couple who raised her aren’t her parents at all. Her real mother and father are out there somewhere, and Ruby becomes determined to find them. Venturing into the forest with nothing but a suitcase and the company of her only true friend—the imaginary Shadow Boy—Ruby discovers a group of siblings who live alone in the woods. The children take her in, and while they offer the closest Ruby’s ever had to a family, Ruby begins to suspect that they might need her even more than she needs them. And it’s not always clear what’s real and what’s not—or who’s trying to help her and who might be a threat. Told from shifting timelines, and the alternating perspectives of teenage Ruby; her mother, Anna; and even the Shadow Boy, The Doll Funeral is a dazzling follow-up to Kate Hamer’s breakout debut, The Girl in the Red Coat, and a gripping, exquisitely mysterious novel about the connections that remain after a family has been broken apart.

Download or read book I Felt a Funeral In My Brain written by Will Walton and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the poignant and provocative debut Anything Could Happen comes an astonishing novel in verse about love, death, and the poetry we find when we most need it. How do you deal with a hole in your life?Do you turn to poets and pop songs?Do you dream? Do you try on love just to see how it fits? Do you grieve? If you're Avery, you do all of these things. And you write it all down in an attempt to understand what's happened--and is happening--to you. I Felt a Funeral, In My Brain is an astonishing novel about navigating death and navigating life, at a time when the only map you have is the one you can draw for yourself.

Download or read book Instructions for a Funeral written by David Means and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After winning international acclaim with his first novel, the Man Booker-nominated Hystopia, David Means returns to the form that made his name in Instructions for a Funeral, a collection of fourteen masterful stories that run the gamut from the playful to the personal. 'The Terminal Artist,' originally published in Vice, skirts reportage in grappling with the revelation that the death of a hospitalized loved one was in fact a murder; 'The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934,' from the New Yorker, is a wry anatomy of the moments before an FBI raid goes spectacularly wrong; while 'The Chair,' from The Paris Review, gives us a clear-eyed look at fatherhood, with all its paradoxes, recriminations, and rewards gloriously intact. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Poe, Chekhov, and Carver - but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.

Download or read book A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire written by Michael Bishop and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Funeral Party written by Ludmila Ulitskaya and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN? This marvelous group of individuals inhabits the first novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya to be published in English, a book that was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and has been praised wherever translated editions have appeared. Simultaneously funny and sad, lyrical in its Russian sorrow and devastatingly keen in its observation of character, The Funeral Party introduces to our shores a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.

Download or read book A Beautiful Funeral A Novel Maddox Brothers Book 5 written by Jamie McGuire and published by Jamie McGuire. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Losing has never been easy for a Maddox, but death always wins. Eleven years to the day after eloping with Abby in Vegas, Special Agent Travis Maddox delivers his own brand of vigilante justice to mob boss Benny Carlisi. Vegas's oldest and most violent crime family is now preparing for vengeance, and the entire Maddox family is a target. The secret Thomas and Travis have kept for a decade will be revealed to the rest of the family, and for the first time the Maddoxes will be at odds. While none of them are strangers to loss, the family has grown, and the risk is higher than ever. With brothers against brothers and wives taking sides, each member will make a choice—let the fear tear them apart, or make them stronger.

Download or read book Nine Years Under written by Sheri Booker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming of age in a black funeral home in Baltimore Sheri Booker was only fifteen when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea her summer job would become nine years of immersion into a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, Sheri found comfort in the funeral home and soon had the run of the place. With AIDS and gang violence threatening to wipe out a generation of black men, Wylie was never short on business. As families came together to bury one of their own, Booker was privy to their most intimate moments of grief and despair. But along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald’s with dead bodies in tow. While she never got over her terror of the embalming room, Booker learned to expect the unexpected and to never, ever cry. Nine Years Under offers readers an unbelievable glimpse into an industry in the backdrop of all our lives.

Download or read book Invitation To A Funeral written by Molly Brown and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: APHRA BEHN is an unusual woman by any standard, especially those of 1676 London. A popular playwright and former spy, she does not bow to convention, does not always have the fortitude to turn a charming, but alcoholic attorney from her bed, and currently, does not have the funds to pay the rent on her London home. But a long-shot bet--that the Earl of Rochester's doltish young mistress can improve her painfully poor acting enough to play the lead in Aphra's latest play--could have her in the clear again. Until she's indebted to pay for the funerals of two brothers whose kindness helped her years ago. And the debt goes further than that--both deaths smack of murder, and Aphra is determined to find a killer and uncover a deadly secret...one that could engage all of England in a bloody civil war. From the squalid streets of London to the grand chambers of Whitehall Palace, author Molly Brown vividly recreates Restoration England at its most uproarious, while crafting a brilliant novel of history, humor, and heart-pounding intrigue.

Download or read book Life in 20 Lessons written by Chris Meyer and published by Meaning of Life Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-24 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you could fast forward your life to your deathbed and hear your regrets (and joys), then rewind and live your life with that knowledge, would you do it? This book provides that knowledge. After fourteen years in the funeral business, Chris Meyer has sat with families and listened to their “could’ves,” “should’ves,” and “would’ves.” In doing so he learned many lessons—lessons that kept repeating themselves year after year. Meyer knew he could help a lot of people with this information. So he sat down and memorialized the lessons he learned to share with the world: some simple, some profound, some irreverent. Lessons from life, from death, from surviving. But make no mistake, this is NOT a story about dying…this is a story of living. This is…Life in 20 Lessons. Poignant. Funny. Filled with love.

Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology written by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-23 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a series of essays contributed by leading experts in the field, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology presents an introduction to practical theology as a major area of Christian study and practice, including an overview of its key developments, themes, methods, and future directions. The first comprehensive reference work to provide a survey, description and analysis of practical theology as an area of study A range of leading scholars in the field provide original contributions on the major areas, issues, and figures in practical theology Reviews an extensive range of methods for studying theology in practice, along with sub-disciplines in theological education such as pastoral care and preaching Covers developments in the discipline in a range of global contexts and distinct Christian traditions Shows how practical theology is relevant to everyday life

Download or read book The Funeral written by Matt James and published by Groundwood Books Ltd. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times / New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book New York Public Library Best Books for Kids Ezra Jack Keats Award Honor Winner Norma and her parents are going to her great-uncle Frank’s funeral, and Norma is more excited than sad. She is looking forward to playing with her favorite cousin, Ray, but when she arrives at the church, she is confronted with rituals and ideas that have never occurred to her before. While not all questions can be answered, when the day is over Norma is certain of one thing — Uncle Frank would have enjoyed his funeral. This sensitive and life-affirming story will lead young readers to ask their own questions about life, death and how we remember those who have gone before us. Key Text Features speech bubbles Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.1 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.7 With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.3 Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.7 Explain how specific aspects of a text's illustrations contribute to what is conveyed by the words in a story (e.g., create mood, emphasize aspects of a character or setting)

Download or read book My Best Friend s Funeral written by Roger W Thompson and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There’s a certain kind of lost a boy feels in this world without a father. Tim felt it. I felt it. And we realized our only way out would be together. In an openhearted memoir of faith on the fringe, Roger Thompson meditates on the life and premature death of his best friend and business partner, Tim Garrety, cofounder of Skate Street Ventura. Roger and Tim’s twenty-year friendship was forged in the surf and on the streets of 1980s California. Together they hazarded countless waves and every rite of passage—from guitars to girls to God—and influenced the lives of thousands of skateboarders, musicians, surfers, and otherwise disconnected youth in the process. With unrestrained honesty and a punk-rock soundtrack, My Best Friend’s Funeral is a memoir of friendship, doubt, surfing, and the complex relationships between fathers and sons. If life has ever left you feeling abandoned—or if you simply prefer a rock show to a sermon—My Best Friend’s Funeral is a memoir you won’t want to miss, and a confirmation that you are never alone.

Download or read book Funeral for a Friend written by Brian Freeman and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “You’re safe, Stride. I found the body at the Deeps. I buried him.” Jonathan Stride’s best friend, Steve Garske, makes a shocking deathbed confession: he protected Stride by covering up a murder. Hours later, the police dig up Steve’s yard and find a body with a bullet hole in its skull. Stride is pretty sure he knows who it is. Seven years ago, an out-of-town reporter disappeared while investigating anonymous allegations of rape against a prominent politician. Back then, the police believed that the reporter drowned at a dangerous swimming hole called the Deeps ... but the discovery of the body changes everything. Now Stride’s partner, Maggie Bei, is forced to ask Stride an uncomfortable question: Did you kill him? Stride is obviously hiding things. He was the last person to see the reporter alive. And he admits lying to Maggie about that meeting, but won’t tell her why. With suspicion in the murder pointing at him, Stride finds himself off the case and on leave from the Duluth Police. His only ally in clearing his name is his wife, Serena, who retraces the reporter’s investigation into the explosive allegations. The clues all point to a hot Duluth summer years earlier that everyone in town would prefer to forget. Someone was willing to kill rather than let those long-ago secrets come out, and the suspect with the strongest motive ... is Stride.

Download or read book The Funeral Makers written by Cathie Pelletier and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A crazy, rollicking whoop of a book, written with a poet's sensibility and deeply wacky down-home wisdom."—Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls A century after the impulsive McKinnon brothers set out to tame the Canadian wilderness and instead landed in Mattagash, Maine, their madcap legacy reigns supreme. It's 1959, and Pearl and Sicily McKinnon have gathered to plan a funeral for Marge, their older sister dying from the rare disease beriberi, thanks to her eccentric diet. Pearl, who skipped town with big-city dreams only to marry a funeral director, soon clashes with the long-suffering Sicily, who herself is coping with an unfaithful husband. To make matters worse, Sicily's teenage daughter is lusting after the town's blackest sheep, a ne'er-do-well twice her age. Brimming with darkly quirky humor and irresistible spunk, The Funeral Makers explores the inescapable ironies of American life and family dynamics and captures the spirit of a world that is as once familiar and quickly fading from view.