Download or read book Kind Mirrors Ugly Ghosts written by Claire Donato and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major book from a longtime legend in underground literature; known by citation and word of mouth, but only now emerging with a work that will earn a broad audience. “Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is why I want to read. There are few books at all that expand the exploration of family, outsider sex, animal love, therapy and surreal vision and even fewer writers who do it as well as Claire Donato. My mind and heart are thankfully changed forever.” —JAMIE STEWART of Xiu Xiu and author of Anything That Moves “Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts moves and feels like a novel of ideas, yes, but also a lookbook of Rorshachs; a concept cookbook for famished phantoms; a fragmentary tour de force a la Duras. On every page, it lines the mind with vibrant space, as extraordinary in its candor about desire, artifice, and intimacy as it is with wordplay, wit, and social theory. “Death is a mirror of time, and life is not as heavy as it seems,” Donato writes, beckoning us forward through the void of realism as might an imaginary friend we thought we’d lost—or should I say ‘guardian angel’?” —BLAKE BUTLER, author "In Claire Donato's fiction, I am both looking in and being looked at. The depths of desire are on display, laying bare the complexity and the ugliness that often comes with it." —MOLLY SODA, artist "Claire Donato's prose is at once playful and masterful, charming and haunting—I loved these short stories with huge imaginations." —CHELSEA HODSON, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else "Love is a source of radical questioning whose only enemy is indifference. Claire Donato’s fever dream of a novel goes toe to toe with today’s anomie, stretching our only resource left, language, so we can navigate a 21st century landscape of violently changing relationships, with one another, with the natural world, and with our bodies." —JAMIESON WEBSTER, psychoanalyst and author In the disquieting stories of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, a fractaled Claire Donato contemplates grief and disgust in heterosexuality, deconstructing the romance myth and the illicit fantasies which reflect our haunted selves. These fictions are populated with Lynchian characters, draped in memory and the subconscious mind, who imagine their way out of the painful limits of their world: a turtle retreats into its shell and becomes a real girl. A porn addict turns into a baby boy in the arms of his barren cyber-girlfriend. And a digitally-marred depressive joins forces with the ghost of Simone Weil to kill a chicken. Donato’s fictions are precise and cutting, seamlessly integrating a vast knowledge of art through sharp criticism and a history of cult traditions: Donnie Darko, Wings of Desire, Daisies, and Twin Peaks and artists including Clarice Lispector, M.F.K. Fisher, Sibylle Baier, and The Velvet Underground. Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts concludes with "Gravity and Grace, the Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian", a novella-in-vignettes that frames cooking as an entrypoint to light, awareness, and connection. With associative lyricism and a preternatural ability to gaze into the void with tenderness, Donato relays an indescribably strange perception of our world, in which maniacal grief turns to a gleeful protest before becoming, against all odds, a love letter to what remains. Cover photo: Jimmy DeSana Contact Paper, 1980 Vintage C-print © the Jimmy DeSana Trust Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York

Download or read book Burial written by Claire Donato and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sorrowful daughter works through her grief after her father dies.

Download or read book Domestirexia written by JoAnna Novak and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2024-07-16 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poetry collection contorting the idea of home away from being a site of comfort and nourishment by coaxing the reader to think about domesticity in knotty new ways Domestirexia goes beyond the entanglement of "domestic" and "anorexia” exploring a behind-closed-doors sensuality, borne in the concept of making home. Home can be a space of both resistance and discomfort that one desires or takes pleasure in enjoying. Rote notions of home and the domestic are reimagined in these poems as estranging, excessive, and populated by unknowable characters. Exploring themes of family, sacrifice, disease, death, money, cooking, romance, sex, art, and the visceral qualities of the everyday, the poems twist themselves into binds for the reader to undo or surrender to. Quarantined at her in-law’s house during Covid, Novak wrote these poems while watching The Great British Baking Show, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, skimming Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and babysitting an infant. These are poems about wanting to misbehave. Light voyeurism at home, with gin and cake.

Download or read book The Second Body written by Claire Donato and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Following her genre-bending novella BURIAL, Claire Donato's first full-length collection of poems THE SECOND BODY meditates on love, language, animals, science, and death. An independent digital arts curator at Babycastles Gallery in Manhattan and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Architecture Writing and BFA Writing programs at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Claire is both the author and the titular second body of the text, in which she appears as a character and female subject alienated by doom, greenhouse gases, Gchat, and sex. As Donato writes in "Corpse Pose," "There are ways in which to see inside a person's body using text." THE SECOND BODY is the fractured self that emerges into a 21st century landscape of terrorism and hyperreality, exported via corporate networks to the cloud. "What is THE SECOND BODY? Alice in the pit of despair, humming pop songs and practicing inversions. The ocean, sex, void, women. Dead chickens. 'Doves at the edge of the lake / Falling across the age of the computer.' A bomb going off on the patriarchy. Gloom and glee, bones and teeth: this is how Claire Donato is trying to describe the world to you."--Kate Durbin "When a speaker in Claire Donato's poem 'Grief Interlude' says, 'I care in different meanings, none of / Which are paraphrasable,' we're getting to the root of these poems, which will try everything to articulate the broken and reverent heart that made them. These poems are thick with music and formally rangy and sort of amazing for the things they actually did to me, among which: hurt; puzzle; astonish; delight. Which is to say--they moved me. They move me. Hard to paraphrase that too."--Ross Gay "Generous, violent, open, and dark, THE SECOND BODY continuously lays clear a self-other, and that self- other continuously extends into the universe. As a person, and a reader, I feel very thankful for that, to be in that kind of space, in that kind of literature."--Amina Cain "Claire Donato is a rare and beguiling voice. I am tempted to call her a sincere trickster--the love-child of Joseph Cornell and Carrie Brownstein, perhaps. There is great rigor beneath her verse, and her themes--the body in pain, supplementarity, simulacra, sexuality as textuality, the flexible borders of species-being--are striking in the precision of their arrangements, and the delicacy of their assembly, suspended between the suggestive and the vivid. 'There are ways in which to see inside a person's body using text,' she writes, and her second body--an uncanny, rewarding companion--is well worth listening to."--Dominic Pettman, author of Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age "Claire Donato's THE SECOND BODY answers and deepens the anxiety that I can't stop feeling and that poetry like hers can't stop making us feel. 'I Will Not Die Here,' 'The Pleasure of Tearing Down the Forest,' 'Off to the Nervous Museum'--titles that unnerve you, set over writing that remains unnerving and yet is remarkably studied, political, socially engaged--particularly with the making and remaking of the female subject, necessarily and unashamedly sexualized, but in edgy, productively discordant registers."--John Cayley

Download or read book An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth written by Anna Moschovakis and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2024-11-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new work from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis, whose translation of David Diop’s Frêre d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black, Pushkin and FSG) won the 2021 International Booker Prize After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world. Darkly comic, deeply resonant, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, and Sheila Heti.

Download or read book The Ghosts We Keep written by Mason Deaver and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everything happens for a reason. At least that's what everyone keeps telling Liam Cooper after his older brother Ethan is killed suddenly in a hit-and-run. Feeling more alone and isolated than ever, Liam has to not only learn to face the world without one of the people he loved the most, but also face the fading relationships of his two best friends in the process. Soon, Liam finds themself spending time with Ethan's best friend, Marcus, who might just be the only person that seems to know exactly what they're going through-for better and for worse. The Ghosts We Keep is an achingly honest portrayal of grief. But it is also about why we live. Why we have to keep moving on, and why we should.

Download or read book Tales from the Haunted South written by Tiya Miles and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.

Download or read book Blue Light of the Screen written by Claire Cronin and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blue Light of the Screen is a memoir about the author's obsession with horror and the supernatural. Blue Light of the Screen is about what it means to be afraid -- about immersion, superstition, delusion, and the things that keep us up at night. A creative-critical memoir of the author's obsession with the horror genre, Blue Light of the Screen embeds its criticism of horror within a larger personal story of growing up in a devoutly Catholic family, overcoming suicidal depression, uncovering intergenerational trauma, and encountering real and imagined ghosts. As Cronin writes, she positions herself as a protagonist who is haunted by what she watches and reads, like an antiquarian in an M.R. James ghost story whose sense of reality unravels through her study of arcane texts and cursed archives. In this way, Blue Light of the Screen tells the story of the author's conversion from skepticism to faith in the supernatural. Part memoir, part ghost story, and part critical theory, Blue Light of the Screen is not just a book about horror, but a work of horror itself.

Download or read book The Ghost in the Mirror written by John Bellairs and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-10-01 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a warm summer day in 1951 when Rose Pottinger and Mrs. Zimmermann entered the tunnel. When they had emerged, it was snowing...and the year was 1828. Mrs. Zimmermann had felt that the ghost of Granny Wetherbee, who had taught Mrs. Zimmermann witchery, was in trouble and needed help. So she and Rose Rita had traveled to Pennsylvania where Granny had lived. They never dreamed that they would also journey back to a time long ago where they would encounter a sorcerer more terrifying than either could have imagined. Books by John Bellairs: The Doom of the Haunted Opera The Figure In the Shadows The Ghost in the Mirror The House With a Clock In Its Walls The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring The Mansion in the Mist The Specter From the Magician's Museum The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder

Download or read book Ghost Catcher written by Martha Hamilton and published by august house. This book was released on 2008 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a retelling of a traditional Bengali tale in which a kind and generous Indian barber, pressed by his father then his wife to earn more money, cleverly persuades a ghost to bring him riches.

Download or read book Hush Baby Ghostling written by Andrea Beaty and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the sun begins to rise, it’s time for Baby Ghostling to sleep. But sleeping is hard when your head is filled with scary thoughts of human children! All of the elements of a classic good-night story are turned on their heads as Mama comforts her ghostling with thoughts of owls and bats and monsters. Young children will delight in seeing their bedtime rituals turned upside down. With gentle humor and glowing illustrations in the hues of dawn, this eBook with audio is a lullaby that any child—ghost or human—will enjoy.

Download or read book Too Bright to See written by Kyle Lukoff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Newbery Honor Book • Winner of the Stonewall Book Award • A National Book Award Finalist "A gentle, glowing wonder, full of love and understanding." –The New York Times Book Review It's the summer before middle school and eleven-year-old Bug's best friend Moira has decided the two of them need to use the next few months to prepare. For Moira, this means figuring out the right clothes to wear, learning how to put on makeup, and deciding which boys are cuter in their yearbook photos than in real life. But none of this is all that appealing to Bug, who doesn't particularly want to spend more time trying to understand how to be a girl. Besides, there's something more important to worry about: A ghost is haunting Bug's eerie old house in rural Vermont...and maybe haunting Bug in particular. As Bug begins to untangle the mystery of who this ghost is and what they're trying to say, an altogether different truth comes to light--Bug is transgender.

Download or read book Promise Not to Tell written by Jennifer McMahon and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “McMahon unfurls a whirlwind of suspense...Combining murder mystery and coming-of-age tale with supernatural elements, this taut novel is above all a reflection on the haunting power of memory.” –Entertainment Weekly A woman’s past and present collide in terrifying ways in this explosive debut by New York Times bestselling author Jennifer McMahon. Forty-one-year-old school nurse Kate Cypher has returned home to rural Vermont to care for her mother, who's afflicted with Alzheimer's. On the night she arrives, a young girl is murdered—a horrific crime that eerily mirrors another from Kate's childhood. Three decades earlier, her dirt-poor friend Del—shunned and derided by classmates as "Potato Girl"—was brutally slain. Del's killer was never found, while the victim has since achieved immortality in local legends and ghost stories. Now, as this new murder investigation draws Kate irresistibly in, her past and present collide in terrifying, unexpected ways. Because nothing is quite what it seems . . . and the grim specters of her youth are far from forgotten. More than just a murder mystery, Jennifer McMahon's extraordinary debut novel, Promise Not to Tell, is a story of friendship and family, devotion and betrayal—tautly written, deeply insightful, beautifully evocative, and utterly unforgettable.

Download or read book The Summoning written by Kelley Armstrong and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Terrifying ghosts, smatterings of gore and diverse teen voices will prompt young adults to pick up the next in this series.' - Kirkus Reviews, starred review 'Action, danger, supernatural secrets, and a hint of romance--Armstrong's world is one in which trusting the wrong person can have dire consequences. You'll be desperate for a sequel.' - Melissa Marr All Chloe Saunders wants is a life like any normal teenager - the chance to get through school, make friends, and maybe meet a boy. But when she starts seeing ghosts, she knows that life will never be normal again. Soon ghosts are everywhere, demanding her attention. When Chloe finally breaks down, she's admitted to a group home for disturbed kids. At first Lyle House seems okay, but as she gets to know the other patients - charming Simon and his ominous, unsmiling brother Derek; obnoxious Tori; and Rae, who has a 'thing' for fire - Chloe begins to realise that something strange and sinister binds them all together, and it isn't your usual 'problem kid' behaviour. And they're about to discover that Lyle House is not your usual group home, either . . . The first book in the Darkest Powers trilogy - the first YA series by #1 bestselling author Kelley Armstrong. Books by Kelley Armstrong: Women of the Otherworld series Bitten Stolen Dime Store Magic Industrial Magic Haunted Broken No Humans Involved Personal Demon Living with the Dead Frost Bitten Walking the Witch Spellbound Thirteen Nadia Stafford Exit Strategy Made to be Broken Wild Justice Rockton City of the Lost A Darkness Absolute This Fallen Prey Watcher in the Woods Alone in the Wild Darkest Powers The Summoning The Awakening The Reckoning Otherworld Tales Men of the Otherworld Tales of the Otherworld Otherworld Nights Otherworld Secrets Otherworld Chills Darkness Rising The Gathering The Calling The Rising Cainsville Omens Visions Deceptions Betrayals Rituals

Download or read book Another World written by Pat Barker and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1999-07-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 'Gripping in the best, most exquisite sense of the word' Mail on Sunday 'Utterly compelling... She is a novelist who probes deep, revealing what people prefer to keep hidden' Scotsman 'Extraordinary... Without question the best novel I have read this year' Daily Mail 'Brilliant touches of observation, an unfailing ear for dialogue... This is a novel that doesn't allow you to miss a sentence' New York Times Book Review At 101 years old, Geordie, a proud Somme veteran, lingers painfully through the days before his death. His grandson Nick is anguished to see this once-resilient man haunted by the ghosts of the trenches and the horror surrounding his brother's death. But in Nick's family home the dark pressures of the past also encroach on the present. As he and his wife Fran try to unite their uneasy family of step- and half-siblings, the discovery of a sinister Victorian drawing reveals the murderous history of their house and casts a violent shadow on their lives...

Download or read book Haunting Experiences written by Diane Goldstein and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2007-09-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.

Download or read book Embers written by Laura Bickle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book in the thrilling fantasy series about arson investigator Anya Kalinczyk, the fires she fights and the demons she hunts. Truth burns. Unemployment, despair, anger—visible and invisible unrest feed the undercurrent of Detroit’s unease. A city increasingly invaded by phantoms now faces a malevolent force that further stokes fear and chaos throughout the city. Anya Kalinczyk spends her days as an arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department, and her nights pursuing malicious spirits with a team of eccentric ghost hunters. Anya—who is the rarest type of psychic medium, a Lantern—suspects a supernatural arsonist is setting blazes to summon a fiery ancient entity that will leave the city in cinders. By Devil’s Night, the spell will be complete, unless Anya—with the help of her salamander familiar and the paranormal investigating team—can stop it. Anya’s accustomed to danger and believes herself inured to loneliness and loss. But this time she’s risking everything: her city, her soul, and a man who sees and accepts her for everything she is. Keeping all three safe will be the biggest challenge she’s ever faced.