Download or read book Last Looks Last Books written by Helen Vendler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern American poets writing in the face of death In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.
Download or read book Last Looks written by Howard Michael Gould and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE! A razor-sharp, exquisitely paced, madly fun debut thriller that gleefully lampoons Hollywood culture and introduces the highly eccentric yet brilliant ex-detective gone rogue: Charlie Waldo There are run-of-the-mill eccentric Californians, and then there's former detective Charlie Waldo. Waldo, a onetime LAPD superstar, now lives in solitude deep in the woods, pathologically committed to owning no more than one hundred possessions. He has left behind his career and his girlfriend, Lorena, to pay self-imposed penance for an awful misstep on a pivotal murder case. But the old ghosts are about to come roaring back. There are plenty of difficult actors in Hollywood, and then there's Alastair Pinch. Alastair is a onetime Royal Shakespeare Company thespian who now slums it as the "wise" Southern judge on a tacky network show. He's absurdly rich, often belligerent, and typically drunk—a damning combination when Alastair's wife is found dead on their living room floor and he can't remember what happened. Waldo's old flame Lorena, hiding peril of her own, draws him toward the case, and Alastair's greedy network convinces Waldo to take it on. But after such a long time away from both civilization and sleuthing—and plagued by a confounding array of assailants who want him gone—Waldo must navigate complicated webs of ego and deceit to clear Alastair's name...or confirm his guilt.
Download or read book Last Look written by Mariah Stewart and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2007-05-29 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author Mariah Stewart comes a novel of sexy romantic suspense for fans of Nora Roberts, Catherine Coulter, and Karen Robards. THE TRUTH WON’T STAY BURIED. News that the body of a recently murdered prostitute–stabbed repeatedly and dumped on Georgia’s Shelter Island–has been identified as Shannon Randall stuns the FBI, particularly special agent Dorsey Collins. Twenty-four years ago, nineteen-year-old Eric Louis Beale was convicted and later executed for Shannon’ s murder–and the agent in charge of the case was Dorsey’s father. Now Dorsey is determined to find out where her father’s investigation went wrong, what part he played in the death of an innocent man, and where Shannon has been all this time. The heat is on FBI special agent Andrew Shields to discover what happened to Shannon on that night decades ago–to find out who killed her and why. Dorsey shadows Andrew’s every investigative move, hoping to redeem her father’s reputation and capture a cunning killer. Together, Dorsey and Andrew unravel a shocking mystery that will shatter one family and rock an entire town. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Mariah Stewart's Last Words.
Download or read book A Scattering of Salts written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 1995 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of poetry in which the author transforms autobiographical insights and experiences into profound meditations on life and the world around him.
Download or read book Last Look written by Charles Burns and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true graphic milestone: the epic trilogy that began with X'ed Out, continued in The Hive, and concluded in Sugar Skull—now in one volume. The long strange trip of Doug in all its mind-bending, heartbreaking totality. The fragments of the past collide with the reality of the present, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality, and when you finally find out where all of this has been going, and what it means . . . it will make you go right back to the first page and read it all again with new eyes. Just like Doug. (With full-color illustrations throughout)
Download or read book Below the Line written by Howard Michael Gould and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eccentric private eye Charlie Waldo is back in another wildly fun and fast-paced thriller lampooning Southern California. Former LAPD detective Charlie Waldo was living in solitude deep in the woods, pathologically committed to owning no more than one hundred possessions, until his PI ex-girlfriend Lorena dragged him back to civilization to solve a high-profile Hollywood murder. Now Waldo and Lorena have their hands full with a new client, a wild and privileged L.A. teenager named Stevie Rose who tells lies as easily as she breathes. When the teacher Stevie claims seduced her turns up dead, the LAPD pegs her as the prime suspect. Then Stevie disappears, and her self-involved Hollywood parents turn to Waldo to find her—a task that draws him down into Orange County’s dangerous and complex worlds, both opulent and seedy, where nothing is as it seems. With treachery and deception at every turn, and with Waldo’s eco-obsessed rules for living complicating his already complicated relationship with Lorena, Waldo fends off enemies old and new as he races to find Stevie and solve the murder.
Download or read book Misfits written by Michaela Coel and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the brilliant mind of Michaela Coel, creator and star of I May Destroy You and Chewing Gum and a Royal Society of Literature fellow, comes a passionate and inspired declaration against fitting in. When invited to deliver the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Michaela Coel touched a lot of people with her striking revelations about race, class and gender, but the person most significantly impacted was Coel herself. Building on her celebrated speech, Misfits immerses readers in her vision through powerful allegory and deeply personal anecdotes—from her coming of age in London public housing to her discovery of theater and her love for storytelling. And she tells of her reckoning with trauma and metamorphosis into a champion for herself, inclusivity, and radical honesty. With inspiring insight and wit, Coel lays bare her journey so far and invites us to reflect on our own. By embracing our differences, she says, we can transform our lives. An artist to her core, Coel holds up the path of the creative as an emblem of our need to regard one another with care and respect—and transparency. Misfits is a triumphant call for honesty, empathy and inclusion. Championing “misfits” everywhere, this timely, necessary book is a rousing coming-to-power manifesto dedicated to anyone who has ever worried about fitting in.
Download or read book On Whitman written by C. K. Williams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it—to explore why Whitman's epic "continues to inspire and sometimes daunt" him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.
Download or read book The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth century American Poetry written by Rita Dove and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2011 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, featuring Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, and many others.
Download or read book The Last Lecture written by Randy Pausch and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.
Download or read book Wallace Stevens written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this graceful book, Helen Vendler brings her remarkable skills to bear on a number of Stevens' short poems. She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also "words chosen out of desire."
Download or read book Kant s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write An Autobiography in Essays written by Claire Messud and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glimpse into a beloved novelist’s inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.” Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again "an absolute master storyteller" (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).
Download or read book The Summer Book written by Tove Jansson and published by Sort of Books. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating 50 years of Tove Jansson's classic, bestselling novel Featured in the BBC 2 Between the Covers Bookclub Special (Eurovision series 2023) 'Distils the essence of summer' Robert Macfarlane 'Magical, life-affirming' Elizabeth Gilbert The Worldwide Classic about a tiny island and larger love. An elderly artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself. Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own life and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of her adult novels. With a foreword by Esther Freud and an afterword by Sophia Jansson (on whom the child 'Sophia' is based) who returns to the island during the pandemic at the point of becoming a grandmother herself. Includes a 15pp epilogue by Tove's niece Sophia Jansson - the inspiration for 'Sophia' - on a personal and moving return to the island. 'Eccentric, funny, wise, full of joys and small adventures. This is a book for life.' Esther Freud 'Tove Jansson was a genius. This is a marvellous, beautiful, wise novel, which is also very funny.' Philip Pullman
Download or read book Lightning Strike written by William Kent Krueger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An instant New York Times bestseller, this prequel to the acclaimed Cork O’Connor series is “a pitch perfect, richly imagined story that is both an edge-of-your-seat thriller and an evocative, emotionally charged coming-of-age tale” (Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author) about fathers and sons, small-town conflicts, and the events that shape our lives forever. Aurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota’s Iron Lake. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O’Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown, his family, and himself. Cork’s father, Liam O’Connor, is Aurora’s sheriff and it is his job to confirm that the man’s death was the result of suicide, as all the evidence suggests. In the shadow of his father’s official investigation, Cork begins to look for answers on his own. Together, father and son face the ultimate test of choosing between what their heads tell them is true and what their hearts know is right. In this “brilliant achievement, and one every crime reader and writer needs to celebrate” (Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author), beloved novelist William Kent Krueger shows that some mysteries can be solved even as others surpass our understanding.
Download or read book The Last Leonardo written by Ben Lewis and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic quest exposes hidden truths about Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, the recently discovered masterpiece that sold for $450 million—and might not be the real thing. In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small oil painting the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction. In the words of its discoverer, the image of Christ as savior of the world is “the rarest thing on the planet.” Its $450 million sale price also makes it the world’s most expensive painting. For two centuries, art dealers had searched in vain for the Holy Grail of art history: a portrait of Christ as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. Many similar paintings of greatly varying quality had been executed by Leonardo’s assistants in the early sixteenth century. But where was the original by the master himself? In November 2017, Christie’s auction house announced they had it. But did they? The Last Leonardo tells a thrilling tale of a spellbinding icon invested with the power to make or break the reputations of scholars, billionaires, kings, and sheikhs. Ben Lewis takes us to Leonardo’s studio in Renaissance Italy; to the court of Charles I and the English Civil War; to Amsterdam, Moscow, and New Orleans; to the galleries, salerooms, and restorer’s workshop as the painting slowly, painstakingly emerged from obscurity. The vicissitudes of the highly secretive art market are charted across six centuries. It is a twisting tale of geniuses and oligarchs, double-crossings and disappearances, in which we’re never quite certain what to believe. Above all, it is an adventure story about the search for lost treasure, and a quest for the truth. Praise for The Last Leonardo “The story of the world’s most expensive painting is narrated with great gusto and formidably researched detail in Ben Lewis’s book. . . . Lewis’s probings of the Salvator’s backstory raise questions about its historical status and visibility, and these lead in turn to the fundamental question of whether the painting is really an autograph work by Leonardo.”—Charles Nicholl, The Guardian “As the art historian and critic Ben Lewis shows in his forensically detailed and gripping investigation into the history, discovery and sales of the painting, establishing the truth is like nailing down jelly.”— Michael Prodger, The Sunday Times
Download or read book The Given and the Made written by Helen Hennessy Vendler and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy, economics, and decision theory have long been dominated by the idea that rational choice consists of seeking or achieving one's own greatest good. "Beyond Optimizing" argues that our ordinary understanding of practical reason is more complex than this, and also that optimizing/maximizing views are inadequately supported by the considerations typically offered in their favor. Michael Slote challenges the long-dominant conception of individual rationality, which has to a large extent shaped the very way we think about the essential problems and nature of rationality, morality, and the relations between them. He contests the accepted view by appealing to a set of real-life examples, claiming that our intuitive reaction to these examples illustrates a significant and prevalent, if not always dominant, way of thinking. Slote argues that common sense recognizes that one can reach a point where "enough is enough," be satisfied with what one has, and, hence, rationally decline an optimizing alternative. He suggests that, in the light of common sense, optimizing behavior is often irrational. Thus, Slote is not merely describing an alternative mode of rationality; he is offering a rival theory. And the numerous parallels he points out between this common-sense theory of rationality and common-sense morality are then shown to have important implications for the long-standing disagreement between commonsense morality and utilitarian consequentialism. "Beyond Optimizing" is notable for its use of a much richer vocabulary of criticism than optimizing/maximizing models ever call upon. And it further argues that recent empirical investigations of the development of altruism and moral motivation need to be followed up by psychological studies of how moderation, and individual rationality more generally, take shape within developing individuals.
Download or read book No More Pencils No More Books No More Teacher s Dirty Looks written by Diane deGroat and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2006-04-25 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's the last day of school! Gilbert is excited about summer vacation, but first there's the class party, and Mrs. Byrd will give out the end-of-the-year awards. But will Gilbert even get one? Patty's the best speller. Philip's the best reader. What is Gilbert best at? Humorous and reassuring, this story by Diane deGroat perfectly captures the bittersweet emotions of the last day of school. As Gilbert's class says good-bye to Mrs. Byrd, she reminds each of them how special they really are. And that she will miss them very, very much!
