Download or read book Destroy All Monsters written by Jeff Jackson and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A wild roar of a novel . . . Writing about music is tricky. Ninety-nine percent of the time hearing the actual song or going to the actual concert is far more revealing than any paragraph describing it. But Jackson pulls off this near-impossible feat, pulling the reader past the velvet ropes into the black-box theaters and sweaty, sticky-floored stadiums." —Marisha Pessl, The New York Times Book Review An epidemic of violence is sweeping the country: musicians are being murdered onstage in the middle of their sets by members of their audience. Are these random copycat killings, or is something more sinister at work? Has music itself become corrupted in a culture where everything is available, everybody is a "creative," and attention spans have dwindled to nothing? With its cast of ambitious bands, yearning fans, and enigmatic killers, Destroy All Monsters tells a haunted and romantic story of overdue endings and unlikely beginnings that will resonate with anybody who’s ever loved rock and roll. Like a classic vinyl single, Destroy All Monsters has two sides, which can be read in either order. At the heart of Side A, “My Dark Ages,” is Xenie, a young woman who is repulsed by the violence of the epidemic but who still finds herself drawn deeper into the mystery. Side B, "Kill City," follows an alternate history, featuring familiar characters in surprising roles, and burrows deeper into the methods and motivations of the murderers. “At some point, I began to think of it as an ancient folk tale. It’s fine work, with a kind of scattered narrative set within a tight frame. Fast-moving throughout—fragile characters who suggest a bleak inner world made in their own collective image.” —Don DeLillo "Destroy All Monsters has a distinct pulse—a kind of heartbeat—that comes out of the rhythm of the prose, the inventiveness of the form, and the willingness of Jeff Jackson to engage the mysterious alchemy of violence, performance, and authenticity. This accomplished, uncanny novel is simultaneously seductive and unsettling." ?—Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and Eat the Document “Surges with new-century anxiety and paranoia . . . A clear-eyed, stone-cold vision of what’s to come.” —Ben Marcus “Jeff Jackson is one of contemporary American fiction’s most sterling and gifted new masters. Destroy All Monsters . . . is a wonder to behold.” —Dennis Cooper

Download or read book Sidewalks written by Valeria Luiselli and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2014-04-21 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grantland Book of the Year Vol. 1 Brooklyn, A Year of Favorites, Jason Diamond Book Riot, 2014’s Must-Read Books from Indie Presses "Valeria Luiselli is a writer of formidable talent, destined to be an important voice in Latin American letters. Her vision and language are precise, and the power of her intellect is in evidence on every page."—Daniel Alarcón "I'm completely captivated by the beauty of the paragraphs, the elegance of the prose, the joy in the written word, and the literary sense of this author."—Enrique Vilas-Matas Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky's tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the questions embedded in our human landscapes. Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her novel and essays have been translated into many languages and her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's. Some of her recent projects include a ballet performed by the New York City Ballet in Lincoln Center; a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London; and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. She lives in New York City.

Download or read book Nobody Is Ever Missing written by Catherine Lacey and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge. Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks. Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive? The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self.

Download or read book Praying Drunk written by Kyle Minor and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby.” —Daniel Handler The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture classmates, fall in love, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. Ranging from Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these stories enact the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout an untamable, turbulent world. Described as an author whose “voice lands somewhere between William Faulkner and Stephen King” (New Pages), Kyle Minor presents a dark, compelling collection of fiction showcasing the talent that has earned him multiple literary honors.

Download or read book Mr Splitfoot written by Samantha Hunt and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strange odysseys of two young women animate this “hypnotic and glowing” American gothic novel that blurs the line between the real and the supernatural (Gregory Maguire, The New York Times Book Review). A New York Times Editors’ Choice A Paris Review Staff Pick Ruth and Nat are seventeen. They are orphans living at The Love of Christ! Foster Home in upstate New York. And they may be able to talk to the dead. Enter Mr. Bell, a con man with mystical interests who knows an opportunity when he sees one. Together they embark on an unexpected journey that connects meteor sites, utopian communities, lost mothers, and a scar that maps its way across Ruth’s face. Decades later, Ruth visits her niece, Cora. But while Ruth used to speak to the dead, she now doesn’t speak at all. Even so, she leads Cora on a mysterious mission that involves crossing the entire state of New York on foot. Where is she taking them? And who—or what—is hidden in the woods at the end of the road? “[A] gripping novel…The narratives, which twist together into a shocking dénouement, are marked by ghost stories.”—The New Yorker

Download or read book Mira Corpora written by Jeff Jackson and published by . This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mira Corpora est le récit onirique, électrique et noir d'un jeune fugueur. Reprenant par bribes ses carnets intimes, on y suit un enfant déraciné, confronté très jeune à la cruauté et qu'une mère alcoolique dépassée par les événements ne parvient pas à contrôler. Seule la vision fugitive d'une petite fille derrière un rideau qui s'ouvre à la fenêtre d'en face parvient à le faire rêver. La vie en captivité devient alors impossible : ce sera la fuite, la plongée dans l'immensité du monde et sa solitude. Réfugié au coeur de la forêt parmi une colonie d'enfants livrés à eux-mêmes, il hante des parcs d'attractions abandonnés, s'adonne à d'étranges rituels adolescents avant de fuir les bois pour la ville où il lui faudra pour devenir adulte vivre en exil et affronter ses démons. Véritable poème en prose, Mira Corpora est un bouleversant et inquiétant conte moderne sur la rédemption et la possibilité d'être libre, une sorte d'anti-roman d'apprentissage, rock et violent.

Download or read book California written by Edan Lepucki and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they've left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable in the face of hardship and isolation. Mourning a past they can't reclaim, they seek solace in each other. But the tentative existence they've built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she's pregnant. Terrified of the unknown and unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realize this community poses dangers of its own. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust. A gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent, California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind's dark nature and deep-seated resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love. "In her arresting debut novel, Edan Lepucki conjures a lush, intricate, deeply disturbing vision of the future, then masterfully exploits its dramatic possibilities."-Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad

Download or read book Spanish Learner Corpus Research written by Margarita Alonso-Ramos and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-12-16 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to present a comprehensive picture of the current state of Spanish learner corpus research (SLCR), which makes it unique, since no other monograph has focused on collecting research dealing with learner corpora of any language other than English. In addition to an introductory appraisal of current SLCR, as well as a wake-up call reminding us that learner corpus design still needs to be improved, this volume features a selection of original studies ranging from general issues concerning learner corpora compilation to more specific aspects such as phonetic, lexical, grammatical and pragmatic features of the interlanguage of learners of Spanish, as reflected in corpus data. This volume will undoubtedly be of significant interest to researchers involved in corpus linguistics, second language acquisition research, as well as to professionals in the field of Spanish as a second language, including teachers, and creators and publishers of teaching materials.

Download or read book Purity Body and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature written by Mira Balberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-02-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis’ new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between one’s self and one’s body and, more broadly, the relations between one’s self and one’s human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.

Download or read book Jeff Jackson s Mira Corpora written by Jeff Jackson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the 'Best Books of 2013.' ?Slate, Flavorwire, Largehearted Boy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, LitReactor "To read Jeff Jackson's Mira Corpora is to enter into a trance state. A hypnotic, brutal, and lyric exploration of youth, trauma and the construction of memory, this novel is like nothing I've ever read before and is, unquestionably, one of my favorite books published this year." ?Laura van den Berg, Salon "A piercing howl of a book. Slyly seductive and utterly gripping ... [Jackson's] prose practically crackles and sparks. This punk coming-of-age story smolders long after the book is through." ?Slate "Style is pre-eminent in Jeff Jackson's eerie and enigmatic debut. The prose works like the expressionless masks worn by killers in horror films." ?Wall Street Journal "Episodic yet suspenseful, smeared with gutter detritus yet glittering with right-on apercus, the novel delivers both jolts to the spine and food for thought." ?Bookforum "A gutter punk Catcher in the Rye." ?Shelf Awareness "What's most compelling?and terrifying... is the originality and execution. [Mira Corpora] has a very cinematic quality to it, like the dreamscapes of a Lynch, or, better, a strange, filmic mash-up of Lord of the Flies, Demian, and House of Leaves, as directed by Harmony Korine." ?Impose "[A] mesmerizing debut, which reads like some cross between Bruno Schulz and the backstories of random characters from Penelope Spheeris' 1984 film Suburbia. It's the overarching sensibility that also puts Mira Corpora in a unique group of books that can only be dubbed Punk Lit. " ?Flavorwire "It's fine work in its manic pacing and its summoning of certain cultural emblems. Present tense with a vengeance. I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the face." ?Don DeLillo "Jeff Jackson is one of the most extraordinarily gifted young writers I've read in a very long time. His strangely serene yet gripping, unsettling, and beautifully rendered novel Mira Corpora has within it all the earmarks of an important new literary voice." ?Dennis Cooper Mira Corpora is the debut novel from acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson, an inspired, dreamlike adventure by a distinctive new talent. Literary and inventive, but also fast-paced and gripping, Mira Corpora charts the journey of a young runaway. A coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories, featuring a colony of outcast children, teenage oracles, amusement parks haunted by gibbons, mysterious cassette tapes, and a reclusive underground rockstar. With astounding precision, Jackson weaves a moving tale of discovery and self-preservation across a startling, vibrant landscape. Jeff Jackson holds an MFA from NYU and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award?winning Collapsable Giraffe company.

Download or read book Transitory written by Tobias Carroll and published by . This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Et Tu Babe written by Mark Leyner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fiendishly original new novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models -- which naturally revolve around him. Leyner's jet-propelled roller derby through the cultures of celebrity, cyberpunk, and rabid egotism is exhilaratingly bizarre, exhaustingly funny -- and you'd better hope it's just fiction.

Download or read book In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language written by Shlomo Izre'el and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the best way to analyze spontaneous spoken language? In their search for the basic units of spoken language the authors of this volume opt for a corpus-driven approach. They share a strong conviction that prosodic structure is essential for the study of spoken discourse and each bring their own theoretical and practical experience to the table. In the first part of the book they segment spoken material from a range of different languages (Russian, Hebrew, Central Pomo (an indigenous language from California), French, Japanese, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese). In the second part of the book each author analyzes the same two spoken English samples, but looking at them from different perspectives, using different methods of analysis as reflected in their respective analyses in Part I. This approach allows for common tendencies of segmentation to emerge, both prosodic and segmental.

Download or read book The Age of Disenchantments written by Aaron Shulman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An intriguing narrative of literary ambition and family dysfunction—betrayal, drug addiction, and madness—that begins during the Spanish Civil War.” —Amanda Vaill, The New York Times Book Review In this absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative, journalist Aaron Shulman takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain’s most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time—from Neruda to Salvador Dalí, from Ava Gardner to Pablo Picasso to Roberto Bolaño. Weaving memoir with cultural history and biography, and brought together with vivid storytelling and striking images, The Age of Disenchantments sheds new light on the romance and intellectual ferment of the era while revealing the profound and enduring devastation of the war, the Franco dictatorship, and the country’s transition to democracy. A searing tale of love and hatred, art and ambition, and freedom and oppression, The Age of Disenchantments is a chronicle of a family who modeled their lives (and deaths) on the works of art that most inspired and obsessed them and who, in turn, profoundly affected the culture and society around them. “A valuable primer on the ways literature intertwined with politics during Franco’s reign.” —Rigoberto González, Los Angeles Times “In this sweeping, ambitious debut, journalist Shulman offers a group biography of a family indelibly marked by the Spanish Civil War . . . Prodigiously researched and beautifully written.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Download or read book The Mandaean Book of John written by Charles G. Häberl and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic homelands by war and oppression. Today, they are a community in crisis, but they provide us with unparalleled access to a library of ancient Gnostic scriptures, as part of the living tradition that has sustained them across the centuries. Gnostic texts such as these have caught popular interest in recent times, as traditional assumptions about the original forms and cultural contexts of related religious traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have been called into question. However, we can learn only so much from texts in isolation from their own contexts. Mandaean literature uniquely allows us not only to increase our knowledge about Gnosticism, and by extension all these other religions, but also to observe the relationship between Gnostic texts, rituals, beliefs, and living practices, both historically and in the present day.

Download or read book Text Representation written by Ted Sanders and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-12-19 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together linguistics and psycholinguistics. Text representation is considered a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text production and text understanding. The focus is on referential and relational coherence and the role of linguistic characteristics as processing instructions from a text linguistic and discourse psychology point of view. Consequently, this book presents various research methodologies: linguistic analysis, text analysis, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, argumentation analysis, and the experimental psycholinguistic study of text processing. The authors compare, test, and evaluate linguistic and processing theories of text representation. A state of the art volume in an emerging field of interest, located at the very heart of our communicative behavior: the study of text and text representation.

Download or read book Electricity written by Ray Robinson and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel of a thirty-year-old epileptic woman and her estranged family is “mesmerizing . . . and unexpectedly tender” (Jim Crace, author of Harvest). Lily O’Connor lives with epilepsy, uncontrollable surges of electricity that leave her in a constant state of edginess. Prickly and practical, she’s learned to make do, to make the most of things, to look after—and out for—herself. Then her mother—whom Lily has not seen for years—dies, and Lily is drawn back into a world she thought she’d long since left behind. Reunited with her brother, a charismatic poker player, Lily pursues her own high-stakes gamble, leaving for London to track down her other, missing brother Mikey. In the pandemonium of the city, Lily’s seizures only intensify. As her journey takes her from her comfort zone, it leads her into the question of what her life is meant to be. “A wry, ingenuous, hugely compassionate heroine.” —The Guardian “A gritty tour of both London and the wrecked neurological pathways of epileptic Lily O’Connor. With equal parts hip misanthropy and sweet, clean-hearted sentiment, Ray Robinson convincingly channels the voice of a woman at war with the material world, for whom language itself arrives as a jarring shock to the brain.” —Jonathan Raymond, author of The Half-Life