Download or read book Molly written by Blake Butler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century. Blake Butler has changed the world of language with his mind-melting literary thrillers, and now he brings his abilities to bear on the emotional world. "Terrifyingly intense and eerily spiritual ...The best book I’ve read this year." —LOS ANGELES TIMES "A powerfully sad book ... Writers are often praised as 'fearless,' but Butler is not. In Molly, he makes fear his companion. That is the only way to write, and to live." —THE NEW YORKER "Shattering ... The result is a brutal yet beautiful look at the ravages of mental illness and the complexities of grief." —PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY “I’m not sure I’ve ever been so totally consumed by any book—the way I was by Molly.” —INTERVIEW "The most immediate feeling of life I've ever had reading a book—a life lived at the desk and out in the world, a life of openness and secrets. "Make art for me," Molly wrote to Blake. "I will read it all." I breathed along with every word." —PATRICIA LOCKWOOD "How to praise a book of such wounded beauty as Blake Butler's phenomenal Molly? The same way one would a life lost early: with love and sincerity and anger and wonder and lithely elegant and observant insights that remind us and inspire us, as Butler precisely does, to live and to love ourselves." —JOHN D'AGATA "Molly is a brilliant and brutal book. Blake Butler fearlessly takes on love and grief and the mysteries of this world and the next." —EMMA CLINE "A dark miracle—actual evidence that what we can never know, what we could never imagine about the one we love, is what binds us to them, beyond death." —MICHAEL W. CLUNE "I was gripped from the start by this memoir's urgent honesty. Blake Butler turned a story that was almost unspeakable into a narrative at once brutal and loving, broken and solid." —CATHERINE LACEY Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents. Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was. A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love. Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.

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 NDA An Autofiction Anthology written by Arata and published by Archway Editions. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting new anthology of autofiction featuring a wide range of today's best writers, both established and up-and-coming. Collected autofictions from mainstays of literary art and internet avant-garde writing. The contributors in this anthology produce a contemporary, subversive primer of works engaging the relationship between the writer and the text. Featuring: Aiden Arata Nathan Dragon David Fishkind Aristilde Kirby Tao Lin Chris Molnar Vi Khi Nao Elle Nash Gina Nutt Brad Phillips Sam Pink Darina Sikmashvilli BR Yeager

Download or read book Conceptualisms written by Steve Tomasula and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anyone who looks beyond the bestseller lists can see that the literary landscape outside its commercial walls is just as varied as that of visual art, just as wild, just as conceptual: novels in the form of dioramas, narratives read through virtual-reality glasses, or told as a series of tweets, stories told as recipes, poems in skywriting, genetic code, pixels, skin-as well as print and sound. The 100+ prose works and poems that make up Conceptualisms all have the strangeness authors have always given ordinary speech in order to transform it into literature. In fact, this strangeness, or unfamiliarity, may be the very core of what makes writing literature, and pushed to its boundaries, what makes literature conceptual. Experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, anti- or new literature.... Across the years, a variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry and hybrid writing that, like conceptual visual art, foregrounds its ideas, explores new forms, challenges mainstream writing traditions, strives for ways to speak to the present. Along with whatever else they do, they ask, Why isn't this also literature?-and keep the boundaries of literature flexible and unresolved. Now, for the first time, here is an anthology that offers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century. The first major anthology of this other tradition, Conceptualisms presents writing by over 90 authors, across three generations, representing a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to their subjects. Readers will recognize authors who have shaped the nature of contemporary writing, such Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. They'll also find authors, and responses to the canon, that they haven't yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live"--

Download or read book The Best Short Stories 2021 written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty prizewinning stories selected from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year—continuing the O. Henry Prize's century-long tradition of literary excellence. "Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction." —The Atlantic Monthly. Now entering its second century, the prestigious annual story anthology has a new title, a new look, and a new guest editor. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and young emerging voices. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Adichie, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. Featured in this collection: Daphne Palasi Andreades • David Means • Sindya Bhanoo • Crystal Wilkinson • Alice Jolly • David Rabe • Karina Sainz Borgo (translator, Elizabeth Bryer) • Jamel Brinkley • Tessa Hadley • Adachioma Ezeano • Anthony Doerr • Tiphanie Yanique • Joan Silber • Jowhor Ile • Emma Cline • Asali Solomon • Ben Hinshaw • Caroline Albertine Minor (translator, Caroline Waight) • Jianan Qian • Sally Rooney

Download or read book cokemachineglow Writing Around Music 2005 2015 written by Clayton Purdom and published by Archway Editions. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irreverent, cultishly adored, and dearly missed, the music writers at cokemachineglow produced some of the greatest, weirdest, funniest, sharpest criticism of the 21st century, and have gone on to write for major publications. In that sweet spot online before streaming and social media, people discovered music on blogs and webzines. A few have gone corporate, and nearly all the rest have disappeared. None are more missed than cokemachineglow - founded by a Canadian music writer in 2002, it grew to encompass a motley crew of brilliant, idiosyncratic writers and draw an intense readership of music fans. These critics have now published books and written for outlets like The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Guardian, Village Voice, Film Comment, Pitchfork, Esquire and GQ, among many other accomplishments, but there's never been - and never will be - another masthead so beloved and anarchic, writing that isn't just describing music but creating a culture, a narrative, a way of speaking that is hugely influential in how we hear, talk and tweet online. Featuring a brand new introductory essay by editor Clayton Purdom.

Download or read book We Wrote in Symbols written by Selma Dabbagh and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a little-known secret that Arabic literature has a long tradition of erotic writing. Behind that secret lies another – that many of the writers are women. We Wrote in Symbols celebrates the works of 75 of these female writers of Arab heritage who articulate love and lust with artistry and skill. Here, a wedding night takes an unexpected turn beneath a canopy of stars; a woman on the run meets her match in a flirtatious encounter at Dubai Airport; and a carnal awakening occurs in a Palestinian refugee camp. From a masked rendezvous in a circus, to meetings in underground bars and unmade beds, there is no such thing as a typical sexual encounter, as this electrifying anthology shows. Powerfully conveying the complexities and intrigues of desire, We Wrote in Symbols invites you to share these characters' wildest fantasies and most intimate moments. 'Fierce, captivating, revolutionary. A dazzling collection that will win hearts and change minds.'- Elif Shafak 'These voices are furious, witty, outrageous, tender and entranced. This collection offers much delightful entertainment and fresh perspectives on women and sex in the Middle East.'- Marina Warner

Download or read book Inside Story written by Martin Amis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An autobiographical novel that’s a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die—from “the Mick Jagger of literature ... Amis is the most dazzling prose stylist in post-war British fiction” (The Daily Telegraph). “[A] charismatic compound of fact and fiction ... Martin Amis has retained the power to surprise.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books, and where to lunch), Hitch was Amis's wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps—an obsession Amis must somehow put behind him if he is ever to find love, marriage, a plausible run at happiness. Other figures competing as Amis's main influencers are his literary fathers—Kingsley, of course; his hero Saul Bellow; the weirdly self-finessing poet Philip Larkin—and his significant literary mothers, including Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Moving among these greats to set his own path, he winds up surveying the horrors of the twentieth century, and the still-unfolding impact of the 9/11 attacks on the twenty-first—and considers what all of this has taught him about how to live and how to be a writer. The result is a love letter to life—and to the people in his life—that achieves a new level of confidentiality with his readers, giving us the previously unseen portrait of his extraordinary world.

Download or read book Ideal Suggestions written by Selah Saterstrom and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Film. Religion & Spirituality. How does one participate (read and write) from within the membranous precinct between our multiple bodies, from within the larger rhizomic field of resonances, where much is sounding and also unsounded? By employing various "divinatory generators" (instructions, methods, trances), the essays in IDEAL SUGGESTIONS: ESSAYS IN DIVINATORY POETICS genuflect to practices that celebrate engagement with uncertainty while cultivating strategies through which one might collaborate with both rupture and rapture.

Download or read book Be My Guest written by CONRAD AUTOR HILTON and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1984 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Archways 1 written by Chris Molnar and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archway Editions is the brand new imprint of powerHouse Books, and a literary complement to their trailblazing photography and illustrated publications, all distributed by Simon & Schuster. Our mission statement is "to publish the finest authors, at all stages of their careers, who write material which is at odds with the prevailing status quo, both legendary and emerging." We are genre-blind with a goal to publish unconventional books for the widest possible audience. This includes writers with long careers like Alice Notley, Ishmael Reed and Paul Schrader, but also young writers who need a place to show off their stuff and meet likeminded literati. Archways is the in-house reading series that takes place every few months at POWERHOUSE Arena, our bookstore in downtown Brooklyn across from the Manhattan Bridge archway. It's our home base and a place for authors to present incredible work out of the mainstream. Some we end up publishing (like Gabriel Kruis' instant classic Acid Virga, excerpted here), and each one is a vital new voice working at odds with a complacent and hidebound publishing industry. Every Archways features a limited edition zine of works read at the event. This anthology collects work from the first three readings, held in 2019 and 2020. Every event has a visual component, and we've shared some stills and photos from our incredible visual artists too. There's nothing quite like the high wire tension of a live reading - but this'll have to do for now. CONTRIBUTORS include: Rachel Allen, Phil Anderson, Brendan Burdzinski, Naomi Falk, Katie Foster, Andrew Gibeley, Ariel Francisco, Kelly Gallagher, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Gabriel Kruis, Shayla Lawz, Etan Nechin, Kwame Opoku-Duku, Chunbum Park, Joseph Rathgeber, Nicolas Rys, Bud Smith, Andrea Stella, and Shy Watson.

Download or read book Leave Society written by Tao Lin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Taipei, a bold portrait of a writer working to balance all his lives—artist, son, loner—as he spins the ordinary into something monumental. An engrossing, hopeful novel about life, fiction, and where the two blur together. In 2014, a novelist named Li leaves Manhattan to visit his parents in Taipei for ten weeks. He doesn't know it yet, but his life will begin to deepen and complexify on this trip. As he flies between these two worlds--year by year, over four years--he will flit in and out of optimism, despair, loneliness, sanity, bouts of chronic pain, and drafts of a new book. He will incite and temper arguments, uncover secrets about nature and history, and try to understand how to live a meaningful life as an artist and a son. But how to fit these pieces of his life together? Where to begin? Or should he leave society altogether? Exploring everyday events and scenes--waiting rooms, dog walks, family meals--while investigatively venturing to the edges of society, where culture dissolves into mystery, Lin shows what it is to write a novel in real time. Illuminating and deeply felt, as it builds toward a stunning, if unexpected, romance, Leave Society is a masterly story about life and art at the end of history. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

Download or read book The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories written by Sam Pink and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Pink is a keen observer of the culture of minimum-wage jobs and low-rent studio apartments that is the reality of life for all those who don't find a cog space in today’s hyper-capitalist economy.” —The Guardian Cone dealer, sunshine stealer, alleyway counselor, lunch lady to the homeless, friend to the dead, maker of sandwiches. Metal wrangler. Stag among stags. And so it goes—another journey through time spent punched in. A life's work of working for a living. Blood, death, and violence. Dirty dishes, dead roaches, and sparkler-lit nights. Nights ahead and no real fate. So open your mouths because the forecast calls for sprinkles. Thirteen delights, scooped and served. Let it melt down your hand. Let the sun burn your face. It's the ice cream man, and other stories.

Download or read book Self Representation in an Expanded Field written by Ace Lehner and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defined as a self-image made with a hand-held mobile device and shared via social media platforms, the selfie has facilitated self-imaging becoming a ubiquitous part of globally networked contemporary life. Beyond this selfies have facilitated a diversity of image making practices and enabled otherwise representationally marginalized constituencies to insert self-representations into visual culture. In the Western European and North American art-historical context, self-portraiture has been somewhat rigidly albeit obliquely defined, and selfies have facilitated a shift regarding who literally holds the power to self-image. Like self-portraits, not all selfies are inherently aesthetically or conceptually rigorous or avant-guard. But, –as this project aims to do address via a variety of interdisciplinary approaches– selfies have irreversibly impacted visual culture, contemporary art, and portraiture in particular. Selfies propose new modes of self-imaging, forward emerging aesthetics and challenge established methods, they prove that as scholars and image-makers it is necessary to adapt and innovate in order to contend with the most current form of self-representation to date. The essays gathered herein will reveal that in our current moment it is necessary and advantageous to consider the merits and interventions of selfies and self-portraiture in an expanded field of self-representations. We invite authors to take interdisciplinary global perspectives, to investigate various sub-genres, aesthetic practices, and lineages in which selfies intervene to enrich the discourse on self-representation in the expanded field today.

Download or read book Piccadilly Jim written by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse and published by McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart. This book was released on 1917 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Famous Hermits written by Stacy Szymaszek and published by Archway Editions. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Famous Hermits, Stacy Szymaszek departs from the annual journal form of her past three books yet still adheres to the belief that the potential for revelatory and revolutionary transformation exists in the power we have, when we claim autonomy, to organize the fabric of our day to day lives. The latest work from poet STACY SZYMASZEK, author of A YEAR FROM TODAY. In Famous Hermits, her sixth full-length poetry collection, Stacy Szymaszek departs from the annual journal form of her past three books yet still adheres to the belief that the potential for revelatory and revolutionary transformation exists in the power we have, when we claim autonomy, to organize the fabric of our day to day lives. Her New York City is present as a memory that interjects its expectations onto new Western and Southwestern landscapes that don't recognize its logic. The concept of the famous hermit is born out of a desire to experience integrity, to not go forgotten, yet with a fierce need to separate from liberal ideas of what poetry should publicly perform. She invokes other kindred artists such as Dante, Bob Kaufman, Tina Modotti, and Jean Seberg as guides as she writes her own statements of renunciation and ultimately of middle-aged self-love. The poems in Famous Hermits take surface narrative and give it deep glide, that deeper dive that happens when you approach the world as your confidante. Within a few lines, Stacy Szymaszek interlaces eons worth of intricate history to galvanize a poet's hangout — "I writhe / I am a human I think." There is tenderness in the assimilation of being human, to write the savage heart with a poet's restraint. In these pages, Basho meets the collective aporia — "my body takes me on a ride / I effloresce" — to enter a synesthetic space, where each allegory is its own parsed quench. Szymaszek shows her mastery of line and form by encapsulating cinematic propulsions that glint, in a flash, to then come back to our daily dialogue. Infiltrating cohesion with density, and a razor sharp wit, the poet's "elite city" appears as a temporal embrace in the heat of a desert, an emodiment of our migratory needs. What do we hold back, that may emote us, to enter, with simultaneity, our understanding of each other—of people, of poem—where all entrances are lived, all recollected stanzas othered? This richly focused collection explores our diurnal awakenings as cognitive planes, where each grouping of text is a radial entity, a hermetic investigation of a poet's walk. —Edwin Torres, The Body In Language: An Anthology (ed)

Download or read book Essays and Fictions written by Brad Phillips and published by . This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short stories about drugs and sex that blur the lines of reality and fiction