Download or read book Ongoingness written by Sarah Manguso and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.” —The New Yorker In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary—it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. “Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict’s testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.” —The Paris Review “Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Download or read book 300 Arguments written by Sarah Manguso and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you. Bad art is from no one to no one. Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you whether you are. Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude. I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll escape the worst of it. —from 300 Arguments A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.

Download or read book The Two Kinds of Decay written by Sarah Manguso and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names. There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities. But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening. At twenty-one, just starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, vanishing and then returning, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her nine-year struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.

Download or read book The Guardians written by Sarah Manguso and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the author's elegiac ode to love, death, and intimate friendship that describes how her life was profoundly changed by the suicide of a mentally ill friend and roommate with whom she shared poignant formative experiences.

Download or read book The Captain Lands in Paradise written by Sarah Manguso and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2002-07-01 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Manguso’s first collection, a combination of verse and prose poems, explores love, nostalgia, remorse, and the joyful and mysterious preparation for the discoveries of new lands, selves, and ideas. The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.

Download or read book Later written by Paul Lisicky and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning portrait of community, identity, and sexuality by the critically acclaimed author of The Narrow Door When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of necessity: What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia? Later dramatizes a spectacular yet ravaged place and a unique era when more fully becoming one’s self collided with the realization that ongoingness couldn’t be taken for granted, and staying alive from moment to moment exacted absolute attention. Following the success of his acclaimed memoir, The Narrow Door, Lisicky fearlessly explores the body, queerness, love, illness, community, and belonging in this masterful, ingenious new book.

Download or read book Ongoingness 300 Arguments written by Sarah Manguso and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire.' Zadie Smith 'Jam-packed with insights you'll want to both text to your friends and tattoo on your skin' Celeste Ng A combined book of two daring works by Sarah Manguso, presented together in a rare reversible single edition. 300 ARGUMENTS Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages. 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms, but the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about writing, desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature. Lines you will underline, write in notebooks and read to the person sitting next to you, that will drift back into your mind as you try to get to sleep. '300 Arguments reads like you've jumped into someone's mind.' NPR ONGOINGNESS: THE END OF THE DIARY In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. ‘I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,’ she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary – it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us.

Download or read book The New Midlife Self Writing written by Emily O. Wittman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The New Midlife Self-Writing, Wittman treats recent self-writing by Rachel Cusk, Roxane Gay, Sarah Manguso, and Maggie Nelson, carefully situating these vital midlife works within the history of self-writing. She argues that they renew and redirect the autobiographical trajectories characteristic of earlier self-writing by switching their orientation to face the future and by celebrating midlife as a growing season, a time of Bildung. In each chapter, writer-by-writer, she demonstrates how the midlife self-writers in question trace confident and future-oriented paths through the past, rejecting triumphalism and complicating both identity and individualism, just as they refine and redefine genres. Exploring these midlife self-writers as chroniclers of Generation X’s midlife in particular, Wittman coins the term "digital absence" to map their unique relationship to new forms of knowledge and knowledge gathering in an Information Age that they are both of and set apart from. She theorizes that their works share a "pedagogical style," a style characterized by clarity, exposition, and classical rhetoric, as well as a concern with the classroom, offering a warrant for reading them in pedagogical terms in concert with traditional scholarly approaches. Furthermore, Wittman presents readers with a look ahead at the future of midlife self-writing as well as self-writing overall, concluding that we might be looking at the scholarship of the future.

Download or read book You Me Forever written by Valerie Hsiung and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Asian American Studies. With her second volume, Valerie Hsiung proves herself to be a poet of lyric's volatile possibility, detonating poetry's uncertain truce between reader and speaker, the deadly and the inconsequential, the profound and the profane. YOU & ME FOREVER performs a multitude of teetering voices through a multitude of tangency points--between the violence enacted against girl bodies and the violence enacted against earth, between inherited language or mother tongue and made/found language or acquired tongue, between the speaking machine and the transhuman, between the woman as artist and the woman as monster, between the horizontality of plain speech and the verticality of lyric fragments. In response, the reader's role fluctuates from direct addressee to participant, from chorus member to puppet master--all while the dark angel of the circus hovers above like a shadow on the page. "A storied, oscillating breath-scape, a wondrous tertium quid, Valerie Hsiung's YOU & ME FOREVER maps a world that moves as simultaneously paradoxical, relational, and permutational. Edged with the epic, speech-based and strange, the writings enact the promise of dreams as they address matters of hauntings and bodies, displacement, and the nature of capital, exile, and art. Here the narrative ripples, achieves both temporal and spatial possibilities, works both boundariness and dissolve. A destabilizing marvel."--Hoa Nguyen "The first time I read Valerie Hsiung's YOU & ME FOREVER, I had a vision of a bonfire in which countless volumes of love-twisted and love-twisting works of literature, including sculptures and films, were reduced to ash, and from the ashes were intuitively yet precisely drawn filaments on which were inscribed prophetic dialogues that voiced the poet's relationship with the forces that would come to make, and perpetually threaten to unmake, her world. The second time I read YOU & ME FOREVER, there was neither filament nor fire, but an animated frieze, or maybe rainfall or serrated light, of intimate retribution, that is retributive intimacy. I say read, but that is not the word that accurately describes what actually happened."--Brandon Shimoda

Download or read book Very Cold People written by Sarah Manguso and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The masterly debut novel from “an exquisitely astute writer” (The Boston Globe), about growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of small-town America. “Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”—The New York Times “Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend.”—The New Yorker ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping “My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.” For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield. As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.

Download or read book Appendix Project written by Kate Zambreno and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the ongoing project of writing about grief; Zambreno's addendum to Book of Mutter. “I came up with the idea of writing these notes, or talks, out of a primary desire to not read from Book of Mutter, and instead to keep gesturing to its incompleteness and ongoingness, which connects, for me, to the fragmentary project of literature, and what I long for in writing." —from Appendix Project Inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Kate Zambreno's Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, Zambreno's book on her mother that took her over a decade to write. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of her child's life, contain Zambreno's most original and dazzling thinking and writing to date. In Appendix Project Zambreno thinks through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

Download or read book Becoming a Professional written by Lesley Scanlon and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-27 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is founded on the idea that ‘becoming’ is the most useful defining concept for a new ‘professional’ class whose members understand that development in their working lives is an open-ended, lifelong process of refinement and learning. In a world where being a ‘professional’ is an increasingly indistinct notion and where better education and technology are challenging ‘professional’ norms, it is imperative that we no longer think in terms of an exclusive, ‘Anglo-American’, knowledge-rich class of workers. Exploring the implications of this insight for professions including nursing, teaching, social work, engineering and the clergy, this volume aims to encourage informed debate on what it means to be a ‘professional’ in this globalised 21st century. The book argues that ‘becoming’ a professional is a lifelong process in which individual professional identities are constructed through formal education, workplace interactions and popular culture. The book advocates the ‘ongoingness’ of developing a professional self throughout one’s professional life. What emerges is a concept of becoming a professional different from the isolated, rugged, individualistic approach to traditional professional practice as represented in popular culture. It is a book for the reflective professional.

Download or read book Little Labors written by Rivka Galchen and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In paperback at last: Rivka Galchen’s beloved baby bible—slyly hilarious, surprising, and absolutely essential reading for anyone who has ever had, held, or been a baby In this enchanting miscellany, Galchen notes that literature has more dogs than babies (and also more abortions), that the tally of children for many great women writers—Jane Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Patricia Highsmith, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Mavis Gallant—is zero, that orange is the new baby pink, that The Tale of Genji has no plot but plenty of drama about paternity, that babies exude an intoxicating black magic, and that a baby is a goldmine.

Download or read book Hunting by Stars A Marrow Thieves Novel written by Cherie Dimaline and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of The Marrow Thieves comes a thrilling new story about hope and survival that New York Times bestselling author Angeline Boulley called “a revelatory must-read” A 2022 American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book Years ago, when plagues and natural disasters killed millions of people, much of the world stopped dreaming. Without dreams, people are haunted, sick, mad, unable to rebuild. The government soon finds that the Indigenous people of North America have retained their dreams, an ability rumored to be housed in the very marrow of their bones. Soon, residential schools pop up—or are re-opened—across the land to bring in the dreamers and harvest their dreams. Seventeen-year-old French lost his family to these schools and has spent the years since heading north with his new found family: a group of other dreamers, who, like him, are trying to build and thrive as a community. But then French wakes up in a pitch-black room, locked in and alone for the first time in years, and he knows immediately where he is—and what it will take to escape. Meanwhile, out in the world, his found family searches for him and dodges new dangers—school Recruiters, a blood cult, even the land itself. When their paths finally collide, French must decide how far he is willing to go—and how many loved ones is he willing to betray—in order to survive. This engrossing, action-packed, deftly-drawn novel expands on the world of Cherie Dimaline’s award-winning The Marrow Thieves, and it will haunt readers long after they’ve turned the final page.

Download or read book The Crying Book written by Heather Christle and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears—exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended. . . A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book." —Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias "Spellbinding and propulsive—the map of a luminous mind in conversation with books, songs, friends, scientific theories, literary histories, her own jagged joy, and despair. Heather Christle is a visionary writer." —Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review). Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

Download or read book The Book of Disquiet The Complete Edition written by Fernando Pessoa and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time—and in the best translation ever—the complete Book of Disquiet, a masterpiece beyond comparison The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An “autobiography” or “diary” containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa’s entire writing life.

Download or read book Axiomatic written by Maria Tumarkin and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology--the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough. Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is a boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, reportage and meditation. It takes as its starting point five axioms: 'Time Heals All Wounds'; 'History Repeats Itself'; 'Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It'; 'Give Me a Child Before the Age of Seven and I Will Show You the Woman'; and 'You Can't Enter The Same River Twice.' These beliefs--or intuitions--about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live.