Download or read book Empty Words written by Mario Levrero and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A writer begins keeping a notebook of handwriting exercises hoping that, if he is able to improve his penmanship, he himself will also improve. What begins as a mere physical exercise is filled involuntarily with humorous reflections and tender anecdotes about living, writing, and the sense—or nonsense—of existence.

Download or read book Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge written by Peter Orner and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Orner zeroes in on the strange ways our memories define us: A woman's husband dies before their divorce is finalized; a man runs for governor of Illinois and loses much more than an election; two brothers play beneath the infamous bridge at Chappaquiddick. Employing the masterful compression for which he has been widely praised, Orner presents a kaleidoscope of individual lives viewed in startling, intimate close-up. Whether writing of Geraldo Rivera's attempt to reveal the contents of Al Capone's vault or of a father and daughter trying to outrun a hurricane, Orner illuminates universal themes. In stories that span considerable geographic ground -- from Chicago to Wyoming, from Massachusetts to the Czech Republic -- he writes of the past we can't seem to shake, the losses we can't make up for, and the power of our stories to help us reclaim what we thought was gone forever. "A ravishing collection, full of wisdom, grief, beauty, and especially surprise." -- Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collectors

Download or read book We Are Bridges written by Cassandra Lane and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this evocative memoir, Cassandra Lane deftly uses the act of imagination to reclaim her ancestors’ story as a backdrop for telling her own. The tradition of Black women’s storytelling leaps forward within these pages—into fresh, daring, and excitingly new territory." —Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According to Fannie Davis When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town. We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family—and considers how to take back one’s American story.

Download or read book Life in a Field written by Katie Peterson and published by Omnidawn. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time. A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson's slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California--with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn't wish for? A narrator's voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of "the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth."

Download or read book Yonder Stands Your Orphan written by Barry Hannah and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wildly colorful, darkly comic, and ultimately sinister tale of madness and murder” from the award-winning master of Southern fiction (Library Journal). “Set in a lake community in the vicinity of Vicksburg, Miss., the story revolves around a fellow named Man Mortimer, a thief, pimp and murderer—and those are his good qualities—who physically resembles the late country singer Conway Twitty. On his trail are Byron Egan, a somewhat reformed biker-turned-preacher and prophet, and Max Raymond, a former doctor who plays saxophone in a bar band and has an attractive Cuban wife who sings, sometimes for the band, sometimes nude in her backyard. Meanwhile, the young town sheriff, distrusted since he hails from the North, manages to shock even the most degenerate denizens of the area with his affair with a luscious 72-year-old widow. The plot is kaleidoscopic, with flashes and slashes of wonder, humor and the macabre expertly mixed…Reading today's fiction is too often like eating stale bread. With Hannah, just imagine your most mouthwatering meal, take a double helping and you've come close to the pleasure of reading this book.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Maddeningly brilliant…a stunning assemblage of characters: ruffians, high rollers, heartbroken lushes, prostitutes, bikers-turned-preachers, dead ringers, drug addicts, third-rate porn stars, lounge lizards…They do not so much interact as collide, like atomic particles in a cyclotron.”—The Hartford Courant “An electrifying prose style, memorable characters, plot lines laced with violence and absurdity, and humor as black as an Ace comb…an expert navigator of the back roads of the human heart.”—The Denver Post “Like moonshine whisky, [Hannah’s fiction] packs quite a wallop.”—The Wall Street Journal

Download or read book American Purgatory written by Rebecca Gayle Howell and published by eBook Partnership. This book was released on 2020-07-05 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Purgatory is a story of the working class, a dystopia set in a near-future United States marked by severe drought, herbicidal warfare, and a totalitarian climate of poverty. This purgatory is populated by those who believe if that they work hard enough, they will be set free. Against this backdrop, three unlikely characters begin a journey that will take them away from work, belief, and even each other, until the protagonist uncovers the truth about this place and the people in it-a truth that indeed sets her free. Equal parts Dante and Cormac McCarthy, American Purgatory is a coming-of-age for capitalism written in the decade of tea-party terror.AN INDIE BEST-SELLER!Winner of the 2016 Sexton Prize, selected for publication by Don Share

Download or read book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down written by Anne Fadiman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child.

Download or read book Agape Agape written by William Gaddis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-09-30 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.

Download or read book Fairyland written by Alysia Abbott and published by WW Norton. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to raucous parties, pushes her in front of the microphone at poetry readings, and introduces her to a world of artists, thinkers, and writers. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure. As a child Alysia views her father as a loving playmate who can transform the ordinary into magic, but as she gets older Alysia wants more than anything to fit in. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference. In Alysia’s teens, Steve’s friends—several of whom she has befriended—fall ill as AIDS starts its rampage through their community. While Alysia is studying in New York and then in France, her father tells her it’s time to come home; he’s sick with AIDS. Alysia must choose whether to take on the responsibility of caring for her father or continue the independent life she has worked so hard to create. Reconstructing their life together from a remarkable cache of her father’s journals, letters, and writings, Alysia Abbott gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic time in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father’s legacy and a daughter’s love.

Download or read book Bottomfeeder written by B. H. Fingerman and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man can go missing in New York City. A life can disappear, teeth can sharpen, skin gcan o pale, eyes can reject the sun. People can be human one day, a vampire the next. Set in the Gotham of prostitutes, junkies, and lonely hearts, "Bottomfeeder" tells the story of Philip, a smart-ass in a dead-end job, whose life takes an unusual turn after he tangles with a vampire. Now, spurred by a bloodlust stronger than his humanity, he haunts the abandoned streets alone, trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy while looking for prey. Like his entertaining, empathetic comics and graphic novels, "Bottomfeeder" displays Fingerman's unerring ear for dialogue and spot-on portrayal of New York's urban subculture -- drawn here in words rather than images -- that have won him legions of fans.

Download or read book For Other Ghosts written by Donald Edem Quist and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Troubled souls haunt these thirteen interrelated stories of loss and rebirth. From a cramped passenger van in Ghana to a cash-only roadside motel in Utah to a cursed forest in Japan, Donald Quist's narratives draw connections between the common and inexplicable. The diverse characters that people these stories are foreign and flawed but intimately familiar."--

Download or read book The Best of the Prose Poem written by Peter Johnson and published by White Pine Press (NY). This book was released on 2000 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its inception in 1992, 'The Prose Poem' has published work which even the writers themselves cannot define without restoring the metaphor. Russell Edson likens prose poems to 'cast iron aeroplanes that can actually fly', while Charles Simic states that writing them is like trying to catch a fly in a dark room. The fly probably isn't even there...You keep tripping over and bumping into things in hot pursuit. Nonetheless, Johnson knows a prose poem when he reads one. Better still, he recognises a good one and has included many of them here.

Download or read book Artforum written by César Aira and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One man's obsession with Artforum magazine takes us on a hilarious journey to the ultimate meaning of the very creation of art

Download or read book Prosthesis written by Ian Hatcher and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Ian Hatcher's PROSTHESIS is a poetry collection infused with the syntax of source code and the cadences of machinic speech, concerned with the question of where the apparatus ends and the body begins. Published by Poor Claudia along with a parallel set of recordings of performances by the author. "Flooded with voices not its own, with flows of information and code both seductive and alienating, the multitudinous 'I' speaking from within PROSTHESIS addresses us tenderly, beseechingly, grappling with felt loss, with immersive gain, both of which overwhelm as wave after wave of irreversible feedback expand the entrapping and enabling network, itself a prosthesis for us all." Stephanie Strickland "Ian Hatcher has always understood that there is no life or language without prosthesis, and he is wonderful in his ability to make prosthetic beauty in language, for us, his listening readers. Every day our language is being transfigured by processes and devices enjoined to us and running in our bodies, minds, and memories. Hatcher knows, feels, and makes these processes his writing." John Cayley "These test pattern/text pattern works perform their constructions/deconstructions of the communicative structures of contemporary poetic practice in acts of (un) making that are sensually rich and intellectually provocative. Be sure to look at these works and listen to Hatcher's performances to sense their timings and shaped rhythms, their staccato repetitions, combinatoric sequences, algorithmic arrays, and their elegant dissections of traditional poetic forms." Johanna Drucker"

Download or read book Song for Night written by Chris Abani and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Luck, a West African boy solider who has not spoken for three years, fights in a senseless war and embarks on a terrifying yet beautiful journey to find his lost platoon.

Download or read book Saturn Peach written by Lily Wang and published by . This book was released on 2020-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saturn Peach, Lily Wang establishes a distinctive voice that is part heartbreak and part wise witness chronicling the strangeness of a technologized world. When asked to describe her book, Wang answered in her quintessential way, "There are things I never want to know but always know. Every day I live with them. Every day I live. I am like a young fruit. Like a peach, common, not the popular kind but oblate, saturn. I live and inside me this pale fruit, yellow and white. I take bites out of myself and share them with you. Maybe you taste like me. Maybe you hold this fruit and become a tree." If ever there were a book that disarmingly - and seemingly effortlessly - encouraged its reader to become a metaphor, then Saturn Peach is it.

Download or read book Dope Menace written by Stephen J. Gertz and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lurid glories of twentieth-century pulp drug literature.