Download or read book Self Portrait with Ghost written by Meng Jin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A knockout short story collection...Each one of these 10 dizzyingly immersive stories offers up a heady and visceral portrait of what ails us, from isolation and self-doubt, to unrequited love and regret over what might have been, to what it means to be (and to be considered) an American." -- San Francisco Chronicle Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories. Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power. Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).
Download or read book Self Portrait with Boy written by Rachel Lyon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-09-12 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Lyon's first novel – soon to be made into a major motion picture starring Zoë Kravitz and Thomasin McKenzie Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, and worrying that the crumbling warehouse she lives in is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. Until, by pure chance, Lu discovers she’s captured a tragedy in the background of a self portrait; a boy falling to his death. The photograph turns out to be the best work of art she’s ever made. It’s an image that could change her life – if she lets it. Set in early 90s Brooklyn on the brink of gentrification, Self-Portrait with Boy is a provocative commentary about the emotional dues that must be paid on the road to success. ‘Beautifully imagined and flawlessly executed’ Joyce Carol Oates ‘A sparkling debut’ New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Self Portrait in Green written by Marie NDiaye and published by Influx Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.
Download or read book Self Portraits Fictions written by Frederic Tuten and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the stories the author read to his possibly illiterate Sicilian grandmother as a child, these nested narratives are told by couples traveling through hallucinatory, romantic landscapes. As the traveler in "Self Portrait with Sicily" rides a train through the Bronx, boundaries between worlds, geography, and generations blur, transporting him through Sicily and the rural landscape of his Nonna. On a honeymoon in Spain, the narrator of "Self Portrait with Bullfight" decides that "forbearance" is the key to a lasting marriage and proceeds to try the patience of his new bride with a long-winded tale of the "frisson of rivalry" between two youths vying for the attentions of a Gypsy woman. In "Self Portrait with Cheese," an allegory about a family of bears that flees the circus only to languish, bored, in their freedom, offers a convoluted fable about the needs of artists. Tuten's (The Green Hour) polished stories of beauty, longing, and loss are relatable, yet strange enough that they constantly pique--Publisher's Weekly.
Download or read book The Ghost and the Haunted Portrait written by Cleo Coyle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bookshop owner Penelope Thornton-McClure and her gumshoe ghost team up to solve the stunning mystery at the heart of a madwoman’s self-portrait in this all new installment from New York Times bestselling author Cleo Coyle. While gathering a collection of vintage book cover paintings for a special event in her quaint Rhode Island bookshop, Penelope discovers a spooky portrait of a beautiful woman, one who supposedly went mad, according to town gossip. Seymour, the local mailman, falls in love with the haunting image and buys the picture, refusing to part with it, even as fatal accidents befall those around it. Is the canvas cursed? Or is something more sinister at work? For answers, Pen turns to an otherworldly source: Jack Shepard, PI. Back in the 1940s, Jack cracked a case of a killer cover artist, and (to Pen’s relief) his spirit is willing to help her solve this mystery, even if he and his license did expire decades ago.
Download or read book Little Gods written by Meng Jin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD “Compellingly complex…Expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review Combining the emotional resonance of Home Fire with the ambition and innovation of Asymmetry, a lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel that explores the complex web of grief, memory, time, physics, history, and selfhood in the immigrant experience, and the complicated bond between daughters and mothers. On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement. A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.
Download or read book The Girl with Ghost Eyes written by M. H. Boroson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Girl with Ghost Eyes is a fun, fun read. Martial arts and Asian magic set in Old San Francisco make for a fresh take on urban fantasy, a wonderful story that kept me up late to finish.” —#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs It’s the end of the nineteenth century in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and ghost hunters from the Maoshan traditions of Daoism keep malevolent spiritual forces at bay. Li-lin, the daughter of a renowned Daoshi exorcist, is a young widow burdened with yin eyes—the unique ability to see the spirit world. Her spiritual visions and the death of her husband bring shame to Li-lin and her father—and shame is not something this immigrant family can afford. When a sorcerer cripples her father, terrible plans are set in motion, and only Li-lin can stop them. To aid her are her martial arts and a peachwood sword, her burning paper talismans, and a wisecracking spirit in the form of a human eyeball tucked away in her pocket. Navigating the dangerous alleys and backrooms of a male-dominated Chinatown, Li-lin must confront evil spirits, gangsters, and soulstealers before the sorcerer’s ritual summons an ancient evil that could burn Chinatown to the ground. With a rich and inventive historical setting, nonstop martial arts action, authentic Chinese magic, and bizarre monsters from Asian folklore, The Girl with Ghost Eyes is also the poignant story of a young immigrant searching to find her place beside the long shadow of a demanding father and the stigma of widowhood. In a Chinatown caught between tradition and modernity, one woman may be the key to holding everything together. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
Download or read book Riding with the Ghost written by Justin Taylor and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unflinching memoir from a writer reckoning with his relationship with his troubled father and the complicated legacy that each generation hands down to the next “Justin Taylor’s relentless, peripatetic, and tender search for reconciliation with his late troubled father blooms into a full-throated song of joy about his own life lived through music, teaching, travel, and literature.”—Lauren Groff, author of Florida NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS When Justin Taylor was thirty, his father, Larry, drove to the top of the Nashville airport parking garage to take his own life. Thanks to the intervention of family members, he was not successful, but the incident forever transformed how Taylor thinks of his father, and how he thinks of himself as a son. Moving back and forth in time from that day, Riding with the Ghost captures the past’s power to shape, strengthen, and distort our visions of ourselves and one another. We see Larry as the middle child in a chilly Long Island family; as a beloved Little League coach who listens to kids with patience and curiosity; as an unemployed father struggling to keep his marriage together while battling long-term illness and depression. At the same time, Taylor explores how the work of confronting a family member’s story forces a reckoning with your own. We see Taylor as a teacher, modeling himself after his dad’s best qualities; as a caregiver, attempting to provide his father with emotional and financial support, but not always succeeding; as a new husband, with a dawning awareness of his own depressive tendencies. With raw intimacy, Riding with the Ghost lays bare the joys and burdens of loving a troubled family member. It’s a memoir about fathers and sons, teachers and students, faith and illness, and the pieces of our loved ones that we carry with us always.
Download or read book Self Portrait with Nothing written by Aimee Pokwatka and published by Tordotcom. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Aimee Pokwatka's novel Self-Portrait with Nothing is "fraught and deeply moving...the work of a genuinely exciting new talent." (Booker Prize winner, George Saunders). If a picture paints a thousand worlds... Abandoned as an infant on the local veterinarian's front porch, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two loving mothers, and now at thirty-six is married to the stable, supportive Ike. She's never told anyone that at fifteen she discovered the identity of her biological mother. That's because her birth mother is Ula Frost, a reclusive painter famous for the outrageous claims that her portraits summon their subjects' doppelgangers from parallel universes. Researching the rumors, Pepper couldn't help but wonder: Was there a parallel universe in which she was more confident, more accomplished, better able to accept love? A universe in which Ula decided she was worth keeping? A universe in which Ula's rejection didn't still hurt too much to share? Sometimes living our best life means embracing the imperfect one we already have..."--
Download or read book Self Portrait with Russian Piano written by Wolf Wondratschek and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A legendary literary figure who initiated a one-man Beat Generation in his native Germany, Wolf Wondratschek “is eccentric, monomaniacal, romantic—his texts are imbued with a wonderful, reckless nonchalance.”* Now, he tells a story of a man looking back on his life in an honest Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. Vienna is an uncanny, magical, and sometimes brutally alienating city. The past lives on in the cafes where lost souls come to kill time and hash over the bygone glories of the twentieth century—or maybe just a recent love affair. Here, in one of these cafes, an anonymous narrator meets a strange character, “like someone out of a novel”: a decrepit old Russian named Suvorin. A Soviet pianist of international renown, Suvorin committed career suicide when he developed a violent distaste for the sound of applause. This eccentric gentleman—sometimes charming, sometimes sulky, sometimes disconcertingly frank—knows the end of his life is approaching, and allows himself to be convinced to tell his life story. Over a series of coffee dates, punctuated by confessions, anecdotes, and rages—and by the narrator’s schemes to keep his quarry talking—a strained friendship develops between the two men, and it soon becomes difficult to tell who is more dependent on whom. Rhapsodic and melancholic, with shades of Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Hans Keilson, and Thomas Bernhard, Wolf Wondratschek's Self-Portrait with Russian Piano is a literary sonata circling the eternal question of whether beauty, music, and passion are worth the sacrifices some people are compelled to make for them. “A romantic in a madhouse. To let Wondratschek’s voice be drowned in the babble of today’s literature would be a colossal mistake.” —*Patrick Süskind, international bestselling author of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Download or read book How to Cure a Ghost written by Fariha Róisín and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poetry compilation recounting a woman’s journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance, confusion to clarity, and bitterness to forgiveness Following in the footsteps of such category killers as Milk and Honey and Whiskey Words & a Shovel I, Fariha RoÌ?isiÌ?n’s poetry book is a collection of her thoughts as a young, queer, Muslim femme navigating the difficulties of her intersectionality. Simultaneously, this compilation unpacks the contentious relationship that exists between RoÌ?isiÌ?n and her mother, her platonic and romantic heartbreaks, and the cognitive dissonance felt as a result of being so divided among her broad spectrum of identities.
Download or read book Ghost Image written by Hervé Guibert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert’s brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert’s parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed. Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert’s particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, “I don’t even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl.” In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer. With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert’s Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.
Download or read book Ghost Hawk written by Susan Cooper and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of a winter-long journey into manhood, Little Hawk returns to find his village decimated by a white man's plague and soon, despite a fresh start, Little Hawk dies violently but his spirit remains trapped, seeing how his world changes.
Download or read book The Apparitionists written by Peter Manseau and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2017 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of faith and fraud in post-Civil War America told through the lens of a photographer who claimed he could capture images of the dead
Download or read book Ghost written by Jason Reynolds and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aspiring to be the fastest sprinter on his elite middle school's track team, gifted runner Ghost finds his goal challenged by a tragic past with a violent father.
Download or read book Tiny Beautiful Things written by Cheryl Strayed and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Soon to be a Hulu Original series • The internationally acclaimed author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. Rich with humor and insight—and absolute honesty—this "wise and compassionate" (New York Times Book Review) book is a balm for everything life throws our way. Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.
Download or read book Ghost of written by Diana Khoi Nguyen and published by Omnidawn Open. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Prize
