Download or read book Shaggy Muses written by Maureen Adams and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “You’ll call this sentimental–perhaps–but then a dog somehow represents the private side of life, the play side,” Virginia Woolf confessed to a friend. And it is this private, playful side, the richness and power of the bond between five great women writers and their dogs, that Maureen Adams celebrates in this deeply engaging book. In Shaggy Muses, we visit Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush, the golden Cocker Spaniel who danced the poet away from death, back to life and human love. We roam the wild Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë, whose fierce Mastiff mix, Keeper, provided a safe and loving outlet for the writer’s equally fierce spirit. We enter the creative sanctum of Emily Dickinson, which she shared only with Carlo, the gentle, giant Newfoundland who soothed her emotional terrors. We mingle with Edith Wharton, whose ever-faithful Pekes warmed her lonely heart during her restless travels among Europe and America’ s social and intellectual elite. We are privileged guests in the fragile universe of Virginia Woolf, who depended for emotional support and sanity not only on her human loved ones but also on her dogs, especially Pinka–a gift from her lover, Vita Sackville-West–a black Cocker Spaniel who became a strong, bright thread in the fabric of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s life together. Based on diaries, letters, and other contemporary accounts–and featuring many illustrations of the writers and their dogs– these five miniature biographies allow us unparalleled intimacy with women of genius in their hours of domestic ease and inner vulnerability. Shaggy Muses also enchants us with a pack of new friends: Flush, Keeper, Carlo, Foxy, Linky, Grizzle, Pinka, and all the other devoted canines who loved and served these great writers.

Download or read book Shaggy Muses written by Maureen B. Adams and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For lovers of dogs and lovers of literature, these never-before-told stories chronicle the extraordinary relationships between five beloved women writers and the dogs who have loved and inspired them.

Download or read book Canis Modernis written by Karalyn Kendall-Morwick and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-12-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist literature might well be accused of going to the dogs. From the strays wandering the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses to the highbred canine subject of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, dogs populate a range of modernist texts. In many ways, the dog in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a potent symbol of the modern condition—facing, like the human species, the problem of adapting to modernizing forces that relentlessly outpaced it. Yet the dog in literary modernism does not function as a stand-in for the human. In this book, Karalyn Kendall-Morwick examines the human-dog relationship in modernist works by Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Albert Payson Terhune, J. R. Ackerley, and Samuel Beckett, among others. Drawing from the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and the scientific, literary, and philosophical work of Donna Haraway, Temple Grandin, and Carrie Rohman, she makes a case for the dog as a coevolutionary and coadapting partner of humans. As our coevolutionary partners, dogs destabilize the human: not the autonomous, self-transparent subject of Western humanism, the human is instead contingent, shaped by its material interactions with other species. By demonstrating how modernist representations of dogs ultimately mongrelize the human, this book reveals dogs’ status both as instigators of the crisis of the modern subject and as partners uniquely positioned to help humans adapt to the turbulent forces of modernization. Accessibly written and convincingly argued, this study shows how dogs challenge the autonomy of the human subject and the humanistic underpinnings of traditional literary forms. It will find favor with students and scholars of modernist literature and animal studies.

Download or read book The Black Book written by Orhan Pamuk and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-08-18 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ** PRE-ORDER NIGHTS OF PLAGUE, THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORHAN PAMUK ** Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 'Dazzling ... Turns the detective novel on its head.' Independent on Sunday 'Pamuk's masterpiece' Times Literary Supplement A brilliantly unconventional mystery and a provocative meditation on the weight of history in modern Istanbul. Galip's wife has disappeared. Could she have left him for Celál, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celál, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he gradually assumes the enviable Celal's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. But despite pursuing every clue the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and Galip never feels himself to be any closer to finding his beloved Ruya. When he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst . . .

Download or read book I Wear the Black Hat written by Chuck Klosterman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine). Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the darkness. In I Wear the Black Hat, he questions the modern understanding of villainy. When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying, and why are we so obsessed with saying it? How does the culture of malevolence operate? What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). As the Los Angeles Times notes: “By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture—and maybe even American morality.” I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny.

Download or read book Death in Her Hands written by Ottessa Moshfegh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 by: The Washington Post, Vogue, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, New York Magazine, Paste Magazine, LitHub, E! News Online, and many more From one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds an ominous note on a walk in the woods. While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one. Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past; we must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one. A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth and keep us blind to it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, and the stakes have never been higher.

Download or read book Iris Has Free Time written by Iris Smyles and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy and riffing on Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Iris Has Free Time is a subtle, complicated, funny, bold, lyrical and literary, sad and wise book about youth, time, and what it means to grow up. An instant classic and essential reading for anyone who has ever been young. “There, I came across a cluster of NYU graduates standing in cap and gown. They were laughing and posing for photos. Was it June again already? Their voices echoed through the subway tunnel. ‘Congratulations!’ ‘Congratulations!’ their parents said. And I wanted to yell, ‘Don’t do it! Go back! You don’t know what it’s like!’” Whether passed out drunk at The New Yorker where she’s interning; assigning Cliffs Notes when hired to teach humanities at a local college; getting banned from a fleet of Greek Island ferries while on vacation, or trying to piece together the events of yet another puzzling blackout—“I prefer to call them pink-outs, because I’m a girl”—Iris is never short on misadventures. From quarter-life crisis to the shock of turning thirty, Iris Has Free Time charts a madcap, melancholic course through that curious age—one’s twenties—when childhood is over, supposedly.

Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Download or read book The Arrest written by Jonathan Lethem and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-collapse yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car. The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working. . . . Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn’t hurt. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings’ life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he’s up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him. Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

Download or read book Blackthorn Winter written by Kathryn Reiss and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her parents on a trial separation, the last thing fifteen-year-old Juliana wants is to be dragged by her mother to an artists' colony in England. Halfway across the world, Juliana misses her father terribly. But soon she has bigger worries when the sleepy town of Blackthorn is set on its heels by the murder of one of its own. Juliana feels compelled to solve the crime, but she is shocked and frightened when she uncovers clues that have chilling parallels to her own mysterious past. Can she figure out who the murderer is before anyone else--herself included--gets hurt?

Download or read book Chance and Circumstance written by Carolyn Brown and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-12-23 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited memoir from one of the most celebrated modern dancers of the past fifty years: the story of her own remarkable career, of the formative years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and of the two brilliant, iconoclastic, and forward-thinking artists at its center—Merce Cunningham and John Cage. From its inception in the l950s until her departure in the l970s, Carolyn Brown was a major dancer in the Cunningham company and part of the vibrant artistic community of downtown New York City out of which it grew. She writes about embarking on her career with Cunningham at a time when he was a celebrated performer but a virtually unknown choreographer. She describes the heady exhilaration—and dire financial straits—of the company’s early days, when composer Cage was musical director and Robert Rauschenberg designed lighting, sets and costumes; and of the struggle for acceptance of their controversial, avant-garde dance. With unique insight, she explores Cunningham’s technique, choreography, and experimentation with compositional procedures influenced by Cage. And she probes the personalities of these two men: the reticent, moody, often secretive Cunningham, and the effusive, fun-loving, enthusiastic Cage. Chance and Circumstance is an intimate chronicle of a crucial era in modern dance, and a revelation of the intersection of the worlds of art, music, dance, and theater that is Merce Cunningham’s extraordinary hallmark.

Download or read book Can t and Won t written by Lydia Davis and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of short stories from the woman Rick Moody has called "the best prose stylist in America" Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of "Bloomington" reads, "Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before." Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert's correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author's own dreams, or the dreams of friends. What does not vary throughout Can't and Won't, Lydia Davis's fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.

Download or read book Vision s Immanence written by Peter Lurie and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2004-08 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lurie takes particular interest in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in August of stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I forget thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Propertius in Love written by Sextus Propertius and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-06-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These ardent, even obsessed, poems about erotic passion are among the brightest jewels in the crown of Latin literature. Written by Propertius, Rome's greatest poet of love, who was born around 50 b.c., a contemporary of Ovid, these elegies tell of Propertius' tormented relationship with a woman he calls "Cynthia." Their connection was sometimes blissful, more often agonizing, but as the poet came to recognize, it went beyond pride or shame to become the defining event of his life. Whether or not it was Propertius' explicit intention, these elegies extend our ideas of desire, and of the human condition itself.

Download or read book Growing Girls written by Jeanne Marie Laskas and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2009-07-22 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author Jeanne Marie Laskas has charmed and delighted readers with her heartwarming and hilarious tales of life on Sweetwater Farm. Now she offers her most personal and most deeply felt memoir yet as she embarks on her greatest, most terrifying, most rewarding endeavor of all…. A good mother, writes Jeanne Marie Laskas in her latest report from Sweetwater Farm, would have bought a house in the suburbs with a cul-de-sac for her kids to ride bikes around instead of a ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere with a rooster. With the wryly observed self-doubt all mothers and mothers-to-be will instantly recognize, Laskas offers a poignant and laugh-out-loud-funny meditation on that greatest–and most impossible–of all life’s journeys: motherhood. What is it, she muses, that’s so exhausting about being a mom? You’d think raising two little girls would be a breeze compared to dealing with the barely controlled anarchy of “attack” roosters, feuding neighbors, and a scheme to turn sheep into lawn mowers on the fifty-acre farm she runs with her bemused husband Alex. But, as any mother knows, you’d be wrong. From struggling with the issues of race and identity as she raises two children adopted from China to taking her daughters to the mall for their first manicures, Jeanne Marie captures those magic moments that make motherhood the most important and rewarding job in the world–even if it’s never been done right. For, as she concludes in one of her three a.m. worry sessions, feeling like a bad mother is the only way to know you’re doing your job. Whether confronting Sasha’s language delay, reflecting on Anna’s devotion to a creepy backwards-running chicken, feeling outclassed by the fabulous homeroom moms, or describing the rich, secret language each family shares, these candid observations from the front lines of parenthood are filled with love and laughter–and radiant with the tough, tender, and timeless wisdom only raising kids can teach us.

Download or read book Crossroads written by Jonathan Franzen and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 679 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘His best novel yet ... A Middlemarch-like triumph’ Telegraph

Download or read book E B White on Dogs written by Martha White and published by Tilbury House Publishers and Cadent Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: E. B. White (1899 1985) is best known for his children's books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. Columnist for The New Yorker for over half a century and co-author of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, White hit his stride as an American literary icon when he began publishing his 'One Man's Meat' columns from his saltwater farm on the coast of Maine. In E. B. White on Dogs, his granddaughter and manager of his literary estate, Martha White, has compiled the best and funniest of his essays, poems, letters, and sketches depicting over a dozen of White's various canine companions. Featured here are favorite essays such as 'Two Letters, Both Open,' where White takes on the Internal Revenue Service, and also 'Bedfellows,' with its 'fraudulent reports'; from White's ignoble old dachshund, Fred. ('I just saw an eagle go by. It was carrying a baby.') From The New Yorker's 'The Talk of the Town' are some little-known Notes and Comment pieces covering dog shows, sled dog races, and the trials and tribulations of city canines, chief among them a Scotty called Daisy who was kicked out of Schrafft's, arrested, and later run down by a Yellow Cab, prompting The New Yorker to run her 'Obituary.' Some previously unpublished photographs from the E. B. White Estate show the family dogs, from the first collie, to various labs, Scotties, dachshunds, half-breeds, and mutts, all well-loved. This is a book for readers and writers who recognize a good sentence and a masterful turn of a phrase; for E. B. White fans looking for more from their favorite author; and for dog lovers who may not have discovered the wit, style, and compassion of this most distinguished of American essayists.