Download or read book A Fish Growing Lungs written by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At age 18 Alysia Sawchyn was diagnosed with bipolar I. Seven years later she learned she had been misdiagnosed. A Fish Growing Lungs takes the form of linked essays that reflect on Sawchyn's diagnosis and its unraveling, the process of withdrawal and recovery, and the search for identity as she emerges from a difficult past into a cautiously hopeful present.Sawchyn captures the precariousness of life under the watchful eye of doctors, friends, and family, in which saying or doing the wrong thing could lead to involuntary confinement. This scrutiny is compounded by the stigmas of mental illness and the societal expectations placed on the bodies of women and women of color. And yet, amid juggling medications, doubting her diagnosis, and struggling with addiction and cutting, there is also joy, friendship, love, and Slayer concerts. Funny, intelligent, and unflinchingly honest, Sawchyn explores how we can come to know ourselves when our bodies betray us. Drawing from life experience, literature, music, medical journals, films, and recovery communities, each essay illuminates the richness of self-knowledge that comes from the act of writing itself.

Download or read book The Big Rumpus written by Ayun Halliday and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2002-03-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 The Big Rumpus written by Ayun Halliday and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2002-03-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of anecdotes about the daily life of parents, features observations on finding the perfect Halloween costume and public breast feeding.

Download or read book The Other Mothers written by Jennifer Berney and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of fertility, feminism, and family Jenn Berney was one of those people who knew she was destined for motherhood—it wasn't a question of if, but when. So when she and her wife Kelly decided to start building their family, they took the next logical step: they went to a fertility clinic. But they soon found themselves entrenched in a medical establishment that didn't know what to do with people like them. With no man factoring into their relationship, doctors were at best embarrassed and at worst disparaging of the couple. Soon Jenn found herself stepping outside of the system determined to disregard her. Looking into the history of fertility and the LGBTQ+ community, she saw echoes of her own struggle. For decades queer people have defied the patriarchy and redefined the nuclear family—and Jenn was walking in their footsteps. Through the ups-and-downs of her own journey, Jenn reflects on a turbulent past that has led her to this point and a bright future worth fighting for. With clarity, determination, and hope, The Other Mothers gives us a wonderful glimpse into the many ways we can become family.

Download or read book Two Big Differences written by Ian Ross Singleton and published by M-Graphics Pub.. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zinaida Bondarenko is returning to Odessa, Ukraine from Detroit, USA, with one companion, Valentine Pechenko, a Ukrainian-American who is in love with her. Zina came to Detroit in search of her mother, met Valinka (Valentine), and forged a strange relationship with him. Now Zina-as Valinka ends up calling her-has been deported. Upon their return to Odessa, they are greeted by her father and a country at the brink of war with Russia. It's 2014, and the Euromaidan Movement is underway in Kiev. Odessa appears to be taking her usual unique path.On May 2nd, 2014, the worst violent event in Odessa since the Great Patriotic War (World War II) took place in the fire in the Building of Trade Unions along Kulikovo Field. This event will bring Zina's and Valinka's journeys to an end. It will both unite and divide Odessa. It will show how even Odessa, long thought to be "not Ukraine" because of the language (most Odessans still speak Russian), must decide on her identity.

Download or read book The Big Rumpus written by Ayun Halliday and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Creatures of Passage written by Morowa Yejidé and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With echoes of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Yejidé's novel explores a forgotten quadrant of Washington, DC, and the ghosts that haunt it. Longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction “Yejidé’s writing captures both real news and spiritual truths with the deftness and capacious imagination of her writing foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin . . . Creatures of Passage is that rare novel that dispenses ancestral wisdom and literary virtuosity in equal measure.” —Washington Post Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying passengers in a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, ten-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash—reeling from having witnessed an act of molestation at his school, but still questioning what and who he saw—has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the “River Man.” When Dash arrives unexpectedly at Nephthys’s door bearing a cryptic note about his unusual conversations with the River Man, Nephthys must face what frightens her most. Morowa Yejidé’s deeply captivating novel shows us an unseen Washington filled with otherworldly landscapes, flawed super-humans, and reluctant ghosts, and brings together a community intent on saving one young boy in order to reclaim itself.

Download or read book Good Grief written by E.B. Bartels and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unexpected, poignant, and personal account of loving and losing pets, exploring the singular bonds we have with our companion animals, and how to grieve them once they’ve passed. E.B. Bartels has had a lot of pets—dogs, birds, fish, tortoises. As varied a bunch as they are, they’ve taught her one universal truth: to own a pet is to love a pet, and to own a pet is also—with rare exception—to lose that pet in time. But while we have codified traditions to mark the passing of our fellow humans, most cultures don’t have the same for pets. Bartels takes us from Massachusetts to Japan, from ancient Egypt to the modern era, in search of the good pet death. We meet veterinarians, archaeologists, ministers, and more, offering an idiosyncratic, inspiring array of rituals—from the traditional (scattering ashes, commissioning a portrait), to the grand (funereal processions, mausoleums), to the unexpected (taxidermy, cloning). The central lesson: there is no best practice when it comes to mourning your pet, except to care for them in death as you did in life, and find the space to participate in their end as fully as you can. Punctuated by wry, bighearted accounts of Bartels’s own pets and their deaths, Good Grief is a cathartic companion through loving and losing our animal family.

Download or read book Max Attacks written by Kathi Appelt and published by Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fish and birds and lizards and socks…is there anything Max won’t attack? Watch your ankles and find out in this clever, rhyming picture book about a very naughty kitty cat. Max is a cat. He attacks. From socks to strings to many a fish, attacking, for Max, is most de-lish. But how many of these things can he actually catch? Well, let’s just say it’s no even match.

Download or read book McGlue written by Ottessa Moshfegh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut novella from one of contemporary fiction's most exciting young voices, now in a new edition. Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection. They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.

Download or read book Bright Dead Things written by Ada Limón and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Bright Dead Things buoyed me in this dismal year. I'm thankful for this collection, for its wisdom and generosity, for its insistence on holding tight to beauty even as we face disintegration and destruction.' Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, Bright Dead Things considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth and falls in love. In these extraordinary poems Ada Limón's heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 'I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,' the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and 'effortlessly lyrical' (New York Times) - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived.

Download or read book The Big Scream written by Kirsti Call and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweet, reassuring board book, little ones will learn what to do when an ugly bad mood turns into one BIG SCREAM. Chest aches Fists pound Big wail Kick ground BIG SCREEEEEEEEEEEEAM! Everyone has bad days, and it’s okay to be sad and upset sometimes. But what do you do when you want to let out a BIG SCREAM? In this loving story, little ones will learn how to pause, breathe in, and calm down. The perfect read-aloud for parents and little ones to share before and after a big tantrum, this story proves that sometimes the best medicine to cure a big bad scream is a little dose of big love.

Download or read book So We Can Glow written by Leesa Cross-Smith and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE A lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning author Roxane Gay calls "a consummate storyteller." From Kentucky to the California desert, these forty-two short stories -- ranging from the 80's and 90's to present day -- expose the hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more. On a hot July night, teenage girls sneak out of the house to meet their boyfriends by the train tracks. Members of a cult form an unsettling chorus as they proclaim their adoration for the same man. A woman luxuriates in a fantasy getaway to escape her past. A love story begins over cabbages in a grocery store, and a laundress's life is consumed by her obsession with a baseball star. After the death of a sister, two high school friends kiss all night and binge-watch Winona Ryder movies. Leesa Cross-Smith's sensuous stories -- some long, some gone in a flash, some told over text and emails -- drench readers in nostalgia for summer nights and sultry days. They recall the intense friendships of teenage girls and the innate bonds between mothers, the first heady rush of desire, and the pure exhilaration of womanhood, all while holding up the wild souls of women so they can catch the light.

Download or read book Wild Ones written by Jon Mooallem and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without that easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, [Jon] Mooallem merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring life into, a broken world."--Back cover.

Download or read book No Touch Monkey written by Ayun Halliday and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zine queen Ayun Halliday confesses the best-and worst-of her globetrotting misadventures. "I laughed hard on nearly every page of this shockingly intimate memoir and deeply funny book." -- Stephen Colbert Ayun Halliday may not make for the most sensible travel companion, but she is certainly one of the zaniest, with a knack for inserting herself (and her unwitting cohorts) into bizarre situations around the globe. Curator of kitsch and unabashed aficionada of pop culture, Halliday offers bemused, self-deprecating narration of events from guerrilla theater in Romania to drug-induced Apocalypse Now reenactments in Vietnam to a perhaps more surreal collagen-implant demonstration at a Paris fashion show emceed by Lauren Bacall. On layover in Amsterdam, Halliday finds unlikely trouble in the red-light district -- eliciting the ire of a tiny, violent madam, and is forced to explain tampons to soldiers in Kashmir -- "they're for ladies. Bleeding ladies" -- that, she admits, "might have looked like white cotton bullets lined up in their box." A self-admittedly bumbling vacationer, Halliday shares -- with razor-sharp wit and to hilarious effect -- the travel stories most are too self-conscious to tell. Includes line drawings, generously provided by the author.

Download or read book Imagine a Death written by Janice Lee and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn’t the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out. The writer, traumatized by the violent death of her mother when she was a child, lives alone with her dog and struggles to finish her book. The photographer, stunted by the death of his grandmother and caretaker, struggles to take a single picture and enters into a complicated relationship with the writer. The old man, facing his past in small doses, spends his time watching television and reorganizing the objects in his apartment to stay distracted from the deterioration around him. A depiction of the cycles of abuse and trauma in a prolonged end-time, Imagine a Death examines the ways in which our pasts envelop us, the ways in which we justify horrible things in the name of survival, all of the horrible and beautiful things we are capable of when we are hurt and broken, and the animal (and plant) companions that ground us. ​ Innovative Prose