Download or read book The Substance of Fiction written by Sophie Volpp and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do the portrayals of objects in literary texts represent historical evidence about the material culture of the past? Or are things in books more than things in the world? Sophie Volpp considers fictional objects of the late Ming and Qing that defy being read as illustrative of historical things. Instead, she argues, fictional objects are often signs of fictionality themselves, calling attention to the nature of the relationship between literature and materiality. Volpp examines a series of objects—a robe, a box and a shell, a telescope, a plate-glass mirror, and a painting—drawn from the canonical works frequently mined for information about late imperial material culture, including the novels The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Story of the Stone as well as the short fiction of Feng Menglong, Ling Mengchu, and Li Yu. She argues that although fictional objects invite readers to think of them as illustrative, in fact, inconsistent and discontinuous representation disconnects the literary object from potential historical analogues. The historical resonances of literary objects illuminate the rhetorical strategies of individual works of fiction and, more broadly, conceptions of fictionality in the Ming and Qing. Rather than offering a transparent lens on the past, fictional objects train the reader to be aware of the fallibility of perception. A deeply insightful analysis of late Ming and Qing texts and reading practices, The Substance of Fiction has important implications for Chinese literary studies, history, and art history, as well as the material turn in the humanities.
Download or read book The Substance of Things Hoped For written by Tom Noyes and published by Slant Books. This book was released on 2021-04-12 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a brief time in mid-nineteenth century Oneida, New York, two of the most eccentric and fascinating figures in American history crossed paths when troubled soul and soon-to-be presidential assassin Charles Guiteau threw in his lot with John Humphrey Noyes's utopian community of "free love" believers. In The Substance of Things Hoped For, Tom Noyes--a distant relative of John Humphrey Noyes--renders this historical intersection by deftly imagining the dynamics and consequences of an ominous and unusual relationship. As Guiteau stumbles further into madness and eventually achieves infamy for his murder of President Garfield, John Humphrey Noyes is left to face the consequences of his own missteps and misunderstandings as he's forced to make a hasty exit from Oneida. Joining Noyes and Guiteau in their parallel narratives is a chorus of other characters--family members, lovers, rivals, notable historical figures--whose haunting voices complement, undermine, complicate, and enhance Noyes's and Guiteau's versions of events, while also homing in on the novel's most pressing questions, including those related to revelation, delusion, loyalty, and love.
Download or read book The Substance of All Things written by Sam Harris and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Theo Dalton was six years old, his hands were irreparably damaged in a horrific car accident that took his pregnant mother's life. Six years later, during the sweltering summer of 1968 in rural Oklahoma, Theo meets Frank, a Native American outcast, and learns that he has the ability to heal through his disfigured hands.As he explores the extraordinary, Theo desperately attempts to remain an ordinary boy. But when word of his gift spreads, Theo is shunned by the church for doing "the devil's work." He is immediately swept away by his Auntie Li, and into a world which ultimately threatens his life as he saves others'. Told from Theo's perspective some fifty years later, it is through his work as a therapist with a broken woman that he musters the courage to relive the summer that haunts him.The Substance of All Things is the gripping, heart-wrenching, and often humorous tale of mentors and mothers and fathers, love and redemption, prophets and charlatans, miracles and faith.
Download or read book The Second Substance written by Anne Lardeux and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Squatters at a rural gas station try to find freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization in this sensual novel. A community of outsiders takes over an abandoned gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking beer and eating hot dogs, and wandering through woods and towns in search of new ways of living. People come and go: a charismatic landscaper, Italian anarchists, a policewoman, travellers. A teenager drifts into homelessness. And The Girl With No Name keeps a journal of her attempts to meet new people and sleep with them, sex that is “not a sideline” but the motivating force in a story she is struggling to understand. Neighbors grow hostile. An investigation threatens the community. Tension builds between the surface violence of “normal life” and the attempt of these outsiders to experience freedom and build something new on the ashes of our oil-addicted society. With a character borrowed from Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and inspiration taken from Anne Boyer’s writings, Anne Lardeux’s highly original debut assembles elements of poetry, film, and visual arts into an exuberant choral novel, an ode to the daughters of fire and to the poetry of the body. Often funny, sometimes raunchy, consistently surprising, never flinching, The Second Substance heralds an important new voice in Quebec literature. "A revolutionary diary that parses the lines of sex and power, in language that pushes itself around on the page like paint. With echoes of Emma Goldman's if I can't dance, Lardeux's revolution has fucking at its core. The Second Substance is fleshy, cinematic, intuitive." -Tamara Faith Berger, author of Queen Solomon “A nomadic miscellany of gruff scavengers and would-be pioneers has commandeered the derelict filling station at 69 Rue Principale—an anonymous sensualist and moonlighting authoritarian among them—all jockeying for position at the nexus of self-determination and fate. In Anne Lardeux’s enigmatic debut, presented here in a translation by Pablo Strauss, the constant friction between societal strictures and communal revision spark a series of disorderly experiments, abstract epiphanies blasting off in every direction. The Second Substance is a novel about overriding our programming, rewriting our code in order to initiate an even more radical set of protocols for eroticism, destruction, and rebirth.” —Justin Walls, Bookshop.org
Download or read book The Most Precious Substance on Earth written by Shashi Bhat and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journey Prize winner Shashi Bhat’s "powerful, surprising and terrifying" (Rufi Thorpe) story about a high school student's traumatic experience and how it irrevocably alters her life, for fans of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Girlhood, and Pen15. Bright, hilarious, and sensitive fourteen-year-old Nina spends her spare time reading Beowulf and flirting with an internet predator. She has a vicious crush on her English teacher, and her best friend Amy is slowly drifting away. Meanwhile, Nina’s mother tries to match her up with local Indian boys unfamiliar with her Saved by the Bell references, and Nina’s worried father has started reciting Hindu prayers outside her bedroom door. Beginning with a disturbing incident at her high school, The Most Precious Substance on Earth tells stories of Nina’s life from the ‘90s to present day, when she returns to the classroom as a high school teacher with a haunting secret and discovers that the past is never far behind her. Darkly funny, deeply affecting, unsettling, and at times even shocking, Shashi Bhat’s irresistible novel-in-stories examines the relationships between those who take and those who have something taken. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is a sharp-edged and devastating look at how women are conditioned to hide their trauma and suppress their fear, loneliness, and anger, and an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.
Download or read book The Substance of Shadow written by John Hollander and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts—from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens—Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self. An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander’s account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.
Download or read book The Book of the Most Precious Substance written by Sara Gran and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highly anticipated new thriller from internationally renowned author Sara Gran, author of Come Closer and the Claire DeWitt series. A mysterious book that promises unlimited power and unrivaled sexual pleasure. A down-on-her-luck book dealer hoping for the sale of a lifetime. And a twist so shocking, no one will come out unscathed. After a tragedy too painful to bear, former novelist Lily Albrecht has resigned herself to a dull, sexless life as a rare book dealer. Until she gets a lead on a book that just might turn everything around. The Book of the Most Precious Substance is a 17th century manual on sex magic, rumored to be the most powerful occult book ever written--if it really exists at all. And some of the wealthiest people in the world are willing to pay Lily a fortune to find it-if she can. Her search for the book takes her from New York to New Orleans to Munich to Paris, searching the dark corners of power where the world's wealthiest people use black magic to fulfill their desires. Will Lily fulfill her own desires, and join them? Or will she lose it all searching for a ghost? The Book of the Most Precious Substance is an addictive erotic thriller about the lengths we'll go to get what we need-and what we want.
Download or read book Speedboat written by Renata Adler and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it. A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthrall a new generation of readers.
Download or read book The Substance of God written by Perry Brass and published by Perry Brass. This book was released on 2004 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Murdered gay scientist returns to life due to a substance that constantly regenerated itself. He is pursued by his murderers who want the substance he now carries.
Download or read book Ursula Under written by Ingrid Hill and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-06-28 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft—"the only sound is an astonished tiny intake of breath from Ursula as she goes down, like a penny into the slot of a bank, disappeared, gone." It is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in the rescue of this little girl, the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. One TV viewer following the action notes that the Wong family lives in a decrepit mobile home and wonders why all this time and money is being "wasted on that half-breed trailer-trash kid." In response, the novel takes a breathtaking leap back in time to visit Ursula's most remarkable ancestors: a third-century-B.C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned playmate of a seventeenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer (on exotic Chinese topics) traveling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; her great-great-grandfather Jake Maki, who died at twenty-nine in a Michigan iron mine cave-in; and others whose richness and history are contained in the induplicable DNA of just one person—little Ursula Wong. Ursula's story echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that her very existence—like ours—comes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining—a daring saga of culture, history, and heredity.
Download or read book The Substance of Hope written by William Jelani Cobb and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-06-02 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For acclaimed historian William Jelani Cobb, the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency is not the most remarkable development of the 2008 election; even more so is the fact that Obama won some 90 percent of the black vote in the primaries across America despite the fact that the established black leadership since the civil rights era-men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Andrew Young, who paved the way for his candidacy-all openly supported Hillary Clinton. Clearly a sea change has occurred among black voters, ironically pushing the architects of the civil rights movement toward the periphery at the moment when their political dreams were most fully realized. How this has happened, and the powerful implications it holds for America's politics and social landscape, is the focus of The Substance of Hope, a deeply insightful, paradigm-shifting examination of a new generation of voters that has not been shaped by the raw memory of Jim Crow and has a different range of imperatives. Cobb sees Obama's ascendancy as "a reality that has been taking shape in tiny increments for the past four decades," and examines thorny issues such as the paradox and contradictions embodied in race and patriotism, identity and citizenship; how the civil rights leadership became a political machine; why the term "postracial" is as iniquitous as it is inaccurate; and whether our society has really changed with Obama's election. Elegantly written and powerfully argued, The Substance of Hope challenges conventional wisdom as it offers original insight into America's future.
Download or read book Shadow and Substance written by Rudine Sims and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this monograph is to provide classroom teachers, librarians, and teacher educators in the field of children's literature with information that will enable them to make better informed selections of recent literature for and about Afro-Americans. The first chapter of the work places contemporary realistic fiction about Afro-Americans in a sociocultural and historical context, while the second chapter discusses the "social conscience" books that are written primarily to help whites know the condition of blacks in the United States. The third chapter reviews "melting pot" books that were written for both blacks and whites on the assumption that both groups need to be informed that nonwhite children are exactly like other American children--except for their skin color. The fourth chapter examines "culturally conscious" books that were written for Afro-American readers and that attempt to reflect both the uniqueness and the universal humaneness of the Afro-American experience from the perspective of an Afro-American child or family. The fifth chapter presents a brief overview of the work of five Afro-American writers who have made significant contributions to children's fiction since 1965, and the final chapter summarizes the current status of children's fiction about Afro-Americans and suggests some areas yet to be covered in fictional works. (FL)
Download or read book Worldly Stage written by Sophie Volpp and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In seventeenth-century China, as formerly disparate social spheres grew closer, the theater began to occupy an important ideological niche among traditional cultural elites, and notions of performance and spectatorship came to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. In this study of late-imperial Chinese theater, Sophie Volpp offers fresh readings of major texts such as Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting) and Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan), and unveils lesser-known materials such as Wang Jide’s play The Male Queen (Nan wanghou). In doing so, Volpp sheds new light on the capacity of seventeenth-century drama to comment on the cultural politics of the age.Worldly Stage arrives at a conception of theatricality particular to the classical Chinese theater and informed by historical stage practices. The transience of worldly phenomena and the vanity of reputation had long informed the Chinese conception of theatricality. But in the seventeenth century, these notions acquired a new verbalization, as theatrical models of spectatorship were now applied to the contemporary urban social spectacle in which the theater itself was deeply implicated."
Download or read book Story written by Robert McKee and published by Methuen Publishing. This book was released on 1999-01 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Story screenwriting guru Robert McKee presents his powerful and much sought-after knowledge in a comprehensive guide to the essentials of screenwriting and storytelling." -- Methuen.
Download or read book Making Shapely Fiction written by Jerome Stern and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deft analysis and appreciation of fiction—what makes it work and what can make it fail. Here is a book about the craft of writing fiction that is thoroughly useful from the first to the last page—whether the reader is a beginner, a seasoned writer, or a teacher of writing. You will see how a work takes form and shape once you grasp the principles of momentum, tension, and immediacy. "Tension," Stern says, "is the mother of fiction. When tension and immediacy combine, the story begins." Dialogue and action, beginnings and endings, the true meaning of "write what you know," and a memorable listing of don'ts for fiction writers are all covered. A special section features an Alphabet for Writers: entries range from Accuracy to Zigzag, with enlightening comments about such matters as Cliffhangers, Point of View, Irony, and Transitions.
Download or read book Write Get Paid Repeat written by Jyssica Schwartz and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-08-06 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you want to make the jump from writing as a side hustle to full-time freelancer? Are you already a freelancer looking for ways to bring in new clients and revitalize your business? This book is for you! Follow the journey of author Jyssica Schwartz as she went from personal blogger to writing on the side to building a profitable business as a full-time freelance writer and editor. You will see exactly where she found clients, how she cold calls and direct messages companies, and read real examples of marketing strategies. It was 90 days almost to the day of getting her first paying client to making enough to quit her sales and business development career to be a writer. She shares personal details of her struggle with anxiety and feeling isolated working from home to the mistakes and failures she has learned from - and hopes you can learn from, too! Share in her trials and tribulations on the journey to creating a profitable writing business in Write. Get Paid. Repeat.
Download or read book A Woman of Substance written by Barbara Taylor Bradford and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2014-02-06 with total page 1064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the top-ten bestselling novels ever written. “An extravagant, absorbing novel of love, courage, ambition, war, death and passion.” —The New York Times Barbara Taylor Bradford’s The Emma Harte Saga begins with this record-shattering New York Times bestseller that traces Emma Harte’s legacy through multiple generations of indomitable women. From the servants’ quarters of a manor house on the brooding Yorkshire moors to the helm of a profitable international business, Emma Harte’s life is a sweeping saga of unbreakable spirit and resolve. Rising from abject poverty to glittering wealth at the upper echelons of society, there is only one man the indomitable Emma cannot have—and only one she yearns for. The novel was also the subject of a popular 1984 miniseries starring Jenny Seagrove and Deborah Kerr. “A long, satisfying novel of money, power, passion and revenge set against the sweep of 20th century history.” —Los Angeles Times “A wonderfully entertaining novel.” —The Denver Post “A mighty saga. Little has been so riveting since Gone with the Wind.” —Manchester Evening News “Tailor-made for fans of McCullough’s Thornbirds.” —Publishers Weekly “The storyteller of substance.” —The Times (London)
