Download or read book The Volcano Lover written by Susan Sontag and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1992 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in 18th century Naples, based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, and peopled with many of the great figures of the day, this unconventional, bestselling historical romance from the National Book Award-winning author of In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsessions, and, above all, love.
Download or read book The Volcano Lover written by Susan Sontag and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical romance, Sontag's book is based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Passionately examining the shape of Western civilization since the Age of Enlightenment, Sontag's novel is an exquisitely detailed picture of revolution, the fate of nature, art and love.
Download or read book In America written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2001-05-04 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover. The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In her enthralling new novel--once again based on a real story--Sontag shows us our own country on the cusp of modernity. In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travel to California to found a "utopian" commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California--as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification--constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the émigrés go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book--about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater--that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement. In America is the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.
Download or read book I etcetera written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the themes of her essays—the nature of knowing, our relationship with the past, and the future in an alienated present.
Download or read book Death Kit written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1967, Death Kit--Susan Sontag's second novel--is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, it offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.
Download or read book Regarding the Pain of Others written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.
Download or read book The Volcano and After written by Alicia Suskin Ostriker and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s passionate voice has long been acknowledged as a vital force in American poetry. From urgent spiritual quest to biting political satire, from elegy to comedy, from celebration of the city street and the world “as a paradise might be / if we had eyes to see,” to the “crack in earth . . . crack in her mind,” from brilliant evocations of art and music to mother-daughter wrestlings, Ostriker’s poetry rings with insistence on beauty and truth. Drawing from six of her previous books, and highlighting a sequence of bold new poems exploring the challenges and absurdities of aging, The Volcano and After is a masterpiece for our time.
Download or read book The Scandal of Susan Sontag written by Barbara Ching and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Sontag (1933-2004) spoke of the promiscuity of art and literature--the willingness of great artists and writers to scandalize their spectators through critical frankness, complexity, and beauty. Sontag's life and thought were no less promiscuous. She wrote deeply and engagingly about a range of subjects--theater, sex, politics, novels, torture, and illness--and courted celebrity and controversy both publicly and privately. Throughout her career, she not only earned adulation but also provoked scorn. Her living was the embodiment of scandal. In this collection, Terry Castle, Nancy K. Miller, Wayne Koestenbaum, E. Ann Kaplan, and other leading scholars revisit Sontag's groundbreaking life and work. Against Interpretation, "Notes on Camp," Letter from Hanoi, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, I, Etcetera, and The Volcano Lover--these works form the center of essays no less passionate and imaginative than Sontag herself. Debating questions raised by the thinker's own images and identities, including her sexuality, these works question Sontag's status as a female intellectual and her parallel interest in ambitious and prophetic fictional women; her ambivalence toward popular culture; and her personal and professional "scandals." Paired with rare photographs and illustrations, this timely anthology expands our understanding of Sontag's images and power.
Download or read book Under the Volcano written by Malcolm Lowry and published by New Amer Library. This book was released on 1984 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul's life--the Day of the Dead, 1938--his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. She is determined to rescue Firmin and their failing marriage, but her mission is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul's half brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one significant day unfold against an unforgettable backdrop of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical. Under the Volcano remains one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.
Download or read book A Susan Sontag Reader written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Sontag occupies a special place in Modern American letters. She has become our most important critic, while her brilliant novels and short fiction are, at long last, getting the recognition they deserve. Sontag is above all a writer, which is only to say that, though the form may differ, there is an essential unity in all her work. The truth of this is perhaps more evident in A Susan Sontag Reader than in any of Sontag's individual books. The writer selected a sampling of her work, meaning the choice both to reflect accurately a career and also to guide the reader toward those qualities and concerns which she prizes in her own writing. A Susan Sontag Reader is arranged chronologically and draws on most of Sontag's books. There are selections from her two novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, and from her collections of short stories, I, etcetera. The famous essays from the 1960s--"Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," and "On Style"--which established Sontag's reputation and can be fairly said to have shaped the cultural views of a generation are included, as are selctions from her two subsequent volumes of essays, Styles of Radical Will and Under the Sign of Satury. A part of Sontag's best-selling On Photography is also included. It is astonishing to read these works when they are detached from the books they appeared in and offered instead in the order in which Sontag wrote them. The connections between various literary forms, the progression of themes, are revealed in often startling ways. Moreover, Sontag has included a long interview in which she moves mroe informally over the whole range of her concerns and of her work. The volume ends with "Writing Itself," a previously uncollected essay on Roland Barthes which, in the eyes of many, is one of Sontag's finest achievements. This collection is, in a sense, both a self-potrait and a key for a reader to understand the work of one of the most imporant writers of our time.
Download or read book Surviving Galeras written by Stanley Williams and published by HMH. This book was released on 2001-04-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This true, up-close account of a volcano’s eruption “artfully blends science writing and history with pure, heart-pounding action” (Mark Bowden, bestselling author of Black Hawk Down). In 1993, Stanley Williams, an eminent volcanologist, was standing on top of a Colombian volcano called Galeras when it erupted, killing six of his colleagues instantly. As Williams tried to escape the blast, he was pelted with white-hot projectiles traveling faster than bullets. Within seconds he was cut down, his skull fractured, his right leg almost severed, his backpack aflame. Williams lay helpless and near death on Galeras’s flank until two brave women—friends and fellow volcanologists—mounted an astonishing rescue effort to carry him safely off the mountain. Surviving Galeras is both a harrowing first-person account of an eruption and its aftermath, and a look at the fascinating, high-risk world of volcanology, exploring the profound impact volcanoes have had on the earth’s landscapes and civilizations. Even with improved, highly-sensitive measuring tools and protective equipment, at least one volcanologist, on average, dies each year. This book reveals how Williams and his fellow scientist-adventurers continue to unveil the enigmatic and miraculous workings of volcanoes and piece together methods to predict their actions—potentially saving many human lives. “I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent book . . . [A] riveting story.” —Dava Sobel, author of The Glass Universe “Popular science at its best.” —The New York Times “[A] page-turner.” —Booklist
Download or read book The Volcano Lover written by Susan Sontag and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2009 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Enchanting, always interesting, always entertaining . . . a big, old-fashioned broth of a book' John Banville, The New York TimesThe British Ambassador at the court of Naples has only two passions - his precious art collection, and his fascination with volcanoes - until he agrees to care for his nephew's discarded mistress. He acquires a new obsession in the shape of this beautiful, vulgar, carefree woman and eventually takes her for his wife. But when the heroic captain of the British Navy arrives in Italy, the affair that erupts between him and the ambassador's wife threatens to throw everyone's lives off course. Susan Sontag's exquisite re-telling of the story of Nelson and Emma Hamilton is a powerful exploration of love and possession that, with its shifting voices and viewpoints, conjures up an entire age. 'A great novel. It repeatedly scales heights of complex thought, passion and expression that few American writers ever approach, while reimagining a majestic love story in dazzling style' Philadelphia Inquirer
Download or read book Alice in Bed written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1993-06-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy which merges the life of Alice James, the brilliant sister of William and Henry James, with the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women; and about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination.
Download or read book Styles of Radical Will written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.
Download or read book On Photography written by Susan Sontag and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book I Know This Much Is True written by Wally Lamb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-03 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
Download or read book Saving Animals from Volcanoes written by Miriam Aronin and published by Bearport Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saving animals from volcanoes, readers will meet the courageous people and organizations that rush in to save animals when disasters strike.
