Download or read book Out of My Head written by Tim Parks and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adventures in cutting-edge ideas about consciousness, from bestselling non-fiction writer Tim Parks. Hardly a day goes by without some discussion about whether computers can be conscious, whether our universe is some kind of simulation, whether mind is a unique quality of human beings or spread out across the universe like butter on bread. Most philosophers believe that our experience is locked inside our skulls, an unreliable representation of a quite different reality outside. Colour, smell and sound, they tell us, occur only in our heads. Yet when neuroscientists look inside our brains to see what's going on, they find only billions of neurons exchanging electrical impulses and releasing chemical substances. Five years ago, in a chance conversation, Tim Parks came across a radical new theory of consciousness that undercut this interpretation. This set him off on a quest to discover more about this fascinating topic and also led him to observe his own experience with immense attention. Out of My Head tells the gripping, highly personal, often surprisingly funny, story of Tim Parks' quest to discover more about this fascinating topic. It frames complex metaphysical considerations and technical laboratory experiments in terms we can all understand. Above all, it invites us to see space, time, colour and smell, sounds and sensations in an entirely new way. The world will feel more real after reading it.
Download or read book Teach Us to Sit Still written by Tim Parks and published by Rodale. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking, and inexplicably entertaining story of how Tim Parks found himself in serious pain, how doctors failed to help, and the quest he took to find his own way out. Overwhelmed by a crippling conditionwhich nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: a breathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks anticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get. As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship between his mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life as an intellectual and writer. He is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religion in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sports and art on our attitudes toward health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight, and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book A Season with Verona written by Tim Parks and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After twenty years of living in Italy, Tim Parks, whom Joseph Brodsky has called "the best British author writing today," spent a full year following the fortunes--and misfortunes--of the Verona football--oops! soccer--club. Here is his rollicking report.
Download or read book An Italian Education written by Tim Parks and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-01-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “marvelous” Mediterranean memoir of an expatriate father raising his children in Italy—from the author of Italian Neighbors (The Washington Post). Tim Parks offers another lively firsthand account of Italian society and culture—this time focusing on all the little things that turn an ordinary newborn infant into a true Italian. When British-born Tim Parks heard a mother at the beach in Pescara shout to her son, “Alberto, don’t sweat! No you can’t go in the sea till eleven, it’s still too cold, go and see your cousin in row three number fifty-two,” he was inspired to write about parenting in Italy—which he was doing himself at the time after adopting the country as his own. In this humorous memoir, Parks offers an enchanting portrait of Italian childhood that shifts from comedy to despair in the time it takes to sing a lullaby. The result is “a wry, thoughtful, and often hilarious book . . . a parable of how our children, no matter what, are other than ourselves” (The New Yorker). “Glimpses of Italy that are fond, critical, pithy and penetrating.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Download or read book Understanding Tim Parks written by Gillian Fenwick and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fenwick reckons with Parks's full literary range, from his novels and nonfiction books to his translations and journalism, and sheds light on the work of a versatile English writer whose international recognition is steadily growing."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Adultery and Other Diversions written by Tim Parks and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant, probing, and provocative reflections from the author of the bestselling "Italian Neighbors" and "An Italian Education".
Download or read book Translating Style written by Tim Parks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising from a dissatisfaction with blandly general or abstrusely theoretical approaches to translation, this book sets out to show, through detailed and lively analysis, what it really means to translate literary style. Combining linguistic and lit crit approaches, it proceeds through a series of interconnected chapters to analyse translations of the works of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. Each chapter thus becomes an illuminating critical essay on the author concerned, showing how divergences between original and translation tend to be of a different kind for each author depending on the nature of his or her inspiration. This new and thoroughly revised edition introduces a system of 'back translation' that now makes Tim Parks' highly-praised book reader friendly even for those with little or no Italian. An entirely new final chapter considers the profound effects that globalization and the search for an immediate international readership is having on both literary translation and literature itself.
Download or read book Italian Neighbors written by Tim Parks and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-01-07 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year: A deliciously entertaining account of expatriate life in a small village just outside Verona, Italy. Tim Parks is anything but a gentleman in Verona. So after ten years of living with his Italian wife, Rita, in a typical provincial Italian neighborhood, the novelist found that he had inadvertently collected a gallery full of splendid characters. In this wittily observed account, Parks introduces readers to his home town, with a statue of the Virgin at one end of the street, a derelict bottle factory at the other, and a wealth of exotic flora and fauna in between. Via Colombare, the village’s main street, offers an exemplary hodgepodge of all that is new and old in the bel paese, a point of collision between invading suburbia and diehard peasant tradition. It is a world of creeping vines, stuccoed walls, shotguns, security cameras, hypochondria, and expensive sports cars. More than a mere travelogue, Italian Neighbors is a vivid portrait of the real Italy and a compelling story of how even the most foreign people and places gradually assume the familiarity of home. “One of the most delightful travelogues imaginable . . . so vivid, so packed with delectable details.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
Download or read book Italian Ways On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo written by Tim Parks and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of "Italian Neighbors" returns with a wry and revealing portrait of Italian life--by riding its trains.
Download or read book Dialogues on Consciousness written by Riccardo Manzotti and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a period of many years, the celebrated English novelist Tim Parks and the Italian philosopher Riccardo Manzotti have been discussing the nature of consciousness. Not long ago, Parks suggested to his friend that they condense their exchanges “into a series of focused dialogues to set out the standard positions on consciousness, and suggest some alternatives.” Fifteen of the resultant conversations were edited by Parks and published in The New York Review of Books online—one of its most popular features ever. Now collected into one slim but thought-provoking volume, the dialogues reveal the profound scholarship of the two men. Their talks touch upon Aristotle and William James, the Higgs boson and Descartes, and include topics such as “Where Are Words?”, “The Body and Us”, “The Reality of Dreams”, “The Object of Consciousness”, and finally “Consciousness: What Is It?”. For those of us searching for insight into some of life’s most basic puzzles—how do we think? how do we perceive one another, and ourselves?—Dialogues on Consciousness will take its place alongside other classics of philosophy.
Download or read book The Hero s Way written by Tim Parks and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Italian Ways returns with an exploration into Italy’s past and present—following in the footsteps of Garibaldi’s famed 250-mile journey across the Apennines. In the summer of 1849, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy’s legendary revolutionary, was finally forced to abandon his defense of Rome. He and his men had held the besieged city for four long months, but now it was clear that only surrender would prevent slaughter and destruction at the hands of a huge French army. Against all odds, Garibaldi was determined to turn defeat into moral victory. On the evening of July 2, riding alongside his pregnant wife, Anita, he led 4,000 hastily assembled men to continue the struggle for national independence elsewhere. Hounded by both French and Austrian armies, the garibaldini marched hundreds of miles across the Appenines, Italy’s mountainous spine, and after two months of skirmishes and adventures arrived in Ravenna with just 250 survivors. Best-selling author Tim Parks, together with his partner Eleonora, set out in the blazing summer of 2019 to follow Garibaldi and Anita’s arduous journey through the heart of Italy. In The Hero’s Way he delivers a superb travelogue that captures Garibaldi’s determination, creativity, reckless courage, and profound belief. And he provides a fascinating portrait of Italy then and now, filled with unforgettable observations of Italian life and landscape, politics, and people.
Download or read book Cara Massimina written by Tim Parks and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bored and broke, Morris Duckworth, an English teacher in Verona, stumbles on a plan for financial salvation – to marry Massimina, one of his lovelier students. And if his intentions are frustrated by a suspicious, conservative family, is it any fault of his that the girl chooses to elope? Obsessed by self-advancement and excitement, Morris’s dreams of blackmail, theft and murder plunge him deep into a chilling nightmare of deception and violence.
Download or read book Italian Life written by Tim Parks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited new book on 'how Italy really works' from the bestselling writer on Italian culture. Forty years ago, Tim Parks made the bel paese his home. Italian Life is his reckoning with his adopted country, an attempt to get to the core of it, to make sense of it, to fold others' stories in with his own experience - now that he is, in his own words, 'to some degree Italian' himself. The result is an arresting, on-the-ground account of 21st century Italy told through the eyes of a rich cast of characters, among them students from poverty-stricken Basilicata trying to start new lives in the wealthy gloom of Milan, a priest, a poet, a young professor from Padua, and an Englishman who refuses to toe the line. At the book's centre is a story of corruption and power. But it is also a celebration of culture and history, fact and fable, sacred and secular, ancient and modern: a thought-provoking, surprising, entertaining and even definitive account of how Italy actually happens.
Download or read book Loving Roger written by Tim Parks and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-10-31 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tight and disturbing, Loving Roger begins with a dead body and a chilling question. Why has nice, ordinary, affectionate Anna picked up her kitchen knife and murdered the man she insists she loves?... This brief novel is a mordantly illuminating essay on the way love contains the seeds of vindictiveness and hatred'' Observer.
Download or read book Understanding Beryl Bainbridge written by Brett Josef Grubisic and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this introduction to prolific British novelist Beryl Bainbridge, Brett Josef Grubisic provides a biographical sketch of the writer, discussion of her motivations and techniques, and a detailed survey of her fiction that places the works in the traditions of British black comedy, social novels, and historical fiction. In approaching her works, Grubisic maps Bainbridge's movement from social to historical novels, beginning with the comic historicism of Young Adolf and continuing to her most recent fiction, The Birthday Boys, Every Man for Himself, Master Georgie, and According to Queeney. Grubisic holds that in portraying historical events through a variety of narrative techniques or from oblique vantage points, Bainbridge's latest novels partially ally themselves with the style and ideological concerns of literary postmodernism while still recalling the defining view of hardship established in her youth."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Understanding Will Self written by M. Hunter Hayes and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Will Self introduces readers to the satire and expressive ingenuity of a British writer who has garnered an array of awards since the 1991 publication of his first short story collection, The Quantity Theory of Sanity. In this guide to the well-received but largely unstudied writer, M. Hunter Hayes examines the key themes, narrative strategies, and cultural commentaries that characterize Self's work. Through close textual analyses, Hayes guides readers through the alternative universe of Self's writing and maps the interplay between his forays into journalism and fiction. Marked by their combination of seemingly improbable events and quotidian details, Self's novels, novellas, and short stories examine contemporary English life through a mode of writing that he has aptly termed dirty magical realism. Hayes shows how recurring characters have evolved through successive works and in relation with their environments.
Download or read book Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald written by Peter Wolfe and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald's canon illuminates writings he characterizes as possessing unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, Wolfe explains how the British novelist brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to the biographies and novels that have earned her renown.
