Download or read book Dear Jenny We are All Find written by Jenny Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Jenny Zhang's poems broadcast themselves with a surrealist anxiety. 'Can't I be my own dream?' she asks. The answer is always yes and always no. With dizzying energy and intelligence, Zhang forages through familial, global, and even anatomical configurations vainly outlining an identity that manifests only to shift and move restlessly on. This book brings to mind a 21st century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological." Elizabeth Robinson"
Download or read book My Baby First Birthday written by Jenny Zhang and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020 A Best Read of 2020 at Ms. Magazine "To read Jenny Zhang is to embrace primal states: pleasure, hunger, longing and rage." —TIME Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people’s dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it’s only in our mothers’ wombs that we’re still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it’s only then that we don’t have to earn love. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism. The magic trick in My Baby First Birthday is that despite all these themes, the book never feels like some jeremiad. Zhang uses friendship as a lyric. She seeks tenderness, radiant beauty, and having love for your mistakes. Through all this, she writes about being alone—really alone, like why-was-I-ever-born alone—and trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch something—skin to skin, animal to animal.
Download or read book Sour Heart written by Jenny Zhang and published by Lenny. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City—for readers of Zadie Smith and Helen Oyeyemi. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction • Finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • NPR • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Guardian • Esquire • New York • BuzzFeed A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy’s Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again. Praise for Sour Heart “[Jenny Zhang’s] coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that’s rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy.”—USA Today “One of the knockout fiction debuts of the year.”—New York “Compelling writing about what it means to be a teenager . . . It’s brilliant, it’s dark, but it’s also humorous and filled with love.”—Isaac Fitzgerald, Today “[A] combustible collection . . . in a class of its own.”—Booklist (starred review) “Gorgeous and grotesque . . . [a] tremendous debut.”—Slate
Download or read book Let s Pretend This Never Happened written by Jenny Lawson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside
Download or read book In Full Velvet written by Jenny Johnson and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These poems, likened to Elizabeth Bishop's, are about desire, love, seeing, gender, difference, ecology, queerness in the "natural" world, loss, LGBTQ lineage, and its community. They contain a sinuous, shape-shifting quality that makes her explorations of sex and selfhood all the more resonant. Jenny Johnson won a 2015 Whiting Fellowship. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Staying True written by Jenny Sanford and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-02-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BONUS: This edition contains a Staying True discussion guide. In this candid and compelling memoir, the first lady of South Carolina reveals the private ordeal behind her very public betrayal—and offers inspiration for anyone struggling to keep faith during life’s most trying times. She’s been a successful investment banker, a mother of four, and the campaign manager for one of American politics’ rising stars—her husband, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, once widely hailed as a possible candidate for president in 2012. Yet to most Americans, Jenny Sanford is best known for the one role she refused to play—that of conventional political spouse standing silently by while her husband went before the media and confessed his infidelity. Instead, she stayed true—to herself, to her faith, and to her highest ideals of parenthood and public service. She chose to let Mark Sanford deal with the embarrassment and political fallout from his own actions while focusing her own efforts privately on raising their children to be men of character, even in the face of the lies their father has told. In Staying True, Jenny Sanford recalls her shock and anguish upon discovering that her husband was having an affair with a woman in Argentina, and the further pain when she learned—just a day ahead of most Americans—that he had not ended the affair when she believed he had. She reveals the source of her determination to be honest and forthright instead of the victim in the tabloid passion play that gripped the nation in June 2009. But her story neither begins nor ends with Mark Sanford’s astounding fall from grace. Writing with uncommon candor from a deep well of spiritual strength, Sanford shares personal stories and life lessons from before and after she stepped into the public realm. She recounts the many stresses—as well as the myriad joys—that she experienced on a daily basis while living in the governmental spotlight. (Just try keeping four young boys out of mischief in the governor’s mansion!) And she describes the many ways that the seductions of power can drive apart even the most committed couples. At every step along her journey, Jenny Sanford has made choices: She gave up her career, moved far from her home state of Illinois, even changed her religious practices. Every choice was a glad concession to harmonious married life and, in some cases, to the support of her husband’s political aspirations. But the one thing she never gave up was her sense of self, her inner moral compass. Her remarkable poise and decency make her a role model for men and women alike. Her story will empower anyone who has fought to maintain independence and integrity—within a marriage or elsewhere in life.
Download or read book Jumping Jenny written by Ellen Bari and published by Kar-Ben Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jenny's love of jumping helps raise money during her school's fundraiser.
Download or read book Dear God written by Bunmi Laditan and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you looking to strengthen your relationship with God? Do you find yourself untangling the threads of what it is you really believe? Are you longing for a deeper connection to your spiritual side? Bunmi Laditan has been in your shoes. In the midst of her darkest days, Bunmi began writing down her deepest fears, hopes, dreams, and frustrations with God in the form of letters. The result of Bunmi's soul-searching journey is Dear God, a collection of funny, heartbreaking, and deeply insightful prayers that put words to the emotions we all feel as we grapple with this broken world and search for divine love. With the same gutsy and poetic honesty that has already charmed readers around the world, Bunmi now shares these moving, intimate conversations with God--prayers and poems that chart her story of reconnecting with the God she loved, lost, and found once again. Dear God catalogs what we're all thinking as we work out our personal relationships with God. These candid field notes will stir your heart and make you laugh out loud with Bunmi's self-awareness and profound insight into the spiritual journeys we're all doing our best to navigate. Join Bunmi as she travels through those all-too-familiar emotions--doubt, anger, joy, desperation, love, loneliness, and gratefulness--that humanity has always wrestled with. Wittily fresh and stunningly relatable, she exquisitely shares the painfully honest questions she's asked along the way, including: God, what is holiness? God, how can it be worth it to love life when it could slip away at any moment? God, what do I do when forgiveness feels impossible? God, I know you love me, but do you like me? This poignant collection of prayers is a timely reminder that even when we wander, God never leaves our side.
Download or read book Fire Color One written by Jenny Valentine and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A finalist for the prestigious Carnegie Medal, this novel is a stunning tribute to fathers and daughters, and to the unique power of art to connect and change us. Sixteen-year-old Iris itches constantly for the strike of a match. But when she’s caught setting one too many fires, she’s dragged away to London before she can get arrested. At least, that’s the story her mother tells. Soon Iris finds herself in the English countryside, where her millionaire father—a man she’s never met—lives. Though not for very much longer. Iris’s father is dying, and her self-interested mother is determined to claim his life’s fortune, including his priceless art collection. Forced to live with him as part of an exploitive scheme, Iris quickly realizes her father is far different from the man she’s been schooled to hate, and everything she thought she knew—about her father and herself—is suddenly unclear. But there may be hidden beauty in Iris’s uncertain past and hopeful future, if only she can see beyond the flames. Praise for Fire Color One: "It’s not often—in fact, it has never happened to me even once—that I fall so hard for a young arsonist. The book moves swiftly, alternating between comedy and sadness, sometimes in the same paragraph. I loved Fire Color One." —Daniel Wallace, critically acclaimed and bestselling author of Big Fish * "Valentine writes about family dysfunction, arson, and art with equal levels of beauty and lyricism, creating a vivid landscape of heartache and redemption....A story about an ugly situation that explodes into beauty through cunning and resilience." —Kirkus *STARRED* * "From the first page to the last, Valentine has crafted a masterpiece." —BCCB *STARRED* "[T]his is a poignant story about the power of art to connect and transform." —SLJ "Beautifully written...a quiet, reflective novel that blooms into a thrilling mystery." —Booklist "Fire Color One is a stunning journey of a teenage girl’s struggle to find her place in a world that tries its hardest to keep her out....For fans of stories in which the good guys prevail, this book is perfect." —VOYA "Wise, brilliantly plotted." —The Sunday Times "Beautifully written...this latest creation is her most spectacular yet." —The Guardian Children's Books review “A beautifully written, darkly funny and surprisingly poignant story of art, family and discovering the people we thought we knew.” —Kerry Kletter, critically acclaimed author of The First Time She Drowned Praise for Me, the Missing, and the Dead: A Morris Award finalist Winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize (under title Finding Violet Park) * “Compulsively readable. A memorable new voice.” —Publishers Weekly *STARRED* * “Lucas’ pitch-perfect voice and authentic family relationships...and the poignant, coming-of-age mystery will stay with the reader long after the book ends. Valentine’s debut novel shines richly.” —Booklist *STARRED* * “Engaging from start to finish.” —School Library Journal *STARRED* “An impressive debut. Valentine offers a rich cast of characters and marvelous writing.” —Buffalo News “Charmingly told, this mystery manages to be both frothy and nourishing.” —Kirkus
Download or read book Susceptible to Light written by Chelan Harkin and published by . This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susceptible to Light, by Chelan Harkin, is a collection of inspired poetry that is mystical and ecstatic in nature--mystical defined as anything having to do with opening the heart to light and ecstatic having to do with anything expressed from this place. Susceptible to Light is here to remind you of your joy, to assist you in reconsidering ways of relating to your life that better serve to open your heart, to deconstruct anything about God that doesn't feel close, intimate, authentic, and warm, and to remind your soul to break the surface and take a breath. Rumi says, "What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest." May this collection help you feel a taste of that sweet openness. Hafiz says, "God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing." May this collection help you feel the possibility of that kind of laughter. Eric Weiner, NY Times Bestselling Author of "The Geography of Bliss" says of Chelan's work: "These pages bear witness to a beautifully reckless and vulnerable love. Susceptible to Light shares the ineffable, all-consuming love of a Rumi or Hafiz, but situated in the here-and-now, amidst our dirty dishes and carpools. Do yourself a favor and savor these poems. Make yourself susceptible to their light." Alfred K. LaMotte, author of 'Wounded Bud' says of Chelan's work: "So much of today's 'spiritual poetry' is not poetry at all, but pedagogy, full of do's and don'ts. Chelan is a true spiritual poet because hers is not the voice of instruction but the voice of holy bewilderment. If she teaches us, she teaches us to dance. She teaches us the taste of what comes out of the grape when it gets crushed. All your tears will find sisters in her poems, and all your laughter will find a home in her belly. Her poems take us to the deepest, darkest loam, where lightning goes."
Download or read book Eye Level written by Jenny Xie and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera For years now, I’ve been using the wrong palette. Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date. Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse. I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight, my overreactive motion sickness. 9 p.m., Hanoi’s Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine. Voices outside the door come to a soft boil. —from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season” Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here—colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes—bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception—both to the tangible world and to “all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.”
Download or read book Shug written by Jenny Han and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annemarie “Shug” Wilcox is clever and brave and true (on the inside anyway). And she’s about to become your new best friend in this enchanting middle grade novel from the New York Times bestselling author of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (soon to be a major motion picture!), Jenny Han. Annemarie Wilcox, or Shug as her family calls her, is beginning to think there's nothing worse than being twelve. She's too tall, too freckled, and way too flat-chested. Shug is sure that there's not one good or amazing thing about her. And now she has to start junior high, where the friends she counts most dear aren't acting so dear anymore -- especially Mark...
Download or read book Constellation Route written by Matthew Olzmann and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2022-01-12 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constellation Route uses the form of the letter to explore issues related to contemporary American society: the environment, race, love, grief, friendship, violence, and spirituality. The book is largely a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large.
Download or read book Focal Point written by Jenny Qi and published by Steel Toe Books. This book was released on 2021-10-13 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, Focal Point is a scientist's unofficial dissertation, a daughter's faithful correspondence, and a coming-of-age story. Written largely while Jenny Qi was a young Ph.D. student conducting cancer research after her beloved mother's death from cancer, the collection turns to "all the rituals of all the faiths," invoking Western and Eastern mythology and history, metaphors from cell biology, and even Jimi Hendrix, as Qi searches for a container to hold grief. The opening poem of this debut collection primes us to consider all definitions of the titular "focal point," as the speaker evaluates this moment of early loss beneath a literal and metaphoric microscope. Here, the past and future converge, but from here, what does divergence look like? What can a scientific mind do except interrogate and attempt to measure the unknown and immeasurable? These poems, at once tender and suffused with wry humor, diverse in form and scope, go on to navigate illness, early relationships, racism, climate change, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic, unflinching in the face of death and the darker side of human nature. At its core, Focal Point is an uncompromising interrogation of how to be alive in the world, always loving something that has been or is in the process of being lost.
Download or read book Would Everybody Please Stop written by Jenny Allen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor "One of the funniest writers in America." That’s what The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz calls Jenny Allen—and with good reason. In her debut essay collection, the longtime humorist and performer declares no subject too sacred, no boundary impassable. With her eagle eye for the absurd and hilarious, Allen reports from the potholes midway through life’s journey. One moment she’s flirting shamelessly—and unsuccessfully—with a younger man at a wedding; the next she’s stumbling upon X-rated images on her daughter’s computer. She ponders the connection between her ex-husband’s questions about the location of their silverware, and the divorce that came a year later. While undergoing chemotherapy, she experiments with being a “wig person.” And she considers those perplexing questions that we never pause to ask: Why do people say “It is what it is”? What’s the point of fat-free half-and-half ? And haven’t we heard enough about memes? Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read Would Everybody Please Stop? is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.
Download or read book Warning written by Jenny Joseph and published by Souvenir Press. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Utterly charming and uplifting' The Good Book Guide Voted Britain's favourite poem, 'Warning', written in 1961, is known and loved the world over for its message of old age as a time for indulgence and fun. In the poem's respectable middle-aged woman, as she imagines herself in old age as a cheeky rebel with outrageous clothes and dotty behaviour, poet Jenny Joseph has created a character whose thoughts have been quoted at conferences and funerals, used to cheer up sick friends and remembered with pleasure by children and adults alike around the world. Here, 'Warning' appears as a beautiful updated edition with new illustrations; the perfect gift for a friend or relative who wants to grow older free from expectations, with a joyful and rebellious spirit.
Download or read book Fire Is Not a Country written by Cynthia Dewi Oka and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her third collection, Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us. As she builds a lyric portrait of her own family, Oka interrogates how migration, economic exploitation, patriarchal violence, and a legacy of political repression shape the beauties and limitations of familial love and obligation. Woven throughout are speculative experiments that intervene in the popular apocalyptic narratives of our time with the wit of an unassimilable other. Oka’s speakers mourn, labor, argue, digress, avenge, and fail, but they do not retreat. Born of conflicts public and private, this collection is for anyone interested in what it means to engage the multitudes within ourselves.
