Download or read book I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris written by Elizabeth Hall and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. LGBT Studies. Women's Studies. Elizabeth Hall began writing I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS in the summer of 2010 after reading Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex. She was particularly struck by Laqueur's bold assertion: "More words have been shed, I suspect, about the clitoris, than about any other organ, or at least, any organ its size." How was it possible that Hall had been reading compulsively for years and never once stumbled upon this trove of prose devoted to the clit? If Lacquer's claim was correct, where were all these "words"? And more: what did size have to do with it? Hall set out to find all that had been written about the clit past and present. As she soon discovered, the history of the clitoris is no ordinary tale; rather, its history is marked by the act of forgetting. "Marvelously researched and sculpted... Bulleted points rat-tat-tatting the patriarchy, strobing with pleasure." Dodie Bellamy "Freud, terra cotta cunts, hyenas, anatomists, and Acker, mixed with a certain slant of light on a windowsill and a leg thrown open invite us... Bawdy and beautiful." Wendy C. Ortiz "Gorgeous little book about a gorgeous little organ... Mines discourses as varied as sexology, plastic surgery, literature and feminism to produce an eye-opening compendium... The 'tender button' finally gets its due." Janet Sarbanes "God this book is glorious... You will learn and laugh and wonder why it took you so long to find this book." Suzanne Scanlon "The luxury of lingering in pleasure is what Hall's book gives its readers, not only because the subject is at once sexy and scientifically compelling, but because it is rendered with graceful care, delivering in small bites an investigation of the clit that is simultaneously a meditation on the myriad ways in which smallness hides power." The Rumpus"

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

Download or read book Stars of the Night Commute written by Ana Božičević and published by Tarpaulin Sky Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ana Božic(evic''s work is sort of animist--it's either about silence or the racket of the world. How does she do it? Clicks the switch to say it's silent & it's happening then on a distant tiny stage. She's muttering, and then it's a story and a very good one. I mean in poetry at some point you don't know what the writer means. In Ana's work I watch "it" vanish (all the time) & I trust it."--Eileen Myles.

Download or read book This Is Pleasure written by Mary Gaitskill and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

Download or read book Potted Meat written by Steven Dunn and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a decaying town in southern West Virginia, Potted Meat follows a young Aftican-American boy into adolescence as he struggles with abusive parents, poverty, alcohol addiction, and racial tensions.

Download or read book Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing written by Dana Green and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Dana Green's debut collection of stories, SOMETIMES THE AIR IN THE ROOM GOES MISSING, explores how storytelling changes with each iteration, each explosion, each mutation. Told through multiple versions, these are stories of weapons testing, sheep that can herd themselves into watercolors, and a pregnant woman whose water breaks every day for nine months stories told with an unexpected syntax and a sense of deja vu: narrative as echo. "I love Dana Green's wild mind and the beautiful flux of these stories. Here the wicked simmers with the sweet, and reading is akin to watching birds. How lucky, and how glad I am, to have this book in my hands." Noy Halloand "Language becomes a beautiful problem amid the atomic explosions and nuclear families and strange symmetries and southwestern deserts and frail human bodies blasted by cancer that comprise Dana Green's bracing debut, which reminds us every ordinary moment, every ordinary sentence, is an impending emergency." Lance Olsen"

Download or read book Ladies Lazarus written by Piper J. Daniels and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Essays. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Equal parts séance, polemic, and love letter, Piper J. Daniels' LADIES LAZARUS examines evangelical upbringing, sexual trauma, queer identity, and mental illness with a raw intensity that moves between venom and grace. Fueled by wanderlust, Daniels travels the country, unearthing the voices of forgotten women. Girls and ghosts speak freely, murdered women serve as mentors, and those who've languished in unmarked graves convert their names to psalms. At every turn, Daniels invites the reader to engage, not in the soothing narrative of healing, but in the literal and metaphorical dynamism of death and resurrection. "Beautifully written collection of 11 lyric essays... [Daniels] emerges as an empowering and noteworthy voice."--Publishers Weekly "Piper J. Daniels is going to rip the essay world apart. LADIES LAZARUS is the best debut I've read in a long time. Daniels has resurrected the personal essay and what it is and what it can do."--Jenny Boully "An extremely intelligent, impressively understated, and achingly powerful work."--David Sheilds "A siren song from planet woman, a love letter from the body, a resistance narrative against the dark."--Lidia Yuknavitch

Download or read book Burial written by Claire Donato and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sorrowful daughter works through her grief after her father dies.

Download or read book Womonster written by Olivia Cronk and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the form of two long poems, "Interro-Porn" and "Chenille," _Womonster_ explores the often monstrous and buffoonish impossibility of a coherent self, even as its speakers take great pleasure in the performance of selves. Everywhere absorbing and leaking other media, _Womonster_ is a "sloppy" text, at once nauseating and thrilling, psychedelic and domestic. "Olivia Cronk's Womonster is a performative feat, a book that makes being out of pretending.... I was thrilled and moved by this wild book, which moves from an explosive rejection of narrative to the creation of a theater of home, that shabby, beautiful structure built with girly hope, our fortification against loss." (Suzanne Scanlon) "With _Womonster_, Olivia Cronk shows that we are other people as much as we are our various selves. We are the people who share our lives; we are our loved ones and our aggressors. If this makes us monsters, then everyone's a monster." (Jay Besemer) "Cronk's writing is forensically spooky.... We are brought closer to Cronk's territory of occult sadomasochistic desire. _Womonster_ is both a hyper-abject soap opera of beige underwear, dusty crystal, sinks full of bloodied dishes, and a redemptive horror story about the power of becoming the monster." (Laura Ellen Joyce) "Olivia Cronk is one of my favorite US poets over the past 15 years. _Womonster_ is something like Lars Noren's Revolver rewritten with Ouija board." (Johannes Göransson)

Download or read book Descent written by Lauren Russell and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet's great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. "In DESCENT, the very talented poet Lauren Russell shows us how to write what we do not know; to give with grace and dignity, humanity to names on the family tree. DESCENT is a search for truths felt in one's bones."--Brenda Coultas "An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering that asks, what do we demand of the past, and what to do with its refusal? Russell's deep archive would not answer her back. With DESCENT, however, she speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up."--Douglas Kearney "Lauren Russell's stellar new book-length poem...portrays a rich, Black American ancestral record. Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell's poems are as much ascent into a present shaped by the past as descent from America's true heroic figures."--John Keene

Download or read book Oriental Girls Desire Romance written by Catherine Liu and published by Kaya/Muae. This book was released on 1997 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By Catherine Liu.

Download or read book Haute Surveillance written by Johannes Göransson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Poetry. "Maybe I should try to wake up. Maybe I should try and forget about Father Voice-Over. Maybe I should try and look away—but I can't. 'News organizations are setting up temporary stations in the mansion. When do you expect the Black Man to show up, one reporter asks me. I'm wearing a new suit, which was made in China, by a Chinese child listening to a mechanical bird tell them about Art.' Göransson's HAUTE SURVEILLANCE is so riveting, so fiercely imagined, so febrile and alive to the violence of our moment, so passionate—its images unbidden, its narrative a continual surprise. It's a work so filled with invention and wit and ferocity that I was compelled to read it, at times against my will, mesmerized, enthralled."—Carole Maso

Download or read book Hunting Season written by Julia Brennan and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julia Brennan's debut novel, _Hunting Season_, is part auto-fiction, part lyric essay, part lament, part film journal, part performance, and part exorcism. Challenging traditional victim/perpetrator narratives, _Hunting Season_ is an intimate investigation into the ways we learn to love and wound. "A kind of fortress: elaborately constructed, designed to protect and to withstand the dangers that are everywhere around us. An imaginative, frightening and heartbreaking tour de force." (CAROLE MASO) "Brennan's cinematic fiction moves through the vignette-influenced narrative landscape with an expression of loneliness like a rifle flung over the hard shoulder of postmodern storytelling: you never know when her rifle will go off, leaving you bruised, cut in halves or quarters, or heartbroken. _Hunting Season_ is 'a slow amputation' of love, film, disaster, agony, tamed or nonchalant sadomasochism and sexual fantasies?. Come here and let her destroy you. Tenderly." (VI KHI NAO) "_Hunting Season_ frees the bildungsroman from its orthodox chronologies and wearisome protagonists. As in Ferrante, we see a woman artist come of age. She comes of age, ages, travels back, comes again. How best to repurpose an education in patriarchy? Like Ferrante, or Amina Cain, Eugene Lim, or Cristina Rivera Garza, Julia Brennan refuses to sacrifice to the gods of narrative arc. _Hunting Season_ plots in phenomenological ecotones, those sites produced in the connective tissue between mothers and children, hunters and prey, lovers and lover's ghosts, or the multiple paramours of a single artist." (DANIELLE PAFUNDA)

Download or read book Man s Companions written by Joanna Ruocco and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. For the characters in MAN'S COMPANIONS, the self is a degraded version of someone else. Fantasy is stymied by performance anxiety. Delayed gratification phones in a last-minute cancellation. The fictions in this collection are mongrel, troubling the genus of story with miscegenations and mutations, and at the heart of the book is the figure of the anima non grata, the unwanted woman, a degraded version of man. Using language by turns digressive, obsessive, overblown, romantic, fickle, and mundane, MAN'S COMPANIONS manipulates feminine tropes and finds a kind of joyous liberty in its proliferation of thwarted affairs and awkward interludes.

Download or read book BAX 2015 written by Seth Abramson and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BAX 2015 is the second volume of an annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year's volume, guest edited by Douglas Kearney, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Dodie Bellamy, Anselm Berrigan, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Aaron Kunin, Joyelle McSweeney, and Fred Moten—as well as emerging voices. Best American Experimental Writing is also an important literary anthology for classroom settings, as individual selections are intended to provoke lively conversation and debate. The series coeditors are Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Download or read book Women s Anatomy of Arousal written by Sheri Winston and published by Mango Garden Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree written by Nice Leng'ete and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An "elegant and inspiring memoir" by the human rights activist who changed the minds of her elders, reformed traditions from the inside, and is creating a better future for girls and women throughout Africa (Sonia Faleiro, New York Times). Nice Leng`ete was raised in a Maasai village in Kenya. In 1998, when Nice was six, her parents fell sick and died, and Nice and her sister Soila were taken in by their father’s brother, who had little interest in the girls beyond what their dowries might fetch. Fearing “the cut” (female genital mutilation, a painful and sometimes deadly ritualistic surgery), which was the fate of all Maasai women, Nice and Soila climbed a tree to hide. Nice hoped to find a way to avoid the cut forever, but Soila understood it would be impossible. But maybe if one of the sisters submitted, the other would be spared. After Soila chose to undergo the surgery, sacrificing herself to save Nice, their lives diverged. Soila married, dropped out of school, and had children–all in her teenage years–while Nice postponed receiving the cut, continued her education, and became the first in her family to attend college. Supported by Amref, Nice used visits home to set an example for what an uncut Maasai woman can achieve. Other women listened, and the elders finally saw the value of intact, educated girls as the way of the future. The village has since ended FGM entirely, and Nice continues the fight to end FGM throughout Africa, and the world. Nice’s journey from “heartbroken child and community outcast, to leader of the Maasai” is an inspiration and a reminder that one person can change the world–and every girl is worth saving.