Download or read book I ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive written by Lynn Melnick and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving and essential exploration of what it takes to find your voice as a woman, a survivor, an artist, and an icon. The first time Lynn Melnick listened to a Dolly Parton song in full, she was 14 years old, in the triage room of a Los Angeles hospital, waiting to be admitted to a drug rehab program. Already in her young life as a Jewish teen in the 1980s, she had been the victim of rape, abuse, and trauma, and her path to healing would be long. But in Parton’s words and music, she recognized a fellow survivor. In this powerful, incisive work of social and self-exploration, Melnick blends personal essay with cultural criticism to explore Parton’s dual identities as feminist icon and objectified sex symbol, identities that reflect the author’s own fraught history with rape culture and the arduous work of reclaiming her voice. Each chapter engages with the artistry and impact of one of Parton’s songs, as Melnick reckons with violence, misogyny, creativity, parenting, friendship, sex, love, and the consolations and cruelties of religion. Bold and inventive, I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive gives us an accessible and memorable framework for understanding our times and a revelatory account of survival, persistence, and self-discovery.
Download or read book I ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive written by Lynn Melnick and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving memoir exploring how a poet found support and revival through Dolly Parton's music and story.
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 If I Should Say I Have Hope written by Lynn Melnick and published by Yesyes Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. "The title of Melnick's stunning book is a microcosm of the poems within—the uncertainty of 'if I should say' followed by the defiance of 'I have hope.' Her poems follow moments of unmooredness ('I am best / when I dabble in consciousness and a soundly / spinning room') with blinding insight ('You wouldn't know happy if it kissed you on the mouth')—tiptoeing followed by a kick to the head. On the melancholy-go-round of these poems, there's a swan-seat for sadness but also a tiger called Beauty and a horse called Hope. The unexpected music and syntax of Melnick's work will make you want to ride/read it again and again."—Matthea Harvey "Lynn Melnick's poems are a series of swift kicks knocking over whatever a lot of Boys think it's like to be a Girl. They're also the bruises afterward. IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE teems with very small and much larger devastations, crackling throughout with fierceness and stealth and wry intelligence. 'There's some kind of crazy on the way,' she says. Those of us who've seen that crazy coming need this book. Those of us who haven't need it more."—Mark Bibbins "Lynn Melnick's poems in IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE recall the raw power of Anne Sexton and read like Lynchian dreams. The voice of these poems proves consistent and potent, steeping the book in weather and worry, in impulse and flesh, sometimes in blood. Most of the poems in IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE are formal in structure and tone, built mostly in couplets, sometimes tercets and quatrains, and all demand recognition of truth, of human details we might rather deny. If I should say I have hope, the speaker suggests, I need to say all of these things first. She confesses, 'I'll wreck it if it's good.' Calling attention to our often-destructive tendencies, the poet admits fallibility and imperfection, while quietly offering refuge to a thing with feathers."—Melinda Wilson, Coldfront Magazine's Top 40 Poetry Books of 2012
Download or read book Refusenik written by Lynn Melnick and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this searing new volume, Lynn Melnick dives head-first through concentric waves of personal and generational trauma with her trademark fearlessness. Evincing a complex mind shaped by the late 20th century's misplaced priorities, Refusenik interrogates misogyny and anti-Semitism across time and a shifting global landscape-from a football field in Los Angeles to a Russian shtetl to a beloved daughter's Brooklyn bedroom. Variously unraveling and allowing for intricate tangles of anger, nostalgia and love, these agile poems furrow deeper into the terrain of Melnick's much-celebrated earlier titles, arriving at a profound and pressured understanding of what it means to be a contemporary American. LYNN MELNICK is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik (2022), Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the coeditor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022.
Download or read book Landscape with Sex and Violence written by Lynn Melnick and published by YesYes Books. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in Landscape with Sex and Violence explore what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, and a trauma survivor in contemporary America.
Download or read book Scatter Adapt and Remember written by Annalee Newitz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How? As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet’s turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human interference. It’s a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth’s past major disasters—from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation—resulted in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet’s species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz, science journalist and editor of the science Web site io9.com explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Life on Earth has come close to annihilation—humans have, more than once, narrowly avoided extinction just during the last million years—but every single time a few creatures survived, evolving to adapt to the harshest of conditions. This brilliantly speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity’s long history of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey’s ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for “living cities” to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death. Newitz’s remarkable and fascinating journey through the science of mass extinctions is a powerful argument about human ingenuity and our ability to change. In a world populated by doomsday preppers and media commentators obsessively forecasting our demise, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a compelling voice of hope. It leads us away from apocalyptic thinking into a future where we live to build a better world—on this planet and perhaps on others. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever the future holds.
Download or read book A Little Life written by Hanya Yanagihara and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.
Download or read book Notes from an Apocalypse written by Mark O'Connell and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine. “Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.
Download or read book Sometimes I Lie written by Alice Feeney and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?
Download or read book The Burn Journals written by Brent Runyon and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-10-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fans of Thirteen Reasons Why, Running with Scissors, and Girl, Interrupted will be entranced by this remarkable true story of teenage despair and recovery. “[The Burn Journals] describes a particular kind of youthful male desolation better than it has ever been described before, by anyone.” —Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon In 1991, fourteen-year-old Brent Runyon came home from school, doused his bathrobe in gasoline, put it on, and lit a match. He suffered third-degree burns over 85% of his body and spent the next year recovering in hospitals and rehab facilities. During that year of physical recovery, Runyon began to question what he’d done, undertaking the complicated journey from near-death back to high school, and from suicide back to the emotional mainstream of life.
Download or read book BrainStorm written by Sara Schley and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sara Schley is the founder of a consulting business and has worked with hundreds of renowned companies worldwide. She's a proud mother, grandmother, community leader and has been married for twenty-six years. She also has a bipolar II brain. Fearing the stigma, she kept this secret for decades. Until now. In her acclaimed memoir BrainStorm: From Broken to Blessed on the Bipolar Spectrum, Sara tells her life-changing story to help end the bipolar stigma, optimize brain health, and save lives. At twenty-one, as a senior in college, Sara was a scholar-athlete who seemed to have it all. Then, like the flip of a switch, she had her first brain breakdown: A tailspin into a living hell. It was terrifying. It took her twenty-five years and five psychiatrists to get the diagnosis that saved her life: Sara is on the bipolar spectrum with a bipolar II brain. If you've never heard of the bipolar spectrum, you're not alone: Most healthcare professionals still don't know it exists. Misdiagnosis results and the wrong medications make broken brains worse. However, bipolar exists on a broad spectrum. Understanding this changes everything: With the correct diagnosis, medication, support, and self-care, people who have experienced severe, persistent depression-which is actually a form of bipolar-can live rich, full lives. Sara's life is proof. The self-care disciplines Sara has honed over forty years of living with her bipolar II brain can help anyone who experiences anxiety, stress, or depression heal. Read this book to transform your life or that of someone you love.
Download or read book Dogsong written by Gary Paulsen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the old days there were songs... Something is bothering Russel Susskit. He hates waking up to the sound of his father's coughing, the smell of diesel oil, the noise of snow machines starting up. Only Oogruk, the shaman who owns the last team of dogs in the village, understands Russel's longing for the old ways and the songs that celebrated them. But Oogruk cannot give Russel the answers he seeks; the old man can only prepare him for what he must do alone. Driven by a strange, powerful dream of a long-ago self and by a burning desire to find his own song, Russel takes Oogruk's dogs on an epic journey of self-discovery that will change his life forever.
Download or read book This Is How written by Augusten Burroughs and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you're fat and fail every diet, if you're thin but can't get thin enough, if you lose your job, if your child dies, if you are diagnosed with cancer, if you always end up with exactly the wrong kind of person, if you always end up alone, if you can't get over the past, if your parents are insane and ruining your life, if you really and truly wish you were dead, if you feel like it's your destiny to be a star, if you believe life has a grudge against you, if you don't want to have sex with your spouse and don't know why, if you feel so ashamed, if you're lost in life. If you have ever wondered, How am I aupposed to survive this? This is How.
Download or read book Every Falling Star written by Sungju Lee and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for a young audience, this intense memoir explores the harsh realities of life on the streets in contemporary North Korea. Every Falling Star is the memoir of Sungju Lee, who at the age of twelve was forced to live on the streets of North Korea and fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly recreates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, “his brothers,” to daily be hungry and to fear arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. This riveting memoir allows young readers to learn about other cultures where freedoms they take for granted do not exist.
Download or read book That s Not What Happened written by Kody Keplinger and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestseller Kody Keplinger comes an astonishing and thought-provoking exploration of the aftermath of tragedy, the power of narrative, and how we remember what we've lost. It's been three years since the Virgil County High School Massacre. Three years since my best friend, Sarah, was killed in a bathroom stall during the mass shooting. Everyone knows Sarah's story--that she died proclaiming her faith. But it's not true. I know because I was with her when she died. I didn't say anything then, and people got hurt because of it. Now Sarah's parents are publishing a book about her, so this might be my last chance to set the record straight . . . but I'm not the only survivor with a story to tell about what did--and didn't--happen that day. Except Sarah's martyrdom is important to a lot of people, people who don't take kindly to what I'm trying to do. And the more I learn, the less certain I am about what's right. I don't know what will be worse: the guilt of staying silent or the consequences of speaking up . . .
Download or read book Eric written by Doris Lund and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2000-05-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the bestselling story of Eric, a boy with leukemia who refused to give up living--as told by the person who was with him through it all, his mother. Eric was seventeen when he heard the doctor's verdict about the disease that wanted his life. At first he and his family could not believe it. Eric was the picture of everything a youth should be--a champion athlete, a splendid human being, vibrant with energy and loved by all who knew him. The doctors could promise little. They would do as much as was medically possible. Eric had to do as much as was humanly possible. But if the odds were not good, they were good enough for Eric. Given the choice between life and death, Eric chose to live.
