Download or read book Kick the Latch written by Kathryn Scanlan and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About one woman’s fine, hard life at the racetrack, Kick the Latch–with its ruthless concision and artful mysteries–is lightning in a bottle Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity. Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, “I wanted to preserve—amplify, exaggerate—Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.” Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.
Download or read book Aug 9 Fog written by Kathryn Scanlan and published by MCD. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A heartrending reassemblage of a life in its waning moments Fifteen years ago, Kathryn Scanlan found a stranger’s diary at an estate auction in a small town in Illinois. The owner of the diary was eighty-six years old when she began recording the details of her life in the small book, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. The diary was falling apart—water-stained and illegible in places—but magnetic to Scanlan nonetheless. She became obsessed with the object. After reading and rereading the diary, studying and dissecting it, for the next fifteen years she played with the sentences that caught her attention, cutting, editing, arranging, and rearranging them into the composition that became Aug 9—Fog (she chose the title from a note that was tucked into the diary). “Sure grand out,” the diarist writes. “That puzzle a humdinger.” Followed by, “A letter from Lloyd saying John died the 16th.” A whole state of mourning reveals itself in “2 canned hams.” The result of Scanlan’s collaging is an utterly compelling, deeply moving meditation on life and death. In Aug 9—Fog, Scanlan’s spare, minimalist approach has a maximal emotional effect, haunting the reader long after the book ends. It is an unclassifiable work from a visionary young writer and artist—a singular portrait of a life that so easily could have been forgotten.
Download or read book The Dominant Animal written by Kathryn Scanlan and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of 2020 by The Guardian, Southwest Review, and Publishers Weekly "[The stories] are short, but their mood and imagery are lasting, and reflective of brutal truths of the commerce of human civilization . . . chilling, finely tuned pieces on power and survival." --Los Angeles Times A collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young literary artist In The Dominant Animal—Kathryn Scanlan’s adventurous, unsettling debut collection—compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned, and teased for maximum impact, and a ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. The nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. The clay head of a man is bought and displayed as a trophy. Interior life manifests on the physical plane, where characters—human and animal—eat and breathe, provoke and injure one another. With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence—and also from deliberate and generative ambiguity to shocking, revelatory exactitude. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. How often the conclusions open—rather than tie—up. How they twist alertly. No mercy, a character says—and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.
Download or read book Far From You written by Tess Sharpe and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don’t miss Tess Sharpe’s new novel, 6 Times We Almost Kissed (and One Time We Did). The truth won't let her go. Sophie Winters nearly died. Twice. The first time, she's fourteen, and escapes a near-fatal car accident with scars, a bum leg, and an addiction to Oxy that'll take years to kick. The second time, she's seventeen, and it's no accident. Sophie and her best friend Mina are confronted by a masked man in the woods. Sophie survives, but Mina is not so lucky. When the cops deem Mina's murder a drug deal gone wrong, casting partial blame on Sophie, no one will believe the truth: Sophie has been clean for months, and it was Mina who led her into the woods that night for a meeting shrouded in mystery. After a forced stint in rehab, Sophie returns home to a chilly new reality. Mina's brother won't speak to her, her parents fear she'll relapse, old friends have become enemies, and Sophie has to learn how to live without her other half. To make matters worse, no one is looking in the right places and Sophie must search for Mina's murderer on her own. But with every step, Sophie comes closer to revealing all: about herself, about Mina---and about the secret they shared.
Download or read book Please Miss written by Grace Lavery and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The queer memoir you’ve been waiting for”—Carmen Maria Machado Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. As soon as she solves her “penis problem,” she begins receiving anonymous letters, seemingly sent by a cult of sinister clowns, and sets out on a magical mystery tour to find the source of these surreal missives. Misadventures abound: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a sixties femmebot; she writes a Juggalo Ghostbusters prequel and a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of a quiz show. Or is it vice versa? As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colors. With more dick jokes than a transsexual should be able to pull off, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.
Download or read book When You Reach Me written by Rebecca Stead and published by Wendy Lamb Books. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Like A Wrinkle in Time (Miranda's favorite book), When You Reach Me far surpasses the usual whodunit or sci-fi adventure to become an incandescent exploration of 'life, death, and the beauty of it all.'" —The Washington Post This Newbery Medal winner that has been called "smart and mesmerizing," (The New York Times) and "superb" (The Wall Street Journal) will appeal to readers of all types, especially those who are looking for a thought-provoking mystery with a mind-blowing twist. Shortly after a fall-out with her best friend, sixth grader Miranda starts receiving mysterious notes, and she doesn’t know what to do. The notes tell her that she must write a letter—a true story, and that she can’t share her mission with anyone. It would be easy to ignore the strange messages, except that whoever is leaving them has an uncanny ability to predict the future. If that is the case, then Miranda has a big problem—because the notes tell her that someone is going to die, and she might be too late to stop it. Winner of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Fiction A New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book Five Starred Reviews A Junior Library Guild Selection "Absorbing." —People "Readers ... are likely to find themselves chewing over the details of this superb and intricate tale long afterward." —The Wall Street Journal "Lovely and almost impossibly clever." —The Philadelphia Inquirer "It's easy to imagine readers studying Miranda's story as many times as she's read L'Engle's, and spending hours pondering the provocative questions it raises." —Publishers Weekly, Starred review
Download or read book The Last Book in the Universe Scholastic Gold written by Rodman Philbrick and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fast-paced action novel is set in a future where the world has been almost destroyed. Like the award-winning novel Freak the Mighty, this is Philbrick at his very best.It's the story of an epileptic teenager nicknamed Spaz, who begins the heroic fight to bring human intelligence back to the planet. In a world where most people are plugged into brain-drain entertainment systems, Spaz is the rare human being who can see life as it really is. When he meets an old man called Ryter, he begins to learn about Earth and its past. With Ryter as his companion, Spaz sets off an unlikely quest to save his dying sister -- and in the process, perhaps the world.
Download or read book We ll Never Have Paris written by Andrew Gallix and published by Repeater. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction and essays inspired by Paris from more than 70 Anglophone writers -- A MoveableFeast for the twenty-first century. "When good Americans die, they go to Paris", wrote the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in 1894. The French capital has always radiated an unmatched cultural, political and intellectual brilliance in the anglophone imagination, maintaining its status as the modern cosmopolitan city par excellence through the twentieth century to today. We'll Never Have Paris explores this enduring fascination with this myth of a bohemian and literary Paris (that of the Lost Generation, Joyce, Beckett and Shakespeare and Company) which also happens to be a largely anglophone construct -- one which the Eurostar and Brexit only seem to have exacerbated in recent years. Edited by Andrew Gallix, this collection brings together many of the most talented and adventurous writers from the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia and New Zealand to explore this theme through short stories, essays and poetry, in order to build up a captivating portrait of Paris as viewed by English speakers today -- A Moveable Feast for the twenty-first century. We'll Never Have Paris includes contributions from seventy-nine authors, including Tom McCarthy, Will Self, Brian Dillon, Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams, Max Porter, Sophie Mackintosh and Lauren Elkin.
Download or read book Aunt Dan and Lemon written by Wallace Shawn and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aunt Dan & Lemon takes us into the world of a young recluse named Lemon (alias Leonora) who spends her nights reading chronicles of Nazi atrocities. Lemon tells the audience about the overwhelming influence in her life of her parents' friend "Aunt Dan," an eccentric, passionate professor whose stories and seductive opinions enthrall Lemon from the time she is a young girl. The relationship that develops between Lemon and Aunt Dan and the conversations that went on in a small house on the bottom of an English garden form the focus of this play about political orientation and the allure of certain ideas-even if they lead to murder. A forceful play exposing the banality of society's evil, Aunt Dan & Lemon explores the ease with which good and bad become reconciled in the human mind.
Download or read book A Window on Eternity written by Edward O., Wilson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable story of how one of the most biologically diverse habitats in the world was destroyed, restored, and continues to evolve—with stunning, full-color photographs by two of the world’s best wildlife photographers. A Window on Eternity is a stunning book of splendid prose and gorgeous photography about one of the biologically richest places in Africa and perhaps in the world. Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique was nearly destroyed in a brutal civil war, then was reborn and is now evolv-ing back to its original state. Edward O. Wilson’s personal, luminous description of the wonders of Gorongosa is beautifully complemented by Piotr Naskrecki’s extraordinary photographs of the park’s exquisite natural beauty. A bonus DVD of Academy Award–winning director Jessica Yu’s documentary, The Guide, is also included with the book. Wilson takes readers to the summit of Mount Gorongosa, sacred to the local people and the park’s vital watershed. From the forests of the mountain he brings us to the deep gorges on the edge of the Rift Valley, previously unexplored by biologists, to search for new species and assess their ancient origins. He describes amazing animal encounters from huge colonies of agricultural termites to specialized raider ants that feed on them to giant spiders, a battle between an eagle and a black mamba, “conversations” with traumatized elephants that survived the slaughter of the park’s large animals, and more. He pleads for Gorongosa—and other wild places—to be allowed to exist and evolve in its timeless way uninterrupted into the future. As he examines the near destruction and rebirth of Gorongosa, Wilson analyzes the balance of nature, which, he observes, teeters on a razor’s edge. Loss of even a single species can have serious ramifications throughout an ecosystem, and yet we are carelessly destroying complex biodiverse ecosystems with unknown consequences. The wildlands in which these ecosystems flourish gave birth to humanity, and it is this natural world, still evolving, that may outlast us and become our legacy, our window on eternity.
Download or read book Computer Engineering for Babies written by Chase Roberts and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to computer engineering for babies. Learn basic logic gates with hands on examples of buttons and an output LED.
Download or read book Peace Like a River written by Leif Enger and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Davy kills two men and leaves home. His father packs up the family in a search for Davy.
Download or read book Someone We Know written by Shari Lapena and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "No one does suburban paranoia like Shari Lapena." —Ruth Ware, internationally bestselling author of The Woman in Cabin 10 Maybe you don't know your neighbours as well as you thought you did . . . In a quiet, leafy suburb in upstate New York, a teenager has been sneaking into houses—and into the owners' computers as well—learning their secrets, and maybe sharing some of them, too. Who is he, and what might he have uncovered? After two anonymous letters are received, whispers start to circulate, and suspicion mounts. And when a woman down the street is found murdered, the tension reaches the breaking point. Who killed her? Who knows more than they're telling? And how far will all these very nice people go to protect their own secrets? In this neighbourhood, it's not just the husbands and wives who play games. Here, everyone in the family has something to hide. You never really know what people are capable of . . .
Download or read book The Bad Ones written by Stylo Fantome and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love isn't always bright and shiny. Sometimes, it's dirty and wrong, buried six feet deep in a secret place where only wild things dare to go. Hidden behind a big black curtain that covers things no one should ever see. Sometimes it happens between two people who should never be allowed to come together. One who is a match, and the other who just happens to be gasoline. One strike is all it takes to burn the whole world down, and that's exactly what they plan on doing. Even if it kills them.
Download or read book Toddler hunting Other Stories written by Taeko Kōno and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disquieting stories exploring women's freedom & bondage in post-WWII Japan.
Download or read book Sleeping in Eden written by Nicole Baart and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lives of a middle-aged doctor and a love-struck young woman intersect across time in Sleeping in Eden, Nicole Baart's haunting novel about love, jealousy, and the boundaries between loyalty and truth. She knew what he wrote . . . One little word that made her feel both cheated and beloved. One word that changed everything. MINE. On a chilly morning in the Northwest Iowa town of Blackhawk, Dr. Lucas Hudson is filling in for the vacationing coroner on a seemingly open-and-shut suicide case. His own life is crumbling around him, but when he unearths the body of a woman buried in the barn floor beneath the hanging corpse, he realizes this terrible discovery could change everything. . . . Years before Lucas ever set foot in Blackhawk, Meg Painter met Dylan Reid. It was the summer before high school and the two quickly became inseparable. Although Meg's older neighbor, Jess, was the safe choice, she couldn't let go of Dylan no matter how hard she tried. Caught in a web of jealousy and deceit that spiraled out of control, Meg's choices in the past ultimately collide with Lucas's discovery in the present, weaving together a taut story of unspoken secrets and the raw, complex passions of innocence lost.
Download or read book David Hammons written by Elena Filipovic and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion. One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale, thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously “black" materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers—to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability. In this engaging study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find. And through it, she reveals Bliz-aard Ball Sale to be the backbone of a radical artistic oeuvre that transforms such notions as “art,” “commodity,” “performance,” and even “race” into categories that shift and dissolve, much like slowly melting snowballs.
