Download or read book The Flicker Against the Light and Writing the Contemporary Uncanny written by JANE. ALEXANDER and published by . This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman walks through a virtual reconstruction of the destroyed streets where she and her lover used to live. A young man trades away his youth, and something of himself, in the plasma extracted from his blood. A clone addresses her dead, doubled 'self' as she tries to understand her personal history. In these uncanny stories of virtual reality, biotech, data surveillance and communications technology, Black Mirror meets M.R. James: unsettling perspectives on contemporary and near-future scenarios are layered with hauntings; borders are blurred between living and non-living, real and not-real. Accompanying the collection is the essay 'Writing the Contemporary Uncanny', an investigation of how the uncanny has shifted in the hundred years since Freud attempted to define it, and how uncanny short fiction can interrogate and illuminate our experiences of science and technology to help us understand what it means to be human in an ever-accelerating technological landscape. '... an indisputably magnificent piece of writing: sensible, practical, hopeful and devastating. Every re-reading allows us to revel in some initially-overlooked nuance or subtle observation.' Aoife Lyall, author of Mother, Nature, on 'Candlemaker Row' 'When I think of the uncanny I will now always think of this astonishing collection. These stories have inspired, unsettled, and moved me; they haunt me still.' Helen Sedgwick, author of The Comet Seekers and The Growing Season
Download or read book Uncanny Magazine Issue 42 written by Aliette de Bodard and published by Uncanny Magazine. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The September/October 2021 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine. Featuring new fiction by Aliette de Bodard, Betsy Aoki, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, P. Djèlí Clark, Kristiana Willsey, Rachael K. Jones, and Eugenia Triantafyllou. Essays by Sarah Kuhn, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Ada Palmer, and Shiv Ramdas, poetry by Chiara Situmorang, Avi Silver, Uche Ogbuji, and Kristian Macaron, interviews with Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam and Eugenia Triantafyllou by Caroline M. Yoachim, a cover by Julie Dillon, and editorials by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Elsa Sjunneson. Uncanny Magazine is a bimonthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in November 2014. Edited by 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 & 2020 Hugo award winners for best semiprozine, and 2018 Hugo award winners for Best Editor, Short Form, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Chimedum Ohaegbu and Elsa Sjunneson, each issue of Uncanny includes new stories, poetry, articles, and interviews.
Download or read book Writing the Uncanny written by Dan Coxon and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing the Uncanny sees some of the best contemporary authors explain what drew them to horror, ghost stories, folklore and beyond, and reveal how to craft unsettling fiction which resonates. An essential guide for both the casual reader and the aspiring writer of strange tales.
Download or read book Underworld Lit written by Srikanth Reddy and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.
Download or read book Uncanny Bodies written by Robert Spadoni and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1931 Universal Pictures released Dracula and Frankenstein, two films that inaugurated the horror genre in Hollywood cinema. These films appeared directly on the heels of Hollywood's transition to sound film. Uncanny Bodies argues that the coming of sound inspired more in these massively influential horror movies than screams, creaking doors, and howling wolves. A close examination of the historical reception of films of the transition period reveals that sound films could seem to their earliest viewers unreal and ghostly. By comparing this audience impression to the first sound horror films, Robert Spadoni makes a case for understanding film viewing as a force that can powerfully shape both the minutest aspects of individual films and the broadest sweep of film production trends, and for seeing aftereffects of the temporary weirdness of sound film deeply etched in the basic character of one of our most enduring film genres.
Download or read book My Death written by Lisa Tuttle and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The November 2023 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to her: she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe, and the inspiration for his classic children’s book, Hermine in Cloud-Land. But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most radical painting, My Death, deemed too unsettling—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves an astonishingly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s history and her own. Whose biography is she writing—really?
Download or read book Death 24x a Second written by Laura Mulvey and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the role new media technologies play in our experience of film.
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book Contending for the Chinese Modern written by Xiaoping Wang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Contending for the "Chinese Modern", Xiaoping Wang studies the writing of fiction in 1940s China. It makes critical reappraisements of some famed Chinese writers, and sheds fresh lights on the theoretical issues pertaining to the problematic of plural modernities.
Download or read book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing written by Hélène Cixous and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: The School of the Dead--the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; The School of Dreams--the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and The School of Roots--the importance of depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka.
Download or read book The Comet Seekers written by Helen Sedgwick and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magical, intoxicating debut novel, both intimate and epic, that intertwines the past, present, and future of two lovers bound by the passing of great comets overhead and a coterie of remarkable ancestors. Róisín and François are immediately drawn to each other when they meet at a remote research base on the frozen ice sheets of Antarctica. At first glance, the pair could not be more different. Older by a few years, Róisín, a daughter of Ireland and a peripatetic astronomer, joins the science team to observe the fracturing of a comet overhead. François, the base’s chef, has just left his birthplace in Bayeux, France, for only the second time in his life. Yet devastating tragedy and the longing for a fresh start, which they share, as well as an indelible but unknown bond that stretches back centuries, connect them to each other. Helen Sedgwick carefully unfolds their surprisingly intertwined paths, moving forward and back through time to reveal how these lovers’ destinies have long been tied to each other by the skies—the arrival of comets great and small. In telling Róisín and François’s story, Sedgwick illuminates the lives of their ancestors, showing how strangers can be connected and ghosts can be real, and how the way we choose to see the world can be as desolate or as beautiful as the comets themselves. A mesmerizing, skillfully crafted, and emotionally perceptive novel that explores the choices we make, the connections we miss, and the ties that inextricably join our fates, The Comet Seekers reflects how the shifting cosmos unite us all through life, beyond death, and across the whole of time.
Download or read book The Archer written by Shruti Swamy and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Set in 1970s Bombay, the novel explores art, ambition, gender roles and class with the same shimmering prose of Swamy’s first book, the story collection A House Is a Body.” —San Francisco Chronicle “[A] sublime, boundary-pushing exploration of sexuality, creativity, and love.” —NPR In this transfixing novel, a young woman comes of age in 1960s- and 1970s-era Bombay, a vanished world that is complex and indelibly rendered. Vidya’s childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya navigates the stifling expectations of her life with a vivid imagination until one day she peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak, a dazzling, centuries-old dance form that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Her pursuit of artistic transcendence through kathak soon becomes the organizing principle of her life, even as she leaves home for college and falls in complicated love with her best friend. As the uncertain future looms, she must ultimately confront the tensions between romantic love, her art, and the legacy of her own imperfect mother. Lyrical and deeply sensual, with writing as mesmerizing as kathak itself, Shruti Swamy’s The Archer is a bold portrait of a singular woman coming of age as an artist—navigating desire, duty, and the limits of the body. It is also an electrifying and utterly immersive story about the transformative power of art, and the possibilities that love can open when we’re ready.
Download or read book The Optical Unconscious written by Rosalind E. Krauss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994-07-25 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters" in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as "Anti-Form." These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.
Download or read book James Agee Film Writing and Selected Journalism LOA 160 written by James Agee and published by Library of America James Agee. This book was released on 2005-09-22 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [The author] had a passion for art in all its aspects, but it was the new art of the movies that was his greatest inspiration as a critic. [This book] has long been recognized as the single most influential American book about movies. Witty, probing, lacerating his moral criticisms, eloquent in his admiration of filmmakers from Charlie Chaplin to John Huston, [the author] is a critic who engages the reader no matter what subject he is writing about.-Back cover.
Download or read book Adapting Tolkien written by Will Sherwood and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-12 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hosted online, the Tolkien Society 2020 seminar sought to explore how J.R.R. Tolkien's legacy partly relies on the continued adaption of his works, characters, and languages. It offered insights into a range of artistic adaptions and evaluated how the tangible result expands the Tolkien fanbase and readership while cultivating a love and appreciation of Tolkien through the adaptor's creative vision. It further examined the ways in which Tolkien's creations have been interwoven into the very fabric of our primary world. His words no longer simply exist on the page, they are transformed in our minds and are cast out into the stars. They inspire new universes and invite fresh interpretations from across the globe. Published under the auspices of the Society's Peter Roe Memorial Fund, this proceedings features a collection of six papers delivered at the Tolkien Society 2020 Online seminar.
Download or read book Uncanny Magazine Issue 20 written by Elizabeth Bear and published by Uncanny Magazine. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The January/February 2018 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine. Featuring new fiction by Elizabeth Bear, S.B. Divya, Arkady Martine, Marissa Lingen, Sunny Moraine, Vivian Shaw, and R.K. Kalaw, reprinted fiction by Vandana Singh, essays by Fran Wilde, John Wiswell, Iori Kusano, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Sarah Monette, and poetry by Sofia Samatar & Del Samatar, Nitoo Das, Sonya Taaffe, and Ana Hurtado, interviews with S.B. Divya and Sunny Moraine by Caroline M. Yoachim, a cover by Tran Nguyen, and an editorial by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas.
Download or read book The Book of Night Women written by Marlon James and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf and the WINNER of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings "An undeniable success.” — The New York Times Book Review A true triumph of voice and storytelling, The Book of Night Women rings with both profound authenticity and a distinctly contemporary energy. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings, desires, and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link. But the real revelation of the book-the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose-is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once breathtakingly daring and wholly in command of his craft.
