Download or read book The Nearest Thing to Life written by James Wood and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works - among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to LifeÊis not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic - it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.
Download or read book Serious Noticing written by James Wood and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive collection of literary essays by The New Yorker’s award-winning longtime book critic Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own. Together, Wood’s essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works, share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.
Download or read book Four Thousand Weeks written by Oliver Burkeman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time." —Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.
Download or read book Upstate written by James Wood and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Yorker book critic and award-winning author James Wood delivers a novel of a family struggling to connect with one another and find meaning in their own lives. In the years since his daughter Vanessa moved to America to become a professor of philosophy, Alan Querry has never been to visit. He has been too busy at home in northern England, holding together his business as a successful property developer. His younger daughter, Helen—a music executive in London—hasn’t gone, either, and the two sisters, close but competitive, have never quite recovered from their parents’ bitter divorce and the early death of their mother. But when Vanessa’s new boyfriend sends word that she has fallen into a severe depression and that he’s worried for her safety, Alan and Helen fly to New York and take the train to Saratoga Springs. Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel: Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that might be learned or a cruel accident of birth? Is reflection conducive to happiness or an obstacle to it? If, as a favorite philosopher of Helen’s puts it, “the only serious enterprise is living,” how should we live? Rich in subtle human insight, full of poignant and often funny portraits, and vivid with a sense of place, James Wood’s Upstate is a powerful, intense, beautiful novel.
Download or read book Stuff Your Face Or Face Your Stuff written by Dorothy Breininger and published by Health Communications, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While organizing the lives of her many clients, Emmy-nominated organizing expert Dorothy Breininger learned to face her own stuff, and lost seventy-five pounds in the process. In this one-of-a-kind book she addresses weight loss from the much-needed perspective of what lies underneath our clutter metaphorically, physically, and emotionally. Whether you're a packrat or a calorie-counter, a neat freak or a binge eater, Breininger reveals why, to be successful on the scale, you must first master the clutter within you and around you. With the same no-holds barred candor that resonates with TV viewers, she offers prescient advice to help anyone face their stuff, with an organized, step-by-step approach to either toss it, tame it, or tailor it to fit their lives. Filled with personal stories from clients, her own success story, and tips from fitness coaches and organizing experts, this imminently practical book gives everyone the tools to declutter their way to their dream size.
Download or read book This Thing Called Life written by Neal Karlen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock’s greatest talents: Prince. Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold,” Prince’s “rock video opera,” as well as the star’s last testament, which may be buried with Prince’s will underneath Prince’s vast and private compound, Paisley Park. According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar’s life. Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis’s mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen’s grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can’t be understood without first understanding ‘70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince’s best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them. Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of “mamma jammas.”
Download or read book Life written by Richard Fortey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By one of Britain's most gifted scientists: a magnificently daring and compulsively readable account of life on Earth (from the "big bang" to the advent of man), based entirely on the most original of all sources--the evidence of fossils. With excitement and driving intelligence, Richard Fortey guides us from the barren globe spinning in space, through the very earliest signs of life in the sulphurous hot springs and volcanic vents of the young planet, the appearance of cells, the slow creation of an atmosphere and the evolution of myriad forms of plants and animals that could then be sustained, including the magnificent era of the dinosaurs, and on to the last moment before the debut of Homo sapiens. Ranging across multiple scientific disciplines, explicating in wonderfully clear and refreshing prose their findings and arguments--about the origins of life, the causes of species extinctions and the first appearance of man--Fortey weaves this history out of the most delicate traceries left in rock, stone and earth. He also explains how, on each aspect of nature and life, scientists have reached the understanding we have today, who made the key discoveries, who their opponents were and why certain ideas won. Brimful of wit, fascinating personal experience and high scholarship, this book may well be our best introduction yet to the complex history of life on Earth. A Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection With 32 pages of photographs
Download or read book The Vital Question written by Nick Lane and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A game-changing book on the origins of life, called the most important scientific discovery 'since the Copernican revolution' in The Observer.
Download or read book Nearest Thing to Crazy written by Elizabeth Forbes and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cassandra. Contentedly married to Dan. They rub along together in that sort of comfortable middle-years manner. Everything is pretty much 'normal', uneventful, dull even. Then Ellie arrives in the village. Ellie is writing a novel and, with her self-professed expertise in uncovering other people's secrets, she always likes to place herself in the centre of the plot. Cassandra thinks she might be a little too much in the centre when she discovers that Ellie is writing about her, Dan and their daughter Laura and it seems that Ellie wants Cassandra to know.
Download or read book The Fun Stuff written by James Wood and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works—books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation—The Fun Stuff confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches—that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leon Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov—Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Aleksandar Hemon, and Michel Houellebecq. Included in The Fun Stuff are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming—which was a finalist for last year's National Magazine Awards—as well as Wood's essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for the Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.
Download or read book Rip Tide written by Kat Falls and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Return to the subsea frontier with Ty and Gemma, where the mysteries of the deep are deadlier than ever. With time running out for his parents, Ty's desperation leads the two teenagers to the underwater underworld... and into an alliance with the outlaws of the Seablite Gang. But one mystery soon leads to another. How has an entire township disappeared? Why is the local sea-life suddenly so aggressive? And can the Seablite Gang be trusted... or are Ty and Gemma in deeper water than they realise?
Download or read book How Fiction Works written by James Wood and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-07-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
Download or read book We All Looked Up written by Tommy Wallach and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lives of four high school seniors intersect weeks before a meteor is set to pass through Earth's orbit, with a 66.6% chance of striking and destroying all life on the planet.
Download or read book A Land Remembered written by Patrick D Smith and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Land Remembered has become Florida's favorite novel. Now this Student Edition in two volumes makes this rich, rugged story of the American pioneer spirit more accessible to young readers. Patrick Smith tells of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family battling the hardships of the frontier. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias and Emma MacIvey arrive in the Florida wilderness with their son, Zech, to start a new life, and ends in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that his wealth has not been worth the cost to the land. Between is a sweeping story rich in Florida history with a cast of memorable characters who battle wild animals, rustlers, Confederate deserters, mosquitoes, starvation, hurricanes, and freezes to carve a kingdom out of the Florida swamp. In this volume, meet young Zech MacIvey, who learns to ride like the wind through the Florida scrub on Ishmael, his marshtackie horse, his dogs, Nip and Tuck, at this side. His parents, Tobias and Emma, scratch a living from the land, gathering wild cows from the swamp and herding them across the state to market. Zech learns the ways of the land from the Seminoles, with whom his life becomes entwined as he grows into manhood. Next in series > > See all of the books in this series
Download or read book Not My Idea written by Anastasia Higginbotham and published by Ordinary Terrible Things. This book was released on 2018-09 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People of color are eager for white people to deal with their racial ignorance. White people are desperate for an affirmative role in racial justice. Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness helps with conversations the nation is, just now, finally starting to have.
Download or read book Seveneves written by Neal Stephenson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years. What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
Download or read book Meanwhile Next Door to the Good Life written by Jean Hay Bright and published by Brightberry Press. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated a decade after its original publication, this memoir by Jean Hay Bright chronicles the years in the 1970s when the author and her first husband, a traumatized Vietnam veteran, homesteaded on 25 rugged Maine acres sold to them by Living the Good Life authors Helen and Scott Nearing, and the aftermath of that experience in the decades that followed. Jean also used her investigative reporting skills to try to resolve some long-standing and nagging questions about the Nearings, focusing particularly on their finances over the decades. Her research also turned up some surprising and enlightening facts about how Helen and Scott Nearing actually lived and died. The revised edition has a new Prologue by Susan Hand Shetterly, more family photos, an expanded Afterword, as well as details and a new chapter pulled from Scott Nearing's FBI file, including documentation of Scott's listing in J. Edgar Hoover's Custodial Detention program.
