Download or read book The Thanatos Syndrome written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVPercy’s stirring sequel to Love in the Ruins follows Tom More’s redemptive mission to cure the mysterious ailment afflicting the residents of his hometown/divDIV/divDIVDr. Tom More returns to his parish in Louisiana determined to live a simpler life. Fresh out of prison after getting caught selling uppers to truck drivers, he wants nothing more than to live “a small life.” But when everyone in town begins acting strangely—from losing their sexual inhibitions to speaking only in blunt, truncated sentences—More, with help from his cousin Lucy Lipscomb, takes it upon himself to reveal what and who is responsible. Their investigation leads them to the highest seats of power, where they discover that a government conspiracy is poised to rob its citizens of their selves, their free will, and ultimately their humanity./div /div

Download or read book Lost in the Cosmos written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.

Download or read book Love in the Ruins written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIV“A great adventure . . . So outrageous and so real, one is left speechless.” —Chicago Sun Times/divDIV/divDIVIn Walker Percy’s future America, the country is on the brink of disaster. With citizens violently polarized along racial, political, and social lines, and a fifteen-year war still raging abroad, America is crumbling quickly into ruin. The country’s one remaining hope is Dr. Thomas More, whose “lapsometer” is capable of diagnosing the spiritual afflictions—anxiety, depression, alienation—driving everyone’s destructive and disastrous behavior./divDIV /divDIVBut such a potent machine has its pitfalls. As Dr. More soon learns, in the wrong hands, the powerful lapsometer could lead to open warfare, pushing America into anarchy at full-speed./div /div

Download or read book The Moviegoer written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review). On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul. A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life. With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him. Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.

Download or read book Walker Percy s Search for Community written by John F. Desmond and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this criticism of Percy, John F. Desmond traces the writer's enduring concerns with community. These concerns, Desmond argues, were grounded in the realism of such Scholastics as Aquinas and Duns Scotus.

Download or read book Lancelot written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIV“A modern knight-errant on a quest after evil; grotesque, convincing and chilling.” —The New York Times Book Review/divDIV/divDIVFed up with the excesses of the 1970s, Lancelot Andrews Lamar, a liberal lawyer and distinguished member of the New Orleans gentry, is determined to stop the modern world’s ethical collapse. His quest begins with his wife—an actress who he suspects has been cheating on him for years. Though he initially plans only to gather proof of her infidelity, Lancelot quickly descends into a fog of obsession. And as he crosses the line from sanity into madness, he will try once and for all to purify the world or destroy it in the attempt./divDIV /divDIVMesmerizing and unforgettable, Lancelot is a masterful story of one man’s collision with the follies of modern culture, and a thought-provoking look at the nature of good and evil./div /div

Download or read book Signposts in a Strange Land written by Walker Percy and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-04 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.

Download or read book Fyodor Dostoevsky Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide written by John F. Desmond and published by Catholic University of America Press. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide is a study of the phenomenon of suicide in modern and post-modern society as represented in the major fictional works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Walker Percy. In his study, suicide is understood in both a literal and spiritual sense as referring to both the actual suicides in their works and to the broader social malaise of spiritual suicide, or despair. In the 19th century Dostoevsky called suicide “the terrible question of our age”. For his part, Percy understood 20th century Western culture as “suicidal” in both its social, political and military behavior and in the deeper sense that its citizenry had suffered an ontological “loss of self” or “deformation” of being. Likewise, Thomas Merton called the 20th century an “age of suicide”.

Download or read book Pilgrim in the Ruins written by Jay Tolson and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When The Moviegoer, an extraordinary first novel by an unknown Louisiana author, won the National Book Award in 1962, it marked the arrival of an exceptional literary talent. With his five successive novels and his wide-ranging philosophical and occasional essays, Walker Percy shored up his reputation as one of America's greatest writers - an ironic moralist and perhaps the shrewdest chronicler of life in the New South. Yet even by the time of his death in 1990, little was known about this intensely private man." "Based on extensive interviews, written with access to Percy's letters and manuscripts, Jay Tolson has fashioned the first major biography of the writer, an authoritative portrait that brings Percy alive as it illuminates his distinguished body of work. We see Percy's life and his brilliant career against the background of the American South, whose colorful and tragic history is rooted deeply in the hearts and minds of its most talented sons and daughters. With a novelist's eye for character and the judgment of an informed critic, Tolson captures the lifelong drama of genius, always attentive to its artistic, psychological and spiritual dimensions." "Percy was the scion of a proud, honorable and accomplished family, a clan haunted by a crippling streak of melancholy that issued repeatedly in suicides, including the self-inflicted deaths of Walker Percy's father and grandfather. Tolson depicts the struggle of Percy's life and the heroism with which he battled his family demons (and his own tubercular condition) and worked his way toward a writing career. Here is the young Percy in the days after his father's death, traveling with his brother and his mother (who would soon die herself, in mysterious circumstances) from his childhood home of Birmingham, Alabama, to Athens, Georgia, and then on to Greenville, Mississippi, and the sprawling house of his Uncle Will. Adopted at 16 by this remarkable "bachelor-poet-lawyer-planter," the most important single influence on the future author's life, Percy came to maturity in what he later described as an "all-male household visited regularly by other poets, politicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, black preachers, folk singers, Civil Rights leaders and itinerant guitar players."" "We follow Percy as he travels north to New York, where he attended medical school and - with the help of a psychiatrist - began to make sense of his complex family legacy. Tolson details Percy's movement toward the Catholic Church, his first struggles as a writer, his early involvement with the publishing world, the steady support of his friend and fellow writer Shelby Foote, and a demanding apprenticeship under the supervision of the gifted novelist Caroline Gordon and her husband, the late Allen Tate. Percy emerged an altogether distinctive writer: a Catholic artist who, like Flannery O'Connor, worked in a predominantly Protestant culture; an heir to the literary traditions of the Southern Renaissance who adopted the strategies of modern European fiction and philosophy to forge his own narrative art." "Tolson guides us through the creation of both the unpublished and published novels - from The Charterhouse through The Thanatos Syndrome - as well as the philosophical works that underlie and complement Percy's fiction. The biographer shows us how the demands of his work were eased by rich friendships, including those with fellow writers Thomas Merton, Eudora Welty and Robert Coles. We learn also about a marriage of abiding strength, and of the love and care that Percy and his wife Bunt gave to the raising of their two daughters, one of them all but deaf from birth." "Above all, we see the man in all his shifting moods, "the gracious, easy, almost avuncular manner straining against a powerful, furious intensity, an almost furious energy." Here is the dark tragedy, the humor, and the hard-earned wisdom of a life whose outward calm concealed an internal drama - an unrelenting fight against hopelessness and despair. Percy's story is that of a writer and moralist who made enduring art out of his search for truth."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Second Coming written by Walker Percy and published by . This book was released on 1980-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Beyond the Pleasure Principle written by Sigmund Freud and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-07-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of some of Freud's most famous essays, including ON THE INTRODUCTION OF NARCISSISM; REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH; BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE; THE EGO AND THE ID and INHIBITION, SYMPTOM AND FEAR.

Download or read book The Thanatos Syndrome written by Walker Percy and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-09-04 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning home to the small Louisiana parish where he had praticed psychiatry, Dr. Tom More quickly notices something strange occuring with the townfolk, a loss of inhibitions. Behind this mystery is a dangerous plot drug the local water supply, and a discovery that takes More into the underside of the American search for happiness.

Download or read book Prophets of the Posthuman written by Christina Bieber Lake and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prophets of the Posthuman provides a fresh and original reading of fictional narratives that raise the question of what it means to be human in the face of rapidly developing bioenhancement technologies. Christina Bieber Lake argues that works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Marilynne Robinson, Raymond Carver, James Tiptree, Jr., and Margaret Atwood must be reevaluated in light of their contributions to larger ethical questions. Drawing on a wide range of sources in philosophical and theological ethics, Lake claims that these writers share a commitment to maintaining a category of personhood more meaningful than that allowed by utilitarian ethics. Prophets of the Posthuman insists that because technology can never ask whether we should do something that we have the power to do, literature must step into that role. Each of the chapters of this interdisciplinary study sets up a typical ethical scenario regarding human enhancement technology and then illustrates how a work of fiction uniquely speaks to that scenario, exposing a realm of human motivations that might otherwise be overlooked or simplified. Through the vision of the writers she discusses, Lake uncovers a deep critique of the ascendancy of personal autonomy as America’s most cherished value. This ascendancy, coupled with technology’s glamorous promises of happiness, helps to shape a utilitarian view of persons that makes responsible ethical behavior toward one another almost impossible. Prophets of the Posthuman charts the essential role that literature must play in the continuing conversation of what it means to be human in a posthuman world.

Download or read book Mortal Subjects written by Christina Howells and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide ranging and challenging book explores the relationship between subjectivity and mortality as it is understood by a number of twentieth-century French philosophers including Sartre, Lacan, Levinas and Derrida. Making intricate and sometimes unexpected connections, Christina Howells draws together the work of prominent thinkers from the fields of phenomenology and existentialism, religious thought, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, focussing in particular on the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion. From Aristotle through to contemporary analytic philosophy and neuroscience the relationship between mind and body (psyche and soma, consciousness and brain) has been persistently recalcitrant to analysis, and emotion (or passion) is the locus where the explanatory gap is most keenly identified. This problematic forms the broad backdrop to the work’s primary focus on contemporary French philosophy and its attempts to understand the intimate relationship between subjectivity and mortality, in the light not only of the ‘death’ of the classical subject but also of the very real frailty of the subject as it lives on, finite, desiring, embodied, open to alterity and always incomplete. Ultimately Howells identifies this vulnerability and finitude as the paradoxical strength of the mortal subject and as what permits its transcendence. Subtle, beautifully written, and cogently argued, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars interested in contemporary theories of subjectivity, as well as for readers intrigued by the perennial connections between love and death.

Download or read book The House of Percy written by Bertram Wyatt-Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-21 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novels of Walker Percy--The Moviegoer, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome to name a few--have left a permanent mark on twentieth-century Southern fiction; yet the history of the Percy family in America matches anything, perhaps, that he could have created. Two centuries of wealth, literary accomplishment, political leadership, depression, and sometimes suicide established a fascinating legacy that lies behind Walker Percy's acclaimed prose and profound insight into the human condition. In The House of Percy, Bertram Wyatt-Brown masterfully interprets the life of this gifted family, drawing out the twin themes of an inherited inclination to despondency and an abiding sense of honor. The Percy family roots in Mississippi and Louisiana go back to "Don Carlos" Percy, an eighteenth-century soldier of fortune who amassed a large estate but fell victim to mental disorder and suicide. Wyatt-Brown traces the Percys through the slaveholding heyday of antebellum Natchez, the ravages of the Civil War (which produced the heroic Colonel William Alexander Percy, the "Gray Eagle"), and a return to prominence in the Mississippi Delta after Reconstruction. In addition, the author recovers the tragic lives and literary achievements of several Percy-related women, including Sarah Dorsey, a popular post-Civil War novelist who horrified her relatives by befriending Jefferson Davis--a married man--and bequeathing to him her plantation home, Beauvoir, along with her entire fortune. Wyatt-Brown then chronicles the life of Senator LeRoy Percy, whose climactic re-election loss in 1911 to a racist demagogue deply stung the family pride, but inspired his bold defiance to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. The author goes on to tell the poignant story of poet and war hero Will Percy, the Senator's son. The weight of this family narrative found expression in Will Percy's memoirs, Lanterns on the Levee--and in the works of Walker Percy, who was reared in his cousin Will's Greenville home after the suicidal death of Walker's father and his mother's drowning. As the biography of a powerful dynasty, steeped in Sou8thern traditions and claims to kinship with English nobility, The House of Percy shows the interrelationship of legend, depression, and grand achievement. Written by a leading scholar of the South, it weaves together intensive research and thoughtful insights into a riveting, unforgettable story.

Download or read book Beauty Will Save the World written by Gregory Wolfe and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture, Not Politics We live in a politicized time. Culture wars and increasingly partisan conflicts have reduced public discourse to shouting matches between ideologues. But rather than merely bemoaning the vulgarity and sloganeering of this era, says acclaimed author and editor Gregory Wolfe, we should seek to enrich the language of civil discourse. And the best way to do that, Wolfe believes, is to draw nourishment from the deepest sources of culture: art and religious faith. Wolfe has been called “one of the most incisive and persuasive voices of our generation,” and this penetrating and wide-ranging book makes a powerful case for the importance of beauty and imagination to cultural renewal. He begins by tracing his own journey from a young culture warrior bent on attacking the modern world to a career devoted to nurturing the creation of culture through contemporary literature and art that renew the Western tradition. Along the way, Wolfe finds in Renaissance Christian humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More—and their belief that imagination and the arts are needed to offset the danger of ideological abstractions— a “distant mirror” in which to see our own times.

Download or read book Desire Violence and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction written by Gary M. Ciuba and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-02-04 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction -- Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy -- expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned -- and sometimes ritually sanctified -- victimization of those deemed outcasts. Ciuba offers an impressively broad intellectual discussion that gives universal cultural meaning to the southern experience of desire, violence, and divinity with which these four authors wrestled and out of which they wrote. In a comprehensive analysis of Porter's semiautobiographical Miranda stories, Ciuba focuses on the prescribed role of women that Miranda imitates and ultimately escapes. O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away reveals three characters whose scandalous animosity caused by religious rivalry leads to the unbearable stumbling block of violence. McCarthy's protagonist in Child of God, Lester Ballard, appears as the culmination of a long tradition of the sacred violence of southern religion, twisted into his own bloody faith. And Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome brings Ciuba's discussion back to the victim, in Tom Moore's renunciation of a society in which scapegoating threatens to become the foundation of a new social regime. From nostalgia for the old order to visions of a utopian tomorrow, these authors have imagined the interrelationship of desire, antagonism, and religion throughout southern history. Ciuba's insights offer new ways of reading Porter, O'Connor, McCarthy, and Percy as well as their contemporaries who inhabited the same culture of violence -- violence desired, dreaded, denied, and deified.