Download or read book Truly Askew written by Alistair McHarg and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reality is absurd. Impossible. Ludicrous. Despite this, humanity labors tirelessly in a misguided attempt to make sense of it. The folly of this enterprise grows ever more apparent as one attempts to crack the cosmic code; knowing more leads inevitably to understanding less. Embracing the chaotic irrationality of existence, and taking delight in it, is preferable to being disappointed, even enraged, by the mystery. Learning to view preposterousness not as an enemy but an ally offers enormous advantages to those keen on enjoying life. The level of acceptance required to accomplish this did not come naturally to me. At the advanced age of 36, fate unceremoniously dumped me on the path of spiritual growth, slammed the door, and locked it. The demon in charge of my education was Manic Depression (Bipolar Disorder). Mania raged in the full flower of its righteous, unhinged glory; complete with random strikes of lightning and unrepentant wrath. Pieces of my bourgeois life fled magically; marriage, house, money, jobs, even family. Racing recklessly around a yawning void, I finally summoned the courage to fight. With determination born of terror, desperation, and more than a little spite, I plunged headfirst into talk therapy. There was no other option. Defeating one of the most severe forms of mental illness demanded a search for the source of my fears. I embarked on an internal odyssey. To fully understand what had happened, and to help others as well, I wrote a memoir about my experience (Invisible Driving). This proved to be a fantastically difficult undertaking, both technically and emotionally. Upon completion, I bathed for some time in the illusion of mastery. I thought my struggles were done. Complacency brought a different internal monster to the foreground: addiction. After plowing my car into a cement barricade, fate slammed yet another door and ushered me into the nicotine-stained church basements of Alcoholics Anonymous. In AA I found camaraderie, discipline, and practical philosophy. Having been "softened up" by many years of therapy, I absorbed ideas quickly and was soon regarded as a de facto teacher. While I had assiduously avoided this role all my life, I learned to love it simply because, for the first time, I was well positioned to be of service. That was 18 clean and sober years ago (I even gave up cigarettes). The spiritual path led me to the point where I avoid self-destructive behavior in favor of health and usefulness. Being a writer, this naturally led to sharing my experience publicly; hence, Truly Askew. Buried within the ramshackle humor, tactless sincerity, and unrepentant iconoclasm of these 72 vignettes and 240 quotes, is a thoroughly authentic story of recovery and redemption I hope will delight, amuse, reveal, and provoke. All stories and essays were originally written individually and assembled chronologically later. Some are autobiographical snapshots, some dive into the experience of bipolar disorder and substance abuse, while others speak directly to the recovery process. There are even a few satirical sketches which first appeared in my mental health humor column. Interspersed are epigrams, adages, and aphorisms. These enigmatic tidbits are united by my quest for immutable truth. Many are absurd, self-contradictory, funny, odd, counterintuitive, maddening, and uncooperative in a host of other ways. I did not set out to make them difficult, they are truly askew because life is truly askew. Frankly, the true of life is often most evident in the askew-ness of it. The vignettes guide you along my journey of discovery; the quotes glow with the insight and happiness that came of it.
Download or read book Harpsong written by Rilla Askew and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family’s yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan’s long-standing debt. Finding shelter in hobo jungles and Hoovervilles, the newlyweds careen across the 1930s landscape in a giant figure eight with Oklahoma in the middle. Sharon’s growing doubts about her husband’s quest set in motion events that turn Harlan Singer into a hero while blinding her to the dark secret of his journey. A love story infused with history and folk tradition, Harpsong shows what happened to the friends and neighbors Steinbeck’s Joads left behind. In this moving, redemptive tale inspired by Oklahoma folk heroes, Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story. Harpsong is a novel of love and loss, of adventure and renewal, and of a wayfaring orphan’s search for home—all set to the sounds of Harlan’s harmonica. It shows us the strength and resilience of a people who, in the face of unending despair, maintain their faith in the land.
Download or read book Unnatural Selection written by Mara Hvistendahl and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize A Slate Best Book of 2011 A Discover Magazine Best Book of 2011 Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: Asia now has 163 million females "missing" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval. Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them.
Download or read book Dead Artist written by Ivan Jenson and published by Hen House Press. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pop artist Milo Sonas was a New York City art world star in the 80s and 90s. After 9/11, a nervous breakdown and years of obscurity, Milo now finds himself sheltered in a government subsidized motel room in the Midwest, wandering in the streets, coffee shops and shopping malls in the afternoons, and experiencing frequent supernatural visitations from famous dead artists.When Milo is suddenly rediscovered by a former collector, his fortunes start to shift. His reemergence from obscurity is underway. However, first he must deal with his eccentric family members, plan his dying mother's funeral (that she intends to attend) and his own wedding to a University coed, all in the same afternoon. Will Milo escape the drone of suburbia, and stop fearing that art history would rather see him dead, before he is allowed to feel, touch and taste success?Jenson's tour de force written with a unique new voice, will also please those familiar with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Philip Jose Farmer. Readers will be taken on a hilarious, sensual, heartfelt ride. Dead Artist features riotous stream-of-consciousness and time shifting literary riffs. In this high energy novel Pop art icon, poet and author Ivan Jenson creates a vivid portrait of an artist as a post-modern man.
Download or read book Only Glory Awaits written by Leslie S. Nuernberg and published by Emerald House Group. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the true story of a young English woman, who faced adversity and affliction with strong belief that Christ is indeed sufficent in all circumstances--and no matter what the cost, the truth of Christ must prevail.
Download or read book Women Reading and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England written by Edith Snook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history. It looks at depictions of reading in women's printed devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, and fiction, as well as manuscripts, for evidence of ways in which women conceived of reading in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Among the authors and texts considered are Katherine Parr, Lamentation of a Sinner; Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew; Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing; Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives; Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; and Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Attentive to contiguities between representations of reading in print and reading practices found in manuscript culture, this book also examines a commonplace book belonging to Anne Cornwallis (Folger Folger MS V.a.89) and a Passion poem presented by Elizabeth Middleton to Sarah Edmondes (Bod. MS Don. e.17). Edith Snook here makes an original contribution to the ongoing scholarly project of historicizing reading by foregrounding female writers of the early modern period. She explores how women's representations of reading negotiate the dynamic relationship between the public and private spheres and investigates how women might have been affected by changing ideas about literacy, as well as how they sought to effect change in devotional and literary reading practices. Finally, because the activity of reading is a site of cultural conflict - over gender, social and educational status, and the religious or national affiliation of readers - Snook brings to light how these women, when they write about reading, are engaged in structuring the cultural politics of early modern England.
Download or read book Rape Revenge Films written by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-03-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often considered the lowest depth to which cinema can plummet, the rape-revenge film is broadly dismissed as fundamentally exploitative and sensational, catering only to a demented, regressive demographic. This second edition, ten years after the first, continues the assessment of these films and the discourse they provoke. Included is a new chapter about women-directed rape-revenge films, a phenomenon that--revitalized since #MeToo exploded in late 2017--is a filmmaking tradition with a history that transcends a contemporary context. Featuring both famous and unknown movies, controversial and widely celebrated filmmakers, as well as rape-revenge cinema from around the world, this revised edition demonstrates that diverse and often contradictory treatments of sexual violence exist simultaneously.
Download or read book Never Say Die written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wake-up call to Americans who have long been deluded by the dangerous twenty-first hucksters of longevity. “If old age isn’t for sissies, neither is Susan Jacoby’s tough-minded and important book ... which demolishes popular myths that we can ‘cure’ the ‘disease’ of aging.”—The Washington Post Combining historical, social, and economic analysis with personal experiences of love and loss, Jacoby reveals the hazards of the magical thinking that prevents us from facing the genuine battles of growing old. Never Say Die speaks to Americans, whatever their age, who draw courage and hope from facing reality instead of embracing platitudes and delusions, and who want to grow old with dignity and purpose. It is a life-affirming and powerful message that has never been more relevant.
Download or read book Song of Solomon written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” selection • The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author. Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world. “Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and revelling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs.” —The New Yorker
Download or read book Our Last Echoes written by Kate Alice Marshall and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kara Thomas meets Twin Peaks in this supernatural thriller about one girl's hunt for the truth about her mother's disappearance. In 1973, the thirty-one residents of Bitter Rock disappeared. In 2003, so did my mother. Now, I've come to Bitter Rock to find out what happened to her--and to me. Because Bitter Rock has many ghosts. And I might be one of them. Sophia's earliest memory is of drowning. She remembers the darkness of the water and the briny taste as it filled her throat, the sensation of going under. She remembers hands pulling her back to safety, but that memory is impossible--she's never been to the ocean. But then Sophia gets a mysterious call about an island names Bitter Rock, and learns that she and her mother were there fifteen years ago--and her mother never returned. The hunt for answers lures her to Bitter Rock, but the more she uncovers, the clearer it is that her mother is just one in a chain of disappearances. People have been vanishing from Bitter Rock for decades, leaving only their ghostly echoes behind. Sophia is the only one who can break the cycle--or risk becoming nothing more than another echo haunting the island.
Download or read book Grundish and Askew written by Lance Carbuncle and published by . This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two white-trash, trailer-park-dwelling, platonic life-partners go on a moronic and misdirected crime spree. Can their manly love for each other endure when one of them suffers a psychological slap that renders him a homicidal maniac?
Download or read book The Monstrous Kind written by Lydia Gregovic and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An atmospheric, haunting, romantasy inspired by Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, set in Regency era England about two sisters fighting to hold on to their manor while deadly monsters prowl along its perimeters—perfect for fans of House of Salt and Sorrows and Anatomy: A Love Story. Merrick Darling’s life as daughter of the Manor Lord of Sussex is better than most. Unlike the commoners, she is immune to the toxic fog that encroached on England generations earlier. She will never become a Phantom—one of the monstrous creatures that stalk her province’s borders—and as long as the fires burn to hold them back, her safety is ensured. She wants for nothing, yet she will never inherit her family’s Manor. She must marry smartly or live at the kindness of her elder sister, Essie. Everything is turned on its head, though, when Merrick’s father dies suddenly. Torn from her New London society life of ball gowns and parties, Merrick must travel back to her childhood home, the Darling estate of Norland House, and what she finds there is bewildering. Once strong and capable, Essie is withdrawn and frightened—and with good cause. A recent string of attacks along the province’s borders has turned their formerly bucolic countryside into a terrifying and unpredictable landscape. The fog is closing in and the fires aren’t holding, which makes Merrick and Essie vulnerable in more ways than one. Because the Phantoms are far from the only monsters in Merrick’s world, and the other eleven Manor Lords are always watching for weakness. Revealing her and her sister’s current state to the rest of the Manors is out of the question, but when Essie goes missing, it’s clear that Merrick needs help. Only, who can she trust when everyone seems to be scheming, and when all she holds true feels like it’s slipping right out of her grasp?
Download or read book Kind of Kin written by Rilla Askew and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Kind of Kin by award-winning author Rilla Askew, when a church-going, community-loved, family man is caught hiding a barn-full of illegal immigrant workers, he is arrested and sent to prison. This shocking development sends ripples through the town—dividing neighbors, causing riffs amongst his family, and spurring controversy across the state. Using new laws in Oklahoma and Alabama as inspiration, Kind of Kin is a story of self-serving lawmakers and complicated lawbreakers, Christian principle and political scapegoating. Rilla Askew’s funny and poignant novel explores what happens when upstanding people are pushed too far—and how an ad-hoc family, and ultimately, an entire town, will unite to protect its own.
Download or read book The Fly in My Eye written by J. Michaels and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fly in My Eye is a reflection of an illusion. It is the mirror of my creature self declaring itself as real to the eye of the beholder. Yet the human self would fade away into its parent nothingness but for the trance of the image it beholds. Enamored of its own appearance, regardless the truth of the echo, the affair with the dream continues. Narcissus sees himself time after time in the clouded pond and falls for it; hook, line and sinker. He is king in his own mind only. They say it's great to be the king, but of what, I say. If it be a ragged throne in a hellish realm, of what value to the soul is it? I have chosen to stand beside my King, instead of displacing Him. The position is not as exalted by the world, but instead of the king of hell, I claim Prince of the eternal Kingdom. I inherit now, and forever, the gifts of joy, peace, wholeness, and freedom. I relinquish title to the nightmare dream; giving up only pain, guilt, discord, and death. I choose to accept the reality of my eternal being and deny, once and for all time, the temporal, chaotic, and completely insufficient life of the world of man. I will stay for awhile, but only to convince you, my brothers and sisters, to join me and journey to a better reality. Know the fly you see in your eye is but a frail wisp of a dream, destined to fade away into the illusory mysts from whence it sprang, dissolving now as we lean in the direction of truth. Clear the reflecting fly from your eye and see henceforth with the one, eternal Mind that unifies us as brothers in Christ.
Download or read book Aylmer Vance Ghost Seer written by Alice & Claude Askew and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-07-11 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of eight ghost stories, written by the remarkably prolific husband and wife team of Claude and Alice Askew, centering on Aylmer Vance, an investigator of the supernatural. Dexter, the narrator, meets Vance during a fishing holiday and Vance tells him three ghost stories on successive nights, each story involving Vance more closely in the action. The fourth story brings Dexter himself into the action, and reveals him to have unsuspected clairvoyant powers. The remaining stories feature Vance and Dexter as a sort of Holmes-and-Watson team investigating incidents not all of which prove to have supernatural causes. The final story, "The Fear" is very effective, describing a house in which a general feeling of extreme fear grips the inhabitants at various times and locations; the emotion of fear is effectively evoked and an interesting tale is constructed as Vance and Dexter work to assign the fear "a local habitation and a name".
Download or read book The Gentleman s journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1869 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Quiet Storm written by Valda Mutakabbir and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quiet Storm is about a Federal and International Intelligence Agent turned mercenary. He is hired by governments to infiltrate adversarial governmental infrastructures, steal top secrets and classified documents on clandestine operations and destroy those nations from within¿if necessary. Someone gave an order to assassinate Satin Masters and murder his family and destroy the Venus Corporation. Agent Dawn Takabbir, the beautiful and perilous International Intelligence Agent, is thought to be the World¿s best Clandestine Operative¿she does not exist in government files. She must find out whether Satin Masters is alive, determine who he is posing, and know for a fact that he has signed a contract to take control of America¿s economical and political structure. Now, after years gathering intelligence, she is ready to apprehend Satin Masters. Her superiors fear for her life, after an unsuccessful raid on Beyond Time¿s Elite Security Facilities. Forensic teams only found Special Forces and Intel Agents¿ corpses, and removed government issued slugs and casings. The IIA Assistance Director orchestrates her abduction like they staged her family¿s death.
