Best of
Tragedy

2010

Wade Garrison's Promise


Richard Greene - 2010
    When Emmett Spears is gunned down by four killers in cold blood in a saloon in Harper, Colorado, his best friend makes a promise at Emmett's burial to get revenge. Sarah Talbert loves Wade and begs him not to go, but Wade made a promise he has to keep. Armed with a pistol, and a Sharps .50 caliber rifle, he sets out to find the four men. The journey takes him, two aging sheriffs and an Indian across Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and into Mexico following a trail of violence and death that Wade may never recover from.

The Tin Ring: How I Cheated Death


Zdenka Fantlova - 2010
    Enamored with a man named Arno, Zdenka Fantlová, a young Czech-Jewish woman, is separated from her soul-mate due to the German invasion. During a brief reunion, Arno proposes to 19-year-old Zdenka with a ring made from tin. Following Zdenka from Terezin through Auschwitz and Kurzbach to Bergen–Belsen, this heartbreaking account dwells less on the horrors of extermination camps and more on the compassion of the friends and family who shared in her ordeal.

Cut Through the Bone


Ethel Rohan - 2010
    Through tight language and searing scenarios, Rohan brings to life a plethora of characters--exposed, vulnerable souls who are achingly human.

Prelude to a Million Years / Song Without Words / Vertigo


Lynd Ward - 2010
    Prelude to a Million Years (1933) is a dark meditation on art, inspiration, and the disparity between the ideal and the real. Song Without Words (1936), a protest against the rise of European fascism, asks if ours is a world still fit for the human soul. Vertigo (1937), Ward’s undisputed masterpiece, is an epic novel on the theme of the individual caught in the downward spiral of a sinking American economy. Its characters include a young violinist, her luckless fiancé, and an elderly business magnate who—movingly, and without ever becoming a political caricature—embodies the social forces determining their fate.The images reproduced in this volume are taken from prints pulled from the original woodblocks or first-generation electrotypes. Ward’s novels are presented, for the first time since the 1930s, in the format that the artist intended, one image per right-hand page, and are followed by four essays in which he discusses the technical challenges of his craft. Art Spiegelman contributes an introductory essay, “Reading Pictures,” that defines Ward’s towering achievement in that most demanding of graphic-story forms, the wordless novel in woodcuts.

Phantom Noise


Brian Turner - 2010
    These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.

World Press Photo 2010


World Press Photo Foundation - 2010
    Universally recognized as the definitive competition for photographic reporting, it draws submissions from photojournalists, newspapers, and magazines throughout the world.World Press Photo 2010 brings together some 200 images, selected from more than 90,000 photographs taken by over 5‚000 photographers. These prize-winning photos provide an impressive visual record of social, political, cultural, scientific, and, above all, human milestones from an eventful year.

If You Come Softly/Behind You


Jacqueline Woodson - 2010
    In this bindup of If You Come Softly and Behind You, Jacqueline Woodson has created two heartbreaking, interconnected tales that beautifully capture the undying power of first love. Sometimes, love outlives us.Miah is black and Ellie is white. But that doesn't matter to them. All they want is to be together. But then, on a tragic evening, Ellie and Miah are separated forever. Now each is trying to figure out how to move on--without the other."Woodson handles delicate, even explosive subject matter with exceptional clarity, surety, and depth."--Publishers Weekly, starred review of If You Come Softly"Love and sadness permeate the pages of this brief, beautifully written novel, but there is a feeling of hope at the end."--KLIATT on Behind You"Woodson writes with impressive poetry about race, love, death, and what grief feels like--the things that 'snap the heart'--and her characters' open strength and wary optimism resonate."--Booklist on Behind You

Hamlet


Nicki Greenberg - 2010
    The play's the thing. Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king! Denmark is in turmoil. The palace is seething with treachery, suspicion and intrigue. On a mission to avenge his father's murder, Prince Hamlet tries to claw free of the moral decay all around him. But in the ever-deepening nest of plots, of plays within plays, nothing is what it seems. Doubt and betrayal torment the Prince until he is propelled into a spiral of unstoppable violence. In this sumptuous staging of Shakespeare's enigmatic play on the page, Nicki Greenberg has created an extraordinary visual feast that sweeps up all in its path as the drama intensifies both on stage and off. An astounding work - unique, gripping and, as ever, tragic.

Elephant's Graveyard


George Brant - 2010
    Set in September of 1916, the play combines historical fact and legend, exploring the deep-seated Ameri

Understanding the Crash


Seth Tobocman - 2010
    They show how the troubles of a working-class community in Cleveland or a newly built suburb of Miami became an international financial crisis, explaining the complex new forms of credit that came into being because of financial deregulation, and how they created an economic whirlpool. From there they discuss how, over the same time span, a smaller and smaller group of people came to control a larger and larger percentage of the world’s money — a result of rising inequality that, combined with the shortage of affordable housing, a decline in real wages, and our unwavering belief in an �ownership society,” impelled poor people into debt. Tobocman and Laursen conclude with a consideration of a restructured financial system and a look toward a culture of sustainability — one that covets real wealth in the form of security, meaningful work, and community.

Fixture


Tom Lichtenberg - 2010
    Now his greatest work is threatening to take over everywhere. It's a race against time and space and dimensions nobody even knew were there![short story]

Half Spoon of Rice: A Survival Story of the Cambodian Genocide


Icy Smith - 2010
    Includes historical notes and photographs documenting the Cambodian genocide.

The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece


Brooke Holmes - 2010
    Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (s�ma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature.By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.

You Have Given Me a Country: A Memoir


Neela Vaswani - 2010
    Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba's Tatoos, but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in New York City.

Hiroshima in the Morning


Rahna Rizzuto - 2010
    A writer encounters Hiroshima s survivors at the original Ground Zero as 9/11 changes her marriage and family back home.

What to Do When Your Family Loses Its Home


Rachel Lynette - 2010
    Kid-friendly text helps young readers make sense of it all. Tough topics such as having to move into a shelter are dealt with in a sensitive and encouraging manner. This book also gives some ideas of what to expect when a family moves in with relatives while they get back on their feet.

Hanged: A History of Idaho's Executions


Kathy Deinhardt Hill - 2010