Our Deathbeds Will Be Thirsty


Shane L. Koyczan - 2012
    “The collection of poems speaks like a journey through each formative moment we’d forgotten we had: the monster under the bed and the intricate rules about how to overcome its powers; the ability to talk to girls or boys we liked; the fear of being bullied; our first experience with real anguish.” – Litlive.ca Please note: This is not a young adult title. Some works include language not suitable for some readers.

Boom


Jean Tay - 2009
    Boom tells the story of an elderly woman and her property agent son in Singapore, who are struggling over the potential en bloc sale of their home. Their destinies become interwoven with that of an idealistic civil servant, Jeremiah, who is facing the greatest challenge of his career—persuading a reluctant corpse to yield its memories. Boom is a quirky yet poignant tale about the relocation of both dead and living, and how personal stories get left behind in the inexorable march of progress.Written by economist-turned-playwright Jean Tay, Boom was conceptualised at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2007, and developed and staged by the Singapore Repertory Theatre in September 2008. It was nominated for Best Original Script for The Straits Times’ Life! Theatre Awards in 2009 and is now an O- and N-Level Literature text in Singapore schools.“Jean Tay is one of the most gifted playwrights I have come across in years.” —Gaurav Kripalani, Artistic Director, Singapore Repertory Theatre

Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby


Geoffrey Wolff - 1976
    P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation: these were Crosby's pastimes until 1929, when he shot his girlfriend, the recent bride of another man, and then himself.Black Sun is novelist and master biographer Geoffrey Wolff's subtle and striking picture of a man who killed himself to make his life a work of art.

Agnes Grey & Poems


Anne Brontë - 1992
    Possessed of an unshakeable sense of entitlement and a boundless sense of self-worth, assured of the adoration of all, Matilda can break men's hearts for fun. Agnes-diffident, careworn and poor-can only gape in astonishment at the figure her pupil cuts in the world. Employed to lead and form her, she is instead buffeted about in Matilda's tumultuous wake. She loves her young student-it is impossible not to. But it is hard not to wonder if Matilda's good fortunes will ever end.

Other Women's Children


Perri Klass - 1990
    Amelia Stern became a pediatrician to cure children, not see them die. In a kind of bargain she strikes with herself and fate, she does everything she can to save other women's children, hoping to keep her own child safe from harm.It's never easy. Amelia's hospital life contrasts so starkly with her cozy domestic world that she can't help but bring it home sometimes. Always available for medical emergencies and the needs of her helpless patients, Amelia begins to ignore her own needs. And her family life and marriage fade in importance as she heroically fights to save all of her children.A tender and timely examination of a doctor's world, a mother's world, and a wife's world, OTHER WOMEN'S CHILDREN is a revealing X ray of the complications of women's lives today."Superb . . . A poignant literary page-turner." --The New York Times Book Review

Hannibal Lecter, My Father


Kathy Acker - 1991
    Well, I tell you this: 'Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don't eat cunt'... Edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1991, this handy, pocket-sized collection of some early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making, Hannibal Lecter, My Father gathers together Acker's raw, brilliant, emotional and cerebral texts from 1970s, including the self-published 'zines written under the nom-de-plume, The Black Tarantula. This volume features, among others, the full text of Acker's opera, The Birth of the Poet, produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985, Algeria, 1979 and fragments of Politics, written at the age of 21. Also included is the longest and definitive interview Acker ever gave over two years: a chatty, intriguing and delightfully self-deprecating conversation with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvere Lotringer--which is trippy enough in itself as Lotringer, besides being a real person, has appeared as a character in Acker's fiction. And last, but not least, is the full transcript of the decision reached by West Germany's Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in which Acker's work was judged to be not only youth-threatening but also dangerous to adults, and subsequently banned. Acker is the sort of the writer that should be read first at 16, so that you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure her out; she confuses, infuriates, perplexes and then all of a sudden the writing seems to be in your bloodstream, like some kind of benign virus. She's definitely not for the easily offended--but then, there are worse things in life than being offended. Such as the things that Acker writes about...

Little Labors


Rivka Galchen - 2014
    Varying in length from just a sentence or paragraph to a several-page story or essay, Galchen’s puzzle pieces assemble into a shining, unpredictable, mordant picture of the ordinary-extraordinary nature of babies and literature. Anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd and tender world of wonder. The 47 Ronin; the black magic of maternal love; babies morphing from pumas to chickens; the quasi-repellent concept of “women writers”; origami-ophilia in Oklahoma as a gateway drug to a lifelong obsession with Japan; discussions of favorite passages from the Heian masterpieces Genji and The Pillow Book; the frightening prevalence of orange as today’s new chic color for baby gifts; Frankenstein as a sort of baby; babies gold mines; babies as tiny Godzillas …Little Labors–atomized and exploratory, conceptually byzantine and freshly forthright–delights.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City


Nick Flynn - 2004
    As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other. .

Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt


Richard Brautigan - 1970
    a collection of eighty-five poems, was Brautigan's sixth collection of poetry; his eighth poetry book publication. Brautigan visited Roxy and Judy Gordon in Austin, Texas, in August 1970. While there he was issued a Texas fishing license (August 14, 1970). It notes his height (6'4") and weight (165 pounds). The poem "Autobiography (Polish It like a Piece of Silver)," collected in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, contains a reference to Judy Gordon and Byrds, a town in central Texas, near Brownwood. Two poems, "A Study in Roads" and "Stone (real," both collected in June 30th, June 30th contain references to Bee Caves, Texas, a small town twelve miles west of Austin. Brautigan may have visited Bee Caves with the Gordons. Roxy Gordon, in turn, dedicated his book, Some Things I Did (Austin, Texas: The Encino Press, 1971) toRICHARD BRAUTIGANwhose favorite gun isthe Colt Navy .36In publicity materials associated with the publication of Gordon's book Brautigan wrote:Roxy and Judy Gordon are two very nice people with an open and perceptive way. Reading Roxy's book is to meet them.As to Gordon's reference to Brautigan's interest in the Colt Navy .36 handgun, novelist Tom McGuane said[Brautigan] had a fascination with the . . . Colt because it seemed to sum up gun owning, democratic gun manufacture, and excellence, all in one thing.

The Southwest Corner


Mildred Walker - 1981
    So, with great resourcefulness, she advertised for a companion and eventually staked out a corner of her own—one with a view. Mildred Walker's skill as a storyteller never falters in this portrayal of an elderly woman who won't give up.

The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination


Colin Wilson - 1962
    published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Collected Poems, 1912-1944


H.D. - 1944
    D.'s supposed "fallow" period. As these pages reveal, she was in fact writing a great deal of important poetry at the time, although publishing only a small part of it. The later, wartime poems in this section form an essential prologue to her magnificent Trilogy (1944), the fourth and culminating part of this book. Born in Pennsylvania in 1886, Hilda Doolittle moved to London in 1911 in the footsteps of her friend and one-time fiancé Ezra Pound. Indeed it was Pound, acting as the London scout for Poetry magazine, who helped her begin her extraordinary career, penning the words "H. D., Imagiste" to a group of six poems and sending them on to editor Harriet Monroe in Chicago. The Collected Poems 1912-1944 traces the continual expansion of H. D.'s work from her early imagistic mode to the prophetic style of her "hidden" years in the 1930s, climaxing in the broader, mature accomplishment of Trilogy. The book is edited by Professor Louis L. Martz of Yale, who supplies valuable textual notes and an introductory essay that relates the significance of H. D.'s life to her equally remarkable literary achievement.

Midsummer


Derek Walcott - 1984
    Their principal themes are the stasis, both stultifying and provocative, of midsummer in the tropics; the pull of the sea, family, and friendship on one whose circumstances lead to separation; the relationship of poetry to painting; and the place of a poet between two cultures. Walcott records, with his distinctive linguistic blend of soaring imagery and plainly stated facts, the experience of a mid-life period--in reality and in memory or the imagination. As Louis Simpson wrote on the publication of Wacott's The Fortunate Traveller, "Walcott is a spellbinder. Of how many poets can it be said that their poems are compelling--not a mere stringing together of images and ideas but language that delights in itself, rhythms that seem spontaneous, scenes that are vividly there?...The poet who can write like this is a master."

Half Pleasure Half Pain


Mohamed Ghazi - 2016
    This book is about the girls whose lives were ruined by me. I want to write about my story, for it’s the only way to be immortal. I want you to feel the pleasure of falling in love. The lust, the passion, the desire, and the craving that turns into an unhealthy addiction. And I want you also to feel the pain of losing someone, the ache, the agony, the bitterness, and the grief that cripples your soul forever. This is for everyone. The forgotten souls buried under the melancholy of the past. Yes, I will show you how much you hurt me, I will write. This is what my heart holds for you; half pleasure, half pain.

Writing on Water


Mooji - 2011
    It is especially geared towards those with a fervour for deeper spiritual truths, awakening and enlightenment. Humanity's basic assumptions are being challenged. First and foremost among them is the 'I am the body' idea, which is the cause of suffering for mankind. What is special about these words presented here is that they tackle the truth from both vantage points: the absolute plane of existence and the practical aspect of daily living in this world.