Book picks similar to
Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body by Michael Davidson
disability
non-fiction
nonfiction
critical-theory
The Junket (Kindle Single)
Mike Albo - 2011
He lands an enviable gig writing about shopping and fashion for the city’s major newspaper, but an ill-fated promotional junket gets Albo into hot water. He becomes a gossip item and finds himself caught in an acrimonious war between Old and New Media. Here's a gimlet-eyed account of the back-biting media scene, a glimpse into the inner workings of the fashion crowd, and a candid portrait of what it takes to survive as a writer in today’s chattering and watchful New York City."I was perilously close to exposing a secret underground economy of promotion: favors and junkets and banquets and gifts that keeps the city in motion, and keeps underpaid writers at work. Basically, I became the Silkwood of Swag."
The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice
Gary McDowell - 2010
With its pioneering introduction, this collection provides a comprehensive history of the development of the prose poem up to its current widespread appeal. Half critical study and half anthology, The Field Guide to Prose Poetry is a not-to-be-missed companion for readers and writers of poetry, as well as students and teachers of creative writing.
Rebel Lives: Helen Keller
Helen Keller - 1903
It includes texts written about her, by figures such as socialist leader Eugene V. Debs and Mark Twain.
"Her liberal views and wide sympathies ought to shame those who have physical eyes, yet do not open them to the sorrows that encompass the mass of men."—New York Call (1911)
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"We were born into an unjust system. We are not prepared to grow old in it."—Bernadette Devlin
Rebel Lives books feature writings both by and about individuals who have played significant roles in humanity’s ongoing fight for a better world. The series shows the not-so-well-recognized political views of some well-known figures and introduces some not-so-famous rebels. Strongly representative of race, class and gender, these books are smaller format, inexpensive, accessible and provocative.
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze - 1980
He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Felix Guattari (1930-1992) was a psychoanalyst at the la Borde Clinic, as well as being a major social theorist and radical activist. A Thousand Plateaus is part of Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia - a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. A Thousand Plateaus provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for nomadic thought and has had a galvanizing influence on today's anti-capitalist movement.Translated by Brian Massumi
Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns
Michael Theune - 2007
Michael Theune's breakthrough concept encourages students, teachers, and writers to use structure as a tool to see the fundamental affinities between strikingly different kinds of poetry and radically different literary eras. The book includes examination of the mid-course turn and the elegy, as well as the ironic, concessional, emblem, and retrospective-prospective structures, among others. In addition, 14 contemporary poets provide an example of and commentary on their own work.
Here Be Monsters... 50 Days Adrift At Sea (Kindle Single)
Michael Finkel - 2011
Three young friends, on a drunken dare, set out on a dinghy for a nearby island. But when the gas ran out and they drifted into barren waters, their biggest threat wasn't the ocean -- it was each other.
Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction
Christopher Butler - 2002
But how can it be defined? In this highly readable introduction the mysteries of this most elusive of concepts are unraveled, casting a critical light upon the way we live now, from the politicizing of museumculture to the cult of the politically correct. The key postmodernist ideas are explored and challenged, as they figure in the theory, philosophy, politics, ethics and artwork of the period, and it is shown how they have interacted within a postmodernist culture.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundredsof key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe - 2016
Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.
Of Mice and Me
Mishka Shubaly - 2014
He had a beautiful new girlfriend and sudden prosperity as an author. But when he adopts an orphaned infant mouse, his world is turned on its head. The mouse comes to symbolize everything left unresolved in his life — his relationship with his divorced parents, his fear of family and commitment, and his inability to feel true happiness and love. By turns hilarious and moving, Mishka Shubaly’s latest Kindle Single captures the journey we all take in life — from being loved, to giving love. Cover by Adil Dara.
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Donna J. Haraway - 2016
Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
Marina Warner - 1994
Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity
Marshall Berman - 1982
In this unparalleled book, Marshall Berman takes account of the social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world and the impact of modernism on art, literature and architecture. This new edition contains an updated preface addressing the critical role the onset of modernism played in popular democratic upheavals in the late 1920s.
English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s)
Bruce McComiskey - 2006
Well-known scholars in the field explore the important qualities and functions of English studies' constituent disciplines--Ellen Barton on linguistics and discourse analysis, Janice Lauer on rhetoric and composition, Katharine Haake on creative writing, Richard Taylor on literature and literary criticism, Amy Elias on critical theory and cultural studies, and Robert Yagelski on English education--and the productive differences and similarities among them that define English studies' continuing importance.Faculty and students in both undergraduate and graduate courses will find the volume an invaluable overview of an increasingly fragmented field, as will department administrators who are responsible for evaluating the contributions of diverse faculty members but whose academic training may be specific to one discipline.Each chapter of English Studies is an argument for the value--the right to equal status--of each individual discipline among all English studies disciplines, yet the book is also an argument for disciplinary integration.
On Stories
Richard Kearney - 2001
The author also considers the stories of nations and how these may affect the way a national identity can emerge from stories. He looks at the stories of Romulus and Remus in the founding of Rome, the hidden agenda of stories in the antagonism between Britain and Ireland and how stories of alienation in film such as Aliens and Men in Black reveal often disturbing narratives at work in projections of North American national identity. Throughout, On Stories stresses that far from heralding the demise of the story, the digital and supposedly postmodern era opens up powerful new ways of thinking about narrative.
Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
Marc Augé - 1992
This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls ‘non-space’ results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of ‘supermodernity’ to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena—a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible.Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.