The Plummeting Old Women


Daniil Kharms - 1989
    These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism -- years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. Their painful, unsettling eloquence testify to the humane and the comic in this absurdist writer's work. The translator Neil Cornwall gives a biographical introduction to his subject, enlarged upon by the poet Hugh Maxton in a contextual assessment of the writing of Flann O'Brien, Le Fanu and Doyle, and of their shared concerns with detective fiction, terror and death. Daniil Kharms 91905-42) died under Stalin. Along with fellow poets and prose-writers of the era -- Khlebnikov, Biely, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky and Pasternak -- he is one of the emerging experimentalists of Russian modernism.

Imagination in Place


Wendell Berry - 2010
    And for Berry, what is “local, fully imagined, becomes universal,” and the “local” is to know one’s place and allow the imagination to inspire and instill “a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves.” In Imagination in Place, we travel to the local cultures of several writers important to Berry’s life and work, from Wallace Stegner’s great West and Ernest Gaines’ Louisiana plantation life to Donald Hall’s New England, and on to the Western frontier as seen through the Far East lens of Gary Snyder. Berry laments today’s dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and literary sense.Rich with Berry’s personal experience of life as a Kentucky agrarian, the collection includes portraits of a few of America’s most imaginative writers, including James Still, Hayden Carruth, Jane Kenyon, John Haines, and several others.

The Transcendentalist


Ralph Waldo Emerson - 2000
    Worth reading for both it's historical and current value.

McSweeney's #49


Dave Eggers - 2017
    There have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head. McSweeney’s has won multiple literary awards, including two National Magazine Awards for fiction, and has had numerous stories appear in The Best American Magazine Writing, the O. Henry Awards anthologies, and The Best American Short Stories. Design awards given to the quarterly include the AIGA 50 Books Award, the AIGA 365 Illustration Award, and the Print Design Regional Award.

Old Shirts & New Skins


Sherman Alexie - 1993
    Native American Studies. Amongst the poems and prose of OLD SHIRTS & NEW SKINS appear illustrations by Elizabeth Woody, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon. In the best tradition of confronting American reality and exacting vision and meaning from it, Sherman Alexie chooses to use poetic power. His vision is an amazing celebration of endurance, intimacy, love, and creative insight; finally, it is a victory that can be known only by a people who refuse to submit to the thieves, liars, and killers that have made them suffer tremendous loss and pain. "Like the woman who pours her life into a stew of survival, Sherman Alexie has created a meal, not for a reader to consume but for a reader to be changed by. Survival is being documented, changes measured"--Linda Hogan.

Granta 120: Medicine


John Freeman - 2012
    - Hippocratic OathClinicians have spent centuries perfecting the art of tending to broken bodies. What happens when their medicine succeeds? What happens when it fails us? Where do we turn for healing of the body and the mind?In this wide-ranging collection of essays, fiction, memoir, poetry and photography, Granta explores the mind of the physician, the plight of the patient and the maladies and fears that bring us together. From a young man struggling to regain his mental health, to a writer witnessing the surrender of her body to MS; from the dubiously labeled chalky horse-pills of faceless pharmaceutical conglomerates, to the hot-toddy that was Grandmother’s sworn remedy for everything from a bruised knee to a broken heart � here are the worldviews and the stories of both the surgeon, the shaman, and the patient.This collection shows that sometimes the best medicine is a story itself.

Dhi's Oracle of Divine Epiphanies


Saudamini Mishra - 2021
    

how the poor die


George Orwell
    Orwell gives an anecdotal account of his experiences in a french public hospital which triggers a contemplation of hospital literature in the context of 19th-century medicine.

Dante's Divine Comedy: Boxed Set; Adapted by Marcus Sanders


Marcus Sanders - 2006
    The pair's innovative and authentic adaptation of Dante's epic, coupled with Birk's striking play on Gustave Dor's classic illustrations, make this a "Divine Comedy" for the 21st century. Acclaimed by both the literary and art worlds; rife with contemporary turns of phrase and slang (just as the original poem was written in the vernacular of its day) and pointed visions of the afterlife as contemporary cities; and rich with bold allusion, cultural critique, and witthis is the must-have collection of modern classics.

Psychedelic Prayers: And Other Meditations


Timothy Leary - 1997
    With a new Introduction by Ralph Metzner, Leary's Harvard colleague, this book of poetry and meditations is being published in its first new edition in 25 years. Illustrations/photos.

Smokes and Whiskey


Tejaswini Divya Naik - 2018
    I hope that this book makes everyone feel what I felt while writing it, and that love is a universal thing, and my story is not unique. And I hope that this makes them see that there is a beyond and that they can come out happy and clean. And, that this makes them braver than they already are, and gives them that little extra push and strength that they probably need

To My Country


Ben Lawson - 2020
    As the bushfires continued to rage into the new year on an unprecedented scale, Ben, feeling angry, helpless and broken-hearted as he watched the devastation from across the ocean, sat down and put his feelings into words. To My Country is an ode to the endurance of the Australian spirit and the shared love of our country.In the true Aussie spirit, Ben and Allen & Unwin will be donating proceeds of To My Country to The Koala Hospital.

We Were Always Eating Expired Things


Cheryl Julia Lee - 2014
    The poems deal with the impossibility of such an endeavor and celebrate our persistence in striving anyway.At its core, the collection is built around a very wise line from a Beatles song: I want to hold your hand. I want to hold your hand with no further expectations. I want to hold your hand instead of telling you I understand when I don’t. I want to hold your hand although we don’t always get along. I want to hold your hand despite the calluses, scratches, and scars that get in the way. I want to hold your hand knowing I’ll have to let it go one day.I just want to hold your hand.

Early Works: A Collection of Poetry


Dylan Geick - 2017
    He's set to wrestle and study creative writing at Columbia University in New York. These poems are a look into his early experiences with love and loss, an introspective coming of age tale told in verse.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Salámán and Absál Together With A Life Of Edward Fitzgerald And An Essay On Persian Poetry By Ralph Waldo Emerson


Omar Khayyám - 2010
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.