Book picks similar to
The Book of Endless Sleepovers by Henry Hoke
poetry
fiction
genre-bending
fortællinger-og-korthistorier
Nick Demske
Nick Demske - 2010
"Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room."—Joyelle McSweeneyHis name is "a transcendant uber-obsenity that can be understood universally by speakers of any language."
My Hard Bargain
Walter Kirn - 1990
The exalted, memorable characters in Kirn's acclaimed debut short story col lection confront the real hard bargains in life that spring up from the business of simply living, and Kirn transforms these hard-luck stories into strapping moral lessons which evoke the bonds that unite us all.
The Last Cowgirl
Jana Richman - 2008
From her first stock show to the day she turns eighteen and flees for the comforts of the city, Dickie bucks the cattle-ranching lifestyle and yearns for manicured lawns, housebroken pets, and neighborhood playmates. Yet she reluctantly finds herself drawn to the vast, desolate landscape of the desert and the solitude it offers—a feeling she won't acknowledge even within herself.Now a grown woman, Dickie is a respected reporter in Salt Lake City, convinced that physical distance and a convenient but passionless relationship will erase the memory of her painful childhood. But when her brother dies in a tragic accident, Dickie finds herself back in the farmhouse she tried so desperately to abandon. Suddenly, she is faced with her family's past and a love she's never admitted to, bringing down the walls of her carefully contrived existence.Accustomed to the physical boundaries city life entails, Dickie feels emotionally exposed by the fenceless expanse of the ranch. As she navigates her past, piecing together relationships, romance, and the pull of the mountains themselves, she finally confronts the pivotal moment of her childhood—the horrifying discovery that made her flee the desert so many years ago.A novel that spans two generations and vast landscapes, The Last Cowgirl brings to mind the writing of Pam Houston and Barbara Kingsolver. Richman's provocative prose, pulled from personal experience, will strike a chord with anyone who has been faced with demons from their past and found solace in the space around them.
Shire
Ali Smith - 2013
In an opening up of norths and souths, she traces unexpected conduits between Cambridge and the north of Scotland. Like all of Ali Smith’s work, here spot-lit by Sarah Wood’s delicate art, this is a book that will blow fresh air through the mind and set readers’ pulses racing.
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Elizabeth Smart - 1945
In lushly evocative language, Smart recounts her love affair with the poet George Barker with an operatic grandeur that takes in the tragedy of her passion; the suffering of Barker's wife;the children the lovers conceived. Accompanied in this edition by The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, a short novel that may be read as its sequel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has been hailed by critics worldwide as a work of sheer genius.
James Taylor Long Ago and Far Away: His Life and His Music
Timothy White - 2001
This new edition has been updated by his friend and former Rolling Stone comrade Mitch Glazer and includes an epilogue about the memorial concerts for Timothy that James Taylor helped organize.
Balik Kampung
Verena Tay - 2012
A mysterious lighthouse in Marine Parade calls you home. A missing monkey in Changi recalls your carefree childhood. A red plastic bag in Nee Soon tells you who you truly are.We invite you to read our stories, reminisce, and return once again, back home.
The Hungry Ghost Festival
Jen Campbell - 2012
It's about girls praying to The Angel of the North. It's about a mermaid born in the river Tyne. It's about Chinese lanterns, teenagers at the beach, and a family who run a sacred farm. ..You pick my arms up and spread them outso we are matching. Our woollen scarvestouch our noses - catch our breath like cloth balloons. We dig our feet into the soiland stamp down into the very deep. Somewhere below, the river sleeps with a lady screeching. She has arms that could carry boulders to the edge of cliffs. We wait for herto throw us down...' (extract from 'angel metal')"This is an arresting collection from a writer fully in command of an unusual and significant voice.” Anna Woodford“These are poems full of wonder and surprise.. Jen Campbell tells us stories about growing up...; reimagining love, childhood and home in strange and magical ways.” Liz Berry“Jen Campbell opens the doors wide and takes you through to her own fierce world where nothing goes unquestioned. A mixture of strong filmic images and rich language mean that the poems always keep their sense of wonder and strength.” Sarah Salway"The writing is luminous, immediate, and (yes) magical. I imagine she fell in love with words early, spinning them into shining nets to save herself from a kind of drowning. She’s a real poet, in other words." - Marcia Menter
The Portable Henry Rollins
Henry Rollins - 1997
punk rocker into a universal soldier. His enemies: slackers and hypocrites. His mission: to steel your soul and rock your world."Rollins was frontman for the seminal punk band Black Flag, and since 1987 has led the Rollins Band, whose ninth album, Come In and Burn, was just released by DreamWorks.As a spoken-word artist, he regularly performs at colleges and theaters worldwide and has released eight spoken-word audiotapes. His album Get in the Van won the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for 1995. As an actor, he has appeared in The Chase, Johnny Mnemonic, Heat, and David Lynch's forthcoming film, Lost Highway. From his days as front man for the band Black Flag and the current Rollins Band to his books and spoken-word audiotapes, Henry Rollins is the music, the attitude, and the voice that takes no prisoners. In his twelve books, he has led us on a hallucinatory journey through the decades--and his mind--with poems, essays, short stories, diary entries, and rants that exist at "the frayed edges where reality ends and imagination begins" (Publishers Weekly). For the first time, the best of his legendary, no-holds-barred writings are available. This collection includes new photos and works from such seminal Rollins books as:High Adventure in the Great OutdoorsArt to Choke HeartsBang!Black Coffee BluesGet in the VanDo I Come Here Often?SolipsistPlus never before released stories and more...
The Edge of the Alphabet
Janet Frame - 1962
A native of New Zealand, she is the author of eleven novels, four collections of stories, a volume of poetry, a children's book, and her heartfelt and courageous autobiography -- all published by George Braziller. This fall, we celebrate our thirty-ninth year of publishing Frame's extraordinary writing.
Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War
William Stafford - 2003
Throughout a century of conflict he remained convinced that wars simply don’t work. In his writings, Stafford showed it is possible—and crucial—to think independently when fanatics act, and to speak for reconciliation when nations take sides. He believed it was a failure of imagination to only see two options: to fight or to run away.This book gathers the evidence of a lifetime’s commitment to nonviolence, including an account of Stafford’s near-hanging at the hands of American patriots. In excerpts from his daily journal from 1951-1991, Stafford uses questions, alternative views of history, lyric invitations, and direct assessments of our political habits to suggest another way than war. Many of these statements are published here for the first time, together with a generous selection of Stafford’s pacifist poems and interviews from elusive sources.Stafford provides an alternative approach to a nation’s military habit, our current administration’s aggressive instincts, and our legacy of armed ventures in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and beyond.
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. .
Surrealist Love Poems
Mary Ann Caws - 2001
And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and "the drunken kisses of cyclones." Surrealism, the movement founded in the 1920s on the ashes of Dada's nihilism, embraced absurdity, contradiction, and, to a supreme extent, passion and desire. From André Breton's battle cry of "Mad Love" to the quiet lyricism of Robert Desnos, Surrealist writers and artists obsessively expressed the permutations of that fundamental human state, love, and they did so with the vocabulary of natural and unnatural worlds, the explicit language of sex, and a great deal of humor.Surrealist Love Poems brings together sixty poems by Surrealists who charged their work with all forms of eroticism. Expertly and energetically edited by Mary Ann Caws, this collection seeks to demonstrate the truth of Breton's words, that "the embrace of poetry like that of bodies / As long as it lasts / Shuts out all the woes of the world.""Erotic, impassioned and necrophilic, the sixty works gathered in Surrealist Love Poems celebrate the idea of obsessive and transformative love. 'I want to sleep with you side by side. . . . Stretched out on your shadow / Hammered by your tongue / To die in a rabbit's rotting teeth / Happy' writes Joyce Mansour. . . . Caws places poems by major surrealist writers like André Breton and Paul Eluard, along with the poetry of Picasso, Dalí, and Frida Kahlo, side by side with fourteen lushly printed and alluring black-and-white photos by the likes of Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun."—Publishers Weekly