Book picks similar to
An Earlier Life by Brenda Miller


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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments


David Foster Wallace - 1997
    In this exuberantly praised book — a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner — David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.

Nonprofit Management: Principles and Practice


Michael J. Worth - 2008
    Essential for the classroom. -Robert Silverman, University at Buffalo Nonprofit Management: Principles and Practice, the first comprehensive textbook written for the Nonprofit Management course, covers such topics as the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector, leadership of nonprofits, managing the nonprofit organization, fundraising, nonprofit enterprise, financial management, collaborations and mergers, nonprofit lobbying and advocacy, and international trends. Written specifically for students, this text integrates research, theory, and the practitioner literature and includes more than is found in the more prescriptive, practitioner-oriented alternatives. Providing an overview suitable for students enrolled in their first course in the field, the book also includes cases and discussions of advanced issues for those with experience. Key FeaturesTakes a balanced approach to varied perspectives and controversial issues and encompasses traditional concepts as well as new approaches and thinking Integrates social sciences research, management theory, and practitioner literature Includes mini-cases to enhance student understanding of the issues involved in real-world situations Gives students direction on where to go in the literature to learn more through chapter-ending Suggestions for Further Reading Includes Questions for Discussion at the end of each chapter to help students apply chapter content to actual nonprofit organizationsAccompanied by High-Quality Ancillaries This text is supported by Instructor Resources on CD, featuring sample syllabi, suggested exercises and discussion questions, PowerPoint slides, and more. This CD is available to qualified instructors by contacting Customer Care at 1-800-818-SAGE (7243) from 6 am 5 pm, PST. Nonprofit Management is ideal for courses in Nonprofit Management, Not-for-Profit Management, and Public Management.

The Best American Essays 2021


Robert AtwanGreg Jackson - 2021
    From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year.

Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil


Alexander Edmonds - 2009
    Intrigued by a Carnaval parade that mysteriously paid homage to a Rio de Janeiro plastic surgeon, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds conducted research that took him from Ipanema socialite circles to glitzy telenovela studios to the packed waiting rooms of public hospitals offering free cosmetic surgery. The result is provocative exploration of the erotic, commercial, and intimate aspects of beauty in a nation with extremes of wealth and poverty and a reputation for natural sensuality. Drawing on conversations with maids and their elite mistresses, divorced housewives, black celebrities, and favela residents aspiring to be fashion models, Edmonds analyzes what sexual desirability means and does for women in different social positions. He argues that beauty is a distinct realm of modern experience that does not simply reflect other inequalities. It mimics the ambiguous emancipatory potential of capital, challenging traditional hierarchies while luring consumers into a sexual culture that reduces the body to the brute biological criteria of attractiveness. Illustrated with color photographs, Pretty Modern offers a fresh theoretical perspective on the significance of female beauty in consumer capitalism.

Artemis Fowl (Series)


Frederic P. Miller - 2010
    Artemis Fowl, the main character, is a ruthless and extremely intelligent young (human) criminal whose main goal is the acquisition of money through a variety of often illegal schemes. There are many settings in the series, including Siberia, Chicago, Taiwan, Morocco, France and various places in Ireland. One main setting that has been in all the books is the Lower Elements. The author has described the series as "Die Hard with fairies." There are six novels in the series so far; the first was published in 2001 and the sixth released in the United States on 15 July 2008. A film based on the series is also in development, although most details are unclear. The series has sold over 18 million copies as of June 2008.

Pulphead


John Jeremiah Sullivan - 2011
    Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us—with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that’s all his own—how we really (no, really) live now. In his native Kentucky, Sullivan introduces us to Constantine Rafinesque, a nineteenth-century polymath genius who concocted a dense, fantastical prehistory of the New World. Back in modern times, Sullivan takes us to the Ozarks for a Christian rock festival; to Florida to meet the alumni and straggling refugees of MTV’s Real World, who’ve generated their own self-perpetuating economy of minor celebrity; and all across the South on the trail of the blues. He takes us to Indiana to investigate the formative years of Michael Jackson and Axl Rose and then to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina—and back again as its residents confront the BP oil spill. Gradually, a unifying narrative emerges, a story about this country that we’ve never heard told this way. It’s like a fun-house hall-of-mirrors tour: Sullivan shows us who we are in ways we’ve never imagined to be true. Of course we don’t know whether to laugh or cry when faced with this reflection—it’s our inevitable sob-guffaws that attest to the power of Sullivan’s work.

Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction


Benjamin Percy - 2016
    Now, in his first book of nonfiction, Percy challenges the notion that literary and genre fiction are somehow mutually exclusive. The title essay is an ode to the kinds of books that make many readers fall in love with fiction: science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, horror, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Anne Rice, Ursula K. Le Guin to Stephen King. Percy's own academic experience banished many of these writers in the name of what is "literary" and what is "genre." Then he discovered Michael Chabon, Aimee Bender, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and others who employ techniques of genre fiction while remaining literary writers. In fifteen essays on the craft of fiction, Percy looks to disparate sources such as Jaws, Blood Meridian, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to discover how contemporary writers engage issues of plot, suspense, momentum, and the speculative, as well as character, setting, and dialogue. An urgent and entertaining missive on craft, Thrill Me brims with Percy's distinctive blend of anecdotes, advice, and close reading, all in the service of one dictum: Thrill the reader.

Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City


Derek S. Hyra - 2017
    Where the city’s most infamous open-air drug market once stood, a farmers’ market now sells grass-fed beef and homemade duck egg ravioli. On the corner where AM.PM carryout used to dish out soul food, a new establishment markets its $28 foie gras burger. Shaw is experiencing a dramatic transformation, from “ghetto” to “gilded ghetto,” where white newcomers are rehabbing homes, developing dog parks, and paving the way for a third wave coffee shop on nearly every block.Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City is an in-depth ethnography of this gilded ghetto. Derek S. Hyra captures here a quickly gentrifying space in which long-time black residents are joined, and variously displaced, by an influx of young, white, relatively wealthy, and/or gay professionals who, in part as a result of global economic forces and the recent development of central business districts, have returned to the cities earlier generations fled decades ago. As a result, America is witnessing the emergence of what Hyra calls “cappuccino cities.” A cappuccino has essentially the same ingredients as a cup of coffee with milk, but is considered upscale, and is double the price. In Hyra’s cappuccino city, the black inner-city neighborhood undergoes enormous transformations and becomes racially “lighter” and more expensive by the year.

Paul Among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays


Krister Stendahl - 1976
    Krister Stendahl proposes-in the key title essay-new ways of exploring Paul's speech: Paul must be heard as one who speaks of his call rather than conversion, of justification rather than forgiveness, or weakness rather than sin, of love rather than integrity, and in unique rather than universal language.The title essay is complemented by the landmark paper, Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West, and by two seminal explorations of Pauline issues, Judgement and Mercy and Glossolalia-The New Testament Evidence. The book concludes with Stendahl's pointed reply to the eminent scholar Ernst Kasemann who has taken issue with the author's revolutionary interpretations. This volume provides convincingly new ways for viewing Paul, the most formative of Christian teachers.

Scalper: Inside the World of a Professional Ticket Broker


Clancy Martin - 2011
    

Gertrude Stein: Selections


Gertrude Stein - 2008
    Editor Joan Retallack has chosen complete texts or selections that lend themselves to a clarified vision of Stein's oeuvre. In her brilliant introduction, Retallack provides the historical and biographical context for Stein's lifelong project of composing a "continuous present," an effort which parallels many of the most important technological and scientific developments of her era—from moving pictures to Einstein's revision of our understanding of space and time. Retallack also addresses persistent questions about Stein's work and the best way to read it in our contemporary moment. In suggesting a performative "reading poesis" for these works, Retallack follows Stein's dictum by arguing that to actively experience the work is to enjoy it, and to enjoy it is to understand it.

Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco


Teresa Gowan - 2010
    Within a few years, however, what had been perceived as a national crisis came to be seen as a nuisance, with early sympathies for the plight of the homeless giving way to compassion fatigue and then condemnation. Debates around the problem of homelessness—often set in terms of sin, sickness, and the failure of the social system—have come to profoundly shape how homeless people survive and make sense of their plights. In Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders, Teresa Gowan vividly depicts the lives of homeless men in San Francisco and analyzes the influence of the homelessness industry on the streets, in the shelters, and on public policy. Gowan shows some of the diverse ways that men on the street in San Francisco struggle for survival, autonomy, and self-respect. Living for weeks at a time among homeless men—working side-by-side with them as they collected cans, bottles, and scrap metal; helping them set up camp; watching and listening as they panhandled and hawked newspapers; and accompanying them into soup kitchens, jails, welfare offices, and shelters—Gowan immersed herself in their routines, their personal stories, and their perspectives on life on the streets. She observes a wide range of survival techniques, from the illicit to the industrious, from drug dealing to dumpster diving. She also discovered that prevailing discussions about homelessness and its causes—homelessness as pathology, homelessness as moral failure, and homelessness as systemic failure—powerfully affect how homeless people see themselves and their ability to change their situation. Drawing on five years of fieldwork, this powerful ethnography of men living on the streets of the most liberal city in America, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders, makes clear that the way we talk about issues of extreme poverty has real consequences for how we address this problem—and for the homeless themselves.

How Poetry Can Change Your Heart


Megan Falley - 2019
    • Whether lapsed poetry lovers, aspiring poets, or total novices, readers will learn to uncover verse in unexpected places, find their way through a poem when they don't quite "get it," and discover just how transformative poetry can be.• Andrea Gibson is a leading voice in spoken-word poetry, headlining prestigious performance venues internationally. Megan Falley is a National Poetry Slam finalist and creator of the online writing course "Poems That Don't Suck." Fans of Andrea Gibson's Lord of the Butterflies and Take Me With You, and Megan Falley's Drive Here and Devastate Me will love taking a deeper dive into the inspiring power of poetry. Discover or re-discover the magic that is poetry. • A gorgeous and inspiring gift for any fan of the written word• Will become a go-to volume for poetry writers and readers

100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater


Sarah Ruhl - 2012
    She has written a stunningly original book of essays whose concerns range from the most minimal and personal subjects to the most encompassing matters of art and culture. The titles themselves speak to the volume's uniqueness: "On lice," "On sleeping in the theater," "On motherhood and stools (the furniture kind)," "Greek masks and Bell's palsy."100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write is a book in which chimpanzees, Chekhov, and child care are equally at home. A vibrant, provocative examination of the possibilities of the theater, it is also a map to a very particular artistic sensibility, and an unexpected guide for anyone who has chosen an artist's life.

Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen From the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps, Volume 2


Robert Rodi - 2014
    “Hiarious ... Rodi’s title is a tribute. He’s angry that the Austen craze has defanged a novelist who’s ‘wicked, arch, and utterly merciless. She skewers the pompous, the pious, and the libidinous with the animal glee of a natural-born sadist’ … Like Rodi, I believe Austen deserves to join the grand pantheon of gadflies: Voltaire and Swift, Twain and Mencken.” - Lev Raphael, The Huffington Post