Book picks similar to
A Spy in the Panopticon by Damian Murphy
ex-occidente
weird-modern
on-the-shelf
z-damian-murphy
How to Fish
Chris Yates - 2006
How to Fish is a gem of a book that gets to the heart of the passion for angling: that there's more to fishing than catching fish.
Easy Target: The Long Strange Trip of a Scout Pilot in Vietnam (Taking Flight)
Tom Smith - 1996
Initially cast as target-spotters for gunships and air-assault forces, the scout pilots evolved into live bait as enemy weapons and tactics improved. Their small helicopters were vulnerable even to minor damage, and parachuting from a damaged bird was impossible. Casualty rates could be as high as 50%; a scout unit often resembled a WWI fighter squadron, with replacements dying almost before they could unpack. Yet fresh volunteers kept coming, even if only to stay out of the infantry. In his visceral memoir, Smith tells the familiar story of a young man who flunked out of college, sampled the 1960s counterculture and found himself first in the army, then in Vietnam. For Smith, the war was a theater of the absurd whose only meaning was survival. His narrative of low-altitude, high-risk operations in 1969-70 replicates that of others: initial confusion giving way first to proficiency and pleasure in stalking and killing anonymous enemies, later to a sense that both his skill and his luck are running out. Gritty enough to appeal to adventure fans, this memoir makes a useful contribution to a subject, American helicopter pilots in Vietnam, whose recorded history is largely still in its anecdotal stage.
Friends in Small Places: Ruskin Bond's Unforgettable People
Ruskin Bond - 2000
In addition, there are a host of characters culled from Bond's numerous short stories. Taken together, they constitute a magnificent evocation of the small-town India by one of the country's best storytellers.
The Seas
Samantha Hunt - 2004
An occasional chambermaid, granddaughter to a typesetter, and daughter to a dead man, awkward and brave, wayward and willful, she is in love (unrequited) with an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lands her in prison. What she does to get out is the stuff of legend. In the words of writer Michelle Tea, The Seas is "creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature."
First Ride Collection
K.L. Savage - 2020
Their strength is pushed to the limits, along with their confidence and sanity.Each member has their own painful journey to get to happiness, a foreign place none of them are familiar with.Real issues deserve real torment.Not everyone’s future is paved in gold, not when the road is damned.The Kings will give you one hell of a Ruthless ride by dragging you across nails only to rip your heart.
Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men
Padgett Powell - 2000
Ostensibly writing her grocery list, Mrs. Hollingsworth most happily loses her sense of herself. Her list becomes a discovery of the things she has and those she lacks, including men -- even her own husband. Mrs. Hollingsworth begins her list by imagining a lost-love story in which she is playful with and disdainful of the conventions of Southern literature. Soon tiring of that, she decides to turn up her imagination. For reasons unclear to her, the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, an icon of the Lost Cause, rides into her tired lost-love story. He appears as a hologram created by a media giant, Roopit Mogul, who aims to find the real New Southerner -- in a man who can recognize General Forrest's image. Into this surreal atmosphere enter Mrs. Hollingsworth's all too real daughters, the forgotten husband, Mr. and Mrs. Mogul, the boys of the neighborhood, and petty criminals named Oswald and Bundy. Within this singular narrative collage, strong tenderness arises, with accounts of genuine lost love, both familial and wholly romantic. MRS HOLLINGSWORTH'S MEN is a remarkable achievement, full of style and feeling.
Junkyard Ghost Revival
Anis Mojgani - 2008
Junkyard Ghost Revival is an award winning poetry collection of 7 modern touring authors: Derrick Brown, Anis Mojgani, Buddy Wakefield, Robbie Q, Sonya Renee, Andrea Gibson and Cristin O'keefe Aptowicz
Herland (1915) (includes "The Yellow Wallpaper")
Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 1915
That is, until the three men arrive.This eBook edition also includes the ground-breaking short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" - a haunting tale of a woman's decent into madness.
The Crucible: Text and Criticism
Arthur MillerAldous Huxley - 1971
Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town's most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence. Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing "Political opposition...is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence." The Viking Critical Library edition of Arthur Miller's dramatic recreation of the Salem witch trials contains the complete text of The Crucible as well as extensive critical and contextual material about the play and the playwright, including:Selections from Miller's writings on his most frequently performed playEssays on the historical background of The Crucible, including personal narratives by participants in the trials and records of witchcraft in Salem from the original documentsReviews of The Crucible, in production by Brooks Atkinson, Walter Kerr, Eric Bentley, and othersExcerpts from Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Sorcières de Salem, a "spin-off" of Miller's play, and three analogous works by Twain, Shaw, and Budd SchulbergCritical essays on the play, on Miller, and on the play in the context of Miller's oeuvreAn introduction by the editor, a chronology, a list of topics for discussion and papers prepared by Malcolm Cowley, and a bibliography
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
Ben Loory - 2011
In his singular universe, televisions talk (and sometimes sing), animals live in small apartments where their nephews visit from the sea, and men and women and boys and girls fall down wells and fly through space and find love on Ferris wheels. In a voice full of fable, myth, and dream, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day draws us into a world of delightfully wicked recognitions, and introduces us to a writer of uncommon talent and imagination.Contains 40 stories, including "The Duck," "The Man and the Moose," and "Death and the Fruits of the Tree," as heard on NPR's This American Life, "The Book," as heard on Selected Shorts, and "The TV," as found in The New Yorker.A selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and the Starbucks Coffee Bookish Reading Club.Winner of the 2011 Nobbie Award for Best Book of the Year."This guy can write!" –Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451
My Outcast State
Edward McKeown - 2015
Three alien machines descend to the asteroid base of their enemies. The ensuing battle is short and savage. The lone survivor hopes either for rescue, or for another chance to engage its enemies. It will be a long wait… Wrik Trigardt ekes out a living in the Kandalor system with his small ship, Sinner. He is caught between his failed past and a grim present in service to the local crimelord, Dusko. An expedition to the Rift Asteroids promises better days, but when the well of time is disturbed no one can say what will surface. Set in the same universe as the Robert Fenaday/Shasti Rainhell stories, but decades later, My Outcast State begins a new cycle of exploration of Confederation Space.
George Orwell's 1984: A Guide to Understanding the Classics
Ralph A. Ranald - 1920
Back When We Were Grownups
Anne Tyler - 2001
Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else’s?On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation—something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family’s crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it—how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been—is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel.As always with Anne Tyler’s novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave. But in Back When We Were Grownups she so sharpens our perceptions and awakens so many untapped feelings that we come away not only refreshed and delighted, but also infinitely wiser.
Exiles in the Garden
Ward Just - 2009
Alec and his Swiss wife, Lucia, settle in Georgetown next door to a couple whose émigré gatherings in their garden remind Lucia of all the things Americans are not. She leaves Alec as his career founders on his refusal of an assignment to cover the Vietnam War — a slyly subversive fictional choice from Ward Just, who was himself a renowned war correspondent.At the center of the novel is Alec’s unforeseen reckoning with Lucia’s long-absent father, Andre Duran, a Czech living out the end of his life in a hostel called Goya House. Duran’s career as an adventurer and antifascist commando is everything Alec’s is not. The encounter forces Alec to confront just how different a life where things—“terrible things, terrible things”—happen is from a life where nothing much happens at all.
Yoga Teachers' Toolbox
Joseph Le Page
These cards are designed to support your Yoga teaching and practice by showing how important elements of yoga physiology, psychology, and philosophy relate to the practice of the postures for healing and transformation. Among the tools you'll find inside: - Key poses organized into color-coded groups with complete instructions - Clear illustrations of the poses, with modifications and variations - A warm-up section laying the foundation for the postures - Clear descriptions and illustrations of Yoga physiology for each pose, including Koshas, Chakras, Prana Vayus, and Ayurveda - The main benefits and contraindications for each pose - Affirmations to integrate the essential qualities of the poses.