. . Like Frida Kahlo's painting--impossible to look away from. --Kai Maristed, Los Angeles TimesAt the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced through by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits.A vibrant series of prose poems, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on Frida Kahlo, one of the twentieth century's most compelling artists. Carole Maso brings together pieces from Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries to assemble a text that is as erotic, mysterious, and colorful as one of Kahlo's paintings.

    She is considered one of the outstanding Indian poets writing in English, although her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography. Much of her writing in Malayalam came under the pen name Madhavikkutty. She was born on March 31, 1934 in Malabar in Kerala, India. She is the daughter of V.M. Nair, a former managing editor of the widely-circulated Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and Nalappatt Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali poetess. In 1984, she was short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. Kamala Das is probably the first Hindu woman to openly and honestly talk about sexual desires of Indian woman, which made her an iconoclast of her generation. The fact that the book has run into thirty editions is proof enough to appreciate the popularity of the book

    The next 10 years were to be a nightmare, on a daily basis of physical, mental and sexual abuse. This book is her story, and how a group of women got together to petition against the sentence, and ultimately succeeded in helping her.

    A beautifully illustrated portrait of beat icons Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen and the years in the Cascades high country that shaped their lives and work

    On his release from one of America's toughest prisons, Howard made a promise to himself to go straight. No more drugs, no more smuggling, no more fake passports. He would retire to a quiet life with his family in the Balearic Islands of Spain. It didn't quite work out that way.This was the mid-nineties, the height of the ecstasy and clubbing boom, and Ibiza was at the very centre of the vortex for the 'E generation'. Pills had taken the place of marijuana, Paul Oakenfold had replaced The Rolling Stones as the music of the masses, but some people are just born for life on the other side of the law.It wasn't long before Howard found himself trying pure ecstasy and rubbing shoulders with some of the king-pins of the pill trade. These included some of Britain's most notorious gangsters, who were laundering millions of pounds of gold stolen from the legendary Brink's-Mat bullion raid. As Britons descended on Ibiza ahead of one of the greatest summers of the nineties, Howard was preparing for his most outrageous operation yet.Incredibly funny, moving and scabrous, Howard Marks' Mr Smiley follows a journey to the heartland of the clubbing and British crime scene. It is also a fitting last word from one of Britain's best loved bad boys.

    Authors Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee retraced Kerouac's life at home and on the road and talked with the prophets, musicians, poets, socialites, and working people who knew Jack Kerouac. Some are famous like Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, among others; and some are not like Jack's boyhood buddies, his lovers, and his barroom companions. All, however, have contributed to a remarkably vibrant, riveting portrait of a life. We see Jack at Columbia University and on the scene of Greenwich Village; speeding across the tarmac of America with Neal Cassidy ("Dan Moriarty" in Kerouac's classic novel, On the Road); at home with his possessive mother; in California, drinking wine and talking Buddhism; and finally, in Florida, where his life ends tragically at forty-seven years old. Jack's Book, like Kerouac's novels, makes a unique contribution to our understanding of a man and a generation that shaped the dreams and visions of those who followed.

    Here the author unearths the story of R.S. Thomas's life, and that of his household - one both comic, absurd and touching.

    In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather, and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting.Praise for The Grave on the Wall "Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. ... It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle ... In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb."--Booklist, starred review"In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making."--Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory"Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo's Pedro P�ramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate."--Myriam Gurba, author of Mean"Within this haunted sepulcher built out of silence, loss, and grief--its walls shadowed by the traumas of racial oppression and violence--a green river lined with peach trees flows beneath a bridge that leads back to the grandson."--Jeffrey Yang, author of Hey, Marfa: Poems"It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces--through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, Where are you from? I would answer, From The Grave on the Wall."--Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War"Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. This mystery is part of each of us. Shimoda outlines that mystery in silence and silhouette, in objects left behind at site-specific travels to Japan and in the disparate facts of his grandpa's FBI file. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge."--Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future"Shimoda is a mystic writer ... He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. ... he has written a book that touches the bottom of my own soul."--Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue

    Yet their memory of India's partition has been shrouded in silence. Kavita Puri's father was twelve when he found himself one of the millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims caught up in the devastating aftermath of a hastily drawn border. For seventy years he remained silent – like so many – about the horrors he had seen. When her father finally spoke out, opening up a forgotten part of Puri's family history, she was compelled to seek out the stories of South Asians who were once subjects of the British Raj, and are now British citizens. Determined to preserve these accounts – of the end of Empire and the difficult birth of two nations – here Puri records a series of remarkable first-hand testimonies, as well as those of their children and grandchildren whose lives are shaped by partition's legacy. With empathy, nuance and humanity, Puri weaves a breathtaking tapestry of human experience over a period of seven decades that trembles with life; an epic of ruptured families and friendships, extraordinary journeys and daring rescue missions that reverberates with pain, loss and compassion. The division of the Indian subcontinent happened far away, but it is also a very British story. Many of those affected by partition are now part of the fabric of British contemporary life, but their lives continue to be touched by this traumatic event. Partition Voices breaks the silence and confronts the difficult truths at the heart of Britain's shared history with South Asia.

    In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word.Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York—Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

    A diminutive, left-handed, red-headed country boy from Rockhampton, Rod Laver is one of Australia's greatest ever sporting champions and arguably the best tennis player the world has ever seen. He is the only male player to have won the Grand Slam - all four major titles in the same calendar year - in the Open era, and he is the only player to have won two Grand Slams. He was the dominant force in world tennis for almost two decades, playing and defeating some of the greatest players of the 20th century.Rod Laver writes vividly of his life, from the early days growing up in a Queensland country town, playing on makeshift backyard courts, to breaking into the amateur circuit and eventually the professional realm. He also writes movingly about the stroke he suffered in 1998, and of his beloved wife of more than 40 years, Mary, who died last year after a long illness. Rod Laver's memoir is a wonderfully nostalgic journey into Australia's sporting past, filled with anecdotes about the great players and great matches, set against the backdrop of a tennis world changing from rigid amateurism to the professional game we recognise today.

    Departing from Antonio Gramsci’s summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body. Through reveries on the enduring legacies of pain, desire, sexuality, race, and identity, she asks us to sense and feel what we have been trained to disavow, to re-member the body as more than itself.

    

    A verse account of the popular writer's first trip to Japan, in the spring of 1976, offers an out-of-the-ordinary view of Japan

    A must for anyone who's interested in the business of laughter.' JOE LYCETT'The funniest book I've read in years.' ADAM KAYFrom a childhood spent making smoke bombs, killing wasps and carving soap in 70s Kent, Harry Hill then found himself in charge of hundreds of sick people as a junior doctor. Out of his depth and terrified, he chucked it all in to pursue his dream of becoming a stand-up comedian. Battling his way through the 90s Comedy circuit he quickly rose to become a household name and one of the UK's most celebrated comics, almost making it to the top of the showbiz tree . . .From being chased around a car park by an angry heckler, getting fired from Capital Radio and watching every episode of Freaky Eaters, to a bizarre assassination attempt and cutting up Simon Cowell's trousers, Harry takes an honest and hilarious look at the ups and downs of his life and career through the lens of what didn't go right.He shares his secrets on how to be a great comedian, finding joy in failure and creativity in struggle, whilst never forgetting that life is short . . . What readers are saying about Fight! 'Hilarious... recommended unreservedly' *****'Lots of laughs and memories of days gone by' *****'A great book... I could not put it down' *****'Beautifully written and great fun' *****