Book picks similar to
The Great Chaining of Being by Dylan Forsyth
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Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Donna J. Haraway - 2016
Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
Edmund White - 2008
Even today, over a century after his death in 1891, his visionary poetry has continued to influence everyone from Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. His long poem A Season in Hell (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are essential to the modern canon, marked by a hallucinatory and hypnotic style that defined the Symbolist movement in poetry. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world from scheme to scheme, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while running guns in Africa. He was thirty-seven. Edmund White writes with a historian's eye for detail, driven by a genuine personal investment in his subject. White delves deep into the young poet's relationships with his family, his teachers, and his notorious affair with the more established poet Paul Verlaine. He follows the often elusive (sometimes blatant) threads of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's poems (in those days, sodomy was a crime) and offers incisive interpretations of the poems, using his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.
Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation
Karla Jay - 1999
In Southern California in the early '70s, she continued in the battle for gay civil rights and helped to organize the takeover of The Ladies' Home Journal and an "ogle-in" — where women staked out Wall Street and whistled at the men.
Origins
S.E. Meyer - 2013
Meyer's thrilling, fast paced, roller-coaster ride, deep into the thought provoking, controversial, yet compelling world of what we think we know to be true.John Mitchell's life in the small Midwestern town of Mill City Wisconsin is about to change forever. The animals in his lab at the Neuro Science Research center suddenly die, he learns gut wrenching news about his wife of ten years and the most important meeting of his career gets canceled when his boss mysteriously disappears.After accidentally injecting himself with a serum made from the instructions scribed on a seven-thousand-year-old artifact John discovers he has new abilities and new blood-chilling enemies. He and his wife Jenny are soon running for their lives from the terrifying figures that will stop at nothing to protect the serum's seven-thousand-year-old secret and retrieve the artifact needed to finish their plans.On the run and searching for answers they are thrown into a world of ancient secrets, esoteric mysteries and a clandestine underground race when they become trapped in a cavern deep under the ruins of ancient Babylon. As millions of people around the world suddenly begin disappearing they learn the horrific news of the inevitable extinction of the Human Race. But when John discovers the hideously evil secret motivation of the ancient race that is supposed to be saving them he must rely on his new-found abilities to save the woman he loves, Earth and the billions of tortured souls locked deep within it.All references to historical locations, religions, ancient writings and the representation of current beliefs of local peoples from around the world described in this novel are true.
M31: A Family Romance
Stephen Wright - 1988
They live in a decommissioned church in the middle of America, with a radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in the sanctuary. Their children have the run of the house when Dash and Dot are away. When a couple of UFO groupies show up looking for the extraterrestrial duo, they find instead a nuclear family—or rather, a family gone nuclear—whose comically discomforting world resembles our own as much as it does another world altogether.
How I Wrote Certain of My Books
Raymond Roussel - 1935
His unearthly style based on elaborate linguistic riddles and puns fascinated the Surrealists and famously influenced the composition of Marcel Duchamp's -Large Glass, - but also affected writers as diverse as Gide, Robbe-Grillet and Foucault (author of a book-length study of Roussel). The title essay of this collection is the key to Roussel's method, and it is accompanied by selections from all his major works of fiction, drama and poetry, translated by his New York School admirers John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Harry Mathews, and the painter and author Trevor Winkfield. Ashbery writes that Roussel's work is -like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which has disappeared without a trace... we can still admire its inhuman beauty, and be stirred by a language that seems always on the point of revealing its secret.-
Henry Miller: A Life
Robert Ferguson - 1991
But Robert Ferguson’s new biography tells a different tale; for where the novels are sexually explicit and brutally frank—woundingly so to those close to Miller—they are also the fantasies of a man escaping from his past, and from himself.
Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf
Maureen Adams - 2007
Make room for Carlo (Emily Dickinson's giant Newfoundland). Or Flush (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's golden cocker spaniel). Or, maybe, Keeper (Emily Bronte's intimidating mastiff mix). In self-contained chapters of "Shaggy Muses," the work of each author is viewed intimately within the context of the canine companions who provided love, comfort and inspiration." - Elizabeth Taylor, Literary Editor, The Chicago Tribune “With this book, Adams has created a niche that will thrill those who love literature, biography and dogs.” - Bark Magazine “Dog lovers and literary groupies alike will adore SHAGGY MUSES.” -Bookpage “These concise biographies are affecting and engaging.” -Kirkus Reviews“Written with lively, accessible prose, this absorbing, wholly unique book is a must-read for literature- and dog-lovers alike.” -Booklist“Lovers of both dogs and classic writers will identify with this sweet, quirky book.” -Publishers Weekly “An intimate look into the lives of famous women authors whose lives were more difficult than we would ever have imagined. Their dogs helped them to survive and create their great works of classic English literature. Lovers of literature and all of those interested in the human/animal bond should read this fascinating book.” — Temple Grandin , author of Animals in Translation “I so enjoyed SHAGGY MUSES. It manages very successfully to bring into focus exactly why these dogs were important to these writers—an intriguing mixture of providing some with confidence, some with love, some with protection and all of them with a curious sense of identification with another spirit which, sometimes, fuelled their writing. No mean feat.” — Margaret Forster, author of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Life and Loves of a Poet"Adams, a clinical psychologist, explores the many roles - companions, objects of affection, witnesses, protectors, guides - these dogs played in their owners' lives and their appearances in their work. How charming to visualize delicate Emily Dickinson with amiable Carlo, her Newfoundland, living their lives in Amherst, or Edith Wharton, traveling through Europe with her Pekes." - The Times-Picayune"Adams, an English professor-turned-clinical-psychologist, shows verve and just the right amount of playfulness. Deftly, she places these furry inspirations into the environments that nurtured and restricted their 19th and 20th century mistresses. The result are five entertaining and insightful minibiographies, exquisite as the 19th century miniature of Barrett Browning and her lapdog Flush included in the text." - The Cleveland Plain Dealer"These stories - based on diaries, letters and contemporary accounts with several photographs, many told here for the first time - reveal intimate details and new perspectives on these giants of English and American literature, made even more memorable by Adams' lively writing." - The Providence Journal"Shaggy Muses' is readable and interesting. . .full of facts and insights. Adams goes beyond the superficial and provides real information." - The Oregonian"Adams writes these concise biographies with intelligence, verve and tenderness, and her background in literature and psychology makes her uniquely qualified. She does not avert her gaze from each of her subject's troubles but rather shows how each became a greater writer partially through unconditional canine friendship and devotion." - Times-Dispatch“You’ll call this sentimental–perhaps–but then a dog somehow represents the private side of life, the play side,” Virginia Woolf confessed to a friend. And it is this private, playful side, the richness and power of the bond between five great women writers and their dogs, that Maureen Adams celebrates in this deeply engaging book. In Shaggy Muses, we visit Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush, the golden Cocker Spaniel who danced the poet away from death, back to life and human love. We roam the wild Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë, whose fierce Mastiff mix, Keeper, provided a safe and loving outlet for the writer’s equally fierce spirit. We enter the creative sanctum of Emily Dickinson, which she shared only with Carlo, the gentle, giant Newfoundland who soothed her emotional terrors. We mingle with Edith Wharton, whose ever-faithful Pekes warmed her lonely heart during her restless travels among Europe and America’s social and intellectual elite. We are privileged guests in the fragile universe of Virginia Woolf, who depended for emotional support and sanity not only on her human loved ones but also on her dogs, especially Pinka–a gift from her lover, Vita Sackville-West–a black Cocker Spaniel who became a strong, bright thread in the fabric of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s life together.Based on diaries, letters, and other contemporary accounts–and featuring many illustrations of the writers and their dogs–these five miniature biographies allow us unparalleled intimacy with women of genius in their hours of domestic ease and inner vulnerability. Shaggy Muses also enchants us with a pack of new friends: Flush, Keeper, Carlo, Foxy, Linky, Grizzle, Pinka, and all the other devoted canines who loved and served these great writers.
Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story
Peter Bagge - 2017
If Bagge had not already had a New York Times bestseller with his biography of Margaret Sanger, his newest biography, Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story, would seem to be an unfathomable pairing of author and subject. Yet through Bagge’s skilled cartooning, he turns what could be a rote biography into a bold and dazzling graphic novel, creating a story as brilliant as the life itself.Hurston challenged the norms of what was expected of an African American woman in early 20th century society. The fifth of eight kids from a Baptist family in Alabama, Hurston’s writing prowess blossomed at Howard University, and then Barnard College, where she was the sole black student. She arrived in NYC at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and quickly found herself surrounded by peers such as Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman.Hurston went on to become a noted folklorist and critically acclaimed novelist, including her most provocative work Their Eyes Were Watching God. Despite these landmark achievements, personal tragedies and shifting political winds in the midcentury rendered her almost forgotten by the end of her life. With admiration and respect, Bagge reconstructs her vivid life in resounding full-color.
Bohemians
Paul M. Buhle - 2014
Bohemians is the graphic history of this movement and its illustrious figures, recovering the utopian ideas behind millennial communities, and covering the rise of Greenwich Village, the multiracial and radical jazz world, and West Coast and Midwest bohemians, among other scenes.Drawn by an all-star cast of comics artists, including rising figures like Sabrina Jones, Lance Tooks, and Summer McClinton, alongside established artists like Peter Kuper and Spain Rodriguez, Bohemians is a broad and entertaining account of the rebel impulse in American cultural history.featuring work bySpain Rodriguez,Sharon Rudahl,Peter Kuper, Sabrina Jones, David Lasky, Afua Richardson,Lance Tooks,Milton Knight, and others.The ebook edition is expanded from the paperback edition, andincludes additional chapters on the swing music scene,La Bohemeandmidwest bohemians, as well as expanded material on the Greenwich Village intellectuals, Walt Whitman and Harlem jazz club Mintons Playhouse.
In War Times
Kathleen Ann Goonan - 2007
Afterwards, Sam promises that he will do anything he can to stop the war. During his training, Sam begins to show that he has a knack for science and engineering, and he is plucked from the daily grunt work of twenty-mile marches by his superiors to study subjects like code breaking, electronics, and physics in particular, a science that is growing more important to the war effort. While studying, Sam is seduced by a mysterious female physicist that is teaching one of his courses, and given her plans for a device that will end the war, perhaps even end the human predilection for war forever. But the device does something less, and more, than that. After his training, Sam is sent throughout Europe to solve both theoretical and practical problems for the Allies. He spends his free time playing jazz, and trying to construct the strange device. It's only much later that he discovers that it worked, but in a way that he could have never imagined.
The Galactic Peace Committee
L.G. Estrella - 2016
In another universe, humanity is overrun by monsters so evil that their very presence dims the light of the stars. In yet another universe, humanity is drawn into an endless battle for dominion over the galaxy. This is not one of those universes. In this universe, humanity is in charge of the Galactic Peace Committee. In theory, the Committee is an unmatched force for good, bringing peace and prosperity to countless worlds and ensuring that conflicts between different races are settled with words and not planet-cracking weaponry or super plagues designed to turn everyone into goo. In theory. Jake Smith is a diplomat. He works for the Committee. This is his story – and it goes about as well as you’d expect. In other words, it doesn’t go very well at all. Can Jake survive petty aliens? Sure. He’s a diplomat. It’s all part of the job. What about angry aliens? Probably. He does have a killer robot for a secretary, and he’s not bad with a shock staff. How about a fleet of aliens out for blood? That… that might be a little bit trickier. The Galactic Peace Committee… keeping peace (sort of) throughout the galaxy.
Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life
Alastair Brotchie - 2011
A century later, Jarry is firmly established as one of the leading figures of the artistic avant-garde. Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Philip K. Dick, Paul McCartney, DJ Spooky, Peter Greenaway, and J. G. Ballard are among his many admirers. A community of scholars and artists maintain a posthumous dialogue with Jarry's ideas through the Collège de 'Pataphysique in Paris (named after the "science of imaginary solutions" he conceived), while a steady stream of books on twentieth-century drama pay tribute to his absurd and grotesque play, Ubu Roi. Even so, most people today tend to think of Jarry only as the author of that play, and of his life as a string of outlandish "ubuesque" anecdotes, often recounted with wild inaccuracy. In this first full-length critical biography of Jarry in English, Alastair Brotchie reconstructs the life of a man intent on inventing (and destroying) himself, not to mention his world, and the "philosophy" that defined their relation. In short, Brotchie gives us the narrative version of what Jarry himself produced: a pataphysical life. Drawing on a wealth of new material, Brotchie alternates chapters of biographical narrative with chapters that connect themes, obsessions, and undercurrents that relate to the life.The anecdotes remain, and are even augmented: Jarry's assumption of the "ubuesque," his inversions of everyday behavior (such as eating backwards, from cheese to soup), his exploits with gun and bicycle, and his herculean feats of drinking. But Brotchie distinguishes between Jarry's purposely playing the fool and deeper nonconformities that appear essential to his writing and his thought, both of which remain a vital subterranean influence to this day.
The Supermale
Alfred Jarry - 1902
Jarry's equally revolutionary novels form the cornerstones of a science he named "Pataphysics," a method for the rational disordering of rationality that has influenced countless subsequent artists and writers, from Marcel Duchamp to Wim Delvoye, Andr� Breton to J.G. Ballard. The Supermale elaborates a carnal Pataphysics: Andr� Marcueil, gentleman and scientist, believes that human energy has no limits, and demonstrates his belief by undertaking a 10,000-mile bicycle race with a locomotive, followed by an indefinite bout of lovemaking. After 82 acts of intercourse, doctors finally hook him up to a machine, with whom he merges in the book's--and the Supermale's--final climax. Like a mock Jules Verne, Jarry describes these deranged proceedings in a calm prose, crisply rendered here by Barbara Wright, one of French literature's finest translators.
The Editor
Steven Rowley - 2019
Jackie--or Mrs. Onassis, as she's known in the office--has fallen in love with James's candidly autobiographical novel, one that exposes his own dysfunctional family. But when the book's forthcoming publication threatens to unravel already fragile relationships, both within his family and with his partner, James finds that he can't bring himself to finish the manuscript. Jackie and James develop an unexpected friendship, and she pushes him to write an authentic ending, encouraging him to head home to confront the truth about his relationship with his mother. Then a long-held family secret is revealed, and he realizes his editor may have had a larger plan that goes beyond the page... From the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus comes a funny, poignant, and highly original novel about an author whose relationship with his very famous book editor will change him forever--both as a writer and a son.