Book picks similar to
On the Atlantic Edge by Kenneth White
poetry
travel
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ABC of Reading
Ezra Pound - 1934
With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding “Treatise on Meter” provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. The ABC of Reading emphasizes Pound's ability to discover neglected and unknown genius, distinguish originals from imitations, and open new avenues in literature for our time.
The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin - 1982
In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
Never Say Goodbye: A True Story
Robert Anstey - 2016
While this evil war has torn half the world apart, it has also pulled half the world together. Soldiers both men and women, under American and British flags, gather on the coast of England just days before D-Day. Four friends become brothers and face their greatest fears together. With the coastline packed with ships, and the sky full of planes, hundreds of thousands of soldiers prepare to stand in the crossroads of history. In an impossible moment in time, a young British woman meets an American soldier as he prepares to embark on his treacherous journey. He promised to return and she promised to wait. Join these courageous young men and women as they struggle to find the courage they never knew they had and the future they feared they'd never see.
This Flawless Place Between
Bruno Portier - 2009
She takes the time to enjoy it. It will be over soon. For all those who loved The Alchemist, Siddhartha, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, This Flawless Place Between is a mesmerising and uplifting story about death and dying. Interweaving the key themes of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, one of the world’s most influential and treasured spiritual texts, Portier gently explores our deepest questions about life, love, and death with a refreshing openness and delicacy. Anne and Evan are vacationing in the Tibetan mountains when on an isolated stretch of road they lose control of their motorbike. Bike and riders spin over the edge, plunging into a ravine. Evan’s leg is broken; Anne isn’t moving. A Tibetan peasant hurries to help them, but while Evan tries in vain to save Anne’s life, the stranger focuses on guiding her spirit along the new path it must take to the next one. So begins a cathartic voyage that carries Anne away from her broken body and back through the traumas and ecstasies of her life. Once again, she is a child mourning a dead pet, a young woman embracing her lover, the radiant hostess of an art exhibition, a distraught mother hearing that her young daughter has been critically injured. As she revisits her past, and the futures of those she will leave behind, Anne begins to accept not only her death but also her life – and that what happens next will be up to her. A gifted successor to the inspirational Paulo Coelho, BRUNO PORTIER is a writer, photographer, and documentary maker. He travelled around Asia for 12 years before undertaking a PhD in social anthropology and writing this, his first novel.
Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets
Thomas Howard - 2006
Eliot to be the most important and influential poet of the 20th century, and Four Quartets to be his finest poem and greatest literary achievement. Dove Descending is a journey into the beauties and depths of Eliot's masterpiece written by Thomas Howard, bestselling author, professor and critic. In this line-by-line commentary, Howard unravels the complexities of the sublime poem with such adept adroitness that even its most difficult passages spring to life. During his many years as a professor of English and Literature, Howard taught this poem often, and developed what he calls "a reading" approach to its concepts that render their meaning more lucid for the reader. Dove Descending reunites the brilliant insights of a master teacher whose understanding and love of Eliot's writings are shared here for the great benefit of the reader.Dove Descending is:The first in-depth exposition of Eliot's masterwork ever publishedThe fruit of Howard's many years of teaching Eliot and his unique understanding of the complexities of the great poemA must-have book for fans of T. S Eliot, and anyone who wants to understand his greatest work.
The Greek Way
Edith Hamilton - 1930
Athens had entered upon her brief and magnificent flowering of genius which so molded the world of mind and of spirit that our mind and spirit today are different... What was then produced of art and of thought has never been surpasses and very rarely equalled, and the stamp of it is upon all the art and all the thought of the Western world."A perennial favorite in many different editions, Edith Hamilton's best-selling The Greek Way captures the spirit and achievements of Greece in the fifth century B.C. A retired headmistress when she began her writing career in the 1930s, Hamilton immediately demonstrated a remarkable ability to bring the world of ancient Greece to life, introducing that world to the twentieth century. The New York Times called The Greek Way a "book of both cultural and critical importance."
Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience
Shaun Usher - 2013
Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, Katharine Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Clementine Churchill, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and many more.
My Visit to Hell
Paul Thigpen - 2007
Now, the story continues… Thomas Travis had always thought the toughest streets in the ghettos of Atlanta were next door to hell. But he didn’t know just how close they were until the threat of racial violence sent him fleeing down the stairs of an abandoned building…only to fall headlong into a tortured realm of fire and ice, the place of the damned. The only chance of escape was to trust the strange elderly woman who met him there and insisted on being his guide. She claimed to know the way out, but it would lead through all the terrifying circles of divine judgment, each one deeper and more tormenting than the last. In the lowest pit, the Lord of Darkness himself lay in wait. Thomas had lived a godless life, and now there was hell to pay. If his soul could be purged on the journey, he just might make it. But the odds were against him. In hell, the only guarantee is justice…and the only way out is down. About the AuthorPAUL THIGPEN, PhD, is an award-winning journalist and the best-selling author of more than twenty-five books, including A Dictionary of Quotes from the Saints, Blood of the Martyrs, and Seed of the Church. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University and also holds a doctorate in historical theology from Emory University.
On the Slow Train: Twelve Great British Railway Journeys
Michael Williams - 2010
This beautifully-packaged book will take the reader on the slow train to another era when travel meant more than hurrying from one place to the next, the journey meaning nothing but time lost in crowded carriages, condemned by broken timetables. On the Slow Train will reconnect with that long-missed need to lift our heads from the daily grind and reflect that there are still places in Britain where one can stop and stare. It will tap into many things: a love of railways, a love of history, and a love of nostalgia. This book will be a paean to another age before milk churns, porters, and cats on seats were replaced by security announcements and Burger King. These twelve spectacular journeys will help free us from what Baudelaire denounced as "the horrible burden of time."
Notes to Each Other
Hugh Prather - 1990
Prather subtitled the book, "My struggle to become a person." It was the deeply felt record of his journey to a state of heightened self-knowledge and spiritual flowering. It became a perennial best-seller, and continues to enlighten, comfort, and amuse to this day.Notes to Each Other bravely explores the heart of a relationship that has lasted for 35 yearsthe relationship between Hugh and Gayle Prather. With remarkable candor, one couple traces the emotional route traveled to reach the coveted place where genuine communication, cooperation, and compassion dwell. First published 10 years ago, the book has here been updated and enlarged by the greater wisdom that comes with the experience of raising children and growing older together.Although drawn from two hearts, the book speaks with one voice, asking the questions all couples ask, from "Did I choose the right person?" to "How can you stand me?" Let it speak to you.
Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond
Denis Johnson - 2001
And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable. Where violence and poverty and moral transgression go unchecked, even unnoticed. A world of such wild, rocketing energy that, grasping it, anything at all is possible.Whether traveling through war-ravaged Liberia, mingling with the crowds at a Christian Biker rally, exploring his own authority issues through the lens of this nation's militia groups, or attempting to unearth his inner resources while mining for gold in the wilds of Alaska, Johnson writes with a mixture of humility and humorous candor that is everywhere present.With the breathtaking and often haunting lyricism for which his work is renowned, Johnson considers in these pieces our need for transcendence. And, as readers of his previous work know, Johnson's path to consecration frequently requires a limning of the darkest abyss. If the path to knowledge lies in experience, Seek is a fascinating record of Johnson's profoundly moving pilgrimage.
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
Clive James - 2007
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
C.S. Lewis - 1964
Lewis' The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, as historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It describes the image discarded by later ages as the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe. This, Lewis' last book, was hailed as the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind.
Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis
Michael Ward - 2008
S. Lewis's famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery.Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In Planet Narnia he demonstrates that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to the seven novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis's writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward reveals how the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets - - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn - - planets which Lewis described as "spiritual symbols of permanent value" and "especially worthwhile in our own generation." Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that in each book the plot-line, the ornamental details, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality. The cosmological theme of each Chronicle is what Lewis called 'the kappa element in romance', the atmospheric essence of a story, everywhere present but nowhere explicit. The reader inhabits this atmosphere and thus imaginatively gains connaitre knowledge of the spiritual character which the tale was created to embody.Planet Narnia is a ground-breaking study that will provoke a major revaluation not only of the Chronicles, but of Lewis's whole literary and theological outlook. Ward uncovers a much subtler writer and thinker than has previously been recognized, whose central interests were hiddenness, immanence, and knowledge by acquaintance."
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Camille Paglia - 1990
It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.