Book picks similar to
Underground National by Sueyeun Juliette Lee
poetry
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recent-and-upcoming-jks-guests
sociology
Horsepower: Poems
Joy Priest - 2020
Across the book’s three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self—a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky’s world-famous horseracing track—before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances. Across the collection, Priest writes a horse that acts as a metaphysical engine of flight, showing us how to throw off the harness and sustain wildness. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Priest presents a non-linear narrative in which the speaker lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South, and must instead, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of “the horses & their restless minds.” FROM "RODEO" The four-wheeler is a chariot. Horse-wraiths Kicking up a plume of spirits in the dirt behind us. Her arms kudzu around my middle. Out here, In the desert, everything is invisible. Only the locusts’ flat buzz gives Them away. Everything native & quieting Perennial & nighthawk black As we ride through: the cowgirls, The witch & the water sky-mirror-split, The severity of squall lines. Also, the lips Parting air like lightning & the girl Blowing bubbles—in each one a rainbow.
Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors
Lisa Appignanesi - 2007
From Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a nervous breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife, to Freud, Jung, and Lacan, who developed the new women-centered therapies, Lisa Appignanesi’s research traces how more and more of the inner lives and emotions of women have become a matter for medics and therapists. Here too is the story of how over the years symptoms and diagnoses have developed together to create fashions in illness and how treatments have succeeded or sometimes failed. Mad, Bad, and Sad takes us on a fascinating journey through the fragile, extraordinary human mind.
Brooklyn North
Peter McDonnell - 2020
Jonathan Fleming, Sundhe Moses, Jabbar Washington, and John Bunn were among dozens of innocent New Yorkers who spent decades in prison —guilty until proven innocent. This documentary follows their relentless fight to unveil an insidious pattern of police and prosecutorial corruption in Brooklyn at the height of the war on drugs and a historic peak in violent crime in the 1980s and '90s.
Jackstraws
Charles Simic - 1999
Suffused with hope yet unafraid to mock his own credulity, Simic's searing metaphors unite the solemn with the absurd. His raindrops listen to each other fall and collect memories; his wildflowers are drunk with kissing the red-hot breezes; and his God is a Mr. Know-it-all, a wheeler-dealer, a wire-puller. In this latest lyrical gathering, Simic continues to startle his fans with the powerful and surprising images that are his trademark-slangy images of the ethereal, fantastic visions of the everyday, foreign scenes of the all-American-and moments full of humor and full of heartache.
Invisible Chains: Shawn Hornbeck and the Kidnapping Case that Shook the Nation
Kristina Sauerwein - 2008
Devlin. Hornbeck had been in captivity for four years, was gradually given more and more freedom, but never tried to escape.
Revolution By Murder: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Plot to Kill Henry Clay Frick (Kindle Single)
James McGrath Morris - 2014
In 1892, America was on the verge of another civil war, this one over industrial slavery. It was the era of robber barons, and none was more reviled for his harsh treatment of workers than industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The deadly Homestead Steel Strike that summer had left Frick with blood on his hands, and two young, impassioned radicals thought he should pay for his crimes. Answering the utopian call of a world without government, Alexander Berkman and his lover, Emma Goldman, set out for revenge in the name of the proletariat. Theirs is the story of revolution by murder. James McGrath Morris is a biographer and writer of narrative nonfiction. His books include Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne’s Journey Through the Civil Rights Revolution (forthcoming); Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power; The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism; and Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is currently writing a book about the friendship between writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Cover design by Adil Dara Kim.
Castilian Knight
Griff Hosker - 2019
This is the story of a time when brother fought brother and Christian fought Christian. Power was all and Spain was riven by strife which was political, religious and familial! One man came from the harsh land of Castile to make one land and one state. Spain truly began with Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Campeador, El Cid. His story is told through the eyes of the warrior who spent his life at his side. William Redbeard came from humble origins but he was destined for greatness too as he walked in the seemingly endless shadow of El Cid. This first instalment in the Chronicles tells of Rodrigo’s rise to prominence when he became the champion of Prince Sancho of Castile. This is but the beginning of a tale which still stirs the blood a millennium after it began.
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson - 2011
The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
In These Days of Prohibition
Caroline Bird - 2017
As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, ‘revving on a wish’.
A Redeeming Love in the West
Ava Winters - 2020
Can she trust him now that their past keeps coming after them?Exciting - Romantic - Dauntless!Having inherited her uncle’s ranch in Nevada, Nelly agrees to the biggest challenge of her life, leaving behind London’s high society. She faces difficulties in adjusting to a totally different life, in a ranch. While fighting for her newly found freedom, she experiences the liberating feeling of independency, but an unexpected romance is emerging. Will she learn to trust him and embrace her new life in the ranch?Having a deep secret, Louis keeps to himself. This way, no one will ever get hurt again. But now that a new boss has arrived, Louis realizes that this is not an easy task. As they spend time together, he is faced with his greatest fear. How can he trust again while his past is still haunting him?When a dispute about Nelly’s land blows out of proportion, Nelly and Louis will have to fight. Even if that means sacrificing what is most valuable to them. How can they save the land that they now call home and protect their love at the same time?"A Redeeming Love in the West" is a stand-alone Western Historical Romance Novel with no cheating, no cliffhangers, and a guaranteed happily ever after.
Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness
Alisa Roth - 2018
Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders.In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker.Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.
How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do
Sharon Moalem - 2009
It’s almost as much fun, and needs less energy.” — Peter Macinnis, author of 100 Discoveries: The Greatest Breakthroughs in History "How Sex Works manages to inject science writing with the prurient thrill of a gossip rag." —O magazineMedical maverick and New York Times bestselling author of Survival of the Sickest Dr. Sharon Moalem presents an insightful and engaging voyage through the surprising history and evolution of sexual reproduction. Fans of Freakonomics, Blink, You: The Owner’s Manual, and Why Do Men Have Nipples will find many engaging insights in How Sex Works.
Animals Strike Curious Poses
Elena Passarello - 2017
Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.
A HYPNOTIST'S JOURNEY TO ATLANTIS: EYE WITNESS ACCOUNTS OF OUR ANCIENT HISTORY
SARAH Breskman Cosme - 2020
The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays
Elisa Gabbert - 2020
. . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills.We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last.The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it.Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world."A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less