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RX
By Rachel Lindsay. 2018
A graphic memoir about the treatment of mental illness, treating mental illness as a commodity, and the often unavoidable choice…
between sanity and happiness.In her early twenties in New York City, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Rachel Lindsay takes a job in advertising in order to secure healthcare coverage for her treatment. But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain, developing ads for an antidepressant drug. She is the audience of the work she's been pouring over and it highlights just how unhappy and trapped she feels, stuck in an endless cycle of treatment, insurance and medication. Overwhelmed by the stress of her professional life and the self-scrutiny it inspires, she begins to destabilize and while in the midst of a crushing job search, her mania takes hold. Her altered mindset yields a simple solution: to quit her job and pursue life as an artist, an identity she had abandoned in exchange for medical treatment. When her parents intervene, she finds herself hospitalized against her will, and stripped of the control she felt she had finally reclaimed. Over the course of her two weeks in the ward, she struggles in the midst of doctors, nurses, patients and endless rules to find a path out of the hospital and this cycle of treatment. One where she can live the life she wants, finding freedom and autonomy, without sacrificing her dreams in order to stay well.Helping the Polonskys
By Khaleel Muhammad. 2012
In this exciting new series, a group of Muslim kids come together to clean up an old Jewish man's house…
before his wife returns home from a major operation. But with time running out and a bigger mess than they had imagined . . . can they succeed?Khaleel Muhammad is a well-known singer of nasheeds (Islamic songs). He has also written and produced his own successful audio adventure, The Adventures of Hakim. This is his first children's book. Khaleel lives in London, England.Some Rain Must Fall
By Don Bartlett, Karl Ove Knausgaard. 2016
The fifth installment in the epic six-volume My Struggle cycle is here, highly anticipated by Karl Ove Knausgaard's dedicated fan…
club--and the first in the cycle to be published separately in Canada.The young Karl Ove moves to Bergen to attend the Writing Academy. It turns out to be a huge disappointment: he wants so much, knows so little, and achieves nothing. His contemporaries have their manuscripts accepted and make their debuts while he begins to feel the best he can do is to write about literature. With no apparent reason to feel hopeful, he continues his exploration of and love for books and reading. Gradually his writing changes; his relationship with the world around him changes too. This becomes a novel about new, strong friendships and a serious relationship that transforms him until the novel reaches the existential pivotal point: his father dies, Karl Ove makes his debut as a writer and everything disintegrates. He flees to Sweden, to avoid family and friends.Funny Misshapen Body
By Jeffrey Brown. 2009
Funny Misshapen Body is the story of Jeffrey Brown's evolution as a cartoonist, from his youthful obsession with superhero comics…
to his disillusionment with fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawn with Brown's scratchy, spare, trademark style, Funny Misshapen Body resonates with true-to-life observations on love, fear, and ambition. Through his bare bones graphic style, he reveals his most embarrassing personal moments in raw, intimate detail -- including how he survived high school, binge drinking, mild drug experimentation, doomed friendships, and being diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Ultimately coming to terms with his art and identity, Brown describes the ups and downs of his adolescence with understated simplicity, dark humor, and charm.Snow White: An Islamic Tale
By Fawzia Gilani, Shireen Adams. 2013
Involving the power of a djinn, poisoned dates, seven dwarf sisters-in-faith, and a mysterious old peddler woman in the woods…
wearing a face veil, this lyrically told story offers a unique twist on this fairy tale, whilst keeping the classic much-loved story intact, including a hateful and vain stepmother, a considerate huntsman, and a charming prince.Set in the heady snow-strewn woodlands of Anatolia by the illustrator Shireen Adams, this tale of flight, friendship, and forgiveness is richly detailed and beautifully brought to life.Snow White is the second book in the Islamic Fairy Tales series, which looks to offer meaningful and faithful variants of these popular worldwide stories.Fawzia Gilani has worked as a teacher, librarian, and school principal in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada since 1993. She is the author of thirty children's books, mostly on the topic of Eid.Good Eggs
By Phoebe Potts. 2010
In the tradition of the acclaimed graphic memoirs Fun Home and Persepolis comes a funny, insightful, and deeply moving book…
about learning to appreciate what we have when we can't seem to get what we want. For Phoebe Potts, the path to maternal fulfillment has not been easy. All her friends seem to get pregnant, but she can't conceive for all her trying. As Phoebe and her husband, Jeff, navigate the emotionally and physically fraught world of fertility experts, she takes stock of what matters in the rest of her life and reflects on the winding journey to her true calling as an artist. From her days as an amateur union organizer in Texas to her spiral into paralyzing depression in Mexico; from her soul-shrinking, all-for-the-benefits stint as an administrative assistant at a fancy university in Cambridge to her flirtation with rabbinical school, Phoebe illuminates the bumpy road to vocational and personal contentment. Her wonderful, hilarious, and utterly original drawings capture the truly good eggs-an unforgettably nutty mother; a devoted husband; a team of therapists, hairdressers, and landladies; friends; and a sidekick housecat-that together expand the definition of what really makes a family.An Enlarged Heart
By Cynthia Zarin. 2013
An Enlarged Heart, the exquisitely written prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin, is a poignantly understated exploration of the…
author's experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time's passage. In these intertwined episodes from her New York world and beyond, she charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman, navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments and the rapidly fading New York of people like Mr. Ferri, the Upper East Side tailor ("a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth"). By the end, whether Zarin is writing about vanished restaurants, her decades-long love affair with her collection of coats, a newlywed journey to Italy, a child's illness, Mary McCarthy's file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff she knew as a young woman, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons, and that there are some truths not even a tailor can alter.The First Breath
By Icarus Phaethon. 2009
"Everyone's life is a mountain. You can spend your whole time wandering around the lowlands and foothills of this great…
peak, but unless you make the commitment to get to the top one day, you will never find out who you really are." The First Breath is an astounding work that is a mix of travel narrative, philosophical dialogue, human drama, intrigue, love story and soul-searching personal journey. It will challenge your perception of the world and relationship with it. There's something terribly wrong with the world, at least Icarus thinks so. Something's not quite right and it's something he can't quite put his finger on. It's akin to that fleeting moment when you think of a rose then you actually see one, and can't quite figure out whether it's just a coincidence or something much stranger, deeper and far reaching than you could ever imagine.The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard
By Paul Auster, Ron Padgett. 2012
An artist associated with the New York School of poets, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a wonderful writer whose one-of-a-kind autobiographical…
work I Remember ("a completely original book" -Edmund White) has had a wide and growing influence. It is joined in this major new retrospective with many other pieces that for the first time present the full range of Brainard's writing in all its deadpan wit, madcap inventiveness, self-revealing frankness, and generosity of spirit. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard gathers intimate journals, jottings, stories, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them available until now only as expensive rarities, if at all. "Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed- off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance," writes Paul Auster in the introduction to this collection. "These little works . . . are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits." Assembled by the author's longtime friend and biographer Ron Padgett and including fourteen previously unpublished works, here is a fresh and affordable way to rediscover a unique American artist.The End (My Struggle #6)
By Karl Knausgaard, Don Bartlett, Martin Aitken. 2018
The sixth and final book in Knausgaard's epic My Struggle cycle--the most talked about literary project of its time. The…
sprawling, intimate, and spectacularly unorthodox literary autobiography that unleashed a media frenzy upon its release in Norway, became a global publishing sensation, and sold millions of copies worldwide, now reaches its climactic conclusion. In My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines with ruthless, unsparing rigour his life, his ambitions and frailties, his uncertainties and doubts, and his relationships with friends and exes, his wife and children, his mother and father. It is an opus in which life is described in all its nuances from moments of great drama to the most trivial everyday details. It is also a project that is full of risk, where the borders between private and public worlds cross, not without cost for the author himself and the people portrayed. The End, the sixth and final book, reflects back on the personal fallout from the earlier volumes, with Knausgaard facing growing literary acclaim and the often shattering repercussions that came with it. It is a book about literature itself and its relationship with reality, the capstone on a magnificent achievement. Translated from the Norwegian by superstar literary translators Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken.Among our public men there is not one whose life can be studied with more interest and profit by American…
youth than that of Abraham Lincoln. It is not alone that, born in an humble cabin, he reached the highest position accessible to an American, but especially because in every position which he was called upon to fill, he did his duty as he understood it, and freely sacrificed personal ease and comfort in the service of the humblest. This is the story of Lincoln’s boyhood and manhood.I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal: Stories of a Birmingham Boy
By Charlie Hill. 2020
A vision of drinking, drugs, culture, sex, politics and masculinity in the Midlands in the 1980s and 1990s.I Don't Want…
to Go to the Taj Mahal tells the story of its author, Charlie Hill, living in the Midlands in the 1980s and 1990s. In a series of vignettes, I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal recounts Hill's experiences with work, identity, sex, politics, drugs, homelessness and dissolution, set against the backdrop of Birmingham at the end of the twentieth century.Not Now but Now: A Novel
By M. F. Fisher. 1984
Those who court danger are often the most circumspect. In this stylish novel, M. F. K. Fisher traces the course…
of Jennie, a willful wandering woman, a lovely enchantress calculating the havoc caused by her life of danger and license. Jennie's path is devastating to those around her, a sinister invasion. But Jennie, more Lilith than Eve, survives unscathed.First published in 1947, Not Now But Now traces the subtleties and nuances of a woman's mind. Jennie is not controlled by others, nor by time, and we follow her through separate eras and beautifully drawn settings. Whether in San Francisco, Chicago, Lausanne, or Paris, Jennie is surrounded by sensuality, fine food and furniture, and beautiful clothes.Those not yet familiar with Fisher's style will delight in her careful, exact prose. She is the author of several books, including How to Cook a Wolf, A Considerable Town, The Cooking of Provincial France, and As They Were.The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides
By John West. 2010
A husband and wife, both medical professionals, are gravely ill. Rather than living in pain, they choose to end their…
lives, and they turn to their son for help. Despite the legal risks and certain emotional turmoil, he agrees—and ultimately performs an act of love more difficult than any other.The Last Goodnights provides a unique, powerful, and unflinching look inside the reality of one of the most galvanizing issues of our time: assisted suicide. Told with intensity and bare honesty, John West's account of the deaths of two brave people is gritty and loving, frightening and illuminating, nerve–wracking and even, at times, darkly humorous. As West's story places him in one of the most difficult experiences anyone can endure, it also offers a powerful testament to the act of death by choice, and reveals the reasons why end–of–life issues are far too personal for government intrusion.Intimately told, The Last Goodnights points out the unnecessary pain and suffering that is often forced upon dying people and their families, and honors the choice to die with purpose and dignity. In the end, this story is not just about death—it is also about love, courage, and autonomy.O / Exorcismos de esti(l)o
By Guillermo Cabrera Infante. 1995
Dos libros experimentales reunidos en un volumen en el que brilla el inigualable talento lúdico de Guillermo Cabrera Infante En…
este volumen conviven dos libros próximos en el tiempo de Guillermo Cabrera Infante: la colección de artículos y ensayos O, publicada originalmente en 1975, y el libro de piezas experimentales Exorcismos de esti(l)o, aparecido en 1976. En el primero, el autor despliega su peculiar ingenio creador, en ocasiones satírico y burlón, para describir facetas de su cotidianidad y de la vida contemporánea, haciendo referencia a protagonistas tan diversos como su inigualable gato Offenbach y los miembros de la policía secreta. En Exorcismos, una colección repleta de saber clásico y sarcásticas investigaciones literarias, brilla el talento lúdico del Cabrera Infante, así como su obsesión por las sorpresas del lenguaje, plasmada en una serie de retruécanos, juegos de palabras multilingües e ingeniosas manipulaciones tipográficas que evocan a e.e. cummings y al OuLiPo. La crítica ha dicho:«Guillermo Cabrera Infante era un grandísimo escritor.»Mario Vargas Llosa «Uno de los mayores y mejores renovadores de la prosa en castellano, un clásico de vanguardia.»Fernando Savater «Su talento verbal era extraordinario, tanto de viva voz como por escrito, aunque esto último lo sepa cualquiera que haya leído sus libros.»Javier Marías «Cabrera Infante trajo al sector desarraigado a la fuerza de Cuba las virtudes de la parodia, la sátira y el humor.»José Miguel Oviedo, Letras LibresMy Life at First Try: A Novel
By Mark Budman. 2008
This semi–autobiographical debut novel chronicles the life of Alex, born in Siberia in 1950, and his dreams of becoming a…
writer and of meeting Annie, his distant American cousin. As a child, Alex observes a group of foreign tourists do something that non–drunk Soviet adults seldom do: they laugh. Alex yearns to become one of them—a free and happy foreigner. Those aspirations quickly fade as Alex begins to encounter the absurdities and constraints of living in a society where conformity is institutionalized. Hilarious and sometimes sobering, the book's short chapters chronicle making it through the army, mastering the English language, sex, and meeting the girl of his dreams. In 1980, Alex and his young family finally get the chance to move to America. There he realizes that he is finally a foreigner—not the happy foreigner of his dream, but an alien. Ultimately, Alex finds his own place in the world, despite the fact that having the right "to vote for an elephant or an ass" does not necessarily guarantee self–fulfillment.A Place on Earth
By Wendell Berry. 1983
Published in 1967, we return to Port William during the Second World War to revisit Jayber Crow, the barber, Uncle…
Stanley, the gravedigger, Jarrat and Burley, the sharecroppers, and Brother Preston, the preacher, as well as Mat Feltner, his wife Margaret, and his daughter–in–law Hannah, whose son will be born after news comes that Hannah’s husband Virgil is missing."The earth is the genius of our life,” Wendell Berry writes here. “The final questions and their answers lie serenely coupled in it."Casa se busca
By Socorro Giménez. 2021
Híbrido entre prosa, poesía, autoficción, memoria y crónica postal, Casa se busca compone, a modo de mosaico, o de rompecabezas,…
un autorretrato emocional. A veces me agarra una voluntad destructiva de objetos. La llamo así porque llamarla torpeza es humillante e inexacto y prefiero llamarla voluntad aunque no la comprenda, aunque este impulso no sea asimilable a la intención ni a la consciencia. Es algo más que una torpeza. Vuelco agua y me resbalo en el suelo mojado, tiro el vino sobre la computadora y el parlante, rompo los libros cuando quiero mostrarlos, mancho con aceite la camisa nueva y le echo mal la sal, como si no importara. Quiero arreglar la canilla que gotea y armo una inundación. Golpeo la ventana que no cierra hasta descoyuntarla. Me impacientan las cosas que asumo que debieran ser transparentes, funcionales, y sin embargo fallan. Es una especie de impaciencia platónica, una furia ante el cuerpo, la consideración de la materia como una resistencia, un obstáculo. Como si no supiera ya que es la materia el instrumento vibratorio, es la materia lo que permite que haya música. Como si todavía creyera en una música celeste.Jill Mansell's A-Z Of Happiness (An e-short)
By Jill Mansell. 2016
In this delightful ebook, Jill Mansell gives readers an exclusive glimpse of her life as a writer. Newly updated with…
exclusive extra material! Find out what's IN JILL'S HANDBAG, enjoy A DINNER DATE WITH JILL and get to know Jill in a QUICKFIRE Q & A.This updated ebook also includes a sneak peek at Jill's new novel for January 2017, MEET ME AT BEACHCOMBER BAY.And as in the original A-Z OF HAPPINESS, there's a bear (not a real one), lit up by fairy lights, with zillions of happy endings buzzing around, eating Chinese takeaway for breakfast, getting up late and tweeting A LOT. Oh, and there's been an explosion in the glitter factory!Recommended for all with withdrawal symptoms from YOU AND ME, ALWAYS, and anticipation disorder for MEET ME AT BEACHCOMBER BAY.NOT A NOVEL - but a little happiness fix.As Though She Were Sleeping
By Elias Khoury. 2007
Meelya's dreams are her refuge from events that threaten her or escape her understanding. She leaves her home in Lebanon…
to live in Nazareth with her Palestinian husband, but Mansour - an older man who fell for her beauty - is frustrated by her spiritual absence.When Mansour's brother's death demands a move to Jaffa - the centre of early tensions between Jewish settlers and displaced Palestinians - Meelya withdraws further into the realm of dreams. Expecting the birth of their son, Mansour can only watch as she cuts loose from the physical world.Over three traumatic nights, past, present and future merge seamlessly into a series of visions that draw the reader towards a conclusion that is powerfully symbolic of the ongoing troubles in the Middle East.