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Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
By Annette Trefzer. 2012
Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text collects eleven essays presented at the Thirty-fifth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference sponsored…
by the University of Mississippi in Oxford on July 20-24, 2008. Contributors query the status of Faulkner's literary text in contemporary criticism and scholarship. How do scholars today approach Faulkner's texts? For some, including Arthur F. Kinney and James B. Carothers, “returns of the text” is a phrase that raises questions of aesthetics, poetics, and authority. For others, the phrase serves as an invitation to return to Faulkner's language, to writing and the letter itself. Serena Blount, Owen Robinson, James Harding, and Taylor Hagood interpret “returns of the text” in the sense in which Roland Barthes characterizes this shift his seminal essay “From Work to Text.”For Barthes, the text “is not to be thought of as an object . . . but as a methodological field,” a notion quite different from the New Critical understanding of the work as a unified construct with intrinsic aesthetic value. Faulkner's language itself is under close scrutiny in some of the readings that emphasize a deconstructive or a semiological approach to his writing. Historical and cultural contexts continue to play significant roles, however, in many of the essays. The contributions by Thadious Davis, Ted Atkinson, Martyn Bone, and Ethel Young-Minor by no means ignore the cultural contexts, but instead of approaching the literary text as a reflection, a representation of that context, whether historical, economic, political, or social, these readings stress the role of the text as a challenge to the power of external ideological systems. By retaining a bond with new historicist analysis and cultural studies, these essays are illustrative of a kind of analysis that carefully preserves attention to Faulkner's sociopolitical environment. The concluding essay by Theresa Towner issues an invitation to return to Faulkner's less well-known short stories for critical exposure and the pleasure of reading.The Reckoning: Searching for Meaning with the Father of the Sandy Hook Killer
By Andrew Solomon. 2014
First published in The New Yorker, "Solomon tells the story of Peter Lanza, the father of Adam Lanza, the Sandy…
Hook Elementary shooter. Read it--it's moving, brave and just profoundly human and sad....There aren't any answers. And that's what makes this all so impossible, and Solomon's journalism so essential" (Salon.com). "Both parents loved Adam. Neither parent imagined or wanted their child's horrific end. This is why what Peter Lanza did by sharing his story with Andrew Solomon is so important. Lanza's story fills important gaps in our understanding of how a beloved child became a killer--and reminds us as a society that we have an obligation to help families and children before they find themselves on irreversible paths of violence" (Time).Me and My MG: Stories From Mg Owners Around The World
By Gordon Thorburn. 2011
A collection of heartwarming personal stories from MG owners around the world. Read about the Berkshire restorer who saw a…
heap of old iron in the bushes and realized it used to be a 1926 bullnose Super Sports; and the seven-year-old boy in Norfolk, Virginia, who read a book called The Red Car and knew that one day he would have to have a TC; and the Dutch boy who saw an MGB on his way to school and knew something similar. There&’s the nine-year-old French boy whose nan gave him a model kit to assemble; and the USAF fighter pilot who saw his first MG in Britain during the war and was in love for ever. A Canadian took 32 years to restore his TA, while a Swiss professor installed space-ship electronics in his TD. An aeronautical engineer was left some money and bought a 1929 18/80 Tourer that he thought had been restored. An Australian 17-year-old happened across a second-hand MGB, was done for speeding, and lived happily ever after. A Swedish boy walked out one Sunday morning into the middle of an MG rally. All the stories are different, but the storytellers have something in common: They would all rather love—and sometimes despair of—a wonderful vehicle with faults in its character, than have no feelings about one that has no character at all.Praise for Me and My MG&“A loving look at one of Britain&’s most iconic motors—brilliant photographs interspersed with personal reminiscences and memories—a book to be treasured.&” —Books Monthly (UK)My Misspent Youth: Essays
By Meghan Daum. 2015
My Misspent Youth is an incisive collection that marked the start of a new millennium and became a cult classic,…
from the editor of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed and the author of The UnspeakableAn essayist in the tradition of Joan Didion, Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of her generation, widely recognized for her fresh, provocative approach with which she unearths the hidden fault lines in the American landscape.From her well remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber-relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff in Harper's about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas
By Jenny Allen. 2017
Finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor"One of the funniest writers in America." That’s what The New Yorker’s Andy…
Borowitz calls Jenny Allen—and with good reason. In her debut essay collection, the longtime humorist and performer declares no subject too sacred, no boundary impassable.With her eagle eye for the absurd and hilarious, Allen reports from the potholes midway through life’s journey. One moment she’s flirting shamelessly—and unsuccessfully—with a younger man at a wedding; the next she’s stumbling upon X-rated images on her daughter’s computer. She ponders the connection between her ex-husband’s questions about the location of their silverware, and the divorce that came a year later. While undergoing chemotherapy, she experiments with being a “wig person.” And she considers those perplexing questions that we never pause to ask: Why do people say “It is what it is”? What’s the point of fat-free half-and-half ? And haven’t we heard enough about memes?Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read Would Everybody Please Stop? is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer's Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage
By Theodore M. Bernstein. 1971
Once you recall that Miss Thistlebottom was your elementary-school teacher who laid down all manner of taboos concerning the use…
of language, you will have an idea of what this book is about. In no sense permissive or radical, it topples the taboos that lack historical, logical or grammatical basis. It is a refreshing look at our living language, the perfect companion to the author's indispensable work, The Careful Writer.Mr. Bernstein writes four letters to Miss Thistlebottom that divide the book into four sections: "Witchcraft in Words," "Syntax Scarecrows," "Imps of Idioms," and "Spooks of Style." Can there be more than two "alternatives"? You'll find the answer in the Words section. Can something "grow smaller"? Ditto. How about Split Infinitives: is it proper to ever split one? Is "none" invariably singular? Take a look in the Syntax section. Isn't it absurd to say "if worst comes to worst" rather than "if worse comes to worst" or to say "head over heels" rather than "heels over head"? The section on idioms will enlighten you on these "absurdities." And then, is a preposition a proper word to end a sentence with? The section on Style will show you that some authoritarians don't know what they are talking about and don't know what rules are for.The scores and scores of entries in this book are crisp, lightly written and amply provided with illustrative material. They are designed to help anyone who writes anything--the student, the reporter, the copy editor, the professional writer-cast off the inhibitions and prohibitions that lack validity and cramp his writing style.An Appendix includes some rare, out-of-print sources of some of the bogies: William Cullen Bryant's Index Expurgatorius for writers on the old New York Post, James Gordon Bennett's "Don't List" for writers on the old New York Herald and Ambrose Bierce's blacklist Write It Right.The Prime Objective
By Ginna Gray. 2009
Feisty Kate Mahaffey doesn't need anyone looking out for her--until the night she receives a hysterical phone call from her…
sister Colleen. Something about two men, a murder and a plea to run, hide and above all, don't contact the police.Terrified and alone, Kate reaches out to the one man who can help her--one with every reason to refuse. Her ex-husband, Jackson Prime, is a CIA operative whose shadowy life eclipsed their marriage. Jack may have signed divorce papers, but his heart still belongs to Kate. He'll do anything to keep her safe...and win her back.Dodging hit men and bullets, the former lovers must track down Colleen before their mission changes from run-and-hide to turn-and-fight--for their love and their lives.Globetrotting: Writers Walk the World
By Duncan Minshull. 2024
&“There was nowhere to go but everywhere.&” —Jack KerouacFrom Duncan Minshull, the UK&’s &“laureate of walking,&” a collection of more…
than fifty writings about hiking the globe from contemporary and classic authors such as Mark Twain, William Boyd, Edith Wharton, Helen Garner, Rabindranath Tagore, and many more.In Globetrotting, Duncan Minshull, the UK&’s &“laureate of walking,&” brings together the work of more than fifty walker-writers who have traveled the world&’s seven continents by foot. From the 1500s to the present day comes a memorable band of explorers and adventurers, scientists and missionaries, pleasure-seekers and literary drifters recalling their experiences and asking themselves a compelling question—why travel this way in the first place?With contributions from Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Vernon Lee, Sarah H. Bradford, Rabindranath Tagore, D. H. Lawrence, Isabella Bird, Katherine Mansfield, Rachel Carson, Helen Garner, Jean-Paul Clébert, Colin Thubron, William Boyd, Matsuo Bashō, and many more, Globetrotting takes us across the streets of London, Rome, Melbourne, Cairo, Kiev and Kabu; through the frozen wastes of Antarctica; along the pilgrim paths of Japan; into the jungles of Ghana; and around the Great Wall of China.The Book of (More) Delights: Essays
By Ross Gay. 2023
**Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, and St. Louis Public…
Radio** The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with exactly the book we need in these unsettling times. Margaret Roach of The New York Times says, &“Yes, please. I'll have another dose of delight.&” In Ross Gay&’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America&’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the &“nefarious&” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor&’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.My Poetics
By Maureen N. McLane. 2024
Acclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry. In…
My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar—but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane’s essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. Ranging widely from romantic-era odes and hymns to anonymous ballads to haikus and haibuns to modernist and contemporary poetries in English, My Poetics explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive. McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surroundings, and how do specific poems activate that relation? If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “poetry is the scholar’s art,” My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet’s art. Punctuated with McLane’s poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.The Real Work: On The Mystery Of Mastery
By Adam Gopnik. 2023
"[W]ise, companionable, and often extremely funny.” —Oliver Burkeman, The Atlantic Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik investigates a…
foundational human question: How do we learn—and master—a new skill? For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it? In The Real Work—the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up—of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection—as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik’s simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who—in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written—helps him master his own demons. Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life—and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.Memoirs
By Robert Lowell. 2022
A complete collection of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and…
confusions of his adult life.Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell’s lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell’s mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell’s reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell’s expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell’s achievement.Includes black-and-white photographsAll Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
By Becca Rothfeld. 2024
A spiky, funny and intellectually dazzling response to modern culture - from BDSM to mindfulness to Sally Rooney'Bracing and brilliant…
... scintillating writing of breadth and power' Kate Kellaway, Observer'A radical and important book' James Wood, author of Serious Noticing'Seriously precise ... and very funny' TelegraphIn All Things Are Too Small, virtuoso young critic and philosopher Becca Rothfeld turns her clear gaze to a series of interconnected cultural and political questions - about aesthetics, taste, literature, equality, power and sexuality. In a healthy culture, she argues, economic security allows for wild extremes of aesthetic experimentation, yet in our society we've got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.Our culture's embrace of minimalism has left our souls impoverished: decluttering has reduced our living spaces to empty non-places; the mindfulness trend has emptied our minds of the thoughts that make us who we are; the regularization of sex has drained it of unpredictability and therefore true eroticism; and our quest for balance has yielded fictions whose protagonists aspire to excise their appetites. As intellectually illuminating as it is gloriously carnal and earthy, All Things Are Too Small is a much needed tonic in a world of oppressive sterility and limitation, and a soul cry for derangement, imbalance, obsession, ravishment and disorder.The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press
By Calvin Trillin. 2024
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected…
from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin&“The Lede contains profiles . . . that are acknowledged classics of the form and will be studied until A.I. makes hash out of all of us.&”—Dwight Garner, The New York TimesI&’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I&’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer.Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation. But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press.In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and their world. There are pieces on a legendary crime reporter in Miami and on an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from a connoisseur of the French nouvelle vague into a fan of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Trillin writes about the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the icebreaker he'd use if he met one of his subjects socially (e.g.: &“You must be wondering why I referred to you in Time as a dork robot&”), and the origins of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking.Uniting all of this is Trillin&’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an invaluable portrait of one our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.The Moth
By George Dawes Green, Adam Gopnik, Catherine Burns. 2013
For the first time in print, celebrated storytelling phenomenon The Moth presents fifty spellbinding, soul-bearing stories selected from their extensive…
archive (fifteen-plus years and 10,000-plus stories strong). Inspired by friends telling stories on a porch, The Moth was born in small-town Georgia, garnered a cult following in New York City, and then rose to national acclaim with the wildly popular podcast and Peabody Award-winning weekly public radio show The Moth Radio Hour.Stories include: writer Malcolm Gladwell's wedding toast gone horribly awry; legendary rapper Darryl "DMC" McDaniels' obsession with a Sarah McLachlan song; poker champion Annie Duke's two-million-dollar hand; and A. E. Hotchner's death-defying stint in a bullring . . . with his friend Ernest Hemingway. Read about the panic of former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart when he misses Air Force One after a hard night of drinking in Moscow, and Dr. George Lombardi's fight to save Mother Teresa's life.This will be a beloved read for existing Moth enthusiasts, fans of the featured storytellers, and all who savor well-told, hilarious, and heartbreaking stories.The Moth
By The Moth, Catherine Burns, Adam Gopnik, George Dawes Green. 2013
The first collection from celebrated storytelling phenomenon The Moth presents fifty spellbinding, soul-bearing stories selected from their extensive archive. With…
tales from writer Malcolm Gladwell's wedding toast gone horribly awry; legendary rapper Darryl "DMC" McDaniels' obsession with a Sarah McLachlan song; poker champion Annie Duke's two million-dollar hand; and A. E. Hotchner's death-defying stint in a bullring . . . with his friend Ernest Hemingway. Read about the panic of former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart when he misses Air Force One after a hard night of drinking in Moscow, and Dr. George Lombardi's fight to save Mother Teresa's life. Inspired by friends telling stories on a porch, The Moth was born in small-town Georgia, garnered a cult following in New York City, and then rose to national acclaim with the wildly popular podcast and Peabody Award-winning weekly public radio show The Moth Radio Hour. A beloved read for Moth enthusiasts and all who savor well-told, hilarious, and heartbreaking stories.Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness
By Edited by Renée Fleming. 2024
"This book inspires us all to immerse ourselves in the vast potential of music and other creative arts to heal our…
wounds, sharpen our minds, enliven our bodies, and restore our broken connections.&” —Bessel van der Kolk, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps the ScoreWorld-renowned soprano and arts/health advocate Renée Fleming curates a collection of essays from leading scientists, artists, creative arts therapists, educators, and healthcare providers about the powerful impacts of music and the arts on health and the human experienceChapters include: Ann Patchett, &“How to Fall in Love with Opera&” Yo-Yo Ma, &“Nature, Culture, and Healing&”Aniruddh D. Patel, &“Musicality, Evolution, and Animal Responses to Music&”Richard Powers, &“The Parting Glass"Daniel J. Levitin, &“What Does It Mean to be Musical?&” Anna Deavere Smith, &“Healing Arts&” Rosanne Cash, &“Rabbit Hole&” Rhiannon Giddens, &“How Music Shows Us What It Means to Be Human&”Robert Zatorre, &“Musical Enjoyment and the Reward Circuits of the Brain&”Concetta Tomaino, &“Music and Memory&”A compelling and growing body of research has shown music and arts therapies to be effective tools for addressing a widening array of conditions, from providing pain relief andalleviating anxiety and depression to regaining speech after stroke or traumatic brain injury, and improving mobility for people with disorders that include Parkinson&’s disease and MS.In Music and Mind Renée Fleming draws upon her own experience as an advocate to showcase the breadth of this booming field, inviting leading experts to share their discoveries. In addition to describing therapeutic benefits, the book explores evolution, brain function, childhood development, and technology as applied to arts and health.Much of this area of study is relatively new, made possible by recent advances in brain imaging, and supported by theNational Institutes of Health, major hospitals, and universities. This work is sparking an explosion of public interest in the arts and health sector.Fleming has presented on this material in over fifty cities across North America, Europe, and Asia, collaborating with leading researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. With essays from notable musicians, writers, and artists, as well as leading neuroscientists, Music and Mind is a groundbreaking book, the perfect introduction and overview of this exciting new field.The Black Lace Book of Women's Sexual Fantasies reveals the most private thoughts of hundreds of women. Here are sexual…
fantasies which on first sight appear shocking or bizarre - such as the bank clerk who wants to be a vampire and the nanny with a passion for Darth Vader.Kerri Sharp investigates the recurrent themes in female fantasies and the cultural influences that have determined them: from fairy stories to cult TV; from fetish fashion to historical novels.Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Penguin Modern Classics)
By Sigmund Freud. 1948
A collection of some of Freud's most famous essays, including ON THE INTRODUCTION OF NARCISSISM; REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH;…
BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE; THE EGO AND THE ID and INHIBITION, SYMPTOM AND FEAR.Because I am a Girl
By Deborah Moggach, Irvine Welsh, Joanne Harris, Kathy Lette, Marie Phillips, Tim Butcher, Xiaolu Guo. 2010
Because I am a girl I am less likely to go to school Because I am a girl I am…
more likely to suffer from malnutritionBecause I am a girl I am more likely to suffer violence in the homeBecause I am a girl I am more likely to marry and start a family before I reach my twenties.Eight authors have visited eight different countries and spoken to young women and girls about their lives, struggles and hopes. The result is an extraordinary collection of writings about prejudice, abuse, and neglect, but also about courage, resilience and changing attitudes.Proceeds from sales of this book will go to PLAN, one of the world's largest child-centered community development organisations.