Author: Jim Crace Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 142998015X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
A haunting new novel about love, death, and the afterlife, from the author of Quarantine Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon. A couple, naked, married almost thirty years, are lying murdered in the dunes. "Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell--just look at them--that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."
Author: A.M. Strickland Publisher: Imprint ISBN: 1250198755 Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
Beyond the Black Door is a young adult dark fantasy about unlocking the mysteries around and within us—no matter the cost... Everyone has a soul. Some are beautiful gardens, others are frightening dungeons. Soulwalkers—like Kamai and her mother—can journey into other people's souls while they sleep. But no matter where Kamai visits, she sees the black door. It follows her into every soul, and her mother has told her to never, ever open it. When Kamai touches the door, it is warm and beating, like it has a pulse. When she puts her ear to it, she hears her own name whispered from the other side. And when tragedy strikes, Kamai does the unthinkable: she opens the door. A.M. Strickland's imaginative dark fantasy features court intrigue and romance, a main character coming to terms with her asexuality, and twists and turns as a seductive mystery unfolds that endangers not just Kamai's own soul, but the entire kingdom ... An Imprint Book “I couldn’t put down this deliciously dark dream of a fantasy.” —New York Times bestselling author Lisa Maxwell “A dark delight, gorgeously written and as twisty and enigmatic as a labyrinth at twilight. I wanted to stay lost in its pages forever, wandering ever deeper into the maze of Strickland’s beguiling, intricately imagined world.” —Margaret Rogerson, New York Times bestselling author of An Enchantment of Ravens
Author: Crissy Van Meter Publisher: Algonquin Books ISBN: 1643750208 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 221
Book Description
“[A] kaleidoscopic narrative . . . Tenacious, wildly original, and full of insight.” —San Francisco Chronicle “An alluring, atmospheric debut.” —People A Belletrist Book Club Pick A Most Anticipated Book of the Year Entertainment Weekly • The Millions • Bustle On the eve of Evangeline’s wedding on Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, the narrative flows back and forth through time as Evie reckons with her complicated upbringing—a weed-dealing, charming but neglectful father, a wild-child best friend—in this lush land off the coast of Southern California. With wit, love, and bracing flashes of anger, Creatures probes the complexities of family and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief—and exerts a pull as strong as the tides.
Author: Lisa Williamson Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) ISBN: 0374302391 Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
An inspiring and timely debut novel from Lisa Williamson, The Art of Being Normal is about two transgender friends who figure out how to navigate teen life with help from each other. David Piper has always been an outsider. His parents think he's gay. The school bully thinks he's a freak. Only his two best friends know the real truth: David wants to be a girl. On the first day at his new school Leo Denton has one goal: to be invisible. Attracting the attention of the most beautiful girl in his class is definitely not part of that plan. When Leo stands up for David in a fight, an unlikely friendship forms. But things are about to get messy. Because at Eden Park School secrets have a funny habit of not staying secret for long , and soon everyone knows that Leo used to be a girl. As David prepares to come out to his family and transition into life as a girl and Leo wrestles with figuring out how to deal with people who try to define him through his history, they find in each other the friendship and support they need to navigate life as transgender teens as well as the courage to decide for themselves what normal really means.
Author: Philip Ball Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226822044 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 513
Book Description
Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human? Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.
Author: Hilary Thompson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351122053 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
Novel Creatures takes a close look at the expanding interest in animals in modern fiction and argues that the novels of this time reveal a dramatic shift in conceptions of "creatureliness." Scholars have turned to the term "creaturely" recently to describe shared aspects of human and animal experience, thus moving beyond work that primarily attends to distinctions between the human and the animal. Carrying forward this recent scholarship, Novel Creatures argues that creatureliness has been an intensely millennial preoccupation, but in two contrasting forms—one leading up to the turn of the century, the other after the tragic events of 9/11.
Author: Yi-Ping Ong Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674916107 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
In this account of how the novel reorients philosophy toward the meaning of existence, Yi-Ping Ong shows that the existentialists discovered a radical way of thinking about the relation between the form of the novel and the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and the world. At stake are the conditions under which knowledge of existence is possible.
Author: Crissy Van Meter Publisher: Algonquin Books ISBN: 1643750836 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
“[A] kaleidoscopic narrative . . . Tenacious, wildly original, and full of insight.” —San Francisco Chronicle “An alluring, atmospheric debut.” —People A Belletrist Book Club Pick A Most Anticipated Book of the Year: Entertainment Weekly • The Millions • Bustle A Best Book of the Year: NPR's Book Concierge On the eve of Evangeline’s wedding on Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, the narrative flows back and forth through time as Evie reckons with her complicated upbringing—a weed-dealing, charming but neglectful father, a wild-child best friend—in this lush land off the coast of Southern California. With wit, love, and bracing flashes of anger, Creatures probes the complexities of family and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief—and exerts a pull as strong as the tides.
Author: K. C. Boyd Publisher: Rebel Island Press ISBN: 1662942230 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
The product of a violent home, John Christian Hillcox overcomes long odds to build a Texas megachurch from where he preaches the gospels of Prosperity and End Times, while also using the power of his voting bloc as a political cudgel. A man of enormous appetites and inadequate self-control, Pastor Hillcox rallies his church and televangelical flock to oppose everything he considers immoral and detrimental to the United States' becoming the godly, Christian nation it is meant to be. Being Christian is a gripping psychological tale of a man who utilizes religion to justify his own sins and lies, heedless of the consequences for his loved ones, his community, and the world at large. The story of this larger-than-life, but all too familiar, character follows him from his crime-ridden early adulthood to the prime of his ministry in post-9/11 America. Not since the twentieth century's Elmer Gantry has a novel so exposed the religious film-flammery and hypocrisy that now threatens to tear apart the American social and political fabric. Being Christian is a quintessentially American story, based on the ideologies and personalities that make the news every day with their challenges to the Constitutional religious/political divide. Book Review: "Being Christian" is a timely and provocative work that reveals a new courageous author and an important not-so fictional introduction to the dangers of an American brand of fundamentalism that is corrupting American politics and policies. The writing is vivid and straight from the shoulder; the narrative is chilling and genuine; the ideas are compelling. Anyone interested in the impact of religious fundamentalism on American politics will absorb this work. As for the Founding Fathers, they would say "we warned you about this. -- Melvin Goodman, Former analyst for the CIA and the State Department, Professor and Fellow
Author: Eugene Hollahan Publisher: University of Delaware Press ISBN: 9780874134452 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
"This book examines the emergence of modern consciousness as consciousness develops historically in one cultural form: prose fiction narrative. The book represents a critical history of crisis, arguably the most characterizing single word in the modern world and a major figuration or trope. Eugene Hollahan has studied the history of this important word within the development of the English-language novel, from Samuel Richardson to Saul Bellow. After establishing a heuristic model for such a critical history, Hollahan tracks the word (characterized by George Eliot in Felix Holt, the Radical as a "great noun") through two-and-a-half centuries of narratives by major novelists, with contextualizing excursions into discourses in related fields such as autobiography, philosophy, theology, and social science." "Hollahan contextualizes his study of English-language narrative fiction by examining the writings of crisis-rhetoricians in the eighteenth century (Thomas Paine), nineteenth century (Thomas Carlyle, J. S. Mill, and J. H. Newman), and twentieth century (Karl Barth, Edmund Husserl, T. S. Kuhn, and Richard M. Nixon). Such varied and powerful crisis-rhetorics establish a matrix of language and ideas for the crisis-centered novels Hollahan surveys. These novels include major works by Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, George Meredith, George Gissing, George Moore, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Coover, and Saul Bellow." "Hollahan's description of the crisis-trope interfaces with various critical issues such as canonical inclusion, reader response, and deconstruction. On the whole, his book acknowledges current critical issues but endeavors to remain basically a critical history. It attempts to demonstrate that the crisis-riddled modern world and the crisis-conscious novel are analogous and coeval." "Crisis begins as Aristotle's term for logical plot structuring, becomes Longinus's term for emotional exacerbation, and eventually enters into a variety of critical and narrative formulations: Matthew Arnold's cultural centrality, Henry James's existential aestheticism, Lawrence's self-defining sexuality, Marshall Brown's revolutionary turning point, Paul de Man's error-ridden criticism, Floyd Merrell's cut into the primordial flux, Durrell's reborn self, and Bellow's analysis of hysterical escapism. Broadly speaking, Hollahan argues that any crisis-trope will enable or even necessitate a unique confluence of writerly and readerly skills." "In Louis Lambert, Balzac urged: "What a wonderful book one would write by narrating the life and adventures of a word." The story Hollahan narrates fulfills Balzac's expectations as it depicts writer after writer working out influential representations of human life in terms of crisis-consciousness centering upon George Eliot's "great noun" crisis. Historically, Hollahan demonstrates, such consciousness comes to define modern humanity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Jim Crace
Author: A.M. Strickland
Author: Crissy Van Meter
Author: Lisa Williamson
Author: Philip Ball
Author: Hilary Thompson
Author: Yi-Ping Ong
Author: Crissy Van Meter
Author: K. C. Boyd
Author: Eugene Hollahan