Where is the line between agony and pleasure? Lexus Davenport bet everything to dive into the deep end of this unknown world. For weeks she's experienced agony in many forms, at the hand of Estate. Now, sitting on the edge of it all, will her new contract bring a new perspective? Will she embrace her alternative path to pleasure or will pain be her only relief?
Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.
An anecdotal lifestyle guide for fans of French and English culture shares tips for inexpensively enjoying everything from travel and fashion to gardening and dining, in a reference inspired by 16th-century exotic encyclopedias that includes coverage of such esoteric topics as the history of champagne and Julia Child's secret to a perfect omelet.
"This book argues for the central role played by absorption in the functioning of the human mind. The importance of absorption makes itself felt in different ways; the two studies combined in this book concentrate on two of them. The first study argues that, largely as a result of language acquisition, humans have two levels of cognition, which in normal circumstances are simultaneously active. Mental absorption is a (or the) means to circumvent some, perhaps all, of the associations that characterize one of these two levels, resulting in what is sometimes referred to as mystical experience, but which is not confined to mysticism and plays a role in various "religious" phenomena, and elsewhere. The second study takes as point of departure some puzzling statements in the early Buddhist canon that raises serious questions of a psychological nature. An essential element in the psychological theory proposed is the observation that mental absorption is a source of pleasure. Since the human mind is in large part guided by pleasure, which it seeks to repeat, states of absorption leave memory traces that subsequently direct the mind. However, these memory traces do not "recall" the states of absorption themselves, but rather the objects or circumstances that accompanied them. The resulting activity of the mind differs in this way from person to person, and can pursue wildly diverging goals."--Publisher description.
