Granta 140
Granta 140

Author: Sigrid Rausing

Publisher: Granta

Published: 2017-08-03

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1909889091

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In an age when we are finally taking mental health as seriously as physical health, this issue of Granta explores the conscious self: how it perceives, judges and lives in the world. John Barth rocks himself to sleep Rana Dasgupta investigates a live-streamed suicide Joe Dunthorne travels to Cyprus for the Writers' World Cup football tournament Charles Glass talks with an ISIS executioner, photographed by Don McCullin Colin Grant remembers schizophrenia in London's East End in the '80s Penelope Lively recalls how her books have furnished her mind Jack Shenker on life in post-revolutionary Cairo NEW FICTION: Robert Coover, Joanna Hershon and Tom Lee POETRY: Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong and Dara Wier PHOTOGRAPHY: Jason Larkin, Reynaldo Rivera and Francesca Todde, introduced by Chris Kraus and Nuar Alsadir. And war photography by Don McCullin. PLUS Siri Hustvedt, Margo Jefferson, Han Kang, Barry Lopez, Max Porter, Marcel Proust, Mary Ruefle and Andrew Solomon share their states of mind.

Constructing a Nervous System
Constructing a Nervous System

Author: Margo Jefferson

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2022-04-12

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1524748188

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From "one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) comes a memoir "as electric as the title suggests" (Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom). A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, Washington Post, Vulture, Buzzfeed, Publishers Weekly The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of others—her parents and maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars. These are the figures who thrill and trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer. In her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics. In Constructing a Nervous System, Jefferson shatters her self into pieces and recombines them into a new and vital apparatus on the page, fusing the criticism that she is known for, fragments of the family members she grieves for, and signal moments from her life, as well as the words of those who have peopled her past and accompanied her in her solitude, dramatized here like never before. Bing Crosby and Ike Turner are among the author’s alter egos. The sounds of a jazz LP emerge as the intimate and instructive sounds of a parent’s voice. W. E. B. Du Bois and George Eliot meet illicitly. The muscles and movements of a ballerina are spliced with those of an Olympic runner, becoming a template for what a black female body can be. The result is a wildly innovative work of depth and stirring beauty. It is defined by fractures and dissonance, longing and ecstasy, and a persistent searching. Jefferson interrogates her own self as well as the act of writing memoir, and probes the fissures at the center of American cultural life.

The White Book
The White Book

Author: Han Kang

Publisher: Hogarth

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0525573062

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A “formally daring, emotionally devastating, and deeply political” (The New York Times Book Review) exploration of personal grief through the prism of the color white, from the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian “Stunningly beautiful writing . . . delicate and gorgeous . . . one of the smartest reflections on what it means to remember those we’ve lost.”—NPR While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. Through lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, attempting to make sense of her older sister’s death using the color white. From trying to imagine her mother’s first time producing breast milk to watching the snow fall and meditating on the impermanence of life, she weaves a poignant, heartfelt story of the omnipresence of grief and the ways we perceive the world around us. In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book offers a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and of our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

The Republic of Motherhood
The Republic of Motherhood

Author: Liz Berry

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2018-07-12

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 1473564050

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

*'The Republic of Motherhood' Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem* ‘I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.’ In this bold and resonant gathering of poems, Liz Berry turns her distinctive voice to the transformative experience of new motherhood. Her poems sing the body electric, from the joy and anguish of becoming a mother, through its darkest hours to its brightest days. With honesty and unabashed beauty, they bear witness to that most tender of times – when a new life arrives, and everything changes.

On Michael Jackson
On Michael Jackson

Author: Margo Jefferson

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-01-09

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0307277658

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic brilliantly unravels the complexities of one of the most enigmatic figures of our time in this passionate, incisive, and bracing work of cultural analysis. Who is Michael Jackson and what does it mean to call him a “What Is It”? What do P. T. Barnum, Peter Pan, and Edgar Allan Poe have to do with our fascination with Jackson? How did his curious Victorian upbringing and his tenure as a child prodigy on the “chitlin’ circuit” inform his character and multiplicity of selves? How is Michael Jackson’s celebrity related to the outrageous popularity of nineteenth-century minstrelsy? What is the perverse appeal of child stars for grown-ups and what is the price of such stardom for these children and for us? What uncanniness provoked Michael Jackson to become “Alone of All His Race, Alone of All Her Sex,” while establishing himself as an undeniably great performer with neo-Gothic, dandy proclivities and a producer of visionary music videos? What do we find so unnerving about Michael Jackson’s presumed monstrosity? In short, how are we all of us implicated? In this stunning book, Margo Jefferson gives us the incontrovertible lowdown on call-him-what-you-wish; she offers a powerful reckoning with a quintessential, richly allusive signifier of American society and popular culture.

The Alarming Palsy of James Orr
The Alarming Palsy of James Orr

Author: Tom Lee

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 164129096X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Kafkaesque and darkly humorous “suburban gothic” that tracks the unraveling of man’s body, mind, and life. James Orr—husband, father, reliable employee and all-around model citizen—awakes one morning to find half his face paralyzed. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he stops going to work and wanders his idyllic estate, with its woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James may not be the man he thought he was. A deeply unsettling story of creeping horror that consistently confounds expectations, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr introduces a writer of extraordinary and disturbing talents.

Fourth Person Singular
Fourth Person Singular

Author: Nuar Alsadir

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 1786940191

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Original and ambitious poetry that makes readers pay attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric and human relationships in the 21st century.

The New Granta Book of Travel
The New Granta Book of Travel

Author: Albino Ochero-Okello

Publisher: Granta Publications

Published: 2011-11-03

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 184708446X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A collection of travel writing by some of the genre’s finest authors, from Paul Theroux to Sara Wheeler, voyaging from Mississippi to Malawi and Thailand. The New Granta Book of Travel Writing represents a sea change in writers’ approaches to the craft. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected. By the mid 1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writers appeared in the magazine, making journeys for more complex and often personal reasons. Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell Steavenson moved to Iraq as a foreign correspondent. What all these pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.

Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica
Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica

Author: Rebecca Priestley

Publisher: Victoria University Press

Published: 2019-10-24

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1776562631

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Rebecca Priestley longs to be in Antarctica. But it is also the last place on Earth she wants to go.In 2011 Priestley visits the wide white continent for the first time, on a trip that coincides with the centenary of Robert Falcon Scott's fateful trek to the South Pole. For Priestley, 2011 is the fulfilment of a dream that took root in a childhood full of books, art and science and grew stronger during her time as a geology student in the 1980s. She is to travel south twice more, spending time with Antarctic scientists &– including paleo-climatologists, biologists, geologists, glaciologists &– exploring the landscape, marvelling at wildlife from orca to tardigrades, and occasionally getting very cold.A constant companion for Priestley is her anxiety &– both the kind that is brought on by flying to the bottom of the world in a military aeroplane; and the kind that clouds our thoughts of how our world will be for our children. Writing against the backdrop of Trump's America, extreme weather events, and scientists' projections for Earth's climate, she grapples with the truths we need to tell ourselves as we stand on a tightrope between hope for the planet, and catastrophic change.Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica offers a deeply personal tour of a place in which a person can feel like an outsider in more ways than one. With generosity and candour, Priestley reflects on what Antarctica can tell us about Earth's future and asks: do people even belong in this fragile, otherworldly place?