An introverted yet raw description of emotional development, Living Still Life follows the lives of a quartet in their late twenties living in San Francisco. The four struggle to find clarity, purpose and themselves. Camille's musing forces herself to live like a hermit rather than experience life, Mea, a quick-witted artist reads lips to escape reality, Jack, a romantic pushover whose ambivalence forces him to choose between two unexpected lovers, and Royce, deviously self-involved but soon figures out that his life is a destructive and self-constructed ruse. Each is presented with a unique disruption to his or her everyday life and they begin to unravel over a period of nine days.
“A brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with heart.”―Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage “Rich and compelling . . . Her characters are vividly, achingly real, including the tiny, furry one at the novel’s center.”―Ann Packer, author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier “Stark and compelling . . . rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion.”―Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn’t sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become “a broken series of unsuccessful gestures.” Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan’s will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey―a tufted capuchin named Ottoline―to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan’s life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough? Katharine Weber is a masterful observer of humanity, and Still Life with Monkey, full of tenderness and melancholy, explores the conflict between the will to live and the desire to die.
Do you want peace in your life? Are you ready to be free to live and love? Sometimes all it takes to change the course of our day is a simple, quiet moment of stillness in the midst of our chaotic living. When we choose to practice stillness with God, we open ourselves to His offer of strength, wisdom, clarity, direction and peace. It is from this still, quiet place that we discover the depth of God's commitment to us and His desire to continually restore and transform us into the people He designed us to be. In moments of stillness, God gives us the courage to look beyond our problems, fear, pain and insecurities and empowers us to make real and lasting change. Whether we have one primary struggle, or many, there is always hope for greater freedom and deeper peace. In Living Still, Abby Lewis shares her journey from the chaos of anxiety, depression, addiction, physical pain and broken personal relationships to a life of freedom that is full of love, peace and purpose. Presented with clarity and compassion, Lewis recounts how her spirit, mind and body were completely transformed by learning the practice of "living still." Her life's journey inspires us to practice stillness before God where we too can find the courage to identify anything that is holding us back from the abundant life God has for us, and where we find the freedom to be love and give love to those around us. Visit Abby at: http: //www.belovegivelove.com *If you discover you need help learning to practice stillness, then Abby encourages you to get her stillness CD, A Breath in Stillness. The CD compliments the powerful, life-changing principles in LIVING STILL. DIRECT LINKS: https: //www.createspace.com/2054186 http: //www.amazon.com/Breath%7E-In-Stillness-Abby-Lewis/dp/B008EMMFO0/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1340894747&sr=8-7&keywords=A+Breath+in+stillness ALSO AVAILABLE in MP3 DOWNLOAD: http: //www.amazon.com/A-Breath -In-Stillness/dp/B008FWV3VK/ref=tmm_msc_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1340976322&sr=8-4
From renowned yogi meditation teacher and author of Do Your Om Thing Rebecca Pacheco comes Still Life, offering an in-depth exploration of mindfulness and meditation misconceptions to arm the reader with inspirational and practical tools for cultivating a consistent mindfulness practice. For years Rebecca Pacheco has taught readers and students alike how to embrace the wisdom of the yoga sutras and reap the mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits of the ancient tradition. Now, in Still Life, she turns her focus to mindfulness, demystifying a seemingly esoteric practice and giving readers practical, real-life tools to implement mindfulness in their own lives—regardless of experience level or lifestyle. Pacheco begins by deconstructing the common misperceptions about meditation—including the idea that is a cure-all for every malady—offering valuable insight into what mindfulness does entail, and why the process of cultivating more of it can improve not only our own lives, but also the lives of others. Pacheco also takes aim at the reductive “good vibes only” veneer commonly heard in the contemporary wellness community, which suggests mindfulness is steeped in positivity. A contemplative life, Pacheco argues, isn’t synonymous with bliss, but rather requires a degree of mental, emotional, and spiritual grappling. Still Life challenges readers to dig deep and develop the tools that can ultimately lead to joy—including to waking up in the present, reclaiming the moment, and living life fully.
For Gillian Marchenko, dealing with depression means learning to accept and treat it as a physical illness, while continuing as a wife and mother of four, two with special needs. How can she care for her family when she can't even get out of bed? Her story is real and raw, not one of quick fixes. But hope remains as she discovers that living with depression is still life.
Mark Doty's prose has been hailed as "tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene" (The New York Times Book Review) and "achingly beautiful" (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.
*A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK* *A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK* “[A] winsome, large-hearted novel ... [Still Life] pulses from the page.” —Entertainment Weekly Set between World War II and the 1980s, Still Life is a beautiful, big-hearted story of strangers brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Tin Man and When God Was a Rabbit. In the wine-cellar of a Tuscan villa, as the Allies advance and bombs fall around them, two people meet and share an extraordinary evening: Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier from London's East End; Evelyn Skinner is a worldly older art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to rescue paintings from the ruins and relive her memories of the time she encountered E.M. Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view. Evelyn's talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses's mind that night, one that will shape the trajectory of his life—and the lives of those who love him—for the next four decades. Moving from war-ravaged Tuscany to the boozy confines of The Stoat and Parrot pub in London and the piazzas of post-war Florence, Still Life is both sweeping and intimate, mischievous and deeply felt. It is a novel about beauty, love and fate, about the things that make life worth living, and the things we're prepared to die for.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Diane Seuss’s brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Still life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned Dreamsicle Still life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinder Still life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeet Still life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of Revelation Still life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry Zinger Still life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face —from “American Still Lives” Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces—details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish—the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.”
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014 THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life. Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.
