Love's Wounds takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, this book shows how Petrarch established a pattern of inequality between suffering poet and exalted Beloved rooted in political parrhēsia. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French and English poets reshaped his model into an idiom of extravagant brutality coded to their own historical circumstances. Cynthia N. Nazarian argues that these poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new "countersovereignty" from within the heart of vulnerability—a potentially revolutionary position through which to challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. Creating a secular equivalent to the martyr, early modern sonneteers crafted a voice that was both critical and unstoppable because it suffered.Love’s Wounds tracks the development of the countersovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, Nazarian reads early modern sonnets as sites of contestation and collaboration and rewrites the relationship between early modern literary forms.
In the hard-edged tradition of Hubert Selby Jr., Daniel Woodrell, and Donald Ray Pollock, and with the fresh, complex humanity of Breaking Bad and Reservoir Dogs, a blistering debut collection that unsparingly confronts the extreme, brutal parts of the human heart. A man runs away from his grave and into a maelstrom of bullets and fire. A Hollywood fixer finds love over the corpse of a dead celebrity. A morbidly obese woman imagines a new life with the jewel thief who is scheming to rob the store where she works. A man earns the name “Mad Dog” and lives to regret it. Denizens of the shadows who live outside the law—from the desolate meth labs of the Ozark Mountains to the dog-fighting rings of Detroit to the lavish Los Angeles mansions of the rich and famous—the characters in Love and Other Wounds all thirst for something seemingly just beyond their reach. Some are on the run, pursued by the law or propelled relentlessly forward by a dangerous past that is disturbingly close. Others are searching for a semblance of peace and stability, and even love, in a fractured world defined by seething violence and ruthless desperation. All are bruised, pushed to their breaking point and beyond, driven to extremes they never imagined. Crackling with cinematic energy, raw and disquieting yet filled with pathos and a darkly vital humor, Love and Other Wounds is an unforgettable debut from an electrifying new voice.
On a plantation somewhere down south, a mystical tree reaches up toward heaven. Generations of slaves have been hanged on this tree. But James is going to be different, as long as he keeps his head down and practices his reading. Moreover, as the Civil War rages on, the possibility of freedom looms closer than ever. When a stranger arrives on the plantation, a striking romance emerges, inviting the couple and those around them into uncharted territory.
St. Rose of Lima (Isabel Flores y Oliva, 1586-1617) was canonized in 1671 as the first saint of the New World and Patron of the Americas. In this engrossing new biography, Frank Graziano offers the most comprehensive examination of the life of Rose to appear in any language. An obscure, self-mortifying mystic, Rose seems a strange choice for the distinction of first American saint. Graziano argues that the cult that grew up around St. Rose during her life and greatly expanded after her death was seen by both Church and State as a challenge and even a threat to authority. For that reason, he contends, the Church acted quickly to render her harmless by "bringing her into the fold." Graziano goes on to consider Rose's ascetic Christianity in its cultural context. He seeks to discover why the severe austerities and mortifications of female piety that today are regarded as psychopathological were lauded as exemplary means of worship in the seventeenth century. In fact, he shows, St.; Rose's behavior and experiences were initially regarded as pathological by many significant observers within her own culture, but such assessments were gradually dismissed as her saintly image was constructed. Drawing on key archival sources and the insights offered by psychoanalytic theory, Graziano constructs a compelling portrait of one of the Catholic Church's most beloved saints
“[Ballingrud's] evocative and strangely beautiful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite contemporary authors and any time he’s got a new book out I run to the front of the line. His work is elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.”—Victor LaValle, award–winning author of The Changeling “Nathan Ballingrud's brilliant fiction brims with imagination, integrity (I do not use that term lightly), and an authentic world-weary dread that bores directly into your heart. With Wounds you'll gladly follow Nathan to Hell and (maybe) back.”—Paul Tremblay, award-winning author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite short fiction writers.” —Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation and Borne “Stretch[es] the boundaries of the genre by employing these grand, horrific worlds. “The Butcher’s Table” reminds me of the first time I read Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” It’s horrifying, but there’s beauty.” —The New York Times “In only two slender collections, Nathan Ballingrud has emerged as one of the field’s most accomplished short story writers.” —The Washington Post “Ballingrud’s work isn’t like any other.”—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing “One of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—The New York Review of Books “Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell is without a doubt one of the best, most accomplished horror collections in recent memory.”—Hellnotes “Wounds will no doubt be remembered as one of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—New York Journal of Books “There’s enough nightmare fuel here to inspire weeks of insomnia — all told with an even hand with a penchant for precise storytelling. How else do you chart the furthest reaches of the uncanny?”—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn A gripping collection of six stories of terror—including the novella “The Visible Filth,” the basis for the upcoming major motion picture—by Shirley Jackson Award–winning author Nathan Ballingrud, hailed as a major new voice by Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, and Carmen Maria Machado—“one of the most heavyweight horror authors out there” (The Verge). In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in “The Visible Filth” to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table,” Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.
This volume provides background information on the Carthusian Order, including letters from St. Bruno, its founder, and a reflection on Bruno's continuing significance today. (Catholic)
A client once left a message on my answering machine that she needed me to call her back quickly. Help, Im bleeding all over my house! was her urgent message. I understood her meaning and anyone who has gone through the trauma of divorce does, too! (Excerpt from Chapter 3) Fewer experiences in life cause greater pain, grief and confusion than a divorce. On the stress scale going through a divorce is the top stressor in anyones life! This is true simply because divorce changes our entire life. Change is difficult for most of us and grief around those changes is inevitable. If you have children the grief is compounded as they too will have to deal with the changes that divorce brings about. As a parent, we not only grieve the loss of our own hopes and dreams, we also grieve for the pain and loss that our children experience. Healing the Love Wound: Relationships After Divorce is a book that began as a weekend workshop designed to help the participants move through the trauma and grief that comes with divorce. It now is available to everyone who needs to find some peace, information and healing as they travel across the bridge from married to single again. The desire to rebuild a new life with another partner is a natural and strong drive for most of us. This book takes the reader through the grief process as it unfolds in real life. It talks about the passages that most people go through on the way to healing their heart after their divorce by helping define the kind of relationships that develop at every developmental stage of the healing process. It helps guide its reader through the maze of questions that are most frequently asked when dating begins again and identifies the feelings that so often fill the newly divorced with confusion. Written in simple, short and easy to understand chapters followed by a short recap of the information in it entitled Keep In Mind allows the reader the ability to refresh understanding of the material without having to re-read the entire chapter. Healing the Love Wound is helpful, easy and inspired writing. Using the experiences of hundreds of divorced individuals, it shares personal experiences, wisdom and points the way toward healing. It may be the book youve been looking for to help you through those tough times!
The book is about the misuse of power by the leadership while those they lead wallow in poverty. It depicts a society bewildered my deep secrets but which come out later to haunt those who committed the mistakes. One moral story is that if you forgive and be in harmony with everyone then you will live a happy life. Mr. Dex who is the people's representative misuses his power to gain wealth while his community languishes in poverty.John who comes from a humble background gains the community's confidence and moves on to represent them. Jane is brought up by her grandmother and though she faces challenges pursuing her education, she succeeds at last and finds her father and also love. The penance seen in every character at the end of the story shows that being in harmony with people will bring happiness and peace to your heart.
