Alberto Manguel has edited for Bayeux Arts this fascinating collection of G.K. Chesterton's essays. Alberto Manguel is the author of "A Short History of Reading" and co-author of "The Dictionary of Imaginary Places". He has edited several collections, among them "Black Water"; "The Anthology of Fantastic Literature" and "The Gates of Paradise: the Anthology of Erotic Short Fiction". He has also authored, for Bayeux Arts, "Kipling: A Brief Biography".
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! In I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying Bassey Ikpi explores her life—as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist—through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our preconceptions of the mind and normalcy as Bassey bares her own truths and lies for us all to behold with radical honesty and brutal intimacy. A The Root Favorite Books of the Year • A Good Housekeeping Best 60 Books of the Year • A YNaija 10 Notable Books of the Year • A GOOP 10 New Favorite Books • A Cup of Jo 5 Big Books of Fall • A Bitch Magazine Most Anticipated Books of 2019 • A Bustle 21 New Memoirs That Will Inspire, Motivate, and Captivate You • A Publishers Weekly Spring Preview Selection • An Electric Lit 48 Books by Women and Nonbinary Authors of Color to Read in 2019 • A Bookish Best Nonfiction of Summer Selection "We will not think or talk about mental health or normalcy the same after reading this momentous art object moonlighting as a colossal collection of essays.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy From her early childhood in Nigeria through her adolescence in Oklahoma, Bassey Ikpi lived with a tumult of emotions, cycling between extreme euphoria and deep depression—sometimes within the course of a single day. By the time she was in her early twenties, Bassey was a spoken word artist and traveling with HBO's Def Poetry Jam, channeling her life into art. But beneath the façade of the confident performer, Bassey's mental health was in a precipitous decline, culminating in a breakdown that resulted in hospitalization and a diagnosis of Bipolar II. In I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying, Bassey Ikpi breaks open our understanding of mental health by giving us intimate access to her own. Exploring shame, confusion, medication, and family in the process, Bassey looks at how mental health impacts every aspect of our lives—how we appear to others, and more importantly to ourselves—and challenges our preconception about what it means to be "normal." Viscerally raw and honest, the result is an exploration of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are—and the ways, as honest as we try to be, each of these stories can also be a lie.
Can language hide thoughts? This question is considered by one of Europe's most eminent scholars in his influential essay "Linguistics of Lying," presented here for the first time in English, along with additional essays selected by the author. His survey of the different ways in which language is untrue links linguistic and literary categories in unexpected fashion to anthropology, sociology, ethics, and even good manners.
'The Decay of Lying' sees Oscar Wilde explore his deepest preoccupations about the relationship between life and art, and examine the work of such writers as Shakespeare and Balzac.
“A strange and dreamy voice . . . , like an Italo Calvino short story, curiously translated from some lost, obscure language.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love An utterly charming study of the history of lying down—which is more complicated than you might think We spend a good third of our lives lying down: sleeping, dreaming, making love, thinking, reading, and getting well. Bernd Brunner’s ode to lying down is a rich exploration of cultural history and an entertaining collection of tales, ranging from the history of the mattress to the “slow living movement” to Stone Age repose—when people did not sleep lying down—and beyond. He approaches the horizontal state from a number of directions, but never loses his keen sense for the odd or unusual detail. Far from being a pose of passivity or laziness, lying down can be a protest, a chance to gather thoughts or change your point of view—the other side to our upright, productive lives. Brunner makes an eloquent case for the importance of lying down in a world that values ever-greater levels of activity, arguing that time spent horizontally offers rewards that we’d do well not to ignore.
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Growing up in an eccentric North Carolina home, with aging-hippie parents whose marriage was forever crumbling around her, author Sarah Sweeney was primed for trouble. For drugs and boys. For learning about sexuality from Madonna videos and prank-calling teachers and meeting celebrities--including a young Adrian Grenier. For escaping the South and even her own family. Funny, exuberant, and often heartbreaking, TELL ME IF YOU'RE LYING examines the lies we're told as children and the downright unbelievable--but true--stories that comprise Sweeney's colorful coming of age. "Sarah Sweeney's new essay collection is sharp, sensitive, and engaging. Even while describing some of the weirdest, darkest and most personal moments of her complicated coming-of-age, Sweeney's voice is vividly relatable--it's hard not to root for her, and identify with her." --Laura Barcella, author of Fight Like a Girl and editor of Madonna & Me "TELL ME IF YOU'RE LYING covers a wide selection of great subjects: sex, drugs, rebellion, youthful misadventures, not-so-youthful misadventures, family, death, cars, aliens, Madonna, the early career of Adrian Grenier. Sarah Sweeney has some kind of range; her writing can be hysterically funny one line and heartbreaking the next. This is a strikingly smart, self-aware, and empathetic book about a lot of things, but mostly love: for the people and places and decisions that make us who we are. Essays, memoir, whatever you want to call it, it's a hell of a good read." --Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun "TELL ME IF YOU'RE LYING is Sweeney's reckoning with her father and her hometown, the place that shaped and confined her. Through her essays we come to intimately know her heartbreak but also her resilience, often rooted in humor, making for a well-rounded collection we should all read."--Kenny Torrella, Rain Taxi
From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.
“[Myles] has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, . . . is happy to show us the way.”—NPR In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time. For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.
Bringing together academics from Romania, the USA, Spain and Turkey, this volume follows the evolution of detective fiction, from its early forms during the late eighteenth century until its contemporary multi-media expressions. Tackling the best-known authors in the genre, as well as marginal, forgotten or eccentric names, and discussing prose which fits perfectly in the pattern of the genre or texts which have been conventionally associated with other genres, as well as films, the book explores the impact of whodunits in both highbrow and popular culture.
This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare’s drama. The discourse of folly’s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims – a fool’s truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the sole preserve of professional jesters and garrulous clowns, for it is also apparent on a thematic, conceptual, and formal level in virtually all of his plays. Examining canonical histories, comedies, and tragedies, this study is the first to either contextualize Shakespearean folly within European humanist thought, or to argue that Shakespeare’s philosophy of folly is part of a subterranean strand of Western philosophy, which itself reflects upon the folly of the wise. This strand runs from the philosopher-fool Socrates through to Montaigne and on to Nietzsche, but finds its most sustained expression in the Critical Theory of the mid to late twentieth-century, when the self-destructive potential latent in rationality became an historical reality. This book makes a substantial contribution to the fields of Shakespeare, Renaissance humanism, Critical Theory, and Literature and Philosophy. It illustrates, moreover, how rediscovering the philosophical potential of folly may enable us to resist the growing dominance of instrumental thought in the cultural sphere.
