Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. SLIM CONFESSIONS is an image-text about digital intimacy and visceral material. A work of "autotheory," the book lays in parallel the history of "slime" as a vehicle for horror and entertainment with personal encounters with quotidian slime in the human and animal worlds. At its center is a story of farm labor: A cold spring spent birthing sheep in northern Iceland interspersed with confessions about the author's sexual past. In the lineage of Dodie Bellamy's Barf Manifesto, this is a book reveling in repulsion and attraction, a personal investigation of physical touch as approximated by visual media, a slow pour of parallel stories that chronicle a research trip gone awry.
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Art. Women's Studies. In Sarah Minor's adventurous and investigatory debut collection of essays, BRIGHT ARCHIVE, place and space are inextricably linked through an imaginative exploration of the patterns, shapes, and systems that alternately organize and disrupt our ordinary intimacies. From a recollection of a summer spent working in an Italian commune to the business of mollusks in Minor's grandparent's hometown in Iowa; from the history of the mapping of the Mississippi River to the mythologies of the image of "the lean;" from studies of soffits and hidden spaces to the freedom found at the top of an island birch tree, these essays reach beyond the classically confined trajectories of literary nonfiction. Using elements of memoir, concrete poetry, archival research, interview, performance, and design in a radiant kaleidoscope of storytelling, the essays in BRIGHT ARCHIVE delight in challenging the reader's habits of interaction with the page and its possibilities. "Sarah Minor's sense of what an essay is, what it can look like, and what it can contain is way beyond what almost anyone else is even attempting. Open to any page in this book and you're going to encounter something new. Every essay's an invention, a new possession, and I for one am down with being possessed if the spirit that possesses me is like Minor's, comprised of wonder, wit, and intelligence. Prepare to read differently: BRIGHT ARCHIVE is a miracle."--Andor Monson "In BRIGHT ARCHIVE, Sarah Minor's inventive, surprising, and moving collection of visual essays, short prose pieces nestle in the soffits of an old family home, sentences wind themselves into knots, passages draft alongside the banks of the Mississippi River--as a way of interrogating the relationships between and among literal, figurative, and symbolic spaces. Minor is preoccupied with interiors and exteriors, bodies and imaginations, myths and secrets, with how places are entered and marked by their inhabitants, and how people, too are shaped. 'All I'm saying is that belief might design a body and not always the other way around. All I'm saying is that a living container could bear signs of the life it contains.' In this thrilling debut, Minor guides us deftly through the underground tunnels of a new age commune, to the branches of a birch tree to build a nest. This collection traverses continents and moves through time, insistent in its curiosity and dazzling in its innovation."--Mary-Kim Arnold "My favorite books are somehow architectural, and I've never encountered one built quite like this. Minor's prose has underground temples, a shadow self, it becomes the thing it describes. Prose morphing into pearls, rivers down the page, a diagram directs the eye, cupping an essay's threads. This is a book that, through both story and design, reminds us what wonder feels like."--Aisha Sabatini Sloan
This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.
Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.
Inspired by the rhythms of the Periodic Table, Primo Levi assesses his life in terms of the chemical elements he associates with his past. From his birth into an Italian Jewish family through his training as a chemist, to the pain and darkness of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Levi reflects on the difficult course of his life in this heartfelt and deeply moving book.
Facsimile reprint of an edition first published in London in 1908. Includes the original text and all 53 original illustrations and map (some were omitted from editions and reprints since 1908). This is Banfield's story of life on Dunk Island in the early 20th century with details of the island's geography, history, flora and fauna. With an introduction by Banfield's biographer, Michael Noonan. The English-born author's other books include 'My Tropic Isle' and 'Tropic Days'.
MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.
The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside
The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts “A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine “Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
