Stabs at Happiness
Stabs at Happiness

Author: Todd Grimson

Publisher: Schaffner Press, Inc.

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1936182467

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Marking the first original publication by Todd Grimson in almost 20 years, the 13 stories compiled in this volume showcase the author’s fascinating fictional canvases, peopled by authentic and sympathetic characters with settings ranging from the Amazon to the Sahara and stops in between to 1970s East Village and pre-Castro Cuba. Whether it’s a Hollywood starlet who goes AWOL from her movie set in the wake of her husband's suicide and in disguise embarks anonymously on a hedonistic bender or an African American man seeking the answer behind the mysterious disappearance of his friend in the heart of Muslim North Africa, each individual within these stories is striving to break free, to make new meaning of their world, to find recognition or self-definition in an otherwise bleak and unsympathetic world. Fresh and bold and original in his voice and depiction of character, places, and events, Grimson’s range is extraordinary, his imagination is unsurpassable, and his empathy for his characters—whether killers, transvestites, prostitutes—are all deeply heartfelt.

Do What You Love
Do What You Love

Author: Miya Tokumitsu

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-08-11

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 1941393950

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The American claim that we should love and be passionate about our job may sound uplifting, or at least, harmless, but Do What You Love exposes the tangible damages such rhetoric has leveled upon contemporary society. Virtue and capital have always been twins in the capitalist, industrialized West. Our ideas of what the “virtues” of pursuing success in capitalism have changed dramatically over time. In the past, we believed that work undertaken with an ethos of industriousness promised financial stability and basic comfort and security for our families. Now, our working life is conflated with the pursuit of pleasure. Fantastically successful—and popular—entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey command us. “You’ve got to love what you do,” Jobs tells an audience of college grads about to enter the workforce, while Winfrey exhorts her audience to “live your best life.” The promises made to today’s workers seem so much larger and nobler than those of previous generations. Why settle for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage and a perfectly functional eight-year-old car when you can get rich becoming your “best” self and have a blast along the way? But workers today are doing more and more for less and less. This reality is frighteningly palpable in eroding paychecks and benefits, the rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few, and workers’ loss of control over their labor conditions. But where is the protest and anger from workers against a system that tells them to love their work and asks them to do it for less? While winner-take-all capitalism grows ever more ruthless, the rhetoric of passion for labor proliferates. In Do What You Love, Tokumitsu articulates and examines the sacrifices people make for a chance at loveable, self-actualizing, and, of course, wealth-generating work and the conditions facilitated by this pursuit. This book continues the conversation sparked by the author’s earlier Slate article and provides a devastating look at the state of modern America’s labor and workforce.

Choosing Happiness
Choosing Happiness

Author: Francisco Ugarte

Publisher: Scepter Publishers

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 1594172633

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St. Josemaría once wrote, “Our Lord does not expect us to be unhappy in our life on earth and await a reward only in the next life. God wants us to be happy on earth too, but with a desire for the other, total happiness that only he can give.” Our lives are full of highs and lows, successes and struggles, joys and sorrows. We are called to live with a happy heart alongside it all. But it is not enough to want to be happy: we must learn to be. Fr. Francisco will help you to discover happiness regardless of life’s circumstances, by uniting your heart with the heart of God. In this book, you will be given the knowledge and the tools to embrace and live out an all-encompassing happiness —a daily fulfillment— that ensures joy now as well as in the afterlife.

Finding True Happiness
Finding True Happiness

Author: Robert Spitzer

Publisher: Ignatius Press

Published: 2015-03-30

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1681496550

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One of the hottest topics in contemporary culture is happiness so much so that the United Nations declared an International Happiness Day in response to the immense popularity of Pharrell Williamsಙ song ಜHappyಝ. The explanation for this current fixation seems to lie in the contrary phenomenon unhappiness. Despite the fact that we have tremendous access to every imaginable form of entertainment, we experience a pervading sense of insecurity, emptiness, and malaise amid sporadic peak experiences. The problem seems to lie less in the external environment than in the internal one. We seem, in the words of Viktor Frankl, to be suffering from an absence of meaning that pervades both individuals and societies, giving rise to a collective emptiness, loneliness, and alienation. Finding True Happiness attempts to provide a way out of this personal and cultural vacuum by helping people to identify and then reach for happiness. As Aristotle noted 2,400 years ago, happiness is the one thing we can choose for its own sake everything else is chosen for the sake of happiness. After an exhaustive investigation of philosophical, psychological, and theological systems of happiness, author Fr. Spitzer developed the ಜFour Levels of Happinessಝ, which he based on the classical thinkers Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas; the contemporary philosophers Marcel, Scheler, Buber, Ricoeur, and Jaspers; and the modern psychologists Maslow, Frankl, Erikson, Seligman, Kohlberg and Gilligan. Finding True Happiness is both a philosophical itinerary and a practical guidebook for lifeಙs most important journey from the mundane and the meaningless to transcendent fulfillment. No other book currently available combines such breadth of practical advice and such depth of philosophical, psychological, and spiritual wisdom.

Verity
Verity

Author: Colleen Hoover

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 153872474X

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Whose truth is the lie? Stay up all night reading the sensational psychological thriller that has readers obsessed, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Too Late and It Ends With Us. #1 New York Times Bestseller · USA Today Bestseller · Globe and Mail Bestseller · Publishers Weekly Bestseller Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered. Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen’s feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife’s words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.

How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife?
How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife?

Author: Jerry B. Harvey

Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Published: 1999-08-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780787947873

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The role we each play in our own downfalls create the profound--and profoundly entertaining--basis for this series of linked "meditations" as the author of The Abilene Paradox takes another irreverent look at the nature of life on the job. In this work, Harvey explores the ethical, moral, and spiritual dilemmas we all face in the modern world of work. But he does it in a most unconventional way. His is an approach that mixes equal parts humor, philosophy, and insight to make us laugh, think, and examine organizational behavior in a brand new light. The twelve essays themselves carry such spirited titles as "What If I Really Believe this Stuff," "On Tooting Your Own Horn," and "Ode to Waco." Altogether, it's an enthralling collection of wise and witty parables that illustrate the redemptive value of the truth in a voice that is ultimately understanding of human shortcomings.

Flaming Creatures
Flaming Creatures

Author: Constantine Verevis

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-11-26

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 0231851308

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Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the prints seized and the organizers arrested, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. Championed and defended by Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, among others, the film wildly and gleefully transgresses nearly every norm of Hollywood morality and aesthetics. In a surreal and visually dense series of episodes, the titular “creatures” reenact scenes drawn from the collective cinematic unconscious, playing on mainstream film culture’s moral code in a way that is at once a love letter to classical Hollywood and a searing send-up of its absurdities. Tracing the film’s production and reception history, Constantine Verevis argues that it embodies a unique type of cinematic rewriting, one that combines Smith’s multifaceted artistic work with exotic fragments drawn from the cinematic past. This study of Smith’s magnum opus explores its status as a cult film that appropriates the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.

Surprised by Joy
Surprised by Joy

Author: C. S. Lewis

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0062565443

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A repackaged edition of the revered author’s spiritual memoir, in which he recounts the story of his divine journey and eventual conversion to Christianity. C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—takes readers on a spiritual journey through his early life and eventual embrace of the Christian faith. Lewis begins with his childhood in Belfast, surveys his boarding school years and his youthful atheism in England, reflects on his experience in World War I, and ends at Oxford, where he became "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." As he recounts his lifelong search for joy, Lewis demonstrates its role in guiding him to find God.

A Small Boy and Others
A Small Boy and Others

Author: Michael Moon

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780822321736

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Moon illuminates the careers of James, Warhol, and others by examining the imaginative investments of their protogay childhoods in their work in ways that enable new, more complex cultural readings.