Through readings of an array of recent texts - literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental - this book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture
Shame and Modern Writing seeks to uncover the presence of shame in and across a vast array of modern writing modalities. This interdisciplinary volume includes essays from distinguished and emergent scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and shorter practice-based reflections from poets and clinical writers. It serves as a timely reflection of shame as presented in modern writing, giving added attention to engagements on race, gender, and the question of new media representation.
This study combines psycho-social and literary perspectives to investigate the interdependency of shame and desire in Annie Ernaux's writing, arguing that shame implies desire and desire vulnerability to shame, and that the interplay between the two generates the energy for personal growth and creative endeavour.
The bestselling Emotion Thesaurus, often hailed as “the gold standard for writers” and credited with transforming how writers craft emotion, has now been expanded to include 56 new entries! One of the biggest struggles for writers is how to convey emotion to readers in a unique and compelling way. When showing our characters’ feelings, we often use the first idea that comes to mind, and they end up smiling, nodding, and frowning too much. If you need inspiration for creating characters’ emotional responses that are personalized and evocative, this ultimate show-don’t-tell guide for emotion can help. It includes: • Body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for over 130 emotions that cover a range of intensity from mild to severe, providing innumerable options for individualizing a character’s reactions • A breakdown of the biggest emotion-related writing problems and how to overcome them • Advice on what should be done before drafting to make sure your characters’ emotions will be realistic and consistent • Instruction for how to show hidden feelings and emotional subtext through dialogue and nonverbal cues • And much more! The Emotion Thesaurus, in its easy-to-navigate list format, will inspire you to create stronger, fresher character expressions and engage readers from your first page to your last.
A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist for Best Fiction and Best Debut • BookBrowse's Best Book of the Year • A Marie Claire Best Women's Fiction of the Year • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year • A PopSugar Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A Washington Post 10 Books to Read in March • A Newsweek Best Book of the Summer • A USA Today Best Book of the Week • A Washington Book Review Difficult-To-Put-Down Novel • A Refinery 29 Best Books of the Month • A Buzzfeed News 4 Books We Couldn't Put Down Last Month • A New Arab Best Books by Arab Authors • An Electric Lit 20 Best Debuts of the First Half of 2019 • A The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the Year “Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns... Etaf Rum’s debut novel is a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice.” —Refinery 29 The New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna TODAY SHOW Book Club pick telling the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community. "Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.” Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.
Examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literatureConsiders the particular intersection of shame, gender and writing in literature produced since the 1990sViews shame as a constitutive factor in the social construction and experience of femininityAnalyses a diverse range of texts from pulp to literary fiction to life writing and autofiction, with a self-reflexive focus on the formal disjunctions produced by/in the writing of shame, and on the shame attending the act of writing itselfOffers political readings of neglected genres (lesbian pulp fiction), highly topical texts (like Kraus's I Love Dick and Knausgaard's My Struggle), and established authors (such as Mary Gaitskill, A.M. Homes, Rupert Thomson)Through readings of an array of recent texts - literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental - this book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture. It unpicks the complex triangulation of shame, gender and writing, and intervenes forcefully in feminist and queer debates of the last three decades. Starting from the premise that shame cannot be overcome or abandoned, and that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, Writing Shame examines writing that explores and inhabits this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page.
An intimate look at the full spectrum of shame—often masked by addiction, promiscuity, perfectionism, self-loathing, or narcissism—that offers a new, positive route forward Encounters with embarrassment, guilt, self-consciousness, remorse, etc. are an unavoidable part of everyday life, and they sometimes have lessons to teach us—about our goals and values, about the person we expect ourselves to be. In contrast to the prevailing cultural view of shame as a uniformly toxic influence, Shame is a book that approaches the subject of shame as an entire family of emotions which share a “painful awareness of self.” Challenging widely-accepted views within the self-esteem movement, author Joseph Burgo argues that self-esteem does NOT thrive in the soil of non-stop praise and encouragement, but rather depends upon setting and meeting goals, living up to the expectations we hold for ourselves, and finally sharing our joy in achievement with the people who matter most to us. Along the way, listening to and learning from our encounters with shame will go further than affirmations and positive self-talk in helping us to build authentic self-esteem. Richly illustrated with clinical stories from Burgo's 35 years in private practice, Shame also describes the myriad ways that unacknowledged shame often hides behind a broad spectrum of mental disorders including social anxiety, narcissism, addiction, and masochism.
Read the book that's getting conversion therapy banned in Canada Winner of the Independent Book Publisher Award, Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction and the Saints and Sinners Emerging Writer Award. "Unforgettable... This book is appallingly appropriate in these times." — FOREWORD REVIEWS This resonant and acclaimed memoir recounts the six years that the author spent in a bizarre form of conversion therapy that attempted to "cure" him of his homosexuality, and the inspiring story of how he cast out shame and reclaimed his life. Kept with other patients in a cult-like home in British Columbia, Canada, Peter Gajdics was under the authority of a dominating, rogue psychiatrist who controlled his patients, in part, by creating and exploiting a false sense of family. Juxtaposed against his parents' tormented past–his mother's incarceration and escape from a communist concentration camp in post-World War II Yugoslavia, and his father's upbringing as an orphan in war-torn Hungary, The Inheritance of Shame explores the universal themes of childhood trauma, oppression, and intergenerational pain. “DEEPLY MOVING." — THE ADVOCATE “RAW AND UNFLINCHING" — KIRKUS REVIEWS “A HERO’S JOURNEY IN WHICH ANY READER, GAY OR STRAIGHT, CAN FIND INSPIRATION.” — LAMBDA LITERARY FOUNDATION All over the United States and Canada, districts, cities and states are banning conversion, ex-gay and reparative therapies. A powerful example of "healing through memoir," this book offers the most complete and compelling reason for those bans to date. A groundbreaking memoir, The Inheritance of Shame offers insights into overcoming all kinds of shame, especially that which has trickled down from previous generations, and into the complicated but all-too-worthwhile process of forgiveness.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. “[White Teeth] is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones, and textures…with a raucous energy and confidence.” —The New York Times Book Review