Floating on Solitude
Floating on Solitude

Author: Dave Smith

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780252065842

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"Forging through this voluminous collection is akin to visiting at length with a charismatic, if highly disturbed, relative. Generally, the poems start out presenting facades of well-mannered normalcy, e.g., brief narratives or odes to nature and the sea, but then something shifts and goes terribly right. A sentence turns odd and powerful; a quiet, streak of insanity emerges; a young girl leaves her scent upon a young boy's body. Sometimes a poem pops up that is dangerous from start to finish, such as "The Suicide Eaters" or "Drunks," about a reading at a V.A. hospital for recovering addicts and alcoholics. Smith is highly conscious of word choice. He tinkers with grammar and rhythm just enough to be utterly engaging, leaving the reader exhausted after the visit, but wiser for the effort."- Publishers weekly.

Adventures in Solitude
Adventures in Solitude

Author: Grant Lawrence

Publisher: Harbour Publishing

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1550176471

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From Captain George Vancouver to Muriel “Curve of Time” Blanchet to Jim “Spilsbury’s Coast” Spilsbury, visitors to Desolation Sound have left behind a trail of books endowing the area with a romantic aura that helps to make it British Columbia’s most popular marine park. In this hilarious and captivating book, CBC personality Grant Lawrence adds a whole new chapter to the saga of this storied piece of BC coastline. Young Grant’s father bought a piece of land next to the park in the 1970s, just in time to encounter the gun-toting cougar lady, left-over hippies, outlaw bikers and an assortment of other characters. In those years Desolation Sound was a place where going to the neighbours’ potluck meant being met with hugs from portly naked hippies and where Russell the Hermit’s school of life (boating, fishing, and rock ’n’ roll) was Grant’s personal Enlightenment—an influence that would take him away from the coast to a life of music and journalism and eventually back again. With rock band buddies and a few cases of beer in tow, an older, cooler Grant returns to regale us with tales of “going bush,” the tempting dilemma of finding an unguarded grow-op, and his awkward struggle to convince a couple of visiting kayakers that he’s a legit CBC radio host while sporting a wild beard and body wounds and gesticulating with a machete. With plenty of laugh-out-loud humour and inspired reverence, Adventures in Solitude delights us with the unique history of a place and the growth of a young man amidst the magic of Desolation Sound.

Seek You
Seek You

Author: Kristen Radtke

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1524748056

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From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This—a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society. There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns. In Seek You, Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels impossible to share. Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage with each other, and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally-charged drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments, and asks how we might keep the spaces between us from splitting entirely.

The Fortress of Solitude
The Fortress of Solitude

Author: Jonathan Lethem

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2004-09-07

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 1400095344

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A New York Times Book Review EDITORS' CHOICE. From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, comes the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. "A tour de force.... Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Walker in the City, and Call it Sleep." --The New York Times Magazine "One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings it to a story worth telling." --Time

The Count of Monte Cristo
The Count of Monte Cristo

Author: Alexandre Dumas

Publisher: Editions Artisan Devereaux

Published: 1922

Total Pages: 1160

ISBN-13:

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Relates a sailor's preparation for and execution of revenge against the three men responsible for his fifteen years in prison.

Desert of Solitude
Desert of Solitude

Author: Steven Richard Harris

Publisher: Alvarez Publishing

Published: 2024-07-18

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13:

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From Mexico City to Chiapas; a search for meaning becomes a fight for justice. Fleeing an apathetic life of privilege, Max embarks upon a journey through a Mexico in the mid-1990s struggling to find its identity in the world. A Mexico in emotional and political turmoil as the discontent of the impoverished indigenous population in Chiapas slowly boils to the surface. As Max travels from Mexico City, the Gulf coast, Yucatán Peninsula and finally into the depths of the jungle in Chiapas, his life is hijacked by the people he finds on his way: A lone traveller that will tear him apart; a charming revolutionary leader; an indigenous freedom fighter; a maverick presidential candidate; and a lover who will inspire him to fight for a cause worth dying for. The deeper into Mexico he goes, the darker the places he discovers inside himself; inside the different, conflicting versions of himself. A journey within a journey. A journey into and out of his very being, where his academic travel companion is not what he seems to be. A journey full of choices that will not only shape who Max is, but also the fate of a society that he has become part of. Desert of Solitude is a story of love, loss, revolution. Where solitude becomes solidarity, and solidarity attempts to bring about the change that a country, and its people, sorely needs.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude

Author: Gabriel García Márquez

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Published: 2022-10-11

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13:

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Netflix’s series adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude premieres December 11, 2024! One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.

Ugo Rondinone
Ugo Rondinone

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2017-08-22

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9788867492640

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With his installations, Ugo Rondinone creates personal dreamscapes. In his retrospective exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the artist presented Vocabulary of Solitude, an arrangement of his works inspired by the color spectrum. Clowns, clocks, candles, shoes, windows, light bulbs and rainbows: they are recognizable images that speak to all of us. These symbols excite free-association and memories. The forty-five clowns with their different postures represent activities of everyday life, at the same time expressing the anguish of human solitude: be, breathe, sleep, dream, wake, rise, sit, hear, look, think, stand, walk, pee, shower, dress, drink, fart, shit, read, laugh, cook, smell, taste, eat, clean, write, daydream, remember, cry, nap, touch, feel, moan, enjoy, float, love, hope, wish, sing, dance, fall, curse, yawn, undress, lie. This is the first of a four-chapter publication series by Ugo Rondinone.

The Caiplie Caves
The Caiplie Caves

Author: Karen Solie

Publisher: Picador

Published: 2019-05-28

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1760786764

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‘Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray [. . .] – she is the one by whom the language lives’. – Michael Hofmann, LRB The Canadian Karen Solie is rapidly establishing a reputation as one of the most important poets at work today. Her fifth book of poetry, The Caiplie Caves, is a profound and timely consideration of the nature of crisis: at its heart is the figure of St Ethernan, a seventh-century Irish missionary to Scotland who retreated to the caves of the Fife coast in order to decide whether to establish a priory on May Island or pursue a life of solitude. His decision would have been informed by realities of war, misinformation and power; Solie imagines this crisis also complicated by grief, confusion – and a faith placed under extreme duress. Woven through Ethernan’s story are poems that orbit the caves’ geographical location, and range through the recurring violences of history and myth, of personal and public record. In poems of the utmost lyric subtlety and argumentative strength, Solie addresses how we might distinguish self-delusion from belief, belief from knowledge – and how, in the frailty of our responses, we can find the courage to move forward.