Roughhouse Friday

Roughhouse Friday PDF Author: Jaed Coffin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720398
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A beautifully crafted memoir about fathers and sons, masculinity, and the lengths we sometimes go to in order to confront our past "[A] lucidly written memoir . . . Coffin’s triumph lies in ridding the language of his father, a language that compelled him to dwell in a house he did not recognize." —Matthew Janney, The Los Angeles Review of Books While lifting weights in the Seldon Jackson College gymnasium on a rainy autumn night, Jaed Coffin heard the distinctive whacking sound of sparring boxers down the hall. A year out of college, he had been biding his time as a tutor at a local high school in Sitka, Alaska, without any particular life plan. That evening, Coffin joined a ragtag boxing club. For the first time, he felt like he fit in. Coffin washed up in Alaska after a forty-day solo kayaking journey. Born to an American father and a Thai mother who had met during the Vietnam War, Coffin never felt particularly comfortable growing up in his rural Vermont town. Following his parents’ prickly divorce and a childhood spent drifting between his father’s new white family and his mother’s Thai roots, Coffin didn’t know who he was, much less what path his life should follow. His father’s notions about what it meant to be a man—formed by King Arthur legends and calcified in the military—did nothing to help. After college, he took to the road, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before heading north. Despite feeling initially terrified, Coffin learns to fight. His coach, Victor “the Savage,” invites him to participate in the monthly Roughhouse Friday competition, where men contend for the title of best boxer in southeast Alaska. With every successive match, Coffin realizes that he isn’t just fighting for the championship belt; he is also learning to confront the anger he feels about a past he never knew how to make sense of. Deeply honest and vulnerable, Roughhouse Friday is a meditation on violence and abandonment, masculinity, and our inescapable longing for love. It suggests that sometimes the truth of what’s inside you comes only if you push yourself to the extreme.

Roughhouse Friday

Roughhouse Friday PDF Author: Jaed Coffin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720398
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A beautifully crafted memoir about fathers and sons, masculinity, and the lengths we sometimes go to in order to confront our past "[A] lucidly written memoir . . . Coffin’s triumph lies in ridding the language of his father, a language that compelled him to dwell in a house he did not recognize." —Matthew Janney, The Los Angeles Review of Books While lifting weights in the Seldon Jackson College gymnasium on a rainy autumn night, Jaed Coffin heard the distinctive whacking sound of sparring boxers down the hall. A year out of college, he had been biding his time as a tutor at a local high school in Sitka, Alaska, without any particular life plan. That evening, Coffin joined a ragtag boxing club. For the first time, he felt like he fit in. Coffin washed up in Alaska after a forty-day solo kayaking journey. Born to an American father and a Thai mother who had met during the Vietnam War, Coffin never felt particularly comfortable growing up in his rural Vermont town. Following his parents’ prickly divorce and a childhood spent drifting between his father’s new white family and his mother’s Thai roots, Coffin didn’t know who he was, much less what path his life should follow. His father’s notions about what it meant to be a man—formed by King Arthur legends and calcified in the military—did nothing to help. After college, he took to the road, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before heading north. Despite feeling initially terrified, Coffin learns to fight. His coach, Victor “the Savage,” invites him to participate in the monthly Roughhouse Friday competition, where men contend for the title of best boxer in southeast Alaska. With every successive match, Coffin realizes that he isn’t just fighting for the championship belt; he is also learning to confront the anger he feels about a past he never knew how to make sense of. Deeply honest and vulnerable, Roughhouse Friday is a meditation on violence and abandonment, masculinity, and our inescapable longing for love. It suggests that sometimes the truth of what’s inside you comes only if you push yourself to the extreme.

A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants

A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants PDF Author: Jaed Coffin
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306815265
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A memoir describing the life of Jaed Coffin and his experiences growing up in New England, discussing how he left Middlebury College at the age of twenty-one to be ordained as a Buddhist monk in his mother's native village of Panomsarakram.

Do Fathers Matter?

Do Fathers Matter? PDF Author: Paul Raeburn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374141045
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
"In Do Fathers Matter? the award-winning journalist and father of five Paul Raeburn overturns the many myths and stereotypes of fatherhood as he examines the latest scientific findings on the parent we've often overlooked. Drawing on research from neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, geneticists, and developmental psychologists, among others, Raeburn takes us through the various stages of fatherhood, revealing the profound physiological connections between children and fathers, from conception through adolescence and into adulthood--and the importance of the relationship between mothers and fathers. In the process, he challenges the legacy of Freud and mainstream views of parental attachment, and also explains how we can become better parents ourselves."--www.Amazon.com.

Sigh, Gone

Sigh, Gone PDF Author: Phuc Tran
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250194725
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
For anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong, Sigh, Gone shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and assimilation woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature. In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents. Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Displaced and The Refugees, Sigh, Gone explores one man’s bewildering experiences of abuse, racism, and tragedy and reveals redemption and connection in books and punk rock. Against the hairspray-and-synthesizer backdrop of the ‘80s, he finds solace and kinship in the wisdom of classic literature, and in the subculture of punk rock, he finds affirmation and echoes of his disaffection. In his journey for self-discovery Tran ultimately finds refuge and inspiration in the art that shapes—and ultimately saves—him.

The Story I Want To Tell: Explorations in the Art of Writing

The Story I Want To Tell: Explorations in the Art of Writing PDF Author: The Telling Room
Publisher: Tilbury House Publishers and Cadent Publishing
ISBN: 088448422X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
The Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center in Portland, Maine, dedicated to the idea that children and young adults are natural storytellers. THE STORY I WANT TO TELL pairs the work of 20 aspiring young writers—including immigrants from war-ravaged countries—with original stories, essays, and poems from Richard Blanco, Richard Russo, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dave Eggers, Lily King, Jonathan Lethem, Bill Roorbach, Monica Wood, and other top writers in a call-and-response anthology. The book’s supplemental materials make it a perfect tool for writers’ groups and writing teachers.

An Unfinished Life

An Unfinished Life PDF Author: Mark Spragg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400043808
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In an extraordinary tale of love and forgiveness, Mark Spragg brings us this novel of a complex, prodigal homecoming. Jean Gilkyson has a history of choosing the wrong men. After yet another night of argument turned to violence with her boyfriend, Roy, Jean knows it's time to leave—if not for herself, then for her ten-year-old daughter, Griff. But the only place they can afford to go is Ishawooa, Wyoming, where Jean's family is dead and her deceased husband's father Einar wishes Jean was too. Of course, Griff knows none of this—only that here in Wyoming, with a grandfather she has never known and his crippled friend Mitch, she may finaly be able to find a home.

Land of Cockaigne

Land of Cockaigne PDF Author: Jeffrey Lewis
Publisher: Haus Publishing
ISBN: 1913368173
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
A novel written as a sharp parable of American society, addressing love, purpose, discrimination, and poverty. In Jeffrey Lewis’s novel, the Land of Cockaigne, once an old medieval peasants’ vision of a sensual paradise on earth, is reimagined as a plot on the coast of Maine. In efforts to assuage their grief over their son’s death and to make meaning of his life, Walter Rath and Catherine Gray build what they hope will be a version of paradise for a group of young men from the Bronx. As Walter and Catherine work to reinvent this land, formerly a summer resort, the surrounding town of Sneeds Harbor proves resistant. The residents’ well-meaning doubts lead to well-hidden threats, and the Raths’ marriage unravels as Walter loses faith in democracy. Meanwhile, the Bronx boys, who have only ever known the city, try to navigate this new land that is completely alien to them. Written as a parable of contemporary American society, Land of Cockaigne is by turns furious, funny, subversive, tragic, and horrifying. Faced with the question of what to do amid disastrous times, Walter Rath offers a clue: Love is an action, not a feeling. Once you go down this path of faith, there is much to be done.

The Book Keeper

The Book Keeper PDF Author: Julia McKenzie Munemo
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0804041067
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In a memoir that’s equal parts love story, investigation, and racial reckoning, Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her family’s history. When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she—a white woman—had been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn,” she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.

Blue Summer

Blue Summer PDF Author: Jim Nichols
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781638081814
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
At forty, Cal Shaw has seen better days, that's for sure, but it wasn't always like this. He grew up with his brother, Alvin, and his sister Julia, in the small Maine town of Baxter, confident in his own capabilities, especially regarding music. He took his happy life for granted, as lucky children often do. But everything changed when he was ten and his dad died in a freak accident. Soon, trouble, mostly in the form of a violent stepfather, found a home -- his home. As an escape, the Shaw kids turned to music lessons with family friend Uncle Gus, but it turns out no one can escape the violence and grief that rains down on the Shaws.

Gore Shriek

Gore Shriek PDF Author: Rolf Stark
Publisher: Fantaco Enterprises
ISBN: 9780938782117
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description