The Two Kinds of Decay

The Two Kinds of Decay PDF Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429940980
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A poet and author recounts her nine-year struggle with a rare autoimmune disease in this spare and unsparing memoir of illness and recovery. At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be. Praise for The Two Kinds of Decay A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Best Book of the Year, San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out Chicago “Moving . . . a fiercely truthful memoir.” —The Boston Globe “Hers is not a day-by-day description of this grueling time, but an impressionistic text filled with bright, poetic flashes. . . . Many sick people learn to live in the moment, but the power of Manguso’s writing makes that truism revelatory.” —The Washington Post Book World “Sarah Manguso has miraculously elevated the act of memory. She has found honesty, fear, longing and beauty in every moment of her young life, giving this book an intensity found nowhere else. You put it down panting with wonder and grief, but never with pity. A breakthrough in the memoir, and in writing.” —Andrew Sean Greer

The Two Kinds of Decay

The Two Kinds of Decay PDF Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429940980
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
A poet and author recounts her nine-year struggle with a rare autoimmune disease in this spare and unsparing memoir of illness and recovery. At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be. Praise for The Two Kinds of Decay A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Best Book of the Year, San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out Chicago “Moving . . . a fiercely truthful memoir.” —The Boston Globe “Hers is not a day-by-day description of this grueling time, but an impressionistic text filled with bright, poetic flashes. . . . Many sick people learn to live in the moment, but the power of Manguso’s writing makes that truism revelatory.” —The Washington Post Book World “Sarah Manguso has miraculously elevated the act of memory. She has found honesty, fear, longing and beauty in every moment of her young life, giving this book an intensity found nowhere else. You put it down panting with wonder and grief, but never with pity. A breakthrough in the memoir, and in writing.” —Andrew Sean Greer

300 Arguments

300 Arguments PDF Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979599
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you. Bad art is from no one to no one. Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you whether you are. Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude. I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll escape the worst of it. —from 300 Arguments A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.

Ongoingness

Ongoingness PDF Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555973361
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
“[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.” —The New Yorker In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary—it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. “Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict’s testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.” —The Paris Review “Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

The Guardians

The Guardians PDF Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374167249
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Presents the author's elegiac ode to love, death, and intimate friendship that describes how her life was profoundly changed by the suicide of a mentally ill friend and roommate with whom she shared poignant formative experiences.

The Captain Lands in Paradise

The Captain Lands in Paradise PDF Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Alice James Books
ISBN: 194857988X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
Sarah Manguso’s first collection, a combination of verse and prose poems, explores love, nostalgia, remorse, and the joyful and mysterious preparation for the discoveries of new lands, selves, and ideas. The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.

Very Cold People

Very Cold People PDF Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Hogarth
ISBN: 0593241231
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The masterly debut novel from “an exquisitely astute writer” (The Boston Globe), about growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of small-town America. “Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”—The New York Times “Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend.”—The New Yorker ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping “My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.” For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield. As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.

There Are Two Kinds of Terrible

There Are Two Kinds of Terrible PDF Author: Peggy Mann
Publisher: Avon Books
ISBN: 9780380458233
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
After his beloved mother dies of cancer, a boy must learn to relate to his father who has withdrawn into his own shell of suffering.

A Woman's Battles and Transformations

A Woman's Battles and Transformations PDF Author: Édouard Louis
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374606757
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Barrios Book in Translation Prize A Woman's Battles and Transformations is a portrait of the author’s mother by the acclaimed writer of the international bestsellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence. Late one night, Édouard Louis got a call from his forty-five-year-old mother: “I did it. I left your father.” Suddenly, she was free. This is the searing and sympathetic story of one woman’s liberation: of mothers and sons, of history and heartbreak, of politics and power. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives—and with the possibility of escape. Sharp, short, and fine as a needle, it is a necessary addition to the work of Édouard Louis, “one of France’s most widely read and internationally successful novelists” (The New York Times Magazine).

The Option of Urbanism

The Option of Urbanism PDF Author: Christopher B. Leinberger
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597267767
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism visionary developer and strategist Christopher B. Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy—car manufacturing and the oil industry—this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma. Highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities for this type of development, The Option of Urbanism shows how the American Dream is shifting to include cities as well as suburbs and how the financial and real estate communities need to respond to build communities that are more environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable.

Vanishing Twins

Vanishing Twins PDF Author: Leah Dieterich
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1593762917
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"[Dieterich's] writing is crisp and intelligent . . . She writes about her own reckoning with her sexuality and exploration of queer identity without becoming pat or coy, giving readers intimate access to her fears and conflicting emotions." --NPR For as long as she can remember, Leah has had the mysterious feeling that she’s been searching for a twin--that she should be part of an intimate pair. It begins with dance partners as she studies ballet growing up; continues with her attractions to girlfriends in college; and leads her, finally, to Eric, whom she moves across the country for and marries. But her steadfast, monogamous relationship leaves her with questions about her sexuality and her identity, so she and her husband decide to try an open marriage. How does a young couple make room for their individual desires, their evolving selfhoods, and their artistic ambitions while building a life together? Can they pursue other sexual partners, even live in separate cities, and keep their original passionate bond alive? Vanishing Twins looks for answers in psychology, science, pop culture, art, architecture, Greek mythology, dance, and language to create a lucid, suspenseful portrait of a woman testing the limits and fluidities of love.