Author: Anne Fadiman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374530549
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Answering the question "is a book the same the second time around?" this collection of essays includes contributions from Sven Krkerts, Allegra Goodman, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Hampl, Phillip Lopate, and Luc Sante, among others.
Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674063317
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.
Author: Graeme Brooker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000726703
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Re-readings 2 is a companion book to Re-readings, originally published in 2004. This second volume is testament to the growing interest and demand for clarification of the re-modelling, adaptation and transformation processes within the existing built environment. With increased interest in the sustainability and heritage agenda and emerging interest from non-European-centric areas of the world in this type of work, this book explores how the re-modelling of existing buildings is a sustainable and viable alternative to the construction of new buildings. Throughout this highly-illustrated book, drawings and photos of various projects from around the world highlight how the new fits into the existing. Case studies are analysed holistically, and include information on the practical issues and challenges of individual projects.
Author: Jo Walton
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466844094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
“A remarkable guided tour through the field—a kind of nonfiction companion to Among Others. It’s very good. It’s great.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing As any reader of Jo Walton’s Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field’s most ambitious series. Among Walton’s many subjects here are the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by “mainstream”; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field’s many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers. “For readers unschooled in the history of SF/F, this book is a treasure trove.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Author: Mary Laura Philpott
Publisher: Atria Books
ISBN: 1982102810
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A charmingly relatable and wise memoir-in-essays by acclaimed writer and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott, “the modern day reincarnation of…Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin—all rolled into one” (The Washington Post), about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on a successful life’s to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list—and herself. Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy. But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right” but still felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options? Taking on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood, Philpott provides a “frank and funny look at what happens when, in the midst of a tidy life, there occur impossible-to-ignore tugs toward creativity, meaning, and the possibility of something more” (Southern Living). She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife and reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary. Most of all, in this “warm embrace of a life lived imperfectly” (Esquire), Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down. You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong. Who among us isn’t trying to do that? “Be forewarned that you’ll laugh out loud and cry, probably in the same essay. Philpott has a wonderful way of finding humor, even in darker moments. This is a book you’ll want to buy for yourself and every other woman you know” (Real Simple).
Author: Pat Thomas
Publisher: B.E.S. Publishing
ISBN: 9781438004792
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 29
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Book Description
"This book will help children understand what autism is and how it affects someone who has it."--Amazon.com.
Author: M. Suddain
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448130913
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
John Tamberlain is The Tomahawk, the universe’s most feared food critic – though he himself prefers the term ‘forensic gastronomer’. He’s on a quest, in search of the much-storied Hotel Grand Skies, a secretive and exclusive haven where the rich and famous retreat to bask in perfect seclusion. A place where the waiters know their fish knife from their butter knife, their carotid from their subclavian artery, and are trained to enforce the house rules with brutal efficiency. Blurring the lines between detective story, horror and sci-fi, Hunters & Collectors is a mesmeric trip into the singular imagination of M. Suddain – a freewheeling talent whose poise, invention and sensational sentences have already earned him comparisons to Vonnegut, Pynchon and Douglas Adams.
Author: William A. Tooman
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725262711
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
The book of Ruth seems simple. It is the tale of a poor Moabite widow who relocates to Bethlehem and finds security there when she marries Boaz, a wealthy Israelite man. Although the plot is simple, the book’s message is elusive. Re(reading Ruth) demonstrates how careful attention to the book’s structure, allusions, wordplay, and location in the canon can reveal the dynamic ways that it engages with other biblical stories and how that engagement shapes its message.
Author: Sandra Hindman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226341569
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Chretien de Troyes was France's great medieval poet—inventor of the genre of courtly romance and popularizer of the Arthurian legend. The forty-four surviving manuscripts of his work (ten of them illuminated) pose a number of questions about who used these books and in what way. In Sealed in Parchment, Sandra Hindman scrutinizes both text and images to reveal what the manuscripts can tell us about medieval society and politics.
Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374716609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2020. One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”
