Saint Sebastian's Abyss

Saint Sebastian's Abyss PDF Author: Mark Haber
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566896444
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
“What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.

Saint Sebastian's Abyss

Saint Sebastian's Abyss PDF Author: Mark Haber
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566896444
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Get Book

Book Description
“What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.

Reinhardt's Garden

Reinhardt's Garden PDF Author: Mark Haber
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895707
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 101

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, as he composes a treatise on melancholy, Jacov Reinhardt sets off from his small Croatian village in search of his hero and unwitting mentor, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who is rumored to have disappeared into the South American jungle—“not lost, mind you, but retired.” Jacov’s narcissistic preoccupation with melancholy consumes him, and as he desperately recounts the myth of his journey to his trusted but ailing scribe, hope for an encounter with the lost philosopher who holds the key to Jacov’s obsession seems increasingly unlikely. From Croatia to Germany, Hungary to Russia, and finally to the Americas, Jacov and his companions grapple with the limits of art, colonialism, and escapism in this antic debut where dark satire and skewed history converge.

The Longcut

The Longcut PDF Author: Emily Hall
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1628974168
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 79

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Book Description
The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn’t know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she’ll know it when she sees it. Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a “completed” column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions—what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue—that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters. An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.

Saint Sebastian's Head

Saint Sebastian's Head PDF Author: LeAnn Neal Reilly
Publisher: Zephon Books
ISBN: 1735131830
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
1997, Boston -- Fifteen years ago an eleven-year-old girl died an unspeakable death in a small Midwestern city.... As a child, Weeble earns her nickname for her ability to stand up under difficult circumstances. Despite the squalor, neglect, and abuse of her home, Weeble adopts the role of protector, first for her younger sister, Annie, and then for her best friend, Lauren. When Lauren dies, Weeble hides her stark, painful childhood from herself in order to survive. Years later and now a civil engineer living thousands of miles away, Weeble's tenuous hold on her emotional state has started to unravel. The methods she uses to cope with her shame and grief no longer work. After winning a grant to create a Web site dedicated to the victims of serial killers, Weeble shuts out longtime friends and begins training for the Boston Sprint Triathlon. Running hard has always kept the nightmares at bay. Then during an early-morning run, she's caught off guard by a Freegan named Tom Paul, a glass artist and modern mystic. Weeble's numb detachment shatters. As her past increasingly invades her present, she will be forced to confront the truth of what happened that long ago summer. Using a structure that switches abruptly between radiant present and dark past, Saint Sebastian's Head tells the ultimately healing love story of a damaged woman and the faithful man who can see the hidden beauty of her soul.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight PDF Author: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811217507
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Nabokov's first novel in English, one of his greatest and most overlooked, with a new Introduction by Michael Dirda.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

A Psalm for the Wild-Built PDF Author: Becky Chambers
Publisher: Tordotcom
ISBN: 1250236223
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Winner of the Hugo Award! In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future. It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They're going to need to ask it a lot. Becky Chambers's new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Fatal Englishman

The Fatal Englishman PDF Author: Sebastian Faulks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307523608
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

Greenland

Greenland PDF Author: David Santos Donaldson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063159570
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Shortlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl—in which Mohammed’s story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction. In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed’s story. Kip has only three weeks until his publisher’s deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed’s story – and then Mohammed himself – begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist’s journey transforms into a quest for truth that offers a world of possibility. Electric and unforgettable, David Santos Donaldson’s tour de force excavates the dream of white assimilation, the foibles of interracial relationships, and not only the legacy of a literary giant, but literature itself.

In the Absence of Men

In the Absence of Men PDF Author: Philippe Besson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446485293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
'An astonishing love story, beautifully told' Time Out 'I am sixteen. I am as old as the century' It is 1916. Vincent is sixteen, on the brink of manhood. Vincent is aristocratic and privileged, frequenting the salons of Paris while France is at war and the city almost deserted of men. In that brutal summer, Vincent's beauty and precocity captivate two men: Marcel, thirty years his senior, a writer and celebrated socialite; and Arthur, the twenty-one year old son of one of the servants, who is now a soldier at the front. As both relationships develop Vincent intuitively tries to keep his passions separate, but over the weeks of indolent Parisian summer and far-off war, confidences are made, absences endured, secrets revealed. All of these men will suffer, and Vincent will lose the last vestiges of his childhood innocence. In the Absence of Men is a stunning first novel to discover this pride season: in its daring in representation and celebration of gay sexuality, in the beauty of its prose and in its delicacy of feeling.

Variations on the Body

Variations on the Body PDF Author: María Ospina
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566896142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
A constellation of short stories illustrate the intersecting lives of women on various peripheries of society in and around Bogotá, Colombia. In six subtly connected stories, Variations on the Body explores the obsessions, desires, and idiosyncrasies of women and girls from different strata of Colombian society. A former FARC guerilla fighter adjusts to urban life and faces the new violence of an editor co-opting her experiences. A woman adrift in the city she left as a child looks for someone to care for, even if it has to be by force, while another documents a flea infestation with a catalog of the marks on her flesh. A little girl copes with her anxiety about the adult world by exacting revenge on her nanny, who she thinks belongs to her. Combining humor, heartbreak, and unexpected violence, Ospina constructs a keen reflection on the body as a simultaneous vehicle of connection and alienation in vibrant, gleaming prose.