The Underhistory

The Underhistory PDF Author: Kaaron Warren
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 1800812051
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
'Wholly unique and deeply compelling' - ESQUIRE 'Hauntingly creepy' - ERIN KELLY 'A heartfelt and chilling gothic tragedy' - CHRIS WHITAKER People come to visit my home and I love to show them around. It's not the original house of course. That was destroyed the day my entire family died. But I don't think their ghosts know the difference. Pera Sinclair was nine the day the pilot intentionally crashed his plane into her family's grand home, killing everyone inside. She was the girl who survived the tragedy, a sympathetic oddity, growing stranger by the day. Over the decades she rebuilt the huge and rambling building on the original site, recreating what she had lost, each room telling a piece of the story of her life and that of the many people who died there, both before and after the disaster. Her sister, murdered a hundred miles away. The soldier, broken by war. Death follows Pera, and she welcomes it in as an old friend. And while she doesn't believe in ghosts, she's not above telling a ghost story or two to those who come to visit Sinclair House. As Pera shows a young family around her home on the last haunted house tour of the season, an unexpected group of men arrive. One she recognises, but the others are strangers. But she knows their type all too well. Dangerous men, who will hurt the family without a second thought, and who will keep an old woman alive only so long as she is useful. But as she begins to show them around her home and reveal its secrets, the dangerous men will learn that she is far from helpless. After all, death seems to follow her wherever she goes... Sinister and lyrical, The Underhistory is a haunting tale of loss, self-preservation and the darkness beneath.

The Underhistory

The Underhistory PDF Author: Kaaron Warren
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 1800812051
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Wholly unique and deeply compelling' - ESQUIRE 'Hauntingly creepy' - ERIN KELLY 'A heartfelt and chilling gothic tragedy' - CHRIS WHITAKER People come to visit my home and I love to show them around. It's not the original house of course. That was destroyed the day my entire family died. But I don't think their ghosts know the difference. Pera Sinclair was nine the day the pilot intentionally crashed his plane into her family's grand home, killing everyone inside. She was the girl who survived the tragedy, a sympathetic oddity, growing stranger by the day. Over the decades she rebuilt the huge and rambling building on the original site, recreating what she had lost, each room telling a piece of the story of her life and that of the many people who died there, both before and after the disaster. Her sister, murdered a hundred miles away. The soldier, broken by war. Death follows Pera, and she welcomes it in as an old friend. And while she doesn't believe in ghosts, she's not above telling a ghost story or two to those who come to visit Sinclair House. As Pera shows a young family around her home on the last haunted house tour of the season, an unexpected group of men arrive. One she recognises, but the others are strangers. But she knows their type all too well. Dangerous men, who will hurt the family without a second thought, and who will keep an old woman alive only so long as she is useful. But as she begins to show them around her home and reveal its secrets, the dangerous men will learn that she is far from helpless. After all, death seems to follow her wherever she goes... Sinister and lyrical, The Underhistory is a haunting tale of loss, self-preservation and the darkness beneath.

Urban Legends

Urban Legends PDF Author: Peter L'Official
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674246489
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A cultural history of the South Bronx that reaches beyond familiar narratives of urban ruin and renaissance, beyond the “inner city” symbol, to reveal the place and people obscured by its myths. For decades, the South Bronx was America’s “inner city.” Synonymous with civic neglect, crime, and metropolitan decay, the Bronx became the preeminent symbol used to proclaim the failings of urban places and the communities of color who lived in them. Images of its ruins—none more infamous than the one broadcast live during the 1977 World Series: a building burning near Yankee Stadium—proclaimed the failures of urbanism. Yet this same South Bronx produced hip hop, arguably the most powerful artistic and cultural innovation of the past fifty years. Two narratives—urban crisis and cultural renaissance—have dominated understandings of the Bronx and other urban environments. Today, as gentrification transforms American cities economically and demographically, the twin narratives structure our thinking about urban life. A Bronx native, Peter L’Official draws on literature and the visual arts to recapture the history, people, and place beyond its myths and legends. Both fact and symbol, the Bronx was not a decades-long funeral pyre, nor was hip hop its lone cultural contribution. L’Official juxtaposes the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s carvings of abandoned buildings with the city’s trompe l’oeil decals program; examines the centrality of the Bronx’s infamous Charlotte Street to two Hollywood films; offers original readings of novels by Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe; and charts the emergence of a “global Bronx” as graffiti was brought into galleries and exhibited internationally, promoting a symbolic Bronx abroad. Urban Legends presents a new cultural history of what it meant to live, work, and create in the Bronx.

The Fetish

The Fetish PDF Author: Massimo Fusillo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501312359
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Oph�ls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.

Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland PDF Author: Andrew Tate
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847796737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century’s most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland’s career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century - amidst the absurd contradictions of instantaneous global communication and acute poverty - Coupland’s novels, short stories, essays and visual art have intervened in specifically contemporary debates regarding authenticity, artifice and art. This book explores Coupland’s response, in ground-breaking novels such as Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, to some of the most pressing issues of our times. Designed for students, researchers and general readers alike, the study is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Coupland’s engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space, religion and ideas of the future.

Modernization and the Crisis of Memory

Modernization and the Crisis of Memory PDF Author: Philipp Wolf
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004487050
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Contemporary studies of memory focus either on the psychology of remembering, on its archives and media, or on the traditional ars memoriae. The general cultural framework with its social and material factors is largely neglected, despite the obvious impact on both collective and individual mnemonic mentality. But, as in the first half of the seventeenth century or the later twentieth century, the literary and political invocation of religious, collective or national memory occurs most of all in times of historical rupture, and attendant changes of a radical technological and cultural nature. Appeals to the power of memory are not only indicative of the anxiety about the loss of its binding or absolving character. They are already symptomatic of a deep crisis of cultural memory in itself, resulting from an erosion of firm spatial, temporal and historical references along with an increasing tendency towards reflexivity, which calls the apparently self-evident facts of past and present into question. The continuity of remembering, however, as this study argues, presupposes the permanence and recurrence of social and material relations, of representative or symbolic persons, objects and events, in which it can inscribe itself. But owing to the shift in historical consciousness from (typological) past to progressive future and novelty and under the impress of industrial production and modern media (mobility and communications), the Western subject has to cope constantly with new empirical situations, symbolic values and historical or current information whose origin and evolution – indeed, the very memory of them – remain alien to personal identity and memory. The promise of redemption and salvation, still inherent in seventeenth-century collective memory, loses credibility. The study includes a wide range of authors from Donne to Pope, Tennyson to George Eliot and Walter Pater, W.B. Yeats to Don DeLillo and covers the whole period from early modern England to postmodernism. It can thus also be read as a brief history of Western memory and its continuing crises.

Virtual Americas

Virtual Americas PDF Author: Paul Giles
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Arguing that limited nationalist perspectives have circumscribed the critical scope of American Studies scholarship, Virtual Americas advocates a comparative criticism that illuminates the work of well-known literary figures by defamiliarizing it—placing it in unfamiliar contexts. Paul Giles looks at a number of canonical nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers by focusing on their interactions with British culture. He demonstrates how American authors from Herman Melville to Thomas Pynchon have been compulsively drawn to negotiate with British culture so that their nationalist agendas have emerged, paradoxically, through transatlantic dialogues. Virtual Americas ultimately suggests that conceptions of national identity in both the United States and Britain have emerged through engagement with—and, often, deliberate exclusion of—ideas and imagery emanating from across the Atlantic. Throughout Virtual Americas Giles focuses on specific examples of transatlantic cultural interactions such as Frederick Douglass’s experiences and reputation in England; Herman Melville’s satirizing fictions of U.S. and British nationalism; and Vladimir Nabokov’s critique of European high culture and American popular culture in Lolita. He also reverses his perspective, looking at the representation of San Francisco in the work of British-born poet Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath’s poetic responses to England. Giles develops his theory about the need to defamiliarize the study of American literature by considering the cultural legacy of Surrealism as an alternative genealogy for American Studies and by examining the transatlantic dimensions of writers such as Henry James and Robert Frost in the context of Surrealism.

THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980

THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980 PDF Author: Rob Hansen
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1326366750
Category : Fan magazines
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description


Bright Hearts

Bright Hearts PDF Author: Kaaron Warren
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1250368685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
A florist becomes obsessed with the strange, haunting red flowers she buys from an equally strange old lady... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

War Power, Police Power

War Power, Police Power PDF Author: Mark Neocleous
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748692398
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In this, the first book to deal with the concepts of war power and police power together, Mark Neocleous conducts a critical exploration of the ways in which war power and police power are intertwined in the form of state violence and exercised in social

Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo’s America

Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo’s America PDF Author: Michael Naas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501390716
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo's America is a fresh and engaging study of “last things” in Don DeLillo's works-things like death, mourning, and the decline of the American empire, but then also the apocalypse, the last judgment, and the end of the world more generally. Michael Naas untangles complex themes in short, witty chapters that highlight and celebrate DeLillo's inventive and playful writing, employing a novel approach to literary criticism. Making no use of secondary sources, the book is entirely a discussion of DeLillo's work, accessible to any level of readership while maintaining a firm grasp of the theory necessary to make this unique argument. And yet, this book is also about all the things that double or shadow those last things in the very same works, like the wonder of language or the radiance of everyday events. From Americana (1971) up through Zero K (2016) and The Silence (2020), and perhaps like no other American author, Don DeLillo has created meaning by contrasting, juxtaposing or, as Naas calls it here, “contrabanding” first and last things, conflicting or opposing forces such as life and death, creation and destruction, consumption and waste, everyday wonder and apocalyptic ruin, the origins of language and the end of the world. In his adept demonstration of how DeLillo has returned repeatedly to these “last things,” Naas shows how the works of Don DeLillo have been there for more than half a century to remind us of one simple and yet profound truth-nothing lasts forever.