An exploration of love and loss by the renowned Costa Award-winning poetYou lived at such speed that the ballpoint script running aslant and fadingacross the faded bluecan scarcely keep up. Many words are illegible. I missimportant steps. Your movements blur. I want to follow, but can't.A Scattering is a book of lamentation and remembrance, its subject being Christopher Reid's wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, who died of cancer at the age of fifty-five. First published in the UK in 2009 to wide acclaim, winning the Costa Book of the Year, this moving and fiercely self-reflective collection is divided into four poetic sequences. The first was written during a holiday a few months before Gane's death with the knowledge that the end was approaching; the second recalls her last courageous weeks, spent in a hospice in London; the third continues the exploration of bereavement from a variety of perspectives; and the fourth addresses her directly, celebrating her life, personality, and achievements. Paired for the first time with Anniversary, which was written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Gane's death, A Scattering and Anniversary brings the poet into dialogue, again, with the wife he loved. A moving exploration of the stages of grief and how the "weighty emptinesses" that remain after bereavement change us, A Scattering and Anniversary shows us what it means to love, lose, and-forever changed-continue on.
Selected poems from the critically acclaimed author of Submission and The Elementary ParticlesA shimmering selection of poems chosen from four collections of one of France's most exciting authors, Unreconciled shines a fresh light on Michel Houellebecq and reveals the radical singularity of his work. Drawing on themes that are similar to the ones in his novels, these poems are a journey into the depths of individual experience and universal passions.Divided into five parts, Unreconciled forms a narrative of love, hopelessness, catastrophe, dedication, and-ultimately-redemption. In a world of supermarkets and public transportation, indifferent landscapes and lonely nights, Houellebecq manages to find traces of divine grace even as he exposes our inexorable decline into chaos.Told through forms and rhythms that are both ancient and new, with language steeped in the everyday, Unreconciled stands in the tradition of Baudelaire while making a bold new claim on contemporary verse. It reveals that in addition to his work as an incisive novelist, Houellebecq is one of our most perceptive poets with a vision of our era that brims with tensions that cannot-and will not-be reconciled.
A startling analysis of how tech solutionism is obscuring creative problem-solving toward a more equitable society.From smart devices that help reduce one's carbon footprint to apps where one can buy themed portfolios of companies that promote vegan or LGBTQ-friendly causes, corporations appear to be producing, at light speed, solutions to our most preoccupying social problems. You, as a conscientious user, just need to buy in. Welcome to solutionism.In Freedom as a Service, tech's most formidable critic, Evgeny Morozov, identifies a new stage of capitalism: organic capitalism, a system that is happy to admit to its own failures while unleashing more capitalist solutions to them. Under organic capitalism, "platform populism" enables a multitude of solutionist interventions while also creating the illusion that the users are in charge. And, Morozov argues, it's the left that is most susceptible to this Trojan horse, as technocratic approaches are combined with the do-good rhetoric of a more humane capitalism. But solutionism doesn't really solve problems; it simply monetizes the behavioral change of an individual. We are actually under-producing solutions because the sort of structural solutions that are not favorable to capital never come into existence.Trenchant, bold, and highly original, Freedom as a Service is an urgent exposé of our current political and technological order. Drawing on Marx and Hayek, Morozov cuts through the fog of solutionism's false promises, proposing a counter-paradigm: obsoletism, where instead of solving problems, we concentrate our efforts on creating a new world where such problems are made obsolete. With this groundbreaking new concept, Morozov illuminates a way forward: more tech-literate, more imaginative, and more effective at securing a just and habitable future.
A hypnotic novel intertwining the author's past with James Earl Ray's attempt to escape after shooting Martin Luther King Jr.The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media's confusion about his location and his image on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities. Using recently declassified FBI files, Antonio Muñoz Molina reconstructs Ray's final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Muñoz Molina's first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now, thirty years later, it becomes the stage for and witness to three alternating stories: Ray in 1968 at the center of an international manhunt; a thirty-year-old Muñoz Molina in 1987 struggling to find his literary voice; and the author in the present, reflecting on his life and the form of the novel as an instrument for imagining the world through another person's eyes. Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.
A selection of Bill Knott's life work-testimony of his enduring, "thorny genius" (Robert Pinsky)Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.They will place my hands like this.It will look as though I am flying into myself.For half a century, Bill Knott's brilliant, vaudevillian verse electrified the poetic form. Over his long career, he studiously avoided joining any one school of poetry, preferring instead to freewheel from French surrealism to the avant-garde and back again-experimenting relentlessly and refusing to embrace straightforward dialectics. Whether drawing from musings on romantic love or propaganda from the Vietnam War, Knott's quintessential poems are alive with sensory activity, abiding by the pulse and impulse of a pure, restless emotion. This provocative, playful sensibility has ensured that his poems have a rare and unmistakable immediacy, effortlessly crystalizing thought in all its moods and tenses.An essential contribution to American letters, I am Flying into Myself gathers a selection of Knott's previous volumes of poetry, published between 1960 and 2004, as well as verse circulated online from 2005 until a few days before his death in 2014. His work-ranging from surrealistic wordplay to the anti-poem, sonnets, sestinas, and haikus-all convenes in this inventive and brilliant book, arranged by his friend the poet Thomas Lux, to showcase our American Rimbaud, one of the true poetic innovators of the last century.I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014 celebrates one of poetry's most determined outsiders, a vitally important American poet richly deserving of a wider audience.
An exciting new adventure starring the New York Times-Bestselling Pout-Pout Fish! Mr. Fish has prepped and packed,And he's made big plans to roam.He's ready for adventureOn his trip away from home!But sometimes trips have detoursAnd not everything goes right.Without his favorite toy,Can he fall asleep at night?Swim along with Mr. Fish as he explores new places and meets new friends in THE POUT-POUT FISH, FAR, FAR FROM HOME. He might just learn that a few bumps along the way are all part of the journey. Deborah Diesen and Dan Hanna are back with everyone's favorite grumpy fish, to show that love doesn't have to be packed, it travels with you always.
To twelve-year-old Molly Nathans, perfect is:-The number four-The tip of a newly sharpened No. 2 pencil-A crisp white pad of paper -Her neatly aligned glass animal figurinesWhat's not perfect is Molly's mother leaving the family to take a faraway job with the promise to return in one year. Molly knows that promises are sometimes broken, so she hatches a plan to bring her mother home: Win the Lakeville Middle School Poetry Slam Contest. The winner is honored at a fancy banquet with white tablecloths. Molly is sure her mother would never miss that. Right...? But as time passes, writing and reciting slam poetry become harder. Actually, everything becomes harder as new habits appear, and counting, cleaning, and organizing are not enough to keep Molly's world from spinning out of control. In this fresh-voiced debut novel, one girl learns there is no such thing as perfect.
"A master of both distilled insight and utter nonsense" (The Believer), Ian Frazier is one of the most gifted chroniclers of contemporary America. Hogs Wild assembles a decade's worth of his finest essays and reportage, and demonstrates the irrepressible passions and artful digressions that distinguish his enduring body of work.Part muckraker, part adventurer, and part raconteur, Frazier beholds, captures, and occasionally reimagines the spirit of the American experience. He travels down South to examine feral hogs, and learns that their presence in any county is a strong indicator that it votes Republican. He introduces us to a man who, when his house is hit by a supposed meteorite, hopes to "leverage" the space object into opportunity for his family, and a New York City police detective who is fascinated with rap-music-related crimes. Alongside Frazier's delight in the absurdities of contemporary life is his sense of social responsibility: there's an echo of the great reform-minded writers in his pieces on a soup kitchen, opioid overdose deaths on Staten Island, and the rise in homelessness in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg.In each dizzying discovery, Hogs Wild unearths the joys of inquiry without agenda, curiosity without calculation. To read Frazier is to become a kind of social and political anthropologist--astute and deeply engaged.
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEAt the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy is entering his third term in office. The Vietnam War rages on, and the president has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from the war have their battlefield traumas "enfolded"-wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy-while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the government and reenacting atrocities on civilians.This destabilized version of American history is the vision of twenty-two-year old Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book-within-a-book at the center of Hystopia. In conversation with some of the greatest war narratives, from Homer's Iliad to the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," David Means channels the voice of Allen, the young veteran out to write a novel that can bring honor to those he fought with in Vietnam while also capturing the tragic history of his own family.The critic James Wood has written that Means's language "offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality." In Hystopia, his highly anticipated first novel, David Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.
The amazing story of one town's real-world effort to build back better!In 2007, a tornado destroyed Greensburg, Kansas, and the residents were at a loss as to what to do next-they didn't want to rebuild if their small town would just be destroyed in another storm. So they decided they wouldn't just rebuild the same old thing; this time, they would build a town that could not only survive another storm, but one that was built in an environmentally sustainable way. Told from the point of view of a child whose family needed to rebuilt after the storm, this is the inspiring addition to the author's acclaimed series about actual everyday communities going green includes plenty of rebuilding scenes and details for construction lovers, too!
A selection from the last twenty years of C. K. Williams's career, plus new work-proof of his enduring powerC. K. Williams's long career has been a catalog of surprises, of inventions and reinventions, of honors. His one constant is a remarkable degree of flexibility, a thrilling ability to shape-shift that goes hand in hand with an essential, enduring honesty. This rare, heady mix has ensured that William's verses have remained, from book to book, as fresh and vibrant as they were when he first burst onto the scene. Selected Later Poems-a generous selection of the last two decades of Williams's poetry, capped by a gathering of new work-is a testament to that enduring vibrancy. Here are the passionate, searching, clear-eyed explorations of empathy in The Vigil; here is the candor and revelation of Repair; here is the agonizing morality of The Singing and Wait, and the unsparing reflections on aging of Writers Writing Dying; here are the poignant prose vignettes of All at Once. Williams's poetry is essential because its lyric beauty, precise and revealing images, and elegant digressions are coupled to a conscience both uneasy and unflinching. Selected Later Poems is at once a celebration of Williams's career, an affirmation of his continued position in the pantheon of American poets, and a kind of reckoning-a reminder of the ways in which art can serve both beauty and justice.
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