Catalog Search Results
Author
Publisher
Sarabande Books
Language
English
Description
"Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life"--Publisher.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whip-smart essays, from a winner of a Whiting Award for nonfiction, traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life....
Author
Language
English
Description
Amy Wright, conductor extraordinaire, has managed to piece apart, then fold together conversations from a bevy of thinkers like Dorothy Allison, Rae Armantrout, Gerald Stern, Lia Purpura, Raven Jackson, Wendy Walters, Kimiko Hahn, Philanese Slaughter, and others, blended into one harmonious whole.
Wright opens the book: "This essay anchors a central thread of dialogue over a dizzying divide. It weaves decades worth of questions and answers from a...
Author
Language
English
Description
Lia Purpura's daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura's hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars,...
5) Love Drones
Author
Language
English
Description
In Love Drones, Noam Dorr explores the troubling relationship between our desire for intimacy and the world of military action, state violence, and intelligence surveillance. Born and raised on a kibbutz in Israel, Dorr served a compulsory military term as an intelligence analyst, tapped for his skill with translation. This is reflected in the book with form-bending interwoven essays that retrace the fragments of a bomb that never explodes, grenades...
Author
Language
English
Description
Drawing on Appalachian literature's roots in Native American myth, African American urban legend, and European folk culture, and embracing Appalachian urban fiction, the Southern Gothic, gritty no-holds-barred realism, and magical realism, the illuminating works in Red Holler perfectly depict what makes Appalachia so fascinating: it's irreverent and outlaw challenges to mainstream notions of propriety and convention. Enthusiasts of Appalachian literature...
Author
Language
English
Description
From Farinelli, the eighteenth century castrato who brought down opera houses with his high C, to the recording of Johnny B. Goode affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, Let Me Clear My Throat dissects the whys and hows of popular voices, making them hum with significance and emotion. There are murders of punk rock crows, impressionists, and rebel yells; Howard Dean's BYAH! and Marlon Brando's Stella! and a stock film yawp that has made cameos in movies...
Author
Language
English
Description
Angela Pelster's startling essay collection charts the world's history through its trees: through roots in the ground, rings across wood, and inevitable decay. These sharp and tender essays move from her childhood in rural Canada surrounded by skinny poplar trees in her backyard to a desert in Niger, where the Loneliest Tree in the World once grew. A squirrel's decomposing body below a towering maple prompts a discussion of the science of rot, as...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
This amazingly wise and nimble collection investigates the horrors inflicted on so-called "witches" of the past. The Witch of Eye unearths salves, potions, and spells meant to heal, yet interpreted by inquisitors as evidence of evil. The author describes torture and forced confessions alongside accounts of gentleness of legendary midwives. In one essay about a trial, we learn through folklore that Jesus's mother was a midwife who cured her own son's...
Author
Language
English
Description
Readers familiar with Lia Purpura's highly praised essay collections-Becoming, On Looking, and Rough Likeness-will know she's a master of observation, a writer obsessed with the interplay between humans and the things they see. The subject matter of All the Fierce Tethers is wonderfully varied, both low (muskrats, slugs, a stained quilt in a motel room) and lofty (shadows, prayer, the idea of beauty). The essay in itself could be a small anthology....
Author
Language
English
Description
Readers will find that the words profiled here have a new trace of meaning, warmth, and a time-worn glow. John Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster, Inc. In One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe, Molly McQuade asks the question all writers love to answer: what one word means the most to you, and why? Writers respond with a wild gallimaufry of their choosing, from ardor to bitchin' to thermostat to wrong to very. There is corn,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Lia Purpura's essays are full of joy in the act of intense observation; they're also deliciously subversive and alert to the ways language gets locked and loaded by culture. These elegant, conversational excursions refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness, superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many stances: metaphysician and...
13) The Cows
Author
Language
English
Description
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize! "You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence....
14) On Imagination
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Mary Ruefle announces at the start of her essay. With wit and intellectual abandon, Ruefle draws inspiration from Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Jesus, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Emily Dickson to explore her subject. The chapbook features original interior illustrations. Mary Ruefle is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including...
Author
Language
English
Description
In Syzygy, Beauty, T Fleischmann builds an essay of prose blocks, weaving together observations on art, the narrator's construction of a house, and a direct address to a lover. Playing with scale and repetition, we are kept off-center, and therefore always looking, as the speaker leads us through an intimate relationship that is complicated and deepened by multiple partners, gender transitions, and itinerancy.
Author
Language
English
Description
In this accessible collection of essays, Patricia Vigderman attempts to translate some of life's disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. She encounters manatees, children, and snakes; with Henry Adams, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald; with Texas landscape, Vertigo, and Johannes Vermeer. Adams, in Japan after his wife's death, found in the elaborate ritual of the tea ceremony and in the discomforts of a rural inn, occasions for the wit...
Author
Language
English
Description
Part biographic inquiry, part lyric portraiture, radio producer Shawn Wen reanimates world-renowned mime Marcel Marceau's silent art. The book opens in darkness, a single figure standing in the spotlight. It's Marceau in his signature hat, painted face, black clothes, and ballet slippers. Over time, the text accumulates objects: dolls, paintings, icons, wives, children, cities, and performances. By turns whimsical and melancholic, this spare volume...
Author
Language
English
Description
Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson's collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson's wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What's the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display...
19) Dear Damage
Author
Language
English
Description
Two weeks before her grandfather purchased a gun, Ashley Farmer's grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It was a swift accident on an ordinary day: her chin hit the floor, her cervical spine shattered. She asked, "I'm paralyzed, aren't I?" Later, thinking to put her out of her misery, he kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years and shot her in the chest. He tried to shoot himself too, but the weapon broke apart in his hands....
Author
Language
English
Description
In her daring essay collection, author Ashley Butler engages the reader in an exploration of her mother's death and an estranged paternal relationship. The candid narrative evolves into a stunning, abstract deconstruction of time and space, piloting the reader precariously close to the unanswered question, "Why are we here?" Among the subjects she touches on: the fastest man on earth, wind farms and tunnels, and the anechoic (without echo) chamber...
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