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On autopsy, the brain of an Alzheimer's patient can weigh as little as 30 percent of a healthy brain. The tissue grows porous. It is a sieve through which the past slips. As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct—easy to hold. At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia.
The author chronicles her lifelong battle with eating disorders and starvation diets, her journey to India to study at the yoga institute of the renowned B. K. S. Iyengar, and her discovery of a spiritual discipline that helped her find peace. 25,000 first printing.
Fiction. An Italian soul-seeker in India encounters an antique racist toy-bank from 19th-Century America and believes it to be an incarnation of Krishna. A fertility-seeking single woman in New York's Chinatown becomes fixated on a Chinese boy and plots a kidnap. An American archaeologist suffers from under-medicated bipolar disease after the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala. A New Yorker interprets the small earthquake of 2011 as a sign of conspiracy, and her obsession masks feelings of grief surrounding the disappearance of her self-destructive twin sister. Following the existential mystery of Paul Auster, Paul Bowles' critique of the tourist, and Flannery O'Connor's redemptive grotesques, Kad...
Fiction. In the wake of a chaotic decade in New York, Netti and her eleven-year-old son, Ian, find themselves on the shores of Malta, a picturesque and antiquated Mediterranean island where the last world war still thrums in the nerves of its residents. When they witness an accident on the streets of Valletta, Netti becomes enmeshed in a mystery of old-world family alliances on an island little touched by time and outsiders. Faced with her own transgressions in the shape of reckless relationships and a constant pursuit of the bottom of the wine bottle, Netti desperately seeks to vindicate the crime and better herself as mother to her precocious, adolescent son. Detailed in sharp yet rich prose and a style reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño and Paul Bowles, ON THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE CENTER OF THE WORLD navigates a confounding existential crisis and the ultimate futility of the desire to escape oneself.
Here, collected for the first time, 19 writers describe their eating disorders from the distance of recovery, exposing as never before the anorexic's self-enclosed world. “This anthology lends remarkable texture to a subject that has been too often sensationalized and oversimplified.” —The New York Times Taking up issues including depression, genetics, sexuality, sports, religion, fashion and family, these essays examine the role anorexia plays in a young person's search for direction. Powerful and immensely informative, this collection makes accessible the mindset of a disease that has long been misunderstood. With essays by Priscilla Becker, Francesca Lia Block, Maya Browne, Jennifer Egan, Clara Elliot, Amanda Fortini, Louise Glück, Latria Graham, Francine du Plessix Gray, Trisha Gura, Sarah Haight, Lisa Halliday, Elizabeth Kadetsky, Maura Kelly, Ilana Kurshan, Joyce Maynard, John Nolan, Rudy Ruiz, and Kate Taylor.
Fiction. An Italian soul-seeker in India encounters an antique racist toy-bank from 19th-Century America and believes it to be an incarnation of Krishna. A fertility-seeking single woman in New York's Chinatown becomes fixated on a Chinese boy and plots a kidnap. An American archaeologist suffers from under-medicated bipolar disease after the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala. A New Yorker interprets the small earthquake of 2011 as a sign of conspiracy, and her obsession masks feelings of grief surrounding the disappearance of her self-destructive twin sister. Following the existential mystery of Paul Auster, Paul Bowles' critique of the tourist, and Flannery O'Connor's redemptive grotesques, Kad...
How We Live Our Yoga collects fourteen frank, moving, and thoughtful personal essays by passionate yoga practitioners on why they began to practice, what it has brought to their lives, how their relationship to yoga changes and evolves, and more. Judith Lasater looks at the unexpected relationship between yoga and parenting. Award-winning poet Stanley Plumly ponders the connection between his Quaker upbringing, his writing, and his yoga practice. The well-known Sanskritist Vyaas Houston tells the story of his first guru and their difficult relationship. And philosopher and conceptual artist Adrian Piper comes out as a yogic celibate.
Many are haunted and obsessed by their own eventual deaths, but perhaps no one as much as Sue William Silverman. This thematically linked collection of essays charts Silverman’s attempt to confront her fears of that ultimate unknown. Her dread was fomented in part by a sexual assault, hidden for years, that led to an awareness that death and sex are in some ways inextricable, an everyday reality many women know too well. Through gallows humor, vivid realism, and fantastical speculation, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences explores this fear of death and the author’s desire to survive it. From cruising New Jersey’s industry-blighted landscape in a gold Plymouth to visiting the emergency room for maladies both real and imagined to suffering the stifling strictness of an intractable piano teacher, Silverman guards her memories for the same reason she resurrects archaic words—to use as talismans to ward off the inevitable. Ultimately, Silverman knows there is no way to survive death physically. Still, through language, commemoration, and metaphor, she searches for a sliver of transcendent immortality.
"Unlike books on yoga that provide instruction on technique, Going Om is a unique collection of personal narratives from celebrated authors. All of the essays are original material, written for this collection. This anthology values the quality of writing over the authors' flexibility. Ira Sukrungruang shares his heartbreaking struggle as a 375 pound yoga student discovering self-worth on his mat; Gloria Munoz explores the practice of stillness with lyrical elegance in the midst of her busy mind; Neal Pollack's signature sarcasm leads to surprising turns at yoga class with his dad; Elizabeth Kadetsky uses yogic wisdom while coping with her mother's devastating Alzheimer's. Going Om will find an eager audience with the 20 million Americans practicing yoga. The editor, Melissa Carroll, is a yoga instructor who teaches more than 200 students every week. As a writer and university creative writing professor with extensive public speaking and print experience, only Carroll could curate these true tales of life from the mat"--
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