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A transsexual activist offers insights into the challenges of gender dysphoria. Born with a female body, and in a lesbian parent relationship prior to sex reassignment surgery, the author explores how we know our sex and discusses the complexities of the answer for those whose sex and gender are mismatched, examining medical options, psychosocial and legal implications, and media representations of "transpeople."
From the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams and the memoir The Recovering, Leslie Jamison’s “exquisitely beautiful” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel about three generations of women and the inescapable brutality of love. As a young woman, Tilly flees home for the hollow underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, drinking herself to the brink of death, her niece Stella—who has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City—arrives on the doorstep of Tilly’s desert trailer. The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between them. With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns, the life we’re given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.
'Intelligent, compassionate, and so fiercely, prodigiously brave. This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best' Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries on THE EMPATHY EXAMS A profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and obsession, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is a book about why and how we tell stories. It takes the reader deep into the lives of strangers - from a woman healed by the song of 'the loneliest whale in the world' to a family convinced their child is a reincarnation of a lost pilot - and asks how we can bear witness to the changing truths of other's lives while striving to find a deeper connection to the complexities of our own.
Addiction is seemingly inexplicable. From the outside, it can look like wilful, arrogant self-destruction; from the inside, it can feel as inevitable and insistent as a heartbeat. It is possible to describe, but hard to explore. Yet in The Recovering, Leslie Jamison draws on her own life and the lives of addicts of extraordinary talent - John Cheever, John Berryman, Jean Rhys and Amy Winehouse among them - to take us inside the experience of addiction, exposing the contours, edges and wholes of an intoxicated life. Part memoir, part group biography, part literary history and part definitive analysis of cultural and social considerations of addiction, The Recovering is a significant moment in the history of post-war narrative non-fiction.
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The first lesson I learned when I turned pro in 1982 was how much an edge could be gained before the match even started. The top players came expecting to have me for lunch, and they’d been thinking about taking that first bite since they found out I was on the menu. #2 The first lesson I learned when I turned pro in 1982 was how much an edge could be gained before the match even started. The top players came expecting to have me for lunch, and they’d been thinking about taking that first bite since they found out I was on the menu #3 The warm-up should begin with your brain. It should evaluate your opponent and think about the match before you arrive at the court. If you drive to the match, your warm-up begins with your car. #4 The first lesson I learned when I turned pro in 1982 was how much an edge could be gained before the match even started. The top players came expecting to have me for lunch, and they’d been thinking about taking that first bite since they found out I was on the menu.
The subjects of this stylish and audacious collection of essays range from an assault in Nicaragua to a Morgellons meeting; from Frida Kahlo's plaster casts to a gangland tour of LA. Jamison is interested in how we tell stories about injury and pain, and the limits that circumstances, bodies and identity put on the act of describing.
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Exuberance is an abounding, ebullient, and effervescent emotion. It is not happiness, but it is a more restless and billowing state. It is not a quiet sense of contentment, but rather exuberance that leaps, bubbles, and overflows. #2 Exuberance, the more energetic form of joy, is essential to our existence. It is a material part of our pursuits, and it is a vibrant force to signal victory, proclaim a time to quicken, to draw together, and to exult. #3 Exuberance is a wonderful thing, but it can also be calamitous. It is a defining quality of great teachers, statesmen, and adventurers. Used properly, it can bring about change and hope. #4 Roosevelt’s life in politics was abruptly broken when his wife and mother died in 1884. He threw himself into reform work, and became a gale force in Washington.
In Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics, old-time musician and flatfoot dancer Philip Jamison journeys into the past and surveys the present to tell the story behind the square dances, step dances, reels, and other forms of dance practiced in southern Appalachia. These distinctive folk dances, Jamison argues, are not the unaltered jigs and reels brought by early British settlers, but hybrids that developed over time by adopting and incorporating elements from other popular forms. He traces the forms from their European, African American, and Native American roots to the modern day. On the way he explores the powerful influence of black culture, showing how practices such as calling dances as well as specific kinds of steps combined with white European forms to create distinctly "American" dances. From cakewalks to clogging, and from the Shoo-fly Swing to the Virginia Reel, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics reinterprets an essential aspect of Appalachian culture.
Featured in this imaginative instructional are quick and easy ways to customize all kinds of glass and ceramic pieces with dashes of color to suit the style and palette of any room. The thirty-plus projects include vibrantly colored bowls, gold-studded champagne glasses, pretty polka-dot teacups, and a spiral-design vase. Sponging, stamping, stenciling, and other simple techniques are explained in step-by-step detail so that even inexperienced painters and crafters can achieve attractive results. More than a dozen templates and a source directory complete this practical, idea-packed book.
A national bestselling author examines one of the mind's most exalted states—one that is crucially important to learning, risk-taking, social cohesiveness, and survival itself. “[Jamison is] that rare writer who can offer a kind of unified field theory of science and art.” —The Washington Post Book World With the same grace and breadth of learning she brought to her studies of the mind’s pathologies, Kay Redfield Jamison examines one of its most exalted states: exuberance. This “abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion” manifests itself everywhere from child’s play to scientific breakthrough. Exuberance: The Passion for Life introduces us to such notably irrepressible types as Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and Richard Feynman, as well as Peter Pan, dancing porcupines, and Charles Schulz’s Snoopy. It explores whether exuberance can be inherited, parses its neurochemical grammar, and documents the methods people have used to stimulate it. The resulting book is an irresistible fusion of science and soul.