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In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.
Isabelle, a woman in her thirties without any of the trappings of a grown-up life, has just been fired from her job at a San Francisco phone company. Returning to the midwestern suburb of her childhood, Standardsville, Illinois, she contends with her dating single mother, a neighbor who once appeared on The Honeymooners, and an ex-boyfriend. She also becomes a mystery shopper for a temp agency, posing as a variety of potential tenants for newly built suburban communities to access their exclusive services. Enchanted by the possiblities of disguise, Isabelle spins a web of lies that keeps the world at a distance until she unearths long-kept secrets that force her to rethink everything she thought she knew.
Meet the college graduate working in a whole body–donation clinic; a young woman obsessed with Benedictine monks; a middle-aged woman who becomes a stand-in talk-show guest; unlikely friends who meet in a domestic violence shelter; a young girl and the father who stole her away to escape his wife's mental illness; a graduate student from a suburban family who believes her physical connection to the world is deteriorating. Maud Casey -- author of The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book -- explores how we survive modern crises of loss and love through the lives of emotional and geographic nomads. Each flirts with madness and self-destruction while reaching toward life. These simple gestures of optimism and vitality, gorgeously rendered, make drastic an unforgettable collection.
Unholy Ghost is a unique collection of essays about depression that, in the spirit of William Styron's Darkness Visible, finds vivid expression for an elusive illness suffered by more than one in five Americans today. Unlike any other memoir of depression, however, Unholy Ghost includes many voices and depicts the most complete portrait of the illness. Lauren Slater eloquently describes her own perilous experience as a pregnant woman on antidepressant medication. Susanna Kaysen, writing for the first time about depression since Girl, Interrupted, criticizes herself and others for making too much of the illness. Larry McMurtry recounts the despair that descended after his quadruple bypass sur...
Bucking the Sun is the story of the Duff family, homesteaders driven from the Montana bottomland to work on one of the New Deal’s most audacious projects—the damming of the Missouri River. Through the story of each family member—a wrathful father, a mettlesome mother, and three very different sons, and the memorable women they marry—Doig conveys a sense of time and place that is at once epic in scope and rich in detail.
Running, Falling, Flying, Floating, Crawling is a loose compendium of photographs and texts that picture, examine, explore, and / or suggest the human body in states of abandon, helplessness, terror, subjugation, serenity, and transcendence. Artists include Andre Kertesz, Yves Klein, Laurie Simmons, Maya Deren, Gideon Mendel, Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Tabitha Soren, Nan Goldin, Rania Matar, John Divola, Harry Callahan, Sarah Charlesworth, and Francesca Woodman. Writers include David Campany, Lynne Tillman, Jennifer Blessing, Diane Seuss, Susan Bright, Gilda Williams, Marvin Heiferman, Maud Casey, and Carol Mavor.
The Man Who Loved Children is Christina Stead's masterpiece about family life. Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of Stead's satirical and brilliantly observed novel about the relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children. Sam, a scientist, uses words as weapons of attack and control on his children and is prone to illusions of power and influence that fail to extend beyond his family. His wife Henny, who hails from a wealthy Baltimore family, is disastrously impractical and enmeshed in her own fantasies of romance and vengeance. Much of the care of their six children is left to Louisa, Sam's 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Within this psychological battleground, Louisa must attempt to make a life of her own. First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was hailed for its satiric energy. Now its originality is again lauded by novelist, Jonathan Franzen, in his illuminating new introduction.
In a trance-like state, Albert walks – from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia – all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images. Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. André in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain.
A WASHINGTON POST BEST POETRY COLLECTION OF 2020 A new collection from a poet whose books "are an amazing experience: harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable" (Louise Glück) Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with poems of personal loss--a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from bewilderment at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and a group of devotional poems. The Nightfields closes with thirty-one metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into an observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear and move gradually toward the possibility of infinitude and connection.
This sweet contemporary story about poetry, family, and determining your own destiny is perfect for fans of books by Wendy Mass, Joan Bauer, Sharon Creech, and Rebecca Stead. Eleven-year-old Emily Elizabeth Davis has never met her father, so when a book of poetry with his name in it goes missing, Emily and her friends search all over their hometown of Berkeley, California, hoping to track it down. Meanwhile, even though her English-professor mother insists that Emily is destined to become a poet (she named her after Emily Dickinson!), Emily secretly corresponds with her idol, romance writer Danielle Steel. As Publishers Weekly says, "Fitzmaurice's story deftly mingles Dickinson, Danielle Steel, a budding crush, and protesting tree sitters while maintaining suspense that leads to a satisfying ending."