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America started a grand experiment in the 1960s: deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The consequences were very destructive: homelessness; a degradation of urban life; increases in violent crime rates; increasing death rates for the mentally ill. My Brother Ron tells the story of deinstitutionalization from two points of view: what happened to the author's older brother, part of the first generation of those who became mentally ill after deinstitutionalization, and a detailed history of how and why America went down this path. My Brother Ron examines the multiple strands that came together to create the perfect storm that was deinstitutionalization: a well-meaning concern about the poor conditions of many state mental hospitals; a giddy optimism by the psychiatric profession in the ability of new drugs to cure the mentally ill; a rigid ideological approach to due process that ignored that the beneficiaries would end up starving to death or dying of exposure.
In his prize-winning collection, Ron Slate seeks out the intersections of art, technology, and humanity with intelligence, wit, and fervor. His unique voice is informed by his world travels as a business executive. As Robert Pinsky writes in his introduction, Slate “brings together the personal and the global in a way that is distinctive, subtle, defying expectations about what is political and what is personal.” In Slate's words, "Is this the end of the world? / No just the end / of the language that describes it." Recently published in The New Yorker, Slate has been praised by James Longenbach for his ability to “make the known world seem wickedly strange — a poetry that is utterly of the moment, our moment, because it sounds like nobody else.”
“Truly a masterpiece.” —Lawrence Joseph On a ravaged street overlooking a cemetery in a Christian enclave in war-torn 1970s Beirut, we meet Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father dies suddenly, Pavlov is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society—an anti-religious sect that arranges secret burial for outcasts denied last rites because of their religion or sexuality. Pavlov agrees to take on his father’s work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and faded community at the heart of Lebanon’s civil war.
Proceeding from Hélène Cixous’s charge to “kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing,” The Fix forges that woman’s reckoning with her violent past, with her sexuality, and with a future unmoored from the trappings of domestic life. These poems of lyric beauty and unflinching candor negotiate the terrain of contradictory desire—often to darkly comedic effect. In encounters with strangers in dive bars and on highway shoulders, and through ekphrastic engagement with visionaries like William Blake, José Clemente Orozco, and the Talking Heads, this book seeks the real beneath the dissembling surface. Here, nothing is fixed, but grace arrives by diving into th...
A collection of inspiring essays by the photographer Robert Adams, who advocates the meaningfulness of art in a disillusioned society In Art Can Help, the internationally acclaimed American photographer Robert Adams offers over two dozen meditations on the purpose of art and the responsibility of the artist. In particular, Adams advocates art that evokes beauty without irony or sentimentality, art that "encourages us to gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence." Following an introduction, the book begins with two short essays on the works of the American painter Edward Hopper, an artist venerated by Adams. The rest of this compilation contains texts--more than ...
A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading. Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as “some luminous globe” wherein “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.” In Gallery of Clouds, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: “The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They tak...
"A book of lectures by Terrance Hayes."--
The powerful English debut of a rising young French star, Our Riches is a marvelous, surprising, hybrid novel about a beloved Algerian bookshop A Library Journal Best Book of the Year Finalist for the PEN Translation Prize Winner of the French American Foundation Prize Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto “by the young, for the young,” discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, b...
She thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marvelled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing. Margot meets Robert. They exchange numbers. They text, flirt and eventually have sex – the type of sex you attempt to forget. How could one date go so wrong? Everything that takes place in Cat Person happens to countless people every day. But Cat Person is not an everyday story. In less than a week, Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker debut became the most read and shared short story in their website’s history. This is the bad date that went viral. This is the conversation we’re all having. This gift edition contains photographs by celebrated photographer Elinor Carucci, who was commissioned by the New Yorker to capture the image that accompanied Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person when it appeared in the magazine. You Know You Want This, Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, will be published in February 2019.
In his acclaimed debut collection The Incentive of the Maggot, Ron Slate delivered an ingenious and enigmatic account of the intersections of global, family and personal histories. Now, in The Great Wave, a more personal tone asserts itself as Slate fashions poignant and haunting poems that shock us with a recognition of our perilous times. These are poems of strange and sometimes caustic assessment, reflecting on family, the work life, catastrophe, creativity, solitude, and desire--tracking the transit between reality and the imagination, and creating the sound of its discoveries. Seductive, demanding, witty, and embittered, Slate's voice comes from a secret, intimate space abutting a large, incongruous world. The poems in The Great Wave, so taken with the collisions between history and contemporary life, remind us that the role of poetry is to confirm our existence by giving shape to the inner world.