Catcher in the Rye(麥田捕手)
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books."If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
Illustrated History Of Ancient Literature, Oriental And Classical
The Great Masters Of Russian Literature In The Nineteenth Century
Why Fish Piss Matters
Called Canada's most influential zine, Fish Piss ran for 11 issues, from 1996 to 2006. It began as a bilingual mash-up of the Montreal anglophone spoken word scene and the comics scene. Edited by Montrealer Louis Rastelli, and rooted in the DIY punk ethos, Fish Piss was a contact zone of literary material, comics, essays, interviews, politics, and music. Eventually the publication went from a scrappy photocopied zine to a 160-page publication with advertising and worldwide distribution through Tower Records. By the time it folded, Fish Piss was a calling card to a true bohemian community, and, due to timing, post-Referendum and pre-social media, perhaps the last of its kind. In Why Fish Piss Matters, Andy Brown does a deep dive into the zine, highlighting the unique way it bridged its French and English influences, creating an exciting space for creative exchange. Some of its early contributors who went on to illustrious careers include Kid Koala, Genevieve Castr矇 e, Catherine Kidd, Heather O' Neill, and Jonathan Goldstein. Brown, who lived in Montreal during this period, offers an insider's reflection on the cultural significance of the zine and its lasting legacy. He explores the history of various bohemian communities over the past 200 years, and Fish Piss's singular role in that history.
Women of a Certain Courage
Women of a Certain Courage is an uplifting read that follows the long tradition of women supporting and guiding other women. These 18 stories of courage will have you weeping, laughing and celebrating moments of bravery. With tales of activism, of finding a voice, escaping domestic violence, battling and much more, Women of a Certain Courage will inspire awe with the myriad ways women prevail and demonstrate courage.
Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007
J. G. Ballard's collected nonfiction from 1962 to 2007, mapping the cultural obsessions, experiences, and insights of one of the most original minds of his generation. J. G. Ballard was a colossal figure in English literature and an imaginative force of the twentieth century. Alongside seminal novels--from the notorious Crash (1973) to the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984)--Ballard was a sought-after reviewer and commentator, publishing journalism, memoir, and cultural criticism in a variety of forms. This volume collects the most significant short nonfiction of Ballard's fifty-year career, extending the range of the only previous collection of his nonfiction, A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996), which selected essays and reviews published between 1962 and 1995. A decade on from Ballard's death in 2009, a new generation of readers needs a new collection. In the period following A User's Guide, Ballard's writing addressed 9/11, British politics from New Labour onward, and what he termed "the rise of soft fascism"--a diagnosis that maintains its relevance amid a shift toward right populism in European and US politics. Beautifully edited by Ballard scholar and novelist Mark Blacklock, this volume includes Ballard's editorials and manifestos; commentaries on his own work; commentaries on the work of others; reviews; and more. Above all, it makes the case for the currency of Ballard's work at a contemporary juncture at which so many of his diagnoses concerning the media and politics have become apparent.
Bargain Witch
An occult history that grounds the sacred yearning for magic in real life. In these essays by scholar and self-initiated witch Brooke Palmieri, occult history, the eternal now, and our magickal queer futures align, connecting us to an enchantment both contemporary and classic. Drawing upon the knowledge and influence of practitioners from Rachel Pollack to Tituba, Palmieri grounds the sacred yearning for magic in real life, whether exploring the gossip of feuding Salem witches, paying the rent by playing "wizard" for news cameras, or detailing the psychic ups and downs of working in an occult bookshop. Written in a voice electrified with love for the craft and its lineage of eccentrics, Bargain Witch shows us witch life in all its quotidian humor and splendor, taking its place amongst the magickal classics that inspired it, a literary ouroboros.
Daughters in their Mothers' Gardens
The book explores the thematics of the mother-daughter relationships in selected texts by contemporary Chinese American women writers Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng and Gish Jen. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, Bone and Mona in the Promised Land altogether reflect an array of matrilineal traditions highly receptive to the conventional wisdom that daughters must separate from their mothers to become strong individuals. I argue that the considered narratives problematize the Western domestic storylines by hinging back to a complex mesh of racial histories, misogyny, rape, displacement, and enforced separation. The book emphasizes a universal impulse for perfection which dovetails with an endeavour to point out the diversity and complementarity of their challenging reactions to the dominant myths of female connection and disconnection. The selected texts relocate the universal romance of symbiosis-individuation at the intersection of a fluid but, nurturing positioning across different worlds and cultures. They demonstrate the crucial significance of storytelling in undercutting the unconscious essence of the mother-daughter rift. Hence, the purely psychological universal friction between every mother and daughter significantly shapes the examined matrilineal stories just as the characters᾽ positioning amid liminal hyphenated spaces do. The discussion contributes to reorienting the homophobic dimension in the mother-daughter attachment toward multicultural issues of consent and descent. The concerned plots create a tour de force in the mainstream matrilineal tradition, through narrative scenarios wherein the mothers and daughters foreground the impossibility of separation.
Dialogue with a Somnambulist
Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Chloe Aridjis now offers readers her first collection of shorter works, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy Chloe Aridjis's stories and essays are known to transport readers into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-m璽ch矇 monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist. Floating through space, cosmonauts are confronted not only with wonder and astonishment, but tedium and solitude. And in Mexico City, stray dogs animate public spaces, "infusing them with a noble life force." In her pen portraits, Aridjis turns her eye to expats and outsiders, including artists and writers such as Leonora Carrington, Mavis Gallant, and Beatrice Hastings. Exploring the complexity of exile and urban alienation, Dialogue with a Somnambulist showcases "the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book" (Garth Greenwell) and who is as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction.
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
"Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous." --The Atlantic One of the great novelists and public intellectuals of our time gives a master class on the philosophy of fiction. Umberto Eco was fond of pointing out that all writing is narrative. He published his famed debut novel The Name of the Rose when he was forty-eight years old, yet he believed that everything he had written to that point--from treatises on semiotics to essays on mass culture--took the form of a story. To Eco, scholarship, much like fiction, was shaped by narrative. It was the stuff of life itself. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, a collection of essays based on Eco's 1992-1993 Norton Lectures at Harvard, illuminates fiction's porous boundaries--in particular, the myriad ways that literary works conscript readers' experiences and expectations. Fiction, says Eco, can offer metaphysical comfort by appealing to our desire for a smaller, more legible world, one that gives a definitive answer to the question of "whodunnit?" But it also makes demands of us, presupposing a model reader who possesses the cultural knowledge necessary to interpret the text, as well as a willingness to follow the never-quite-specified rules of the literary game. Whether he is dissecting grammatical ambiguities in G矇rard de Nerval's nineteenth-century romantic masterpiece Sylvie, studying the rhythms of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, or tracing the web of fraud and misattribution that produced the antisemitic conspiracy theory of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this is Eco at his very best: intellectually omnivorous, endlessly fascinated by hoaxes, and always an adept navigator of the narrative forests that surround us.
Other Traditions
"An entertaining and shrewd little book ... Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur." --Charles Simic, New York Review of Books The most influential American poet of his generation appraises the lesser-known writers who shaped his own confounding, infinitely inventive work. John Ashbery was the quintessential "difficult poet." When asked to explain his work, he typically responded by insisting that his poetry was its own explanation. Fittingly, then, when he was invited to deliver the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1989, Ashbery declined to spell out what he put on the page. Instead, he offered rapt audiences a tour of his influences, the authors he turned to as a "jumpstart for times when the batteries have run down." The poets in Ashbery's personal canon--John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert--were all tragic figures in their own way, plagued by mental illness or poverty, ridiculed or barely recognized in their own lives, and in some cases, all but forgotten today. More importantly for Ashbery, each wrote poetry that somehow defies the reader. Clare's sometimes-monotonous naturalism, Roussel's exhausting maze of parenthetical clauses, and Wheelwright's eccentric Anglican mysticism do not invite casual reading. But under Ashbery's tutelage, we experience the idiosyncratic brilliance of these "other traditions," discovering how they shaped not only Ashbery's poetics but also the broader trajectory of twentieth-century literature, from surrealism to New Criticism. With inimitable charm, wit, and erudition, the lectures collected in Other Traditions elevate the imperfect and peculiar, affirming the literary virtues of Ashbery's difficult predecessors. The result is a revealing self-portrait of one of the giants of American poetry, if only through a convex mirror.
Narrative Songs of Dong Ethnic Group
Narrative Songs of Dong Ethnic Group: 'The Butterfly Lovers' of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai was published by The Ethnic Publishing House in 2020, under the editorship of Long Yaohong et al., who tried to preserve the style and characteristics of the original songs, besides making IPA transcriptions to the work. The Dong ethnic group in Guizhou has a rich tradition of narrative songs, including a popular rendition of the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. The repertoire includes a range of genres such as grand songs, pipa songs, antiphonal songs, vernacular songs, folk songs, operas, wedding songs that express feelings of romantic love. What follows is a preliminary work on it, a try to conveying the meaning and the image, and a story of communication, exchanges, and integration of different ethnic groups in China.
Profiles in Hope
Fifteen Australians tell their stories of surviving suicide and finding the way back to a better life. Every day, nine Australians take their own lives. Nineteen years ago, John Brogden came very close to adding his name to these statistics. But John survived and, since his recovery, he has become a passionate voice for mental health and suicide prevention. Now he is the Honorary President of LifeLine International. Personally and professionally, John knows how urgent it is to talk openly about suicide, and to provide people in despair with a way back when they are at their lowest point. Giving hope to those who think there is no other answer is critical. John is living proof that it's possible to survive and thrive. Now, in Profiles in Hope, John has gathered together some incredible Australians to tell their stories. With contributions from people such as James Packer, Jacqui Lambie, Tom Boyd, Layne Beachley, Preston Campbell and Ian Thorpe, alongside powerful stories of ordinary Aussies, these deeply personal accounts of survival, recovery and lives of purpose are a balm for the vulnerable and a beacon of light to those struggling. This book is for those at risk and for the people who love them and don't know how to help. Searingly honest and ultimately life-affirming, these are stories of solace and hope, and a lifeline for dark times. All royalties earned from the sale of this book will go to Lifeline. 'Surprisingly hopeful' WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN