Waking Gods is a heart-pounding thrill ride. Well, seriously, I don't even know how to convey how exciting, fast-paced and unputdownable this book was. Sleeping Giants had already started to answer some questions, and with the atmosphere of mystery dwindling, I wasn't sure exactly what a sequel would offer. To be honest, I wasn't sure Waking Gods would have as much of an effect on me. Maybe it's just me, but I get shivers at the question: if there is something on our planet that didn't occur naturally, that we didn't make, that we couldn't have made - then, who did? What does this mean for humanity? For science? Religion? After I read Sleeping Giants on a whim last year, I ended up being sucked into its incredible premise: giant body parts are discovered in the earth that predate the human technology required to make them.
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" hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best.She's made a story that's quiet dignified." Publishers Weekly, Starred "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic - and redemptive. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.Īs bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness-not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy. With vivid, unforgettable detail, these Marines reveal harrowing accounts of combat with an implacable enemy, the camaraderie they found, the friends they lost, and the aftermath of the war's impact on their lives. Following fifteen Marines from Pearl Harbor, through their battles with the Japanese, to their return home after V-J Day, Adam Makos and Marcus Brotherton have compiled an oral history of the Pacific War in the words of the men who fought on the front lines. Download Voices of the Pacific Expanded Edition Book in PDF, Epub and Kindleįrom the bestselling author of A Higher Call and Spearhead comes an unflinching firsthand chronicle of the heroic US Marines who fought on Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and in other pivotal battles during the Pacific War, a classic book now expanded with new stories from the flyboys overhead and the home front at war. In our cultural mythology, love doesn’t just conquer all, but it justifies all sorts of bad behavior, too. In fact, the novel offers - among much else - a critique of the privileged status that Western society has accorded to romantic passion since the Middle Ages. Through the power of Nabokov’s art, the book’s narrator, a middle-aged man fixated on a pubescent girl, does all he can to present himself as the besotted victim in a doomed romance. Consider an example from recent literature: I find Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” funny, complex, beautifully written, endlessly rereadable. In the arts, this can result in near hysteria at the discovery of sexism, racism or exoticism in the masterpieces of earlier ages. Absolutism, whether political, aesthetic or religious, leads to favoring those who conform to our beliefs and condemning everyone else. Shannon artfully builds on the world of The Priory of the Orange Tree with this masterful standalone prequel. When the Dreadmount erupts, bringing with it an age of terror and violence, these women must find the strength to protect humankind from a devastating threat. Now someone from her mother's past is coming to upend her fate. Dumai has spent her life in a Seiikinese mountain temple, trying to wake the gods from their long slumber. The dragons of the East have slept for centuries. Their daughter, Glorian, trails in their shadow – exactly where she wants to be. To the north, in the Queendom of Inys, Sabran the Ambitious has married the new King of Hróth, narrowly saving both realms from ruin. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms – but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation is starting to question the Priory's purpose. In A Day of Fallen Night, Samantha Shannon sweeps readers back to the universe of Priory of the Orange Tree and into the lives of four women, showing us a course of events that shaped their world for generations to come. Shannon has created a world rich in intricate mythology, beautifully realized and complex." Jennifer Saint, bestselling author of Ariadne The New York Times bestselling stunning, standalone prequel to The Priory of the Orange Tree. Groaning, I squeezed my eyes shut again and desperately tried not to throw up all over myself. My vision went supernova despite the shade, and what was left of my brain dried into a crusted scab. I tried again, too hoarse to inject it with my usual impatient demand. “Who do I have to fuck to turn that light off?” My voice, ruined by the mother of all hangovers, graveled. Keeping my eyes squeezed shut, I managed to work up enough foul-tasting saliva to rasp a groan. Whatever chemical slank I’d gotten into last night, it wrecked me. That would explain the three-legged tango my guts were attempting, and possibly the incessant drone flattening all the wrinkles in my brain. Given the taste, something furry had crawled inside my mouth and spawned a litter. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, glued by a gummy layer of what felt like mange. The light searing through the thin barrier of my eyelids did its best to fry my already scrambled brains, leaving me groaning as I threw an arm over my aching eye sockets. Two bodies are found in an apartment, a human man and a greycap whose body has been sliced in half – the legs are nowhere to be found. Except of course in the world of Ambergris and the head of Jeff Vandermeer there can never be anything as straight forward as hardboiled noir. So, Shriek, for example, despite moving the Ambergris history on a little bit and being every bit as weird, wild and horrific at times as City of Saints & Madmen was his romance (it could even have been his historical romance) – and Finch? Finch is his hardboiled noir. From the beginning, Vandermeer has been the sort of writer who sees his books in terms of both narrative and genre. A good long while ago now, I interviewed Jeff Vandermeer who at the time was in the midst of publicising his majestic City of Saints & Madmen, a sort of House of Leaves-esque cornucopia centred on the fictional city of Ambergris, a city at once thrilling, unknowable, mysterious and utterly real, in which a century long internecine war was going on between the residents and creatures known as greycaps (who looked a bit mushroomy and had the ability to wield mushrooms and reduce flesh and blood to spores that blew in the wind) – and Jeff talked me through where he saw his envisioned Ambergris cycle going, touching on both Shriek: An Afterword and Finch, each of which have now appeared. Or perhaps it's the detachment of some other creature with a single-minded focus on sensory stimuli. Data about social class, for instance, is presented with a kind of scientific detachment. For Anthill is no tract: The characters are well drawn and the details minutely observed. His skill at making biology accessible and engaging translates to fiction. Wilson, who's won two Pulitzer Prizes for his nonfiction, is a wonderful writer. And after college (and law school), he takes up the cause of saving the Nokobee from condo developers. Then, like Alabama native Wilson, he takes up entomology. Norton & Co.), he's become perhaps the planet's most-senior debut novelist.Īnthill centers on Raff Cody, a small-town, southern Alabama lad who grows up loving nature as embodied in the nearby Nokobee wildlands. And in 1988, he edited BioDiversity, the volume that introduced that now-universal term into popular usage.Īt 81, Wilson has tried a new tack: With April's publication of Anthill (W.W. And for decades, through his writing, he's been an outspoken advocate for the science behind conservation.įor instance, Wilson's 1984 book, Biophilia, about the evolutionary basis for humanity's attraction to nature, heavily influenced the environmental movement. Wilson, an entomologist, is generally thought to know more about ants than anyone, ever. Wilson translates his research for the general public, and explains its relevance beyond scholarship. Much more than most scientists, Edward O. The text presents an extensive reinterpretation of the philosophy of Marx, with particular focus on commodity fetishism and contemporary mass media. Each thesis is briefabout a paragraph in length. Translation of: Commentaires sur la societe du spectacle. The Society of the Spectacle is a philosophical text presented in nine chapters and 221short theses. Comments on the society of the spectacle / Guy Debord translated. 1931- Comments on the society of the spectacle. 1988 This edition published by V erso 1990 © Editions Gerard Lebovici 1988 Translation © Malcolm Imrie 1990 All rights reserved Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIV 3HR USA: 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001-2291 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Debord, Guy L. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, publishedtwenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previousanalysis and demonstrated how they were. First published by Editions Gerard Lebovici. In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign. |