Orphan Black meets Fringe in a story that reminds us that living our best life sometimes means embracing the imperfect one we already have. "Fraught and deeply moving...the work of a genuinely exciting new talent." —Booker Prize winner, George Saunders. “Aimee Pokwatka’s Self-Portrait with Nothing is tantalizing and elusive lacework, delicately balanced between the branches of fantasy, mystery and realism like a spider’s web.” —The New York Times If a picture paints a thousand worlds . . . Abandoned as an infant on the local veterinarian’s front porch, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two loving mothers, and now, at thirty-six is married to the stable, supportive Ike. She’s never told anyone that at fifteen she discovered the identity of her biological mother. That’s because her birth mother is Ula Frost, a reclusive painter famous for the outrageous claims that her portraits summon their subjects’ doppelgängers from parallel universes. Researching the rumors, Pepper couldn’t help but wonder: Is there a parallel universe in which she is more confident, more accomplished, better able to accept love? A universe in which Ula decided she was worth keeping? A universe in which Ula’s rejection didn’t still hurt too much to share? Combining a thrilling pan-continental race against time with an authentic and touching personal drama, Self-Portrait with Nothing is an unforgettable debut that explores what it means to be part of a family. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi's Self-portrait ruptures the linear tradition of art-historical writing. Lonzi first abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising. This is the voice of feminist experimentalism in Italian art and literature, and here Lonzi speaks for herself in English. Self-portrait montages her verbatim conversations with fourteen prominent artists working at the time, all men except one. Lonzi's vital feeling that it was impossible to respond professionally to the political and existential problems embedded in the production and distribution of artworks drives the book's contingent structure. Artmaking struck Lonzi as the invitation to be together in a humanly satisfying way. This first English translation brings Lonzi's final work of criticism before her break with 'art' to an international audience. Her uncompromising enactment and pragmatic drop-out discontinues the narration of postwar modern art in Italy and beyond.

Living with a private investigator can bring an element of danger into one's life as Peter Brandon finds out in this new novel by J.P. Bowie. When his partner Jeff Stevens disappears on a routine trip to meet a friend in LA, Peter's intuition alerts him to the fact that Jeff is somehow being held against his will. Determined to find him, Peter reaches out to his deceased lover, Phillip, through the unbreakable psychic bond that still exists between them. Traumatized into unconsciousness, he dreams and remembers the life-defining relationship he had with Phillip and the subsequent events that took him almost to the point of death--and back. On waking, and with the certain knowledge that Phillip will aid him in his search, he and his close friends Andrew and David, set out to find Jeff. They enlist the help of Nick Fallon, a NYPD detective, who flies in to help them and together they face a cult of Satanists led by Paul Lefevre, a mad illusionist promising his followers eternal life. Lefevre attempts to take control of Peter's bond with Phillip by holding Peter's mother hostage--a mistake that will cost Lefevre dearly as Phillip exacts a terrible revenge. "A Self-Portrait" is an entertaining mix of romance and suspense, of enduring love and friendship, and above all, the human spirit's indomitable will to survive.

miscellanea updated 2024/11/06

Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove examines the entwinement of material music objects, technology and memory in relation to a range of independent record labels, including Sarah Records, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers. Moving from Edison’s phonograph to digital music files, from record collections to online archives, Roy argues that materiality plays a crucial role in constructing and understanding the territory of recorded sound. How do musical objects ‘write’ cultural narratives? How can we unearth and reactivate past histories by looking at yesterday’s media formats? What is the nature, and fate, of the physical archive in an increasingly dematerialized world? In what ways do physical and digital musical objects coexist and intersect? With its innovative theoretical approach, the book explores the implications of materialization in the fashioning of a musical world and its cultural transmission. A substantial contribution to the field of music and material culture studies, Media, Materiality and Memory also provides a nuanced and timely reflection on nostalgia and forgetting in the digital age.

A Study Guide for John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

A couple of months after my mother died, I became aware that I needed something to help me cope with her passing. One day, I was inspired to write a story each day, using a word prompt from a "Photo-a-Day" Facebook group. Some days, it would be the last thing I did, and often as I started to write, I would have no idea what would eventuate. On other days, there would be two or three articles inspired by the one word. Many stories were written over that year, and this book contains 100 of them. Selecting the right stories for this first volume of Conversations with Myself took a lot of prayer and shuffling, but I hope they will encourage, challenge, and give you something to smile about occasionally, just as they did for me while I was writing them.

The Geography of Time is Munayem Mayenin's third poetry collection, first published by Publish America in 2005. Here's the second edition as an Imsonium Books.

In The Naked Heart, Peter Gay explores the bourgeoisie's turn inward. At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport." Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age.

A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality? Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form. By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strategies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagonizes the order of things.