The Inevitable Contemporary Writers Confront Death

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The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death

Author : Bradford Morrow
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393341178
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death by : Bradford Morrow

Download or read book The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death written by Bradford Morrow and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-02-21 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is death and how does it touch upon life? Twenty writers look for answers. Birth is not inevitable. Life certainly isn't. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death. In these eloquent and surprising essays, twenty writers face this fact, among them Geoff Dyer, who describes the ghost bikes memorializing those who die in biking accidents; Jonathan Safran Foer, proposing a new way of punctuating dialogue in the face of a family history of heart attacks and decimation by the Holocaust; Mark Doty, whose reflections on the art-porn movie Bijou lead to a meditation on the intersection of sex and death epitomized by the AIDS epidemic; and Joyce Carol Oates, who writes about the loss of her husband and faces her own mortality. Other contributors include Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman, Peter Straub, and Brenda Hillman.

Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives

Author : Dana Mihăilescu
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443861626
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives by : Dana Mihăilescu

Download or read book Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives written by Dana Mihăilescu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-12 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects work by several European, North American, and Australian academics who are interested in examining the performance and transmission of post-traumatic memory in the contemporary United States. The contributors depart from the interpretation of trauma as a unique exceptional event that shatters all systems of representation, as seen in the writing of early trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dominick LaCapra. Rather, the chapters in this collection are in conversation with more recent readings of trauma such as Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” (2009), the role of mediation and remediation in the dynamics of cultural memory (Astrid Erll, 2012; Aleida Assman, 2011), and Stef Craps’ focus on “postcolonial witnessing” and its cross-cultural dimension (2013). The corpus of post-traumatic narratives under discussion includes fiction, diaries, memoirs, films, visual narratives, and oral testimonies. A complicated dialogue between various and sometimes conflicting narratives is thus generated and examined along four main lines in this volume: trauma in the context of “multidirectional memory”; the representation of trauma in autobiographical texts; the dynamic of public forms of national commemoration; and the problematic instantiation of 9/11 as a traumatic landmark.

What My Mother Gave Me

Author : Elizabeth Benedict
Publisher : Algonquin Books
ISBN 13 : 1616202688
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (162 download)

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Book Synopsis What My Mother Gave Me by : Elizabeth Benedict

Download or read book What My Mother Gave Me written by Elizabeth Benedict and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What My Mother Gave Me, women look at the relationships between mothers and daughters through a new lens: a daughter’s story of a gift from her mother that has touched her to the bone and served as a model, a metaphor, or a touchstone in her own life. The contributors of these thirty-one original pieces include Pulitzer Prize winners, perennial bestselling novelists, and celebrated broadcast journalists. Whether a gift was meant to keep a daughter warm, put a roof over her head, instruct her in the ways of womanhood, encourage her talents, or just remind her of a mother’s love, each story gets to the heart of a relationship. Rita Dove remembers the box of nail polish that inspired her to paint her nails in the wild stripes and polka dots she wears to this day. Lisa See writes about the gift of writing from her mother, Carolyn See. Cecilia Muñoz remembers both the wok her mother gave her and a lifetime of home-cooked family meals. Judith Hillman Paterson revisits the year of sobriety her mother bequeathed to her when Paterson was nine, the year before her mother died of alcoholism. Abigail Pogrebin writes about her middle-aged bat mitzvah, for which her mother provided flowers after a lifetime of guilt for skipping her daughter’s religious education. Margo Jefferson writes about her mother’s gold dress from the posh department store where they could finally shop as black women. Collectively, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; joy and grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage. In these stirring words we find that every gift, ?no matter how modest, tells the story of a powerful bond. As Elizabeth Benedict points out in her introduction, “whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends, we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter the most."

Sex, Drugs and Creativity

Author : Dustin Kahoud
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317353447
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Sex, Drugs and Creativity by : Dustin Kahoud

Download or read book Sex, Drugs and Creativity written by Dustin Kahoud and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sex, Drugs, and Creativity: The Search for Magic in a Disenchanted World, Kahoud and Knafo take a close look at omnipotent fantasies in three domains: sex, drugs, and creativity. They demonstrate how these fantasies emerge and how artists draw on them both to create and destroy—sometimes simultaneously – and how understanding this can help psychoanalysts work more effectively with these individuals. Using the personal statements of influential artists and entertainers, in addition to clinical material, the authors examine the omnipotence of self-destruction as it contends with that of creative artists. The authors argue that creative artists use omnipotent fantasies to imagine the world differently - this enables them to produce their art, but also leaves these artists vulnerable to addiction. Chapters devoted to Stephen King and Anne Sexton demonstrate the ways these authors used drugs and alcohol to fuel imagination and inspire creative output while simultaneously doing harm to themselves. A detailed case study also demonstrates successful clinical work with a creative substance user. Sex, Drugs, and Creativity will appeal to anyone interested in the links between creativity and substance use, and will be of great use to psychoanalysts and mental health practitioners working with these challenging clients.

The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub

Author : John C. Tibbetts
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476627339
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (766 download)

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Book Synopsis The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub by : John C. Tibbetts

Download or read book The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub written by John C. Tibbetts and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horror novelist Peter Straub creates highly personalized fiction with an allusiveness and ambiguity that deny the genre's explicit nature. For him, the Gothic style is to be created and recreated in a changing world--Faustian pacts, buried secrets, haunted places, ghosts, vampires and succubi take on strange new shapes and effects. Stephen King describes Straub's style as "a synthesis of horror and beauty." Drawing on interviews with Straub and featuring an exclusive interview with King, this study explores the work of the author who has been called "a writer of rare wit and intelligence in a field beset with cynical potboilers" (Douglas E. Winter, Washington Post, October 14, 1984).

The Best American Essays 2015

Author : Ariel Levy
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0544579216
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (445 download)

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Book Synopsis The Best American Essays 2015 by : Ariel Levy

Download or read book The Best American Essays 2015 written by Ariel Levy and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “22 contributors explore a wide range of experiences” in this “illuminating, invaluable” anthology edited by the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs (Publishers Weekly). Writing an essay is like catching a wave, posits guest editor Ariel Levy. To catch a wave, you need skill and nerve, not just moving water. The writers featured in this volume are certainly full of nerve, and have crafted a wide range of pieces awash in a diversity of moods, voices, and stances. Leaving an abusive marriage, parting with a younger self, losing your sanity to Fitbit, and even saying goodbye to a beloved pair of pants are just some of the experience probed by essays that are unified in the daring of their creation. As Levy notes, Writing around an idea you think is worthwhile—an idea you suspect is an insight—requires real audacity.” The Best American Essays 2015 includes entries by Hilton Als, Roger Angell, Justin Cronin, Meghan Daum, Anthony Doerr, Margo Jefferson, David Sedaris, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit and others.

The Odditorium

Author : Melissa Pritchard
Publisher : Bellevue Literary Press
ISBN 13 : 1934137472
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (341 download)

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Book Synopsis The Odditorium by : Melissa Pritchard

Download or read book The Odditorium written by Melissa Pritchard and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A writer at the height of her powers.” ―Oprah.com In each of these eight lyrical and baroque tales, Melissa Pritchard transports readers into spine-tingling milieus that range from the astounding realm of Robert LeRoy Ripley’s “odditoriums” to the courtyard where Edgar Allan Poe once played as a child. Whether she is setting the famed figures of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, against the real, genocidal history of the American West, or contrasting the luxurious hotel where British writer Somerset Maugham stayed with the modern-day brothels of India, her stories illuminate the many ways history and architecture exert powerful forces upon human consciousness. Melissa Pritchard is the author of the novel Palmerino, the short story collection The Odditorium, and the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write, among other books. Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, she now lives in Columbus, Georgia.

New Jersey Noir

Author : Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher : Akashic Books
ISBN 13 : 1617750263
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (177 download)

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Book Synopsis New Jersey Noir by : Joyce Carol Oates

Download or read book New Jersey Noir written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of short mystery stories set in the state of New Jersey by such authors as Bradford Morrow, Sheila Kohler, Richard Burgin, and Alicia Ostriker.

The Very Last Interview

Author : David Shields
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681376423
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

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Book Synopsis The Very Last Interview by : David Shields

Download or read book The Very Last Interview written by David Shields and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book Reality Hunger, David Shields has composed a mordantly funny, relentlessly self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have asked him over forty years. David Shields decided to gather every interview he’s ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he transcribed it. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn’t interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him—approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. Then, according to Shields, “the real work began: rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line.” The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent. As Chuck Klosterman says, “The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five years: interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong.” Shields’s new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, “Just when you think Shields couldn’t rethink and reinvent literature any further, he does it again. The Very Last Interview confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since Burroughs.”

A Solemn Pleasure

Author : Melissa Pritchard
Publisher : Bellevue Literary Press
ISBN 13 : 1934137979
Total Pages : 141 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (341 download)

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Book Synopsis A Solemn Pleasure by : Melissa Pritchard

Download or read book A Solemn Pleasure written by Melissa Pritchard and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A writer at the height of her powers” (Oprah.com) reflects on a literary life pulled in two directions: from war zone journalism to the writing and teaching of fiction In an essay entitled “Spirit and Vision” Melissa Pritchard poses the question: “Why write?” Her answer reverberates throughout A Solemn Pleasure, presenting an undeniable case for both the power of language and the nurturing constancy of the writing life. Whether describing the deeply interior imaginative life required to write fiction, searching for the lost legacy of American literature as embodied by Walt Whitman, being embedded with a young female GI in Afghanistan, traveling with Ethiopian tribes, or revealing the heartrending story of her informally adopted son William, a former Sudanese child slave, this is nonfiction vividly engaged with the world. In these fifteen essays, Pritchard shares her passion for writing and storytelling that educates, honors, and inspires. Melissa Pritchard is the author of the novel Palmerino, the short story collection The Odditorium, and the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write, among other books. Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, she now lives in Columbus, Georgia.

What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

Author : Mark Doty
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1324006056
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life by : Mark Doty

Download or read book What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life written by Mark Doty and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] incisive, personal mediation.” —New York Times Book Review Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul. In What Is the Grass, Doty effortlessly blends biography, criticism, and memoir to keep company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.

New Daughters of Africa

Author : Various Authors
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0241997011
Total Pages : 798 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (419 download)

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Book Synopsis New Daughters of Africa by : Various Authors

Download or read book New Daughters of Africa written by Various Authors and published by Random House. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 798 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly three decades after her pioneering anthology, Daughters of Africa, Margaret Busby curates an extraordinary collection of contemporary writing by 200 women writers of African descent, including Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A glorious portrayal of the richness and range of African women's voices, this major international book brings together their achievements across a wealth of genres. From Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the USA, overlooked artists of the past join key figures, popular contemporaries and emerging writers in paying tribute to the heritage that unites them, the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and their common obstacles around issues of race, gender and class. Bold and insightful, brilliant in its intimacy and universality, this landmark anthology honours the talents of African daughters and the inspiring legacy that connects them-and all of us.

Trophic Cascade

Author : Camille T. Dungy
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 0819577200
Total Pages : 89 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (195 download)

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Book Synopsis Trophic Cascade by : Camille T. Dungy

Download or read book Trophic Cascade written by Camille T. Dungy and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A soulful reckoning for our twenty-first century, held in focus through echoes of the past and future, but always firmly rooted in now.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry (2018) In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, Dungy writes positioned at a fulcrum, bringing a new life into the world even as her elders are passing on. In a time of massive environmental degradation, violence and abuse of power, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. Dwelling between vibrancy and its opposite, Dungy writes in a single poem about a mother, a daughter, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, brittle stars, giant boulders, and a dead blue whale. These poems are written in the face of despair to hold an impossible love and a commitment to hope. A readers companion will be available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions. “Dungy asks how we can survive despair and finds her answers close to the earth.” —Diana Whitney, The Kenyon Review “Trophic Cascade frequently bears witness—to violence, to loss, to environmental degradation—but for Dungy, witnessing entails hope.” —Julie Swarstad Johnson, Harvard Review Online “Tension. Simmering. Beneath her matter-of-fact, easy-going, sit-yourself-down, let-me-tell-it-like-it-is clarifying. And her power we take deadly seriously.” —Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews “[Trophic Cascade] asks us, in spite of the pain or difficulty of being human today, to find joy and vibrancy in our experiences.” —Elizabeth Flock, PBS Newshour

Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

Download Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters,

Author : David Shields
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393346064
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts by : David Shields

Download or read book Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts written by David Shields and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary short stories enacting giddy, witty revenge on the documents that define and dominate our lives. In our bureaucratized culture, we’re inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, primers, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, ad infinitum. David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, both writers and professors, have gathered forty short fictions that they’ve found to be seriously hilarious and irresistibly teachable (in both writing and literature courses): counterfeit texts that capture the barely suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents. The innovative stories collected in Fakes—including ones by Ron Carlson (a personal ad), Amy Hempel (a complaint to the parking department), Rick Moody (Works Cited), and Lydia Davis (a letter to a funeral parlor)—trace the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction and exemplify a crucial form for the twenty-first century.

Other People

Author : David Shields
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0804169853
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis Other People by : David Shields

Download or read book Other People written by David Shields and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Other People is something of a revelation: seventy-plus essays that form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but an intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness. Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, what function does art serve? Whether he is writing about sexual desire or information sickness, George W. Bush or Kurt Cobain, women's eyeglasses or Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell or Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism or the agony of first love, Shields sustains a piercing focus on the multiplicity of perspectives, the irreducible log jam of human information, and the possibilities and impossibilities for human connection.

I Think You're Totally Wrong

Author : David Shields
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0804169810
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis I Think You're Totally Wrong by : David Shields

Download or read book I Think You're Totally Wrong written by David Shields and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life; his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art. The stay-at-home dad (three young girls) and the workaholic writer (eighteen books) head to the woods to spend four days together in a cabin, arguing life vs. art. I Think You’re Totally Wrong is an impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate. Shields and Powell talk about everything—marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal, and (of course) writers and writing—in the name of exploring and debating their central question: the lived life versus the examined life. There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters of the universe—only a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish. James Franco’s film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong, starring the authors, premiered in 2015.

How Literature Saved My Life

Author : David Shields
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307961532
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

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Book Synopsis How Literature Saved My Life by : David Shields

Download or read book How Literature Saved My Life written by David Shields and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Reading How Literature Saved My Life is like getting to listen in on a really great, smart, provocative conversation. The book is not straightforward, it resists any single interpretation, and it seems to me to constitute nothing less than a new form.” ––Whitney Otto In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature. Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Renata Adler’s Speedboat to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. Shields evokes his deeply divided personality (his “ridiculous” ambivalence), his character flaws, his woes, his serious despairs. Books are his life raft, but when they come to feel un-lifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness. And he shares with us a final irony: he wants “literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this––which is what makes it essential.” A captivating, thought-provoking, utterly original way of thinking about the essential acts of reading and writing.