Life Ceremony

Life Ceremony PDF Author: Sayaka Murata
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802159591
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
The long-awaited first short story-collection by the author of the cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, tales of weird love, heartfelt friendships, and the unsettling nature of human existence With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness. In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In “A First-Rate Material,” Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can’t stand the conventional use of deceased people’s bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. “Lovers on the Breeze” is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child’s bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. “Eating the City” explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while “Hatchling” closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in. In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.

Earthlings

Earthlings PDF Author: Sayaka Murata
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157025
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
An otherworldly coming-of-age tale of a woman who believes she is an alien, from the author of the international sensation Convenience Store Woman. Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman was one of the most unusual and refreshing bestsellers of recent years, depicting the life of a thirty-six-year-old clerk in a Tokyo convenience store. Now, in Earthlings, Sayaka Murata pushes at the boundaries of our ideas of social conformity in this brilliantly imaginative, intense, and absolutely unforgettable novel. As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her family and her cousin Yuu in her grandparents’ ramshackle wooden house in the mountains of Nagano, Natsuki decides that she must be an alien, which would explain why she can’t seem to fit in like everyone else. Later, as a grown woman, living a quiet life with her asexual husband, Natsuki is still pursued by dark shadows from her childhood, and decides to flee the “baby factory” of society for good, searching for answers about the vast and frightening mysteries of the universe—answers only Natsuki has the power to uncover. Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata’s status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe. Praise for Earthlings A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, TIME and Literary Hub Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, TIME, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, the Guardian, Vulture, Wired, Literary Hub, Bustle, PopSugar, and Refinery29 “Intimate, deadpan, and unflinchingly unhinged. . . . Exceptionally fun. . . . Amid all the hedgehog and alien talk is a novel that asks how happiness and freedom can be possible inside a stiflingly anxious world, and its answers, while grotesque, are worth reading.” —Wired “If you’re in the mood for weird, Sayaka Murata is always a reliable place to turn. . . . [Earthlings] centers on Natsuki, a character whose story begins in childhood with her cousin in the mountains and spirals ever more darkly (and bizarrely) into adulthood and its many strange reckonings. This is a story that’s best not to spoil, but it will get into your head.” —Seattle Times “It’s the book’s visceral, grim savagery, and those final shocking pages, that makes this such a vital, powerful novel. . . . Earthlings is the sort of challenging, confronting fiction that wakes you up with a jolt and leaves a lasting impression.” —Locus

Things Remembered and Things Forgotten

Things Remembered and Things Forgotten PDF Author: Kyoko Nakajima
Publisher: Sort of Books
ISBN: 1908745975
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
'If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes'. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture. The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.

Granta 157: Should We Have Stayed at Home?

Granta 157: Should We Have Stayed at Home? PDF Author: William Atkins
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 190988944X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
From Antarctica and the deserts of the US-Mexico border, to a Siberian whale-killing station and the alleyways of Taipei, these dispatches describe a world in perpetual motion (even when it is 'locked-down'). To travel, we are reminded, is to embrace the experience of being a stranger - to acknowledge that one person''s frontier is another's home. Granta 157 is guest-edited by award-winning travel writer William Atkins. It features: Jason Allen-Paisant remembers the trees of his childhood Jamaica from his home in Leeds Carlos Manuel lvarez navigates Cuba's customs system, translated by Frank Wynne Eliane Brum travels from her home in the Brazilian Amazon to Antarctica in the era of climate crisis, translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty Francisco Cant and Javier Zamora: a former border guard travels to the US-Mexico border with a former undocumented migrant who crossed the border as a child Jennifer Croft's richly illustrated essay on postcards and graffiti, inspired by Los Angeles Bathsheba Demuth visits a whale-hunting station on the Bering Strait, Russia Sinad Gleeson visits Brazil with Clarice Lispector Kate Harris with the Tlingit people of the Taku River basin, on the border of British Columbia and Alaska Artist Roni Horn on Iceland Emmanuel Iduma returns to Lagos in his late father's footsteps, Nigeria Kapka Kassabova among the gatherers of the ancient Mesta River, Bulgaria Taran Khan with Afghan migrants in Germany and Kabul Jessica J. Lee in the alleyways of Taipei, Taiwan, in search of her mother's home Ben Mauk among the volcanoes of Duterte's Philippines Pascale Petit tracks tigers in Paris and India Photographer James Tylor on the legacy of whaling in Indigenous South Australia, introduced by Dominic Guerrera

Recollections of My Nonexistence

Recollections of My Nonexistence PDF Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher:
ISBN: 0593083334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.

Whose Story Is This?

Whose Story Is This? PDF Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Haymarket Books+ORM
ISBN: 1642590770
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Book Description
Feminist essays for the #MeToo era from “the voice of the resistance,” the international bestselling author of Men Explain Things to Me (The New York Times Magazine). Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit appraises what’s emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are. Praise for Rebecca Solnit and her essays “Rebecca Solnit is essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “In these times of political turbulence and an increasingly rabid and scrofulous commentariat, the sanity, wisdom and clarity of Rebecca Solnit’s writing is a forceful corrective. Whose Story Is This? is a scorchingly intelligent collection about the struggle to control narratives in the internet age.” —The Guardian “Solnit’s passionate, shrewd, and hopeful critiques are a road map for positive change.” —Kirkus Reviews “Solnit’s exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy.” —Elle “Rebecca Solnit reasserts herself here as one of the most astute cultural critics in progressive discourse.” —Publishers Weekly “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org

The Mother of All Questions

The Mother of All Questions PDF Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608467201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

Book Description
A collection of feminist essays steeped in “Solnit’s unapologetically observant and truth-speaking voice on toxic, violent masculinity” (The Los Angeles Review). In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, “Solnit draw[s] anecdotes of female indignity or male aggression from history, social media, literature, popular culture, and the news . . . The main essay in the book is about the various ways that women are silenced, and Solnit focuses upon the power of storytelling—the way that who gets to speak, and about what, shapes how a society understands itself and what it expects from its members. The Mother of All Questions poses the thesis that telling women’s stories to the world will change the way that the world treats women, and it sets out to tell as many of those stories as possible” (The New Yorker). “There’s a new feminist revolution—open to people of all genders—brewing right now and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful, not to mention beguiling, voices.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times–bestselling author of Natural Causes “Short, incisive essays that pack a powerful punch.” —Publishers Weekly “A keen and timely commentary on gender and feminism. Solnit’s voice is calm, clear, and unapologetic; each essay balances a warm wit with confident, thoughtful analysis, resulting in a collection that is as enjoyable and accessible as it is incisive.” —Booklist

Taipei

Taipei PDF Author: Tao Lin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307950174
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
The basis for the movie High Resolution From one of this generation's most talked about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal, powerful, and moving novel about family, relationships, accelerating drug use, and the lingering possibility of death. Taipei by Tao Lin is an ode--or lament--to the way we live now. Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas. Along the way—whether on all night drives up the East Coast, shoplifting excursions in the South, book readings on the West Coast, or ill advised grocery runs in Ohio—movies are made with laptop cameras, massive amounts of drugs are ingested, and two young lovers come to learn what it means to share themselves completely. The result is a suspenseful meditation on memory, love, and what it means to be alive, young, and on the fringe in America, or anywhere else for that matter.

Globalization

Globalization PDF Author: Roland Robertson
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473914086
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
A stimulating appraisal of a crucial contemporary theme, this comprehensive analysis of globalizaton offers a distinctively cultural perspective on the social theory of the contemporary world. This perspective considers the world as a whole, going beyond conventional distinctions between the global and the local and between the universal and the particular. Its cultural approach emphasizes the political and economic significance of shifting conceptions of, and forms of participation in, an increasingly compressed world. At the same time the book shows why culture has become a globally contested issue - why, for example, competing conceptions of ′world order′ have political and economic consequences.
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