The Unreality of Memory

Author: Elisa Gabbert
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374720339
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Book Description
"Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. "A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

The Unreality of Memory

Author: Elisa Gabbert
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN: 183895063X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
'A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery' Andrew Sean Greer , author of Less 'Masterly... Her essays have a clarity and prescience that imply a sort of distant, retrospective view, like postcards sent from the near future' New York Times We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase "Did you see?" The feeling that we're living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten. Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert's The Unreality of Memory consists of a series of lyrical and deeply researched meditations on what our culture of catastrophe has done to public discourse and our own inner lives. In these tender and prophetic essays, she focuses in on our daily preoccupation and favorite pasttime: desperate distraction from disaster by way of a desperate obsession with the disastrous. Moving from public trauma to personal tragedy, from the Titanic and Chernobyl to illness and loss, The Unreality of Memory alternately rips away the facade of our fascination with destruction and gently identifies itself with the age of rubbernecking. A balm, not a burr, Gabbert's essays are a hauntingly perceptive analysis of the anxiety intrinsic in our new, digital ways of being, and also a means of reconciling ourselves to this new world. 'One of those joyful books that send you to your notebook every page or so, desperate not to lose either the thought the author has deftly placed in your mind or the title of a work she has now compelled you to read.' Paris Review

Normal Distance

Author: Elisa Gabbert
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 159376734X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Book Description
A collection of funny and thought-provoking poems inspired by surprising facts that will appeal to poetry lovers and poetry haters alike, from the author of the essay collection The Unreality of Memory, “a work of sheer brilliance, beauty, and bravery” (Andrew Sean Greer) Known to be both “casually brilliant” (Sandra Newman) and a “ruthless self-examiner” (Sarah Manguso), acclaimed writer Elisa Gabbert brings her “questing, restless intelligence” (Kirkus Reviews) to a new collection of poetry. By turns funny and chilling, these poems collect strange facts, interrogate language, and ask unanswerable questions that offer the pleasure of discovery on nearly every page: How does one suffer “gladly,” exactly? How bored are dogs? Which is more frightening, nothing or empty space? Was Wittgenstein sexy? The poems in this collection are earwormy, ultracontemporary, essayistic, aphoristic, and philosophical—invitations to eavesdrop on a mind paying attention to itself. Normal Distance is a book about thinking and feeling, meaning and experience, trees and the weather, and the boredom and pain of living through time.

The Word Pretty

Author: Elisa Gabbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781939568267
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Memoir. Cultural Criticism. In THE WORD PRETTY Elisa Gabbert brings together humor and observational intelligence to create a roving and curious series of lyrical essays on writing, reading, and living. Combining elements of criticism, meditation, and personal essay, this book reveals a poet's attention turned to subjects from translation to aphorism, from unreliable memory to beauty and the male gaze.

Future Memory

Author: P. M. H. Atwater
Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing
ISBN: 1571746889
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
There are many different paths to the future. According to P.M.H. Atwater, one of the foremost investigators into near-death experiences, future memory allows people to "live" life in advance and remember the experience in detail when something triggers that memory. Atwater explains the unifying, and permanent, effect of that experience is a brain a "brain shift" which she believes "may be at the very core of existence itself." In Future Memory, Atwater shows that structural and chemical changes are occurring in our brains, changes indicative of higher evolutionary development. This mind-blowing exploration of a mind-blowing topic traces her findings about this phenomenon and explores its implications for the individual and for society. Future Memory: Provides a series of steps to assist in developing future memory Explores new models of time, existence, and consciousness Presents an in-depth study of the brain shift and how it can be experienced Offers an extensive appendix and resource manual Future Memory is an important step in understanding the relationship between human perception and reality.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
Netflix’s series adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude premieres December 11, 2024! One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.

The Self Unstable

Author: Elisa Gabbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984475292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. Elisa Gabbert's THE SELF UNSTABLE combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader's reflection unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the "I" in both literary and daily life: "The future isn't anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear." "Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise." Make Magazine ..". smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn't so much distort as endlessly reveal, ' like the panopticon eye of a camera." The Rumpus ..". the dispassion about the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node." Gently Read Literature"

The Stone of Farewell

Author: Tad Williams
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0756402972
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 610

Book Description
Simon, a young kitchen boy and magician's apprentice, finds his dreams of great deeds and heroic wars becoming an all too shocking reality in a terrifying civil war.

Mystic Chords of Memory

Author: Michael Kammen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307761401
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 879

Book Description
Mystic Chords of Memory "Illustrated with hundreds of well-chosen anecdotes and minute observations . . . Kammen is a demon researcher who seems to have mined his nuggets from the entire corpus of American cultural history . . . insightful and sardonic." —Washington Post Book World In this ground-breaking, panoramic work of American cultural history, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Machine That Would Go of Itself examines a central paradox of our national identity How did "the land of the future" acquire a past? And to what extent has our collective memory of that past—as embodied in our traditions—have been distorted, or even manufactured? Ranging from John Adams to Ronald Reagan, from the origins of Independence Day celebrations to the controversies surrounding the Vietnam War Memorial, from the Daughters of the American Revolution to immigrant associations, and filled with incisive analyses of such phenonema as Americana and its collectors, "historic" villages and Disneyland, Mystic Chords of Memory is a brilliant, immensely readable, and enormously important book. "Fascinating . . . a subtle and teeming narrative . . . masterly." —Time "This is a big, ambitious book, and Kammen pulls it off admirably. . . . [He] brings a prodigious mind and much scholarly rigor to his task . . . an importnat book—and a revealing look at how Americans look at themselves." —Milwaukee Journal

Borges and Memory

Author: Rodrigo Quian Quiroga
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262549565
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
A scientist's exploration of the working of memory begins with a story by Borges about a man who could not forget. Imagine the astonishment felt by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga when he found a fantastically precise interpretation of his research findings in a story written by the great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges fifty years earlier. Quian Quiroga studies the workings of the brain—in particular how memory works—one of the most complex and elusive mysteries of science. He and his fellow neuroscientists have at their disposal sophisticated imaging equipment and access to information not available just twenty years ago. And yet Borges seemed to have imagined the gist of Quian Quiroga's discoveries decades before he made them. The title character of Borges's "Funes the Memorious" remembers everything in excruciatingly particular detail but is unable to grasp abstract ideas. Quian Quiroga found neurons in the human brain that respond to abstract concepts but ignore particular details, and, spurred by the way Borges imagined the consequences of remembering every detail but being incapable of abstraction, he began a search for the origins of Funes. Borges's widow, María Kodama, gave him access to her husband's personal library, and Borges's books led Quian Quiroga to reread earlier thinkers in philosophy and psychology. He found that just as Borges had perhaps dreamed the results of Quian Quiroga's discoveries, other thinkers—William James, Gustav Spiller, John Stuart Mill—had perhaps also dreamed a story like "Funes." With Borges and Memory, Quian Quiroga has given us a fascinating and accessible story about the workings of the brain that the great creator of Funes would appreciate.