Until Further Notice, I Am Alive

Author: Tom Lubbock
Publisher: Granta Publications
ISBN: 1847085326
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Book Description
“These are thoughts for us all, sooner or later—and this is a book I'll keep with me, as long as I live.”—David Sexton, The Scotsman In 2008, art critic Tom Lubbock was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor and told he had only two years to live. Physically fit and healthy, and suffering from few symptoms, he faced his death with the same directness and courage that had marked the rest of his life. Lubbock was renowned for the clarity and unconventionality of his writing, and his characteristic fierce intelligence permeates this extraordinary chronicle. With unflinching honesty and curiosity, he repeatedly turns over the fact of his mortality, as he wrestles with the paradoxical question of how to live, knowing we’re going to die. Defying the initial diagnosis, Tom survived for three years. He savored his remaining days; engaging with books, art, friends, his wife and their young son, while trying to stay focused on the fact of his impending death. There are medical details—he vividly describes the slow process of losing control over speech as the tumor gradually pressed down on the area of his brain responsible for language—but this is much more than a book about illness; rather, it's a book about a man who remains in thrall to life, as he inches closer to death. “I hope that if I am ever diagnosed with a terminal illness I will remember to reread Until Further Notice, I Am Alive. It is, in its tough-minded way, truly joyous.”—Lynn Barber, Sunday Times

The Iceberg

Author: Marion Coutts
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190529
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
“The work of an exceptional woman artist, writing from the inside about the things women have always done: nursing, nurturing, loving.” —The Guardian Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize, and finalist for every major nonfiction award in the UK, including the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Biography Award, The Iceberg is artist and writer Marion Coutts’ astonishing memoir; an “adventure of being and dying” and a compelling, poetic meditation on family, love, and language. In 2008, Tom Lubbock, the chief art critic for The Independent was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The Iceberg is his wife, Marion Coutts’, fierce, exquisite account of the two years leading up to his death. In spare, breathtaking prose, Coutts conveys the intolerable and, alongside their two-year-old son Ev—whose language is developing as Tom’s is disappearing—Marion and Tom lovingly weather the storm together. In short bursts of exquisitely textured prose, The Iceberg becomes a singular work of art and an uplifting and universal story of endurance in the face of loss. “Dazzling, devastating . . . In her plain-spoken retelling of the commonplace human experience of illness and loss, Coutts achieves something truly extraordinary—she’s created one of the most haunting and achingly honest explorations of grief in recent memory.” —Los Angeles Times

I Am Alive and You Are Dead

Author: Emmanuel Carrère
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312424510
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
"As disturbing and engrossing as a work by Dick himself, Carrere's unconventional biography interweaves life and art to reveal the maddening genius whose writing foresaw - from cloning to reality TV - a world that looks ever more like one of his inventions."--BOOK JACKET.

The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature

Author: W. Michelle Wang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000220745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift, and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights. Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres – including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more – the contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. Essays are included from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary. This collection provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death, where “live with” itself might mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and, perhaps most compellingly of all, to escaping. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars working in the fields of medical humanities, thanatography (death studies), life writing, Victorian studies, modernist studies, narrative, contemporary fiction, popular culture, and more.

Uncontrived Mindfulness

Author: Vajradevi
Publisher: Windhorse Publications
ISBN: 1911407627
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
A comprehensive guide to ending suffering through the practice of mindfulness In Uncontrived Mindfulness Vajradevi guides us in the practice of exploring our experience as it happens. The emphasis is on cultivating wisdom, using the tools of attention and curiosity to see through the delusion that is causing our suffering.

Culture

Author: Ben Highmore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136472983
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
What are the qualities and properties that make something cultural? What does claiming something as cultural allow us to do? Culture offers students a workable understanding of the category ‘culture’ and explores how the realm of the ‘cultural’ can be practically explored as a way of understanding the world. Ben Highmore provides a clear and robust defence of the productivity of cultural analysis in a media saturated world, while also instilling a sense of modesty in qualifying what can and can’t be accomplished in the name of cultural analysis. With extensive examples and case studies throughout, the book demonstrates both the productivity and the limitations in orientating analysis to the cultural. A thought-provoking and engaging examination, Culture is an ideal introductory text for students of media and cultural studies.

On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie

Author: Daniel Whistler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474254136
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
Over three decades, Gillian Howie wrote at the forefront of philosophy and critical theory, before her untimely death in 2013. This interdisciplinary collection uses her writings to explore the productive, yet often resistant, interrelationship between feminism and critical theory, examining the potential of Howie's particular form of materialism. The contributors also bring to this debate a serious engagement with Howie's late turn towards philosophies of mortality, therapy and 'living with dying'. The volume considers how differently embodied subjects are positioned within public institutions, discourses and spaces, and the role of philosophy, art, film, photography, and literature, in facing situations such as sexual oppression and life-limiting illness.

RecordCovid19

Author: Kristopher Lovell
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110731002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
RecordCovid19. Historicizing Experiences of the Pandemic provides insights into the experience of the Covid19 pandemic from an historical and sociological perspective. Using the first-hand testimonies submitted as part of the #RecordCovid19 project as its inspiration, the chapters in this edited collection explore and contextualise the initial responses to the Covid19 pandemic. The collection examines people’s relationships with Covid19 as an historical event, including their own experiences of living through history; their relationship with their surroundings, including their relationships with family, the soundscapes and the emotional environments of a pandemic world; the impact and tone of political rhetoric, including the use (and misuse) of wartime myths and language in the United Kingdom; and finally, what lessons can be learnt from how people discuss their own personal stories and what lessons can we draw from previous examples of storytelling in moments of crisis. The result is a fascinating and rich discussion derived from an archive full of idiosyncratic experiences of life changing during the Covid19 pandemic.

The Iceberg

Author: Marion Coutts
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN: 178239351X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
In 2008 the art critic Tom Lubbock was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The tumor was located in the area controlling speech and language, and would eventually rob him of the ability to speak. He died early in 2011. Marion Coutts was his wife. In short bursts of beautiful, textured prose, Coutts describes the 18 months leading up to her partner's death. This book is an account of a family unit, man, woman, young child, under assault, and how the three of them fought to keep it intact. Written with extraordinary narrative force and power, The Iceberg is almost shocking in its rawness. It charts the deterioration of Tom's speech even as it records the developing language of his child. Fury, selfishness, grief, indignity, and impotence are all examined and brought to light. Yet out of this comes a rare story about belonging, an "adventure of being and dying." This book is a celebration of each other, friends, family, art, work, love, and language.

The Wounded Self

Author: Nina Schmidt
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640140166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Takes the recent wave of German autobiographical writing on illness and disability seriously as literature, demonstrating the value of a literary disability studies approach.