A Private Life

A Private Life PDF Author: Ran Chen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231506910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
From one of China's most celebrated contemporary novelists comes this riveting tale of a young woman's emotional and sexual awakening. Set in the turbulent decades of the Cultural Revolution and the Tian'anmen Square incident, A Private Life exposes the complex and fantastical inner life of a young woman growing up during a time of intense social and political upheaval. At the age of twenty-six, Ni Niuniu has come to accept pain and loss. She has suffered the death of her mother and a close friend and neighbor, Mrs. Ho. She has long been estranged from her tyrannical father, while her boyfriend—a brilliant and handsome poet named Yin Nan—was forced to flee the country. She has survived a disturbing affair with a former teacher, a mental breakdown that left her in a mental institution for two years, and a stray bullet that tore through the flesh of her left leg. Now living in complete seclusion, Niuniu shuns a world that seems incapable of accepting her and instead spends her days wandering in vivid, dreamlike reveries where her fractured recollections and wild fantasies merge with her inescapable feelings of melancholy and loneliness. Yet this eccentric young woman—caught between the disappearing traditions of the past and a modernizing Beijing, a flood of memories and an unknowable future, her chosen solitude and her irrepressible longing—discovers strength and independence through writing, which transforms her flight from the hypocrisy of urban life into a journey of self-realization and rebirth. First published in 1996 to widespread critical acclaim, Chen Ran's controversial debut novel is a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity, alienation and belonging, nature and society. As Chen leads the reader deep into the psyche of Ni Niuniu—into her innermost secrets and sexual desires—the borders separating narrator and protagonist, writer and subject dissolve, exposing the shared aspects of human existence that transcend geographical and cultural differences.

Private Life

Private Life PDF Author: Jane Smiley
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1400040604
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
As her husband's obsessions with science take a darker turn on the eve of World War II, Margaret Mayfield is forced to consider the life she has so carefully constructed. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres.

Private Life

Private Life PDF Author: Josep Maria de Sagarra
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 091467126X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Book Description
Private Life holds up a mirror to the moral corruption in the interstices of the Barcelona high society Sagarra was born into. Boudoirs of demimonde tramps, card games dilapidating the fortunes of milquetoast aristocrats - and how they scheme to conceal them - fading manors of selfish scions, and back rooms provided by social-climbing seamstresses are portrayed in vivid, sordid, and literary detail. The novel, practically a roman-à-clef for its contemporaries, was a scandal in 1932. The 1960's edition was bowdlerized by Franco's censors. Part Lampedusa, part Genet, this translation will bring an essential piece of 20th-century European literature to the English-speaking public.

A History of Private Life

A History of Private Life PDF Author: Philippe Ariès
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674400047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 658

Book Description
Library has Vol. 1-5.

The Private Life

The Private Life PDF Author: Josh Cohen
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619026376
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
With social networking and reality television, self–help columns and daytime talk shows, there's an infinite array of platforms to both expose our deepest thoughts and examine the thoughts of others. In this age of non–stop communication, one's privacy is subject to unrelenting examination, intrusion, and attack from the media, the government, friends, family, and complete strangers. So what are we trying to hide? And what are we trying to find out about others? Practicing psychoanalyst and professor of literature Josh Cohen tackles those questions in his study of privacy and personality, the "most vulnerable and indestructible region of your self." Using Sigmund Freud's theories on identity and the ego as a foundation, Cohen weaves through time and place to study an extensive variety of people who unearthed and revealed the rawest form of their selves. From Adam and Eve to the ballerinas in the hit 2010 film Black Swan, from Hester Prynne to British celebrity Katie Price, Cohen finds Freud's ideas in both fiction and reality alike. Yet even with all the times that we've exposed the inner workings of our psyches, Cohen is sure to emphasize that some part of every individual will always remain hidden. Like Freud once wrote, "The ego is not master in its own house." In a culture that floods our lives with light, how is it that we remain so helplessly in the dark?

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams PDF Author: Paul C. Nagel
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307828190
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 636

Book Description
February 21, 1848, the House of Representatives, Washington D.C.: Congressman John Quincy Adams, rising to speak, suddenly collapses at his desk; two days later, he dies in the Speaker’s chamber. The public mourning that followed, writes Paul C. Nagel, “exceeded anything previously seen in America. Forgotten was his failed presidency and his often cold demeanor. It was the memory of an extraordinary human being—one who in his last years had fought heroically for the right of petition and against a war to expand slavery—that drew a grateful people to salute his coffin in the Capitol and to stand by the railroad tracks as his bier was transported from Washington to Boston.” Nagel probes deeply into the psyche of this cantankerous, misanthropic, erudite, hardworking son of a former president whose remarkable career spanned many offices: minister to Holland, Russia, and England, U.S. senator, secretary of state, president of the United States (1825-1829), and, finally, U.S. representative (the only ex-president to serve in the House). On the basis of a thorough study of Adams’ seventy-year diary, among a host of other documents, the author gives us a richer account than we have yet had of JQA’s life—his passionate marriage to Louisa Johnson, his personal tragedies (two sons lost to alcoholism), his brilliant diplomacy, his recurring depression, his exasperating behavior—and shows us why, in the end, only Abraham Lincoln’s death evoked a great out-pouring of national sorrow in nineteenth-century America. We come to see how much Adams disliked politics and hoped for more from life than high office; how he sought distinction in literacy and scientific endeavors, and drew his greatest pleasure from being a poet, critic, translator, essayist, botanist, and professor of oratory at Harvard; how tension between the public and private Adams vexed his life; and how his frustration kept his masked and aloof (and unpopular). Nagel’s great achievement, in this first biography of America’s sixth president in a quarter century, is finally to portray Adams in all his talent and complexity.
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