A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Author: Eimear McBride
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476789029
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Taking the literary world by storm, Eimear McBride’s internationally praised debut is one of the most acclaimed novels in recent years; it is “subversive, passionate, and darkly alchemical. Read it and be changed” (Eleanor Catton). Eimear McBride’s debut tells, with astonishing insight and in riveting detail, the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour, and her harrowing sexual awakening. Not so much a stream-of-consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing plunges inside its narrator’s head, exposing her world firsthand. This isn’t always comfortable—but it is always a revelation. Touching on everything from family violence to religion to addiction, and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity, and mordant wit. A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny, and alarming. It is a book you will never forget.

The Lesser Bohemians

Author: Eimear McBride
Publisher: Hogarth
ISBN: 110190349X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
A breathtaking award-winning novel about an extraordinary, all-consuming love affair One night an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, recently arrived in London to attend drama school, meets an older man—a well-regarded actor in his own right. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by more than a few demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both. A captivating story of passion and innocence, joy and discovery set against the vibrant atmosphere of 1990s London over the course of a single year, The Lesser Bohemians glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love. Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize Shortlisted for the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year

Strange Hotel

Author: Eimear McBride
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374722099
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
From Eimear McBride, author of the award-winning A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, comes the beguiling travelogue of a woman in exile: from her past, her ghosts, and herself. A nameless woman enters a hotel room. She’s been here once before. In the years since, the room hasn’t changed, but she has. Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms. From Avignon to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each is as anonymous as the last but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she negotiates with her memories, with the men she sometimes meets, with the clichés invented to aggravate middle-aged women, with those she has lost or left behind--and with what it might mean to return home. Urgent and immersive, filled with black humour and desire, McBride’s Strange Hotel is a novel of enduring emotional force.

Something Out of Place

Author: Eimear McBride
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782835725
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 110

Book Description
The blistering non-fiction debut from the author of the critically acclaimed A Girl is a Half-formed Thing *As heard on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour* 'A fearless, interrogative work ... A fierce and fascinating manifesto in McBride's persuasive prose' Sinéad Gleeson Here, Eimear McBride unpicks the contradictory forces of disgust and objectification that control and shame women. From playground taunts of 'only sluts do it' but 'virgins are frigid', to ladette culture, and the arrival of 'ironic' porn, via Debbie Harry, the Kardashians and the Catholic church - she looks at how this prejudicial messaging has played out in the past, and still surrounds us today. In this subversive essay, McBride asks - are women still damned if we do, damned if we don't? How can we give our daughters (and sons) the unbounded futures we want for them? And, in this moment of global crisis, might our gift for juggling contradiction help us to find a way forward? 'A satisfying feminist polemic' Susie Orbach 'Remarkable' Scotsman 'Eimear McBride is that old fashioned thing, a genius' Guardian

Mouthpieces

Author: Eimear McBride
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571360505
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 47

Book Description
Written during her time as the inaugural fellow in the Beckett archive last year, Eimear McBride's three short, characteristically brilliant plays - collected in one work, Mouthpieces.Each play depicts a fragment of female experience, all of them told in in Eimear's vivid, original and sharp-witted style. In 'The Adminicle Exists', we hear the inner voice of a woman who saves her troubled, dangerous partner; in 'An Act of Violence', a woman is quizzed about her reaction to a man's death; in 'The Eye Machine', the character 'Eye' tells of her imprisonment, flickering through a slideshow of female stereotypes.

Armed with Madness

Author: Mary Butts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description

Under the Eye of the Clock

Author: Christopher Nolan
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
ISBN: 9781559705127
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Oxygen-deprived for two hours at birth, Christopher Nolan lived to write, at age twenty-one, the autobiography of his childhood, told as the story of Joseph Meehan. He wrote the book, using a "unicorn stick" attached to his head, letter by painful letter. The result is astonishingly lyrical, filled with powerful description, touching moments of triumph and humiliation, and, above all, disarming wit. It is, in the words of London's Daily Express, "a book of sheer wonder".

Sleepless Nights

Author: Elizabeth Hardwick
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174380
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

Hood

Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062316818
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Room, Hood is a tale of grief and lust, frustration and hilarity, death and family. “Hood is thoroughly contemporary in how richly it depicts a beloved's death to review a couple's bumpy love history...This book's real pleasures lie in its intimate insights, its accurate characters and its sharp, rich observations... the greatest achievement of Hood is how it captures the domesticity of erotic passion” – Boston Globe Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in love. Yet Cara, the free spirit, and Pen, the stoic, craft a bond so strong it seems as though nothing could sever it: not the bickering, not the secrets, not even Cara’s infidelities. But thirteen years on, a car crash kills Cara and rips the lid off Pen’s world. Pen is still in the closet, teaching at her old school, living under the roof of Cara’s gentle father, who thinks of her as his daughter’s friend. How can she survive widowhood without even daring to claim the word? Over the course of one surreal week of bereavement, she is battered by memories that range from the humiliating, to the exalted, to the erotic, to the funny. It will take Pen all her intelligence and wit to sort through her tumultuous past with Cara, and all the nerve she can muster to start remaking her life. Donoghue’s Hood is a masterfully crafted narrative of relationships and a daring, deft exploration of the love’s imperfection—and how it can nonetheless dominate our lives as we grow and change.

Middlesex

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307401944
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 546

Book Description
Spanning eight decades and chronicling the wild ride of a Greek-American family through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, Jeffrey Eugenides’ witty, exuberant novel on one level tells a traditional story about three generations of a fantastic, absurd, lovable immigrant family -- blessed and cursed with generous doses of tragedy and high comedy. But there’s a provocative twist. Cal, the narrator -- also Callie -- is a hermaphrodite. And the explanation for this takes us spooling back in time, through a breathtaking review of the twentieth century, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set our narrator’s life in motion. Middlesex is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It’s a brilliant exploration of divided people, divided families, divided cities and nations -- the connected halves that make up ourselves and our world.