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The Dreamy, Sensual, and Bizarre Folk Tales of Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada’s English-language publisher, New Directions, describes her slender book The Bridegroom Was a Dog in simple and straightforward terms: “A bizarre tale of passion and romance between a schoolteacher and a dog.” There is, of course, complexity to this tight and colorful novella (written in 1993, and translated from Japanese in 1998), in which the life of Mitsuko, an eccentric teacher, begins to take on the qualities of a fable when a strange, doglike man arrives in her home and engulfs her life. Dark humor dovetails with stark and erotic prose as the story careens through surreal twists and turns. The story is narrated with the breathless quality and wide-eyed spirit of a child telling a fairytale for the first time, with visceral, lively details spilling across the page:

One August day soon after school had let out for the summer, a man of twenty-seven or -eight came calling at the Kitamura School with an old-fashioned leather suitcase but not a trace of sweat on him despite the hot sun beating down from above, and although he didn’t look like a friend of Mitsuko’s, with his closely cropped hair, immaculate white shirt, neatly creased trousers and polished leather shoes, he seemed to know all about her house, for he walked straight into the garden through the gap in the fence, and when he saw Mitsuko repairing her mountain bike, half-naked, her hair disheveled, he went right up to her and said:

“I’m here to stay.”

Mitsuko’s eyes widened and rolled upward, her mouth dropped open and she forgot to close it, and since she couldn’t think of what to say, she kept touching her throat with her fingertips, while the man silently put his suitcase down on the veranda, took off his wristwatch, and gave it two or three hard shakes as though to get the water out of it.

“Did you get my telegram?” he asked with a knowing laugh.

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A Book in the Mail is the Cure For Ferrante Fever

Magda Szabó. Photo via gabrilu, Flickr

As a regular book browser, or shelf stalker, and former employee of Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, I’ve recently watched several customers come in asking for recommendations of what to read next after finishing Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s four-volume saga, The Neapolitan Quartet — a masterwork concerning issues of class, status, and the remarkable complexity of female friendship, set on the fringe of an economically depressed Naples. I also had been wondering what I myself would find to read and recommend to friends to quench the Ferrante Fever. As if the book gods heard my call, I nearly simultaneously received a long letter and gift from an old friend in the mail the other day. I’d recommended she read Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. In return she sent along a beautiful recommendation of deceased Hungarian novelist, Magda Szabó’s The Door, a novel that also explores the complex and unsettling nature of friendship between two women who couldn’t be more different:

She was nowhere to be seen, either in the apartment when I awoke, or in the street when I set off for the hospital; but there was evidence of her handiwork in the section of pavement outside the front door swept clean of snow. Obviously, I told myself in the car, she was making her rounds at the other houses. I wasn’t distressed, or heartbroken. I felt that only good news awaited me at the hospital, as indeed it did. I was out until lunchtime. Arriving home, rather hungry, I was sure she’d be sitting there in the apartment, awaiting my return. I was wrong. I was faced with the disconcerting experience of walking into my own home, bearing news of life and death, and no-one to share it with. Our Neanderthal ancestor learned to weep the first time he stood in triumph over the bison he had dragged in and found no-one to tell of his adventures, or show his spoils to, or even his wounds. The apartment stood empty. I went into one room after another, looking for her, even calling out her name. I didn’t want to believe that, on this of all days, when she didn’t even know if my patient was alive or dead, she could be somewhere else. The snow had stopped falling. There could be nothing in the street requiring her attention. And yet she was nowhere to be found.

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A Case of Mistaken Identity: Percival Everett’s New Collection of Stories

Publicity still from the film Dances with Wolves. Canadian First Nations actor Graham Greene portrayed Kicking Bird.

After a night in a motel I returned to the library the next morning and looked at images of Graham Greene. The man in my photograph did look a lot like Graham Greene, but also different. Regardless, I didn’t know where next to look. I decided to try the sheriff’s office.

The inside of the office was as nondescript as the outside and in fact so was the sheriff. He was a new sherif, though he was over fifty. I could tell because his clothes were so neat and crisp. His dispatcher was out sick and so he was manning the desk, he told me. I showed him the photograph.

Looks like that actor,” he said.

“I know.”

“What’s his name?”

“Graham Greene.”

“No, that’s not it. He was on that Chuck Norris television show.”

He scratched his head as he looked out the window. “Floyd something. Westerman. Floyd Westerman.”

“This man’s name is Davy Cloud. He’s Arapaho and he’s about eighty now.”

“Why do you want him?”

“I promised his hundred-year-old mother I’d find him.”

—From Percival Everett’s first short story collection since 2004, Half an Inch of Water, which is concerned with issues of race and identity, and family and community, and is set against the backdrop of the American West.

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When Your Grandparents Are Intellectuals: A Family’s History Through Books

Shelves containing Communist histories, including Chimen and Henry Collins’s book on Marx. This bookcase was just to the right of the bed. Photo courtesy of Sasha Abramsky and his family.

All of that mid-century Marxist devotional intensity was concentrated in Mimi and Chimen’s bedroom. There were Socialist and Communist books in Russian, German, Yiddish, French, English, Hebrew. There were old pamphlets so yellowed by time that one risked their disintegration simply by touching them. When Chimen and his close friend Henry Collins, who had collaborated on a number of articles about Marx beginning in the early 1950s—they had met through the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party—decided to write their book Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement: Years of the First International, the books and documents in Chimen and Mimi’s bedroom provided the nucleus for their research. It was, as Chimen had always intended it to be, a working library.

—From journalist Sasha Abramsky’s account of his grandparents’ intellectual lives, The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a tour of Chimen and Miriam Abramsky’s massive book collection of Jewish history and socialist literature.

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How to Get SuperBetter

Photo: Kiyash Monsef

Jessica Gross | Longreads | September 2015 | 18 minutes (4,658 words)

 

In 2009, while game designer Jane McGonigal was writing her first book, Reality Is Broken, she hit her head. The concussion didn’t heal. A month later, she was still plagued by intense physical discomfort and was told to avoid reading, writing, video games, alcohol, and caffeine. She became depressed and anxious, and had suicidal thoughts for the first time in her life.

By then, McGonigal had been researching games, and how the skills they build can help improve our real lives, for nearly a decade. She realized she ought to put her findings into practice. She designed a recovery game called “Jane the Concussion Slayer,” which involved recruiting allies (her sister and her husband) and identifying “bad guys” (symptom triggers) to avoid, “power-ups” (little boosts, like eating walnuts) to seek out, and quests to complete. That game became SuperBetter, which invites players to choose a specific challenge to overcome and, in the process, develop “gameful” abilities.

McGonigal’s new book, SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient, takes readers through the game, as well as research supporting its efficacy and the theory behind it. We spoke by phone about games’ benefits and limitations, how playing games affects the brain, and what she’s using SuperBetter to tackle now.

* * *

You cite some fascinating studies in this book. One that I found particularly surprising, from Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, was that watching an avatar who looks like you work out and show physical improvement makes you more likely to go exercise yourself. Was that surprising to you?

It wasn’t surprising. By the time that study came out of the Stanford Lab, they had done many studies of avatars and how they impact how we think and act in real life. There was, for example, a finding that if you play with an avatar that is highly attractive, you are more confident flirting afterward. The only thing that does surprise me is that this hasn’t been commercialized more quickly, because everybody is looking for that extra motivation to do the things we want to do, like exercise more. Read more…

Alexander Chee on Writing, Success, and Subletting Below Chloë Sevigny

Photo via Flickr

At Catapult, Alexander Chee has a self-reflective essay about a period in the early aughts when he got to sublet a friend’s plum 19th-story apartment in Gramercy Park. She let him have it for just $900 per month, a steal, which took a great deal of financial pressure off of him. This was after the release of his first novel, when his stock as a writer was rising and he was commanding a little more money–by writer standards, anyway. Bonus: Chee soon learned that actress Chloë Sevigny, of whom he was a big fan, was his upstairs neighbor. This revelation, and a few nervous encounters with her, made the author take a hard look at himself. Double bonus: He got a great chandelier out of the deal, which he has to this day.

Every day, the apartment felt like some just reward after a long period of hard work, even a sign that further success was close by. The paperback of my first novel had just come out from Picador and with that money, in addition to money from teaching, I felt rich for the first time in my life as a writer. I knew I was not rich in a way that anyone else in the building would recognize, but I was writer rich. I had money earned from writing that I would spend on more time to write, and the cheap deal on the beautiful apartment meant the money would last even longer—it even felt like the beginning of more of that money and more of that success. It was a beautiful moment, when the money and the time it represented added up to a possibility for the future that felt as vast as the edges of the known world. The apartment’s vast views resembled the way I wanted to feel about my own future each time I looked at them.

The only sign of darkness was that I was trying to begin work on my second novel and it was not going well. Each week I abandoned it by Friday and returned to it on Monday, as if it was a bad love affair. I think somehow I knew even then that the novel would take me a decade to finish. But the apartment made my despair easier to bear.

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How Michael Cunningham Writes About the Pains, Pleasures, and Psychedelia of Childhood

Michael Cunningham’s short story “White Angel” (The New Yorker; paywalled) is a vibrant masterpiece in miniature about two young brothers in suburban Cleveland pursuing the promises and pleasures of the sixties. Told through the eyes of 9-year-old Robert, the story travels an elegant curve – from the wonder, joy, and power imbalance of the brothers’ collusion, to a crashing and tragic denouement – that is at once funny, insightful, and utterly heartbreaking. “White Angel” was originally published in The New Yorker in 1988, and later became a key chapter in Cunningham’s novel A Home at the End of the World (1990):

Here is Carlton several months before his death, in an hour so alive with snow that earth and sky are identically white. He labors among the markers and I run after, stung by snow, following the light of his red knitted cap. Carlton’s hair is pulled back into a ponytail, neat and economical, a perfect pinecone of hair. He is thrifty, in his way.

We have taken hits of acid with our breakfast juice. Or rather, Carlton has taken a hit and I, considering my youth, have been allowed half. This acid is called windowpane. It is for clarity of vision, as Vicks is for decongestion of the nose. Our parents are at work, earning the daily bread. We have come out into the cold so that the house, when we reenter it, will shock us with its warmth and righteousness. Carlton believes in shocks.

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‘Barbados was Bimshire’: Naomi Jackson’s Debut Novel

From the cover of The Star Side of Bird Hill

In Brooklyn, Barbados was bimshire, a jewel that Bajans turned over in their minds, a candy whose sweetness they sucked on whenever the bitter cold and darkness of life in America became too much to bear. Avril, while she reserved a healthy amount of disdain for Bird Hill and its people, still felt something like love for her country, and she wanted at the very least to keep up with what was going on there. Almost twenty years into living in the States, she had no illusions of moving home and starting over again like the other women she knew who went home every year, packed barrels and kept up with phone calls, went to the meeting of the old boys’ and old girls’ clubs of their high schools where fattened, impoverished versions of themselves showed up in the harsh lights of church basements in Brooklyn, picking over the grains of famous stories from the old days and new stories about who had done well or not well at all in what they liked to call “this man country.” In the same way that Avril had never been a good West Indian girl when she was home, she was not a good West Indian woman abroad, not given to cultivating a desire for and a connection to home that smacked of devotion. Still, she told Dionne and Phaedra that no matter what she felt about Bird hill, it was important that they spend time with their grandmother, and get to know the place without which they would still be specks in God’s eye.

—From Naomi Jackson’s debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill, about two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, exiled to Brooklyn from Bird Hill, Barbados, while their mother, a former AIDS nurse, stays back home due to a severe chronic depression.

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On Graywolf Press and the Lyric Essay

Photo: Pixabay

Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major cultural force.” But what exactly is a lyric essay?

The term lyric essay was popularized in the ’90s by the writer John D’Agata (a Graywolf author) to describe a hybrid form of nonfiction that accommodates verse, memoir, and criticism. But its origins go back at least as far as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, journalist-critics whose work is magnetically personal. Its present-day progeny is more diverse and more direct, answering to a very modern hunger for well-worded social arguments rooted in identity and experience. It’s a rapidly expanding niche, where Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay can turn painful confessions into powerful exhortations while — in a different mode — Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti can make universal claims out of private stories. On this shifting ground, Graywolf’s poet-critics are punching above every weight class.

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How Mary Karr Teaches Her Students About Memory

Longreads Pick

A short excerpt from The Art of Memoir.

Author: Mary Karr
Published: Sep 15, 2015