Essays Books

Book SynopsisA Publishers Weekly Top 10 Memoir of the SeasonThe work of a lifetime from the Tony Award-winning, bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-political, personal, profound, and more than forty years in the making.The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer''s and activist''s life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V''s lifelong journals that takes readers from Berlin to Oklahoma to the Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family.Unflinching, intimate, introspective, courageous, Reckoning explores ways to create an unstoppable force for change, to love and survive love, to hold people and states accountable, to reckon with demons and honor the dead, to reclaim the body, and to see oneself as connected to a greater purpose. It reimagines what seems fixed and intractable, providing a path to understand one''s unique experience as deeply rooted in the world, to break through one''s own boundaries, and to write oneself into freedom.

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Book SynopsisKeeping Quiet is a combination of the anthropologist’s keen eye and the language of a storyteller.In Keeping Quiet, Páramo has collected essays addressing what it is like to live in a world of silence or the absence thereof. This collection covers a wide range of angles and experiences, from an exploration of IBM’s anechoic chamber—the world’s quietest place— to stories of incest, marriage, sexual harassment, social justice, and first-person accounts of life in the emirate of Qatar. Páramo crosses the borders between art (Mozart, Monet, Beethoven, Sheila Chandra, Neruda) and yoga, between research and drunkenness, between despair and triumph, weaving the intimate and personal with what is upsetting in women’s health industry. In “Belated Comebacks,” Páramo is full of righteous anger; in “Teaching Mom Long Division,” she explores the oceanic depths of longing; in

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Book SynopsisNamed one of 12 of the Best Jewish Books of the Year by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, New York Jewish Week, & Jerusalem Post2023 International Book Awards Finalist in the Humor/Comedy/Satire CategoryFrom a bilingual master of the literary memoir comes this moving and humorous story of losing immigrant baggage and trying to reclaim it for his American future. In this poignant literary memoir, internationally acclaimed author and Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer (Waiting for America) explores both material and immaterial aspects of immigrant baggage. Through a combination of dispassionate reportage, gentle irony, and confessional remembrance, Shrayer writes about traversing the borders and boundaries of the three cultures that have nourished him—Russian, Jewish, and American. The spirit of nonconformism and the power of laughter come to the rescue of Shrayer’s autobiographical protagonist when he faces existential calamities and life’s misadventures. The aftermath of a dangerous ski accident in Italy reminds the memoirist of history’s black holes. A haunting, Soviet-era theatrical affair pushes the émigré protagonist to the brink of a disaster in a provincial Russian town. Attempting to collect overdue royalties from a Moscow publisher, the expatriate writer tips his hat to Kafka. The book’s six interconnected tales are held together by the memorist’s imperative to make the ordinary absurd and the absurd—ordinary. Shrayer parses a translingual literary life filled with travel, politics, and discovery—and sustained by family love and faith in art’s transcendence.Trade Review“Soviet émigré Maxim D. Shrayer knows who he is, and he is proud of it right from the start. … In Immigrant Baggage… six interconnected ordinary anecdotes of Shrayer’s travels narrate ‘adventures and misadventures’ from previous years and are given surprise endings. Each tale is a gem, filled with the author’s political, ideological and literary sensibility. … In an era when many are searching to understand how to overcome historical trauma, these stories argue for… choosing to connect with one’s roots, to follow one’s passion, to belong to a community and to discover a meaningful channel to integrate the past and present.”— Eva Fogelman, Moment Magazine“In Maxim D. Shrayer’s extraordinary Immigrant Baggage: Morticians, Purloined Diaries, and Other Theatrics of Exile, he claims place through movement, expression through translingualism, all while inscribing history onto our collective present consciousness. Incorporating photographs into the stories of his travels and adventures, Shrayer offers eyewitness evidence of the past, even as his writing invites readers to marvel at improbable connections, surreal coincidences, and occasional forays into imagined endings that bring together past and present. An elegant and compelling narrator, Shrayer invites readers to visualize, understand, hear, and experience the richness of multiple languages, cities, and characters. He does this by inviting us not only to experience specific moments in time and place, but also to reflect on the spaces in between—indeed, it is in these moments that Shrayer seems most at home.” — Jessica Lang, Dean, Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College, CUNY and author of Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust“Maxim D. Shrayer writes like Nabokov’s long lost cousin. Funny, poignant, elegant and light on his feet, Shrayer serves up a banquet of émigré pleasures and sorrows, in the new world as well as the old. Immigrant Baggage is a compact, pang-filled, hilarious marvel.”— David Mikics, Moores Professor of Honors and English, University of Houston, and author of Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker“The lively stories that comprise Maxim D. Shrayer’s Immigrant Baggage burst with a passionate devotion to literature—the Russian literature of Shrayer’s past, in particular, before he and his parents left Russia after eight persecuted years as Jewish refuseniks. Whether describing a literary discussion among friends from his Soviet youth, or among colleagues in America today, the conversations are of utmost importance; indeed, intellectual arguments can be loveable 'tirades' when the nature of literature is at stake. Poignantly, reading into this memoir familiarizes us with the texture of what it is to live exiled, as an immigrant, with one’s mind perpetually in more than one world, and speaking more than one language. Shrayer’s gift is to guide us, through his ‘adventures,’ to an understanding of the many meanings of the phrase Immigrant Baggage, including the inevitable weight of the past, the ever-present quality of being multicultural, and the literal need and desire to travel across the globe to stay connected to a world left behind. The son of a writer, Shrayer brings a certain wistfulness for the literary life of the past when he describes—to his daughters whom he lovingly shares his literary life—his father taking him to editorial offices in Moscow and then for a treat of ‘something delicious like a smoked tongue sandwich and pear soda.’ The past is present, and made alive again, in this most engaging memoir.”— Elizabeth Poliner, author of As Close to Us as Breathing and Mutual Life & Casualty“Maxim D. Shrayer is a faithful student of the great masters of Russian literature. And he is also top-of-the-class as a literary Russian émigré in his own right. This is a charming and breezy book, written by a wordsmith from two worlds—sparkling with the Soviet skepticism of a Jewish novelist who hasn’t quite unpacked all his baggage in America, darting back and forth like a Nabokovian butterfly between locales, languages and the Kafkaesque surprises and vexations of life.”— Thane Rosenbaum, author of How Sweet It Is! and The Golems of Gotham“Maxim D. Shrayer has the sharp humor of a Russian literary outsider, the longings of a Jewish émigré, and the artistic discipline to examine his experiences without sentiment or shtick. Nabokov would have read this book with pleasure.”—David Samuels, literary editor of Tablet Magazine and author of Only Love Can Break Your Heart“Maxim D Shrayer is a precious object: a kind of living Rosetta Stone who embodies multiple literary cultures. In this compelling literary memoir, he moves between the stagnant decades of the late Soviet Union to present-day America, illuminating his tales with dazzling aperçus from the treasure-house of Russian-language literature. Shrayer’s wry, witty, wise and nuanced writing weaves together strands of Soviet, Russian, Jewish and American culture in moments of translingual epiphany. Now more than ever, his work is a vital reminder of our common humanity.”— Marcel Theroux, author of The Sorcerer of Pyongyang and Far NorthTable of ContentsPreface: Translingual Adventures Ribs of EdenIn the Net of Composer N.Romance with a MorticianOnly One Day in VeniceYelets Women’s High SchoolA Return to Kafka Index of Names and PlacesAbout the Author

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Book SynopsisHow do we think of ourselves as poets? How does our race, our home(s), and our cultural heritage, shape our sense of belonging, our ways of seeing or experiencing the world? How can we learn from and offer support to each other? State of Play brings together conversations between an international line-up of poets, taking place over the course of a year, to offer rich insights into these questions and the ways a life lived in many places can invigorate one’s writing. With themes ranging from the sense of home and racialised expectations, to community and language, as well as the process of writing poetry, these creative discussions delve into the complexities and diversity of identity in the days of global citizenship and cultural diaspora.‘Multiple yet singular, the conversations here reveal the complexities of poetic language as a space of becoming rather than being, of identities sharply focusing under the weight of plurality, the forces of migration and the long tethers of home and empire. This book makes a critical intervention in the shaping of diasporic writing, turns us away from the outworn frameworks to demand bolder and more imaginative ways of reading. Let these conversations begin urgent ones elsewhere about how language is made and how it remakes us as global subjects speaking together.’ —Prof. Sandeep Parmar, Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool and Founder of Ledbury Critics of Colour.‘State of Play reminds us of the global reach of English-language poetry and poetics, whose production is not limited to the predominantly white Anglophone countries of the so-called West and reminds us of the ongoing legacies of British colonialism underlying even such seemingly neutral concepts as home, everyday life, and poetics.’ —Prof. Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry & convenor/co-founder of Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK)‘Giving voice to a diverse and multi-generational choir of distinctive voices, this anthology offers rare and intimate insights into the creative challenges of writing poetry now and the vital importance of dialogue as a free space for the play of ideas and critical thinking.’ —Prof. Susheila Nasta, Founder of Wasafiri, Magazine of International Contemporary Writing‘State of Play draws together a sparky and inspiring array of conversations between East and Southeast Asian poets situated across continents and borders. The different interactions are characterised by their commitment to exchange and reciprocity even where the poets meet for the first time only through the medium of these conversations. Editors Jennifer Wong and Eddie Tay have done a superb job of bringing together a rich spectrum of topics including nomadism, childhood, diaspora, race, belonging, the question of what it is to be creative, and all-important issues of language-choice and self-translation. I wager that no reader interested in poetry will not find excitement in this vibrant anthology.’ —Prof. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford

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Book SynopsisWade Davis is a true wayfinder, and these essays offer new insight into his visionary approach to culture, landscape, and the planet he loves as fiercely as any writer working today.John Vaillant, author of Fire WeatherA timely and eclectic collection from one of the foremost thinkers of our time, a powerful, penetrating and immensely knowledgeable writer (The Guardian). The essays in this collection came about during the unhurried months when one who had traveled incessantly was obliged to stay still, even as events flared on all sides in a world that never stops moving. Wade Davis brings his unique cultural perspective to such varied topics as the demonization of coca, the sacred plant of the Inca; the Great War and the birth of modernity; the British conquest of Everest; the endless conflict in the Middle East; reaching beyond climate fear and trepidation; on the meaning of the sacred. His essay, The Unraveling of America, first published in Rolling Stone, attracted five million readers and generated 362 million social media impressions. Media interest in the story was sustained over many weeks, with interview requests coming in from 23 countries. The anthropological lens, as Davis demonstrates, reveals what lies beneath the surface of things, allowing us to see, and to seek, the wisdom of the middle way, a perspective of promise and hope that all of the essays in this collection aspire to convey. Wade Davis has a gift for saying the unsayable. He's a fearless explorer in the intellectual world, as in the physical. His refusal to embrace conventional wisdom on climate change, for example, and instead think through the issue for himself, is a model of independent thinking. Even when I disagree with Wade, as with some of his bleak comments about the United States, I'm grateful for his voice. We usually live on the surface of ideas when we talk about issues such as war and racism; Wade takes us far deeper.David Ignatius, columnist and associate editor, Washington Post

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Book SynopsisRainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century In 1902, the young German poet Rainer Maria Rilke travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city's high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century. This book brings together Rilke's sublime poetic meditations on existence Notes on the Melody of Things and the first English translation of Rilke's experiences in Paris as observed by his French translator Maurice Betz.

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Book SynopsisBeginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalised by humans. Here are the starling that inspired Mozart with its song, Darwin’s tortoise Harriet, and in an extraordinary essay, Jumbo the elephant (and how they tried to electrocute him). Modelled loosely on a medieval bestiary, these witty , playful, provocative essays traverse history, myth, science and more, introducing a stunning new writer to British readers.Trade ReviewI’ve spent decades reading books on the roles animals play in human cultures, but none have ever made me think, and feel, as much as this one. It’s a devastating meditation on our relationship to the natural world. It might be the best book on animals I’ve ever read. It’s also the only one that’s made me laugh out loud. -- Helen Macdonald * New York Times Book Review *Stunning... Passarello’s keen wit is on display throughout as she raises questions about the uniqueness of humans.... A feast of surprising juxtapositions and gorgeous prose. * Publishers Weekly, starred review *This phenomenal collection documents the lives of particular animals from a wide range of species… Passarello treats her subjects with dextrous care, weaving narratives together in a way that investigates, honours, and complicates her subjects… Passarello has created a consistently original, thoroughly researched, altogether fascinating compendium. * Booklist, starred review *In Animals Strike Curious Poses Elena Passarello spins fantastic, wondrous, and true tall tales about species big and small. Her essays are dream-spaces of imagery and ideas…. This book will leave little doubt that Passarello is one our country’s most gifted young prose writers. -- Héctor Tobar, author of Deep Down Dark and The Barbarian NurseriesAnimals Strike Curious Poses turns the bestiary inside out, holds the mummified mammoth heart up against our own, and, from the braided ventricles, springboards into intoxicating and animated meditations on our penchant for ownership via naming... This book is a gift to us from one of the best, most important, and most exciting essayists of the 21st century. -- Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer

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Book Synopsis The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer’s early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.Trade Review “Harry Craver’s rich and nuanced study revisits Kracauer’s nonconformist views and underscores the religious context in which they emerged… In portraying Kracauer’s reflections on religious concepts as emblematic of post–World War I German intellectual life, Craver sets the stage for a novel, intriguing discussion of Weimar modernity and its crisis.” • American Historical Review “Reluctant Skeptic opens a window into a moment and a place in time through in-depth analysisof Kracauer’s polyphonic engagement with pressing contemporary questions and the role of the critic in assessing them. It makes no claim that Kracauer’s perceptions of secularization and religion offer the paramount vantage point from which to take the measure of the crises we associate with Weimar, and it acknowledges that Kracauer’s attentiveness to religion ebbed in the later 1920s. It succeeds admirably in creating an intellectual milieu analogous to the socio-cultural or socio-denominational milieus explored in studies of Weimar political culture It also offers a fresh perspective on the intellectual uncertainties of the post-war era.” • German History “In great and fascinating detail, Craver guides his readers through the confused intellectual landscape that was Weimar Germany and the confusing currents that swirled through Kracauer’s deeply fissured consciousness.” • Journal of European Studies “Unpretentiously written and based on a judicious interpretation of a wide range of materials, Reluctant Skeptic contributes to our understanding not only of Siegfried Kracauer’s intellectual development, but also of Weimar culture as a whole.” • Martin Jay, University of California, BerkeleyTable of Contents Preface Introduction: Kracauer on and in Weimar Modernity Chapter 1. “Location Suggests Content”: Kracauer on the Fringe of Religious Revival Chapter 2. Reading the War, Writing Crisis Chapter 3. From Copenhagen to Baker Street: Kracauer, Kierkegaard and the Detective Novel Chapter 4. Religion on the Street: Kracauer and Religious Flânerie Conclusion: Criticism in the Negative Church Afterword: From Don Quixote to Sancho Panza Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe war on the old has been declared.In the post-Brexit world, intergenerational conflict has become a visible phenomenon. There is an overwhelming sense of blame from younger generations: it was 'the wrinklies', the grey-haired plutocracy, who voted Leave; who are overburdening hospitals, shutting the youth out of the housing market and hoarding accumulated wealth.By 2020, we are told, one in five Britons will be pensioners, and living a longer retirement than ever before. 'A good thing', politicians add, through gritted teeth. The truth is that for them, 'the old' are a social, economic and political inconvenience.John Sutherland (age 78, and feeling keenly what he writes about) examines this intergenerational combat as a new kind of war in which institutional neglect and universal indifference to the old has reached aggressive, and routinely lethal, levels. This is a book which sets out to provoke but in the process tells some deep and inconvenient truths, revealing something British society would rather not think about.

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Book Synopsis“We need more writers with bite. We have lived in the flatlands too long,” writes John Barnie in one of his ‘observations’ (‘Art in the Flatlands’). And bite he delivers. Ranging across politics, history, culture, ecological disaster, the meaning of truth, poetry, what we mean by identity and more… Barnie shares a window onto the world that is both erudite and particular. Leaning towards pessimism in a darkening world, these observations are often provocative, not from any bullish desire to antagonise, but as the result of mining a rationalist line of thought with an honesty and consistency that is applied as much to the author as to his subjects. There is a clarity here that some may find uncomfortable, but the aim is always dialogue above agreement; intellectual engagement above cheap solutions and sentimentality. Barnie asks us to think, consider and dig deeper, but most of all he asks that we “…live richly among our secondary self-created meanings, while recognising them for what they are. To face without flinching the nullity of the great void.” (‘Varieties of Meaning’) Tsunami Days is a vital collection of essays for those prepared to engage with its unflinching observations.

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Book SynopsisBoland's ground-breaking essays and interviews, first collected in Object Lessons (2006), are enhanced by essays and major later writings addressing the changing nature of poetry, the poet, and Ireland.

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Book SynopsisThe Art of the Personal offers a strikingly original, meticulously researched interpretation of what it means to be a person, and is highly relevant for the times in which we live. The 238 excerpts are selected from 21 books published by Patrick Grant during the past 50 years. The excerpts reach across a wide range of topics, including psychology, aesthetics, literary theory, Biblical criticism, political theory, the Northern Ireland Troubles, Sri Lanka, the place of religion in ethnic conflict, the perennial philosophy and the history of spirituality, among others. The excerpts are arranged under general headings, which are introduced and interpreted by brief essays. This format invites an interactive, dialogical response, as the book makes a case for an understanding of the person as situated within the complex networks of discourse by which its threshold status is constituted but not defined, and to which the art of dialogue is indispensable.

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Book SynopsisIn Only a Voice, George Scialabba examines the chasm between modernity's promise of progress and the sobering reality of our present day through studies of the most influential public intellectuals of our time. In Scialabba's hands, literary criticism becomes a powerful tool for expressing political passion and demonstrating the generative power of argument and an inquisitive mind. Drawing together a diverse group of thinkers, artists, activists, and philosophers-including Edward Said, D. H. Lawrence, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ellen Willis, and Noam Chomsky-Scialabba tours western intellectual history to find that no matter the stakes, critical thought remains a necessary precondition for politics.Every writer, Scialabba writes, faces the choice of whether "to tilt at the state and capital or ignore them" - and the world now is too dire not to choose the former.Trade ReviewEssays from across the storied career of 'critic's critic' George Scialabba. Forthright yet charitable, Scialabba gleans his greatest insights from those he disagrees with and is a model for the practice of independent criticism. -- Ryan Ruby * The Millions *Never has a writer of such enviable talents displayed such evident and unpretentious pleasure in good prose. -- Sam Adler-Bell * Commonweal *Scialabba is as lively as ever...Only a Voice is filled with provocative arguments that make the reader want to argue right back. -- Daniel Lazare * Arts Fuse *A celebrated critic and essayist * New York Times *

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Book SynopsisYour pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.'George Orwell set out to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Decline of the English Murder, the tenth in the Orwell's Essays series, Orwell considers the sorts of murders are portrayed in the media, and why exactly people like to read about them. Expounding on his findings in the accompanying essay, titled in full The Ethics of the Detect

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Book SynopsisWhen Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on - a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.

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Book SynopsisBiographical material on Emily Brontë is scarce. In the past, biographers have taken this as an excuse to portray intuition as fact, creating a confused and inaccurate image of the author of Wuthering Heights. In A Life of Emily Brontë, Edward Chitham searches diligently for the truth. He describes his book as an 'investigative biography', delving into Emily's childhood, her relationships with her family, her father's Irish roots, and the influences of her friends and acquaintances. Using material neglected by other biographers, Chitham makes an illuminating and scholarly study of the events and characters that shaped Emily's inspiration - a puzzle that has confounded many and made her, up to this point, an enigmatic and misrepresented figure.

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Book SynopsisThis selection of clinical seminars held by Wilfred Bion in Brasilia (1975) and Sao Paulo (1978) is the nearest we shall ever get to experiencing his application of his theories and views to consulting-room practice. It is also likely to be the only printed record of this area of his work. As those who underwent analysis with Bion will testify, nothing can approach the experience of the thing itself, but, failing that, these seminars may help to fill the gap now that his voice can only be heard through his published writings and lectures. Other works included are 'Four Discussions' and 'Four Papers'.The reader will find here no jargon, dogma or theoretical exposition; Bion knew that the enormous difficulties involved in communicating verbally this infinitely complex subject are only compounded by the use of what is often nothing more than "psychobabble". His intentional choice of simple language, accurately and consistently used, can come as a surprise; a presenting analyst says "Your suggestion of what to say to the patient seemed much simpler than what is usually said by the analyst."He described analysis as a "tough job", "a dangerous occupation", and the analytic experience as "potentially nasty both for the analyst and the analysand ...like being at sea - it is as stormy for both people." To the question of whether it is the analyst's function to help the patient, he gives this illuminating reply: "...we are trying to say: 'I will help you to know yourself...I am trying to be a mirror to reflect back to you who you are, so that you can see in what I say to you an image of your self.'"Throughout these seminars (and the following discussions and papers) runs the thread of Bion's penetrating insight, his recognition of truth, and his fascination with the human character. In observing the patient he believed that the analyst must combine the disciplined curiosity of the scientist, the warmth of the humanist, the wisdom of the philosopher, and the sensitivity of the artist. A tall order indeed, but one to which this remarkable man came very close to fulfilling.Trade ReviewThe reader will find here no jargon, dogma or theoretical exposition; Bion knew that the enormous difficulties involved in communicating verbally this infinitely complex subject are only compounded by the use of what is often nothing more than "psychobabble". His intentional choice of simple language, accurately and consistently used, can come as a surprise; a presenting analyst says "Your suggestion of what to say to the patient seemed much simpler than what is usually said by the analyst."He described analysis as a "tough job", "a dangerous occupation", and the analytic experience as "potentially nasty both for the analyst and the analysand ...like being at sea - it is as stormy for both people." To the question of whether it is the analyst's function to help the patient, he gives this illuminating reply: "...we are trying to say: 'I will help you to know yourself...I am trying to be a mirror to reflect back to you who you are, so that you can see in what I say to you an image of your self.'"Throughout these seminars (and the following discussions and papers) runs the thread of Bion's penetrating insight, his recognition of truth, and his fascination with the human character. In observing the patient he believed that the analyst must combine the disciplined curiosity of the scientist, the warmth of the humanist, the wisdom of the philosopher, and the sensitivity of the artist. A tall order indeed, but one to which this remarkable man came very close to fulfilling.Table of ContentsClinical Seminars -- Brasilia 1975 -- Contributions to panel discussions: Brasilia, A New Experience -- São Paulo 1978 -- Four Discussions 1976 -- Four Papers -- Emotional turbulence 1976 -- On a quotation from Freud 1976 -- Evidence 1976 -- Making the best of a bad job 1979 -- Bion's Works

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Book SynopsisIn 1822 William Hazlitt, forty-four years old and married, was both tormented and enchanted by Sarah Walker, his landlady's nineteen-year-old daughter. "Liber Amoris" is the chronicle of that obsession, an extraordinary fragment of Romantic autobiography that explores the unstable nature of what individuals perceive as 'truth', the unknowability of others, and leaves the reader unsure of who is victim, who seducer in this haunting relationship. Gregory Dart sets "Liber Amoris" in its context of Hazlitt's other writings from 1822-3, and provides a wealth of fascinating notes that take us deep into the period and the writer's imagination.

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Book SynopsisBetween 2010 and 2014 Lynn Jenner made several related emotional and intellectual investigations. Lost and Gone Away is the record of these: a fascinating hybrid text of nonfiction, prose poems and poetry.The book traverses the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake; samples and sifts through the lost and recovered detritus of the ancient world; radiates its attention out from that epicentre of loss, the Point Last Seen, from which all searches begin; and quietly, devastatingly, explores how one might think and write about the Holocaust, from far away. “More than a year ago a friend, who speaks five languages and reads several more, told me it would not be possible to write about the Holocaust from New Zealand. There’s so little to say here, she said. You should go to Europe. But this is where I am, I said. That is the problem. This is where I am from, this is who I am, and this is where I am.”

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Book SynopsisBroken Consort is a chronicle of close attention (to books, films, plays, paintings and life itself) by Will Eaves, author of Murmur (winner of the 2019 Wellcome Prize)

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Book SynopsisIn 1948 Robert Doisneau took a picture of a young woman working at her typewriter on the banks of the Seine. With her stylish sunglasses and short skirt, she seems to epitomise Left Bank bohemian chic. In fact she turns out to be the English author Emma Smith, composing her debut novel during a heatwave. We'll Never Have Paris taps into the enduring fascination with a partly fantasised literary Paris (that of the Lost Generation, Joyce, Beckett and Shakespeare and Company) which also happens to be a largely Anglophone construct - one which the Eurostar and Brexit only seem to have exacerbated in recent years. Andrew Gallix, who teaches at the Sorbonne, has brought together many of the most talented and adventurous writers from the UK, Ireland, USA and Australia to explore this theme through fiction and essays, in order to build up a (real or fictitious, flattering or disparaging) portrait of Paris as viewed by English speakers today. The book includes Deborah Levy, Tom McCarthy, Brian Dillon, Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams, Claire-Louise Bennett and some 70 other contributors.

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Book SynopsisA Guest Among Stars collects recent essays by one of the most respected poet-critics of our time. Mark Ford discusses poets and their work, exploring context and settings behind some of the most prominent figures and works of poetry. The figures considered here range from Guillaume Apollinaire to Ezra Pound, from Derek Walcott to Joni Mitchell. The book's title is drawn from a poem by Douglas Crase, whose oeuvre is assessed in its final essay. An appendix present an enchanting selection of letters received by Ford from John Ashbery, whose work Ford has edited for the Library of America. These letters date from 1986, when Ford was at work on a PhD thesis on Ashbery, to the final missive Ford received in late 2017.

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Book SynopsisThe 44 essays and other pieces collected in his new book range from Adam Lindsay Gordon to Peter Corris, and include Eleanor Dark, Hal Porter, Christina Stead, Dal Stivens and A. B. Facey among many other creators of the unique body of literature Australians may claim as their own. The contribution Michael Wilding has made to the study of Australian Literature, and to literary publishing in Australia and as a novelist in his own right, has been enormous. The most recent count of his works made it 29 non-fiction; 3 documentaries; and 28 novels & short-story collections (not to mention the Cosmo centrefold).

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Book SynopsisThis powerful new work by Bruce Weigl follows the celebrated poet and Vietnam War veteran as he explores combat, survival, and PTSD in brief prose vignettes. In compact, transcendent, and poetic prose, Bruce Weigl chronicles somber observations on the present day alongside painful memories of the war. Reflections on school shootings and the lightning-fast spread of news in the 21st century are set alongside elegies for forgotten soldiers and the lifelong struggle of waiting for the trauma of war to fade. Haunting and nuanced, Among Elms, in Ambush carries readers through meditations and medications, past the shapes of figures in the dark rice fields of Viet Nam and the milkweed pods in the frost-covered fields of Ohio, toward a hard-won determination to survive.Trade Review“Few books transfix me. This book did. Among Elms, in Ambush is a ghostly, mysterious, sometimes angry, mostly loving, and always masterly work of art, poetry mapped by prose, prose elevated by a poet's ear for the music of articulation. Bruce Weigl's accomplishment, if it can be described at all, struck me with the force of a prolonged and vivid dream, one moment terrifying, the next moment celebrative or indignant or regretful. The book is infused with history—Weigl’s own, America's own yet there is nothing merely topical in these pages, unless Dante's dizzying, breathtaking Inferno can be read as topical.” —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried Praise for Bruce Weigl’s On the Shores of Welcome Home “Weigl’s personal reckoning with trauma is juxtaposed against the title poem’s polemic against war, a lengthy plea for empathy and tolerance that establishes war, police brutality, mass shootings, and anti-immigrant sentiments as intricately connected through a web of violence Americans have been taught to accept as necessary.” —Publishers Weekly “All of Bruce Weigl's poems are of high quality and all should be purchased for any collection of literature dealing with the Vietnam War.” —The VVA Veteran “Weigl is always in at least two worlds at once—present and past; here and beyond. He poses questions of motion and emotion without easy Western answers. In fact, there’s nothing in this map of naked truths that’s easy. And, at times, this speaker of lyric reckoning holds himself accountable for the moments he said ‘I dare you.’” —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular "Few poets of any generation have written so searingly of the trauma of war, inscribing its wound while refusing the fragile suture of redemption. In this and in the breadth of his accomplishment, Bruce Weigl is one of the most important poets of our time.” —Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard is True “Weigl always finds the lyric pulse, a flame of our moment.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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