Search results for ""Author Kio Stark""

Part of the TED series: When Strangers Meet Our lives are increasingly insular. We are in a hurry, our heads are down, minds elsewhere, we hear only the voices we already recognize and rarely take the effort to experience something or someone new. When Strangers Meet argues for the pleasures and transformative possibilities of talking to people you don’t know. Talking to a stranger pulls you into a shared humanity, it’s a source of creative energy, it opens your world, it cements your relationship to the places you live and work and play, it’s a beautiful interruption in the steady routines of our lives. Talking to strangers wakes you up. But who is a stranger? Many of us have a deep-seated belief that strangers are dangerous. That idea cripples us and prevents us from connecting with the wider world. Exploring the rich meanings that are conjured up in these experiences of fleeting intimacy, Stark renders visible the hidden processes by which we decide who to trust in passing, and the unwritten rules by which these encounters operate. When Strangers Meet teaches readers how to start talking to strangers, and includes adventurous challenges for those who dare.

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It begins with an envelope. Twenty years old, maybe more, with the dust of the dead-letter office still clinging to the stained, fraying paper. It arrives in the mailbox of Lucy with the address of a vacant neighborhood lot barely legible on the front. Inside she finds only a photograph of a man she does not recognize, but whose face captivates her instantly. She hunts for him, feeling for blind answers in the boroughs of her soul and city. The details of her world -- of a neighborhood decaying and maimed in daylight, yet pulsing with some hidden life in dark; the shaded, shifting menace of shadow on the night sidewalk -- blur together through the fogged lens of her favorite plastic camera, and the casual banter of summer afternoons evaporates into the hiss of something missing, leading Lucy across the darkened city, from the canal slicing through her neighborhood over the rivers at the city limits, its mystery resolving into vivid, caustic focus in the book's concluding scenes. Follow Me Down owns moments both wondrous in their sympathy and wild in their desolation, as Stark culls from the crumbling city setting characters mercurial and impassable, joyous and redemptive.

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