Search results for ""Author Davida"

A debut novel of great depth and power. “Art, grief, and technology churn in this excellent and raw novel…that profoundly explores the way we live with technology and how it informs our understanding of reality.”—Publishers WeeklyIn this debut novel, conceptual artist Sheila B. Ackerman heeds a mysterious urge to return to her estranged family home and arrives at the exact moment of her mother’s suicide.In an attempt to cope with and understand her own self destructive tendencies, Sheila plants a camera on the lawn outside the house to film 24/7 while workers deconstruct the physical object that encases so many of her memories. Meanwhile, as she begins to experience frequent blackouts, she finds herself hunting a robot drone through the San Francisco MOMA with a baseball bat, part of a provocative, technological show, The Last Art, and resuming a violent affair with her college professor. With a backdrop of post-9/11 San Francisco, Sheila navigates the social-media-obsessed, draught-ridden landscape of her life, exploring the frail line between the human impulse to control everything that takes place around us and the futility of excessive effort to do so. This thought-provoking work is for anyone who questions the status quo.

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The first biography of the writer/naturalist, and one of the leading founders of the modern environmental movement, Henry Beston. In September of 1926, Henry Beston spent a two-week vacation in a Cape Cod shack he’d built high on an isolated stretch of dunes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. As he later wrote, “the fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go.” The resulting book, The Outermost House, is universally considered a classic of American nature writing.In his later books, Beston explored the ways that the modern industrial era was endangering the vital connection between humankind and the natural world, and he is now recognized as a key figure in the twentieth century’s conservation movement.In Orion on the Dunes, the first biography of Beston, scholar Daniel Payne—granted unrestricted access to the writer’s archives and drawing on interviews with friends and family—has crafted a scrupulously researched narrative; one presenting a masterful portrait that traces the intellectual growth and tumultuous life of a vital American writer whose work and thought have exerted a tremendous pull on poets, naturalists, and novelists alike. This is the story of a life, at once hidden and transparent, that is here finally revealed.

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