Search results for ""open city""

The bestselling debut novel from a writer heralded as the twenty-first-century W. G. Sebald.A haunting novel about national identity, race, liberty, loss and surrender, Open City follows a young Nigerian doctor as he wanders aimlessly along the streets of Manhattan. For Julius the walks are a release from the tight regulations of work, from the emotional fallout of a failed relationship, from lives past and present on either side of the Atlantic.Isolated amid crowds of bustling strangers, Julius criss-crosses not just physical landscapes but social boundaries too, encountering people whose otherness sheds light on his own remarkable journey from Nigeria to New York - as well as into the most unrecognisable facets of his own soul.

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This study examines Rome Open City and its place in Roberto Rossellini's career. The film is based on events that took place in Nazi occupied Italy 1944, one year before the film was made. The author argues that the film has value as a commerorative piece and as a documentary record.

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The author of the cult novel, The Final Opus of Leon Solomon, makes a posthumous appearance with this powerful poetry manuscript. Written at the height of the anti-war movement, these poems bring together disparate threads of different historical epochs—World War II, the rhythms of the post-Beat era, and the atmosphere in America during the Vietnam war—historical periods that Badanes’ poems make fresh and which feel highly relevant to today's culture and political climate. Featuring insightful commentary by National Book Award winner Gerald Stern and Nancy Willard, this volume gives us another chance to experience the work of a master novelist, poet, and filmmaker.

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The follow-up to her highly praised debut story collection, The First Hurt, Rachel Sherman’s Living Room is a beautiful and disarmingly direct portrait of a family in trouble. With the tone of a modern-day Jewish The Ice Storm set in Long Island, imbued with Alice Munro’s fascination with personal history, Living Room is a deep exploration of the ripple effects of mental illness on a family, as well as a look at generational differences in mating and marriage, and a wry, wise look at suburban angst.

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Rachel Sherman's stories have earned her accolades and support in the writing community and the publication of her first book heralds the arrival of a singularly fresh and remarkably assured new voice. In this brilliantly original story collection, Rachel Sherman evokes the wonders and horrors of a young woman's life, from girl to teenager to adult, through crushes, sex, family, and the agonies and ecstasies of finding one's way. Sherman's beautifully direct and deceptively simple prose produces accessible, shockingly real narratives that combine a disarming sexual edge with great sensitivity and humor. From a high-school girl's crush on her female teacher, to a family's serenity threatened by the presence of a sexy Danish au pair, to a pubescent girl's sexually outrageous soldier pen-pal, all the way to a young couple's horrifying yet life-affirming experience of learning to love their brain-injured newborn twins, this collection wends its way around the deepest of struggles with unusual frankness and wisdom. Fans of A. M. Homes, Mary Gaitskill, Mona Simpson, and Rick Moody will be thrilled at this auspicious and noteworthy debut.

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Bringing together a sequence of disquieting photographs with a dozen original short stories, Pharmakon is a surprising new work from the singular mind of Teju Cole (Open City, Fernweh, Tremor).

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Quarry is a pro in the murder business. When the man he works for becomes a target himself, Quarry is sent South to remove a traitor in the ranks. But in this wide-open city - with sin everywhere, and betrayal around every corner - Quarry must make the most dangerous choice of his deadly career: who to kill?

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Rethinking the open cityPlanners, privatisation, and police surveillance are laying siege to urban public spaces. The streets are becoming ever more regimented as life and character are sapped from our cities. What is to be done? Is it possible to maintain the public realm as a flexible space that adapts over time? Can disorder be designed? Fifty years ago, Richard Sennett wrote his groundbreaking work The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed, likely to produce a fragile, restrictive urban environment. The need for the Open City, the alternative, is now more urgent that ever. In this provocative essay, Pablo Sendra and Richard Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the life of our cities. What the authors call 'infrastructures for disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide,

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Beginning in 1967, Bukowski wrote the column "Notes of A Dirty Old Man" for the underground newspaper Open City. Perennially drunk, broke and in search of a woman, Bukowski takes on the guise of a wise fool as he ventures through America's seedy lowlife. Peopled by Kerouac, Burroughs and other much less salubrious characters, his exploits provoke humour and despair, whilst highlighting the inherent beauty and futility of life.

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The shadow of a tree in upstate New York. A hotel room in Switzerland. A young stranger in the Congo. In Blind Spot, readers will follow Teju Cole's inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm, as he continues to refine the voice and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City. In more than 150 pairs of images and surprising, lyrical text, Cole explores his complex relationship to the visual world through his two great passions: writing and photography. Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature.

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Shortlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the EssayA blazingly intelligent first collection of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief.With these pieces on politics, photography, travel, history and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices, covering subjects as diverse as Virginia Woolf, W.G Sebald, Instagram, Barack Obama and Boko Haram. Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole's wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames.

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Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.Tunde, the man at the centre of this novel, reflects on the places and times of his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, and a traveller drawn to many different kinds of stories: from history and the epic; of friends, family, and strangers; those found in books and films. One man's personal lens refracts entire worlds, and back again.A weekend spent shopping for antiques is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speak out from a pulsing metropolis.Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst "history's own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles" - but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. This is narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.Praise for Open City:'Open City is not a loud novel, nor a thriller, nor a nail-biter. What it is is a gorgeous, crystalline, and cumulative investigation of memory, identity, and erasure. It gathers its power inexorably, page by page, and ultimately reveals itself as nothing less than a searing tour de force. Teju Cole might just be a W. G. Sebald for the twenty-first century.'Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See'Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original...'James Wood, The New Yorker

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In 1970, Richard Sennett published the groundbreaking The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed. Fifty years later, Sennett returns to these still fertile ideas and, alongside campaigner and architect Pablo Sendra, sets out an agenda for the design and ethics of the Open City.The public spaces of our cities are under siege from planners, privatisation and increased surveillance. Our streets are becoming ever more lifeless and ordered. What is to be done? Can disorder be designed? In this provocative essay Sendra and Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the social life of our cities. 'Infrastructures of disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide up, remain open to change rather than closed off.

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Austrian aristocrat Franz Loebek lands in Canada penniless, having lost everything in the violent upheavals brought by the Second World War. In Montreal he finds the Old World sophistication of London and Paris mixed with the youthful vibrancy of New York. But Loebek’s adopted city is an open city, and he unwillingly becomes drawn into the violent underworld of illegal gambling, all the while maintaining a front as he moves amongst Montreal’s most privileged. Gambling with Fire is the story of one man’s struggle to navigate illicit and dangerous waters to finally find stability and peace. Originally published in 1969, it followed The Crime on Cote des Neiges, Murder Over Dorval, and The Body on Mount Royal as David Montrose’s fourth and final novel. The author died while it was in production. This Ricochet Books edition, the first in forty-seven years, marks its paperback debut.

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Cosmopolitan Habitat promotes a research agenda for urban resilience, understanding cities as global avant-garde dealing with the planetary challenges of climate change, migration, and social fragmentation. Within the framework of the Green Deal, Europe is advancing ideas and innovations aimed at manifesting change and long-term strategies for our cities in order to achieve the aims of resilience and sustainability. At the same time, we are facing the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on our cities and on our ways of imagining and constructing urban futures. How can cities become new, concrete places to invent, explore, experiment, and live in open communities that are able to face global challenges while also enhancing liveability, inclusivity, and urban economies? Cosmopolitan Habitat presents conceptual models, urban strategies, and spatial practices for the Open City, combining urbanism, architecture, humanities, culture, economy, and politics.

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Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema is the first systematic study of the role ideology plays in film festivals’ construction of dominant ideas about art cinema. Film festivals are considered the driving force of the film industry outside Hollywood, disseminating ideals of cinematic art and humanist politics. However, the question of what drives them remains highly contentious. In a rare consideration of the European competitive film festival circuit as a whole, this book analyses the shared economic, geopolitical and cultural histories that characterise ‘European A festivals’. It offers, too, the first extensive analysis of such festivals’ role in the canonisation of select Italian films, from Rome, Open City to The Great Beauty and Gomorrah. The book proposes a new approach to ideology critique, one that enables detailed examination of how film festivals construct ideas about not only contemporary art cinema, but assumptions about gender, race, colonialism and capitalism.

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K IRME URIBE (Ondarroa, Vizcaya, 1970) es autor de poemas, narraciones, ensayos y teatro. Ha traducido al euskera poemas de Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Wislawa Szymborska y Mahmud Darwix entre otros, y ha participado en varios proyectos multimedia integrando poesía y música o las artes plásticas. Premio Nacional de la Crítica, sus poemas han sido han sido traducidos a varias lenguas y han aparecido en revistas literarias de prestigio como The New Yorker , Open City y Circunference .Mientras tanto dame la mano es un poemario hecho de ríos, ríos silenciosos que ocultos bajo el asfalto guardan historias. Pequeños fragmentos de realidad que descubrimos al doblar cada página y que parecen dibujados en el agua. El poema, como el proceso de positivados en fotografía, fija un instante, detiene un momento, el de la imagen, en el líquido revelador. Pero los poemas, como las fotografías, deben ser silenciosos. Es una cuestión de música. Necesitan del silencio para existir. Nacen de él, y en

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A major film, co-written and directed by Angelina Jolie Until the age of five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official. She was a precocious child who loved the open city markets, fried crickets, chicken fights and being cheeky to her parents.When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Loung's family fled their home and were eventually forced to disperse to survive. Loung was trained as a child soldier while her brothers and sisters were sent to labour camps. The surviving siblings were only finally reunited after the Vietnamese penetrated Cambodia and started to destroy the Khmer Rouge.Bolstered by the bravery of one brother, the vision of the others and the gentle kindness of her sister, Loung forged on to create for herself a courageous new life.First They Killed My Father is an unforgettable book told through the voice of the young and fearless Loung. It is a shocking and tragic tale of a girl who was determined to survive despite the odds.

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This comprehensive volume analyzes the radical change in the nature of armed conflicts and in the way they are narrated and represented. Ever since the First World War has changed war itself, rendering meaningless the very vocabulary of war in terms such as "battle", "front", "non-combatant", "open city" and "hero", new words, new approaches, new theories and new texts had to be invented. The enemy became invisible: Submarines, tanks, mines, gas, long-range artillery, and airplanes made this war different from all the other that came before. A hundred years after the beginning of this terrible war, it is now time to recall different representations of the armed conflicts of the 20th century. The articles in this collection analyze representations of the Canudos Civil War in Brazil, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the colonial wars in Africa, and the war in Afghanistan, aiming to understand how war and the telling of war have changed during the most murderous hundred years in the history of mankind.

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A stunning novel, spanning generations and continents, Ghana Must Go is a tale of family drama and forgiveness, for fans of Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.Meet the Sais, a Nigerian-Ghanaian family living in the United States. A family prospering until the day father and surgeon Kweku Sai is victim of a grave injustice. Ashamed, he abandons his beautiful wife Fola and their little boys and girls, causing the family to fracture and spiral out into the world - New York, London, West Africa, New England - on uncertain, troubled journeys until, many years later, tragedy unites them. Now this broken family has a chance to heal - but can the Sais take it?'Ghana Must Go is both a fast moving story of one family's fortunes and an ecstatic exploration of the inner lives of its members. With her perfectly-pitched prose and flawless technique, Selasi does more than merely renew our sense of the African novel: she renews our sense of the novel, period. An astonishing debut' Teju Cole, author of Open City

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Soon to be a major film, co-written and directed by Angelina Jolie PittUntil the age of five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official. She was a precocious child who loved the open city markets, fried crickets, chicken fights and being cheeky to her parents.When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Loung's family fled their home and were eventually forced to disperse to survive. Loung was trained as a child soldier while her brothers and sisters were sent to labour camps. The surviving siblings were only finally reunited after the Vietnamese penetrated Cambodia and started to destroy the Khmer Rouge.Bolstered by the bravery of one brother, the vision of the others and the gentle kindness of her sister, Loung forged on to create for herself a courageous new life.First They Killed My Father is an unforgettable book told through the voice of the young and fearless Loung. It is a shocking and tragic tale of a girl who was determined to survive despite the odds.

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Over the last 500 years, a range of innovative, responsive, and pragmatic civic actions have helped to generate, define, and maintain New York City’s global significance. From early on much of these actions were responses to population density and the accompanying challenges for health and well-being. Approaching its next growth cycle, New York is again amid important urban transformations that demand new urban and architectural models that allow for an open city to balance gentrification, and to address a lack of public spaces, social infrastructure, and affordable housing. These challenges and their architectural and urban implications are the focus of Next New York. The book captures the city’s current momentum through the lens of three important urban actions: sharing, connecting, and partnering. Through 10 essays from scholars and practitioners working on pressing urban issues, a photographic essay portraying New York during COVID-19, and more than 35 design projects from graduate studios at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, Next New York reflects, comments, and speculates on New York City’s capacity to bring about new conceptions of city-making and collective cohabitation through architecture.

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Building Cultures Valparaiso takes a critical look at how pedagogy, practice and poetry are brought together at one of the most influential schools of architecture of the past 50 years: the School of Architecture and Design of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso in Chile. The editors have brought together research on the origins of the school, on the role that poetry plays in teaching and practice, and on the school’s larger historical place in the context of a global out-break of radical architectural teaching in the late 1960’s. Contributors come from both within and outside of the school and include Beatriz Colomina, David Jolly Monge and Gerald Wildgruber. In addition to original research, Building Cultures Valparaiso includes a collection of student drawings from the early years of the Valparaiso School’s Open City, a 270 hectare stretch of land along the Pacific Ocean that serves as a laboratory for living and working together. These drawings provide an insight into how the philosophy of the school translates into the making of architecture. Through its exploration of the Valparaiso School’s radical approach to teaching and making, Building Cultures Valparaiso serves as a guide for all those interested in an experimental vision of architecture.

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This is the first full-length study in any language of the most significant film director of Italian Neorealism. Peter Brunette combines close analyses of Roberto Rossellini's formal and narrative style with a thorough account of his position in the political and cultural landscape of postwar Italy. More than forty films are explored, including Open City, Paisan, Voyage to Italy, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, and films made in the director's later years that documented crucial epochs in human history. Brunette's book is based on eight years of research, during which he interviewed members of the director's family as well as Rossellini himself. Brunette also draws on an enormous body of European and American criticism and discusses the various intellectual debates spawned by the director's work. This landmark study is both a comprehensive introduction to one of the most influential practitioners of the contemporary cinema and a boldly original discussion of Italian Neorealism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

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This is the first full-length study in any language of the most significant film director of Italian Neorealism. Peter Brunette combines close analyses of Roberto Rossellini's formal and narrative style with a thorough account of his position in the political and cultural landscape of postwar Italy. More than forty films are explored, including Open City, Paisan, Voyage to Italy, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, and films made in the director's later years that documented crucial epochs in human history. Brunette's book is based on eight years of research, during which he interviewed members of the director's family as well as Rossellini himself. Brunette also draws on an enormous body of European and American criticism and discusses the various intellectual debates spawned by the director's work. This landmark study is both a comprehensive introduction to one of the most influential practitioners of the contemporary cinema and a boldly original discussion of Italian Neorealism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

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'Thank god for Richard Sennett ... essential reading for all students of the city' Anna Minton, Prospect'Constantly stimulating ideas from a veteran of urban thinking' Jonathan Meades, GuardianIn Building and Dwelling, Richard Sennett distils a lifetime's thinking and practical experience to explore the relationship between the good built environment and the good life. He argues for, and describes in rich detail, the idea of an open city, one in which people learn to manage complexity. He shows how the design of cities can enrich or diminish the everyday experience of those who dwell in them.The book ranges widely - from London, Paris and Barcelona to Shanghai, Mumbai and Medellin in Colombia - and draws on classic thinkers such as Tocqueville, Heidegger, Max Weber, and Walter Benjamin. It also draws on Sennett's many decades as a practical planner himself, testing what works, what doesn't, and why. He shows what works ethically is often the most practical solution for cities' problems. This is a humane and thrilling book, which allows us to think freshly about how we live in cities.'Sennett is my kind of urbanist. He sees the modern city. He reads its secrets as he walks down the street, kicking over the detritus of the past ... There is no alternative to the planner, but please a planner who has read Sennett's book' Simon Jenkins, Sunday Times

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The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its didactic and aesthetic aspirations. Yet it exerted such a profound influence on Italian cinema that all the best postwar directors had to come to terms with it, whether in seeming imitation (the early Olmi), in commercial exploitation (the middle Comencini) or in ostensible rejection (the recent Tavianis). Despite the reactionary pressures of the marketplace and the highly personalized visions of Fellini, Antonioni. And Visconti, Italian cinema has maintained its moral commitment to use the medium in socially responsible ways--if not to change the world, as the first neorealists hoped, then at least to move filmgoers to face the pressing economic, political, and human problems in their midst. From Rossellini's Open City (1945) to the Taviani brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982). The author does close readings of seventeen films that tell the story of neorealism's evolving influence on Italian postwar cinematic expression. Other films discussed are De Sica's Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. De Santis's Bitter Rice, Comencini's Bread, Love, and Fantasy, Fellini's La strada, Visconti's Senso, Antonioni's Red Desert, Olmi's Il Posto, Germi's Seduced and Abandoned, Pasolini's Teorema, Petri's Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, Bertolucci's The Conformist, Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, and Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy, Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much provides the occasion for the author's own retrospective consideration of how Italian cinema has fulfilled, or disappointed, the promise of neorealism.

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Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. Brutal Vision challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films—including such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves—should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability. In his readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealism’s international distribution, Karl Schoonover reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. He traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see how—in their views of injury, torture, and martyrdom—these films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the period’s call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism. These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid. Brutal Vision interrogates the role of neorealism’s famously heart-wrenching scenes in a new global order that requires its citizenry to invest emotionally in large-scale international aid packages, from the Marshall Plan to the liberal charity schemes of NGOs. The book fundamentally revises ideas of cinematic specificity, the human, and geopolitical scale that we inherit from neorealism and its postwar milieu—ideas that continue to set the terms for political filmmaking today.

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"An exquisitely haunting, melancholic treasure of a book about people who drop out and populate tiny towns and rural communities, and the longing and loneliness of the human condition."--Judy Natal, Photo-Eye "One of the great American moves is vagrancy, the freedom to drift, the right to look at things from outside the mainstream. The prose in House of Coates hums with this irreducible freedom. The photographs are both perfectly artless and undeniably visionary. Any question of fiction, non-fiction, subterfuge, or narrative trickery is superfluous in a book like this one, so appealingly strange, so delicately balanced, and so incontestably bound to its time and place."--Teju Cole, author of Open City "A very handsome paperback edition...a new afterword wraps the whole mystery of Lester beautifully." --MinnPost "As Brad Zellar so vividly illustrates in his new limited-edition collaboration with photographer Alec Soth, 'House Of Coates,' broken men have always been with us, haunting us, providing a mirror. Society may label them bums, homeless, or pariahs, but Zellar's empathetic writing allows the reader to get inside one broken man, and therefore all." --Jim Walsh, MinnPost Washed up in the shadow of a refinery, Lester B. Morrison, legendary recluse, documents his life in a series of photographs taken with a disposable camera. In a landscape of off ramps, warehouses, and SRO hotels occupied by terminally lonely men, love and faith break in, quietly offering human connection and the possibility of redemption. Brad Zellar has worked as a writer and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, as well as for both regional and national magazines. He is the author of Suburban World: The Norling Photos, The 1968 Project, Conductors of the Moving World, and House of Coates. Alec Soth is a photographer whose first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004. Since then Soth has published over a dozen books including Niagara (2006), Dog Days, Bogota (2007), The Last Days of W (2008), and Broken Manual (2010). Soth's work has been exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.

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After his graduation from Black Mountain College, Michael Rumaker made his way to the post-Howl, pre-Stonewall gay literary milieu of San Francisco, where he entered the circle of Robert Duncan. Contrasting Duncan's daringly frank homosexuality with Rumaker's own then-closeted life, Robert Duncan in San Francisco conjures up with harrowing detail an era of police prosecution of a clandestine gay community struggling to survive in the otherwise "open city" of San Francisco. This expanded edition includes a selection of previously unpublished letters between Rumaker and Duncan, and an interview conducted for this edition, in which Rumaker provides further reflections on the poet and the period. "This is a wonderfully revealing account of a series of lifechanging collisions between a young writer (Rumaker), an older writer (Duncan), a still older mentor for both (Charles Olson), a city (San Francisco), and an important era in American literature (the 1950s), when it was being turned upside down by these individuals and their friends. It's also a tender and intelligent account of a young man's coming to grips with being gay in the midst of this upheaval. Much more than memoir; it's history." --Russell Banks, author of Cloudsplitter Robert Duncan in San Francisco offers a surprising portrait of a mentor in all his witty, wicked, luminous, and vulnerable complexity. Straddling the lines of memoir and cultural history, Michael Rumaker gives a rare and delightful view of Duncan at home in the gay community while also documenting the struggles of that community in 1950s America." --Lisa Jarnot, author of Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus "In this fine memoir of this 16 months in San Francisco, Rumaker learns many lessons about being at home with who he is, in what he calls 'Robert's city.'" --Joanne Kyger, About Now: Collected Poems Michael Rumaker has written several novels and short story collections, as well as the memoir Black Mountain Days. He was born in Philadelphia and is a graduate of Black Mountain College -- where Duncan served as his outside thesis advisor--and Columbia University. He taught at City University of New York and the New School for Social Research. Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was an American poet and well-known as a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. City Lights published a book of his poetry titled Selected Poems.

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A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Colm Toibin, Kamilia Shamsie, David Mitchell and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio’s The Decameron.When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it. In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote “The Decameron”: one hundred nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables. In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe. How might new fiction from some of the finest writers working today help us memorialize and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction? These twenty-nine new stories, from authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and David Mitchell vary widely in texture and tone. Their work will be remembered as a historical tribute to a time and place unlike any other in our lifetimes, and offer perspective and solace to the reader now and in a future where coronavirus is, hopefully, just a memory. Table of Contents: “Preface” by Caitlin Roper “Introduction” by Rivka Galchen “Recognition” by Victor LaValle “A Blue Sky Like This” by Mona Awad “The Walk” by Kamila Shamsie “Tales from the LA River” by Colm Tóibín “Clinical Notes” by Liz Moore “The Team” by Tommy Orange “The Rock” by Leila Slimani “Impatient Griselda” by Margaret Atwood “Under the Magnolia” by Yiyun Li “Outside” by Etgar Keret “Keepsakes” by Andrew O’Hagan “The Girl with the Big Red Suitcase” by Rachel Kushner “The Morningside” by Téa Obreht “Screen Time” by Alejandro Zambra “How We Used to Play” by Dinaw Mengestu “Line 19 Woodstock/Glisan” by Karen Russell “If Wishes Was Horses” by David Mitchell “Systems” by Charles Yu “The Perfect Travel Buddy” by Paolo Giordano “An Obliging Robber” by Mia Cuoto “Sleep” by Uzodinma Iweala “Prudent Girls” by Rivers Solomon “That Time at My Brother’s Wedding” by Laila Lalami “A Time of Death, The Death of Time” by Julián Fuks “The Cellar” by Dina Nayeli “Origin Story” by Matthew Baker “To the Wall” by Esi Edugyan “Barcelona: Open City” by John Wray “One Thing” by Edwidge Danticat

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Arriving in Beijing in 1998 along with other Americans searching for the riches of the new China, Ethan Gutmann rapidly made his way into the expatriate community of American entrepreneurs. For them, Beijing was an Open City inside a controlled world. Entering this well-catered equivalent of a corporate boot camp, Gutmann was indoctrinated in the creed that China's growing strength presented untapped opportunities for profit and expansion. American entrepreneurs might say -- and even believe -- that they were bringing freedom to China, but they were actually engaged in what Gutmann calls "climbing the Gold Mountain." Over the next three years, as Gutmann worked his way into comfortable positions at a Chinese television documentary company and a public affairs firm conducting U.S. politicians on carefully choreographed tours of the New China, he became an insider. What Gutmann discovered in the company meetings, cocktail parties, and after-hours expat haunts made him uneasy. Motorola reps bragged of routinely bribing Chinese officials for market access; Asia Global Crossing executives burned through company expense accounts while racking up massive losses for the corporation; and PR consultants provided svelte Mongolian prostitutes and five-star hotel suites for home office delegations. In Beijing's expat fast lane, success was measured not only by market share, but also by the ability to pay off favors by building hot-swappable research centers for the PLA and lobbying for Chinese interests in Washington. Treating the New China as a combination of El Dorado and Lotus Land, American businessmen allowed themselves to be seduced by a hallucinatory Orientalist dream world of easy money, moral complicity and exotic sex. Gutmann too felt the seductive powers of the Beijing Boot Camp and at one level "Losing the New China" is a trip log of an unexpected personal journey. But above all, this book is a carefully documented report on a commercial world without moral landmarks or boundaries, where actions have unintended consequences. Writing from the ground zero of his daily experience, Gutmann shows how massive American investment generated prosperity -- but also a feverish new nationalism which surged into China's universities, the dot.coms, and the entrepreneurial centers. Beginning with the riots over the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing, he witnessed an eruption of anti-Americanism and a spurning of democracy even as U.S. technology and communication companies executed wholesale transfer of America's most sophisticated technologies to the Chinese market. With the full cooperation of companies such as Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!, Chinese authorities used American technology to monitor, sanitize, and ultimately isolate the Chinese web, creating the world's greatest Big Brother Internet. After three feverish years, Ethan Gutmann returned to the U.S. hardened by what he had experienced in the New China. But he brought something of value with him --- an intimate insider's story of American business in 21st-century Beijing. Filled with character and event, "Losing the New China" tells a fascinating story of strangers in a strange land. Readers will come away from this book understanding how and why U.S. corporations helped to replace the Goddess of Democracy that once stood in Tiananmen Square with the Gods of Mammon and Mars that dominate China today.

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