The Ecstatic PDF Download

Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 037571331X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Anthony James weighs 315 pounds, is possibly schizophrenic, and he’s just been kicked out of college. He’s rescued by his mother, sister, and grandmother, but they may not be altogether sane themselves. Living in the basement of their home in Queens, New York, Anthony is armed with nothing but wicked sarcasm and a few well-cut suits. He intends to make horror movies but takes the jobs he can handle, cleaning homes and factories, and keeps crossing paths with a Japanese political prisoner, a mysterious loan shark named Ishkabibble, and packs of feral dogs. When his invincible 13-year old sister enters yet another beauty pageant—this one for virgins—the combustible Jameses pile into their car and head South for the competition. Will Anthony’s family stick together or explode? With electrifying prose, LaValle ushers us into four troubled but very funny lives.

Author: Victor La Valle
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307428486
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Victor LaValle has already established himself as “one of the most eloquent voices of the approaching century” (Kirkus Reviews), a writer of darkly humorous tales full of haunting beauty, astonishing leaps of imagination, and language that “crackles and hums” (Chicago Tribune). The Ecstatic is LaValle’s debut novel, a startling tale of love, horror, sex, insanity, faith, morbid obesity, and the modern American family. Something is wrong with Anthony—our 318-pound hero—and it’s getting worse. A monster has caught his uncle and his mother; now it wants Anthony. Mental illness has been transmitted through his family’s blood. The three women in his life—his mother, younger sister, and grandmother—find him naked and disoriented in his off-campus college apartment and take him home to Queens, each determined to fix him in her own peculiar way. But his presence soon turns their house into a semisuburban asylum. Sweet but wickedly sarcastic, smart and heartbreakingly vulnerable, Anthony narrates his family’s surreal adventures through a world of grinning exploitation and fake cures, from storefront evangelists and neighborhood loan sharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. He corresponds with a dreadlocked Japanese militant, is haunted by a vicious pack of dogs, and tries to make his own horror movie, all in search of an answer to a question he doesn’t dare ask. Written in the tradition of misfit picaresques from Journey to the End of the Night and Invisible Man to A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, The Ecstatic is the revelatory story of a family trying to save themselves from a ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.

Author: Matthew St. Amand
Publisher: Waywords & Meansigns Press
ISBN: 1738231275
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
Now, after 34 years, here is the book the Vatican banned in 88 countries, the FBI tried to suppress, and every major media outlet in the English speaking world told you did not exist. Available in this limited, unauthorized edition are the stories of Homunculus. These are the ravings of a desert-maddened wanderer grown lunatic on locusts and honey, crazed by these voices that refused to be silenced. Written in the margins of international telephone directories, take-out menus, matchbooks and business cards, Homunculus has been meticulously reconstructed, its hidden codes broken and laid bare. Shield the elderly and the infirm, protect the innocent and nubile.

Author: Jonathan M. Metzl
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807085936
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America. This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the two covers.

Author: Harald William Fawkner
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838632499
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description

Author: Mark J. Bruhn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317936868
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.

Author: Mark P. Worrell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900443318X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Resignation and Ecstasy challenges critical sociology and social philosophy to theorize neoliberalism from the standpoint of a moral economy of sacred forces that both frustrates and facilitates conceptual unifications in the quest for collective solidarity.

Author: David Toft
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 899

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Book Description
About the Book Sara Dee was a child when war broke out between the kingdoms of Apollo and Luna. Separated from her parents, she became a prisoner of war, only to be recruited by the enemy for her magical abilities of Gaia as she inevitably becomes one of the deadliest weapons against all of mankind: the homunculus. Experience the tragic tale of hope that is Sara Dee, a story that is separated into four parts and takes place before her appearance in the upcoming Cole Secretcher Series novel: Cole Secretcher and the Chosen One. Be introduced to the dark fantasy world of Terra, on its continent Pangea, that was stripped of its magic by an unknown catastrophe; and join Sara as she interacts with twisted, but passionate and idealistic survivors of war while on her journey to being reunited with her parents. When one of Sara’s biggest obstacles is an enemy that is capable of seeing into the future, will she be able to win against time itself? Will Sara be able to fulfill her greatest wish: the wish for a happy ending? About the Author David Toft has graduated from Idaho State University and is going into his hard-earned career of being a homeless bum. You can get in touch with David via Facebook or Twitter and maybe hear him scream in agony as he tries to finish his next book Cole Secretcher and the Chosen One.

Author: Alma Dawson Ph.D.
Publisher: Libraries Unlimited
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
Will guide readers to works central to the compelling African American experience that match specific reading interests. A brief history of the evolution of African American literature, collection development guidelines, and readers' advisory tips complete this resource.

Author: Ekow Eshun
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500777314
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In the Black Fantastic assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora that embraces ideas of the mythic and the speculative. Neither Afrofuturism nor Magic Realism, but inhabiting its own universe, In the Black Fantastic brings to life a cultural movement that conjures otherworldly visions out of the everyday Black experience and beyond looking at how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender, identity and the body in the 21st century. Transcending time, space and genre to span art, design, fashion architecture, film, literature and popular culture from African myth to future fantasies and beyond, this vital, timely and compelling publication is an expressive exploration of Black popular culture at its most wildly imaginative, artistically ambitious and politically urgent.