Author: Tim Kreider Publisher: Simon & Schuster ISBN: 9781476738994 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
*A People Top 10 Book of 2018* The New York Times essayist and author of We Learn Nothing, Tim Kreider trains his singular power of observation on his (often befuddling) relationships with women. Psychologists have told him he’s a psychologist. Philosophers have told him he’s a philosopher. Religious groups have invited him to speak. He had a cult following as a cartoonist. But, above all else, Tim Kreider is an essayist—one whose deft prose, uncanny observations, dark humor, and emotional vulnerability have earned him deserved comparisons to David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and the late David Foster Wallace (who was himself a fan of Kreider’s humor). “Beautifully written, with just enough humor to balance his spikiness” (Booklist), I Wrote This Book Because I Love You focuses Tim’s unique perception and wit on his relationships with women—romantic, platonic, and the murky in-between. He talks about his difficulty finding lasting love and seeks to understand his commitment issues by tracking down the John Hopkins psychologist who tested him for a groundbreaking study on attachment when he was a toddler. He talks about his valued female friendships, one of which landed him on a circus train bound for Mexico. He talks about his time teaching young women at an upstate New York college, and the profound lessons they wound up teaching him. And in a hugely popular essay that originally appeared in The New York Times, he talks about his nineteen-year-old cat, wondering if it’s the most enduring relationship he’ll ever have. “In a style reminiscent of Orwell, E.B. White and David Sedaris” (The New York Times Book Review), each of these pieces is “heartbreaking, brutal, and hilarious” (Judd Apatow), and collectively they cement Kreider’s place among the best essayists working today.
Author: Donald Ostrowski Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501749714 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
Who Wrote That? examines nine authorship controversies, providing an introduction to particular disputes and teaching students how to assess historical documents, archival materials, and apocryphal stories, as well as internet sources and news. Donald Ostrowski does not argue in favor of one side over another but focuses on the principles of attribution used to make each case. While furthering the field of authorship studies, Who Wrote That? provides an essential resource for instructors at all levels in various subjects. It is ultimately about historical detective work. Using Moses, Analects, the Secret Gospel of Mark, Abelard and Heloise, the Compendium of Chronicles, Rashid al-Din, Shakespeare, Prince Andrei Kurbskii, James MacPherson, and Mikhail Sholokov, Ostrowski builds concrete examples that instructors can use to help students uncover the legitimacy of authorship and to spark the desire to turn over the hidden layers of history so necessary to the craft.
Author: Naomi S. Baron Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503637905 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 438
Book Description
Would you read this book if a computer wrote it? Would you even know? And why would it matter? Today's eerily impressive artificial intelligence writing tools present us with a crucial challenge: As writers, do we unthinkingly adopt AI's time-saving advantages or do we stop to weigh what we gain and lose when heeding its siren call? To understand how AI is redefining what it means to write and think, linguist and educator Naomi S. Baron leads us on a journey connecting the dots between human literacy and today's technology. From nineteenth-century lessons in composition, to mathematician Alan Turing's work creating a machine for deciphering war-time messages, to contemporary engines like ChatGPT, Baron gives readers a spirited overview of the emergence of both literacy and AI, and a glimpse of their possible future. As the technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and fluent, it's tempting to take the easy way out and let AI do the work for us. Baron cautions that such efficiency isn't always in our interest. As AI plies us with suggestions or full-blown text, we risk losing not just our technical skills but the power of writing as a springboard for personal reflection and unique expression. Funny, informed, and conversational, Who Wrote This? urges us as individuals and as communities to make conscious choices about the extent to which we collaborate with AI. The technology is here to stay. Baron shows us how to work with AI and how to spot where it risks diminishing the valuable cognitive and social benefits of being literate.
Author: Lily E. Kay Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804734172 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 476
Book Description
This is a detailed history of one of the most important and dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity, and society. Drawing on archives, published sources, and interviews, the author situates work on the genetic code (1953-70) within the history of life science, the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), the intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics, and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States. Kay draws out the historical specificity in the process by which the central biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis came to be metaphorically represented as an information code and a writing technologyand consequently as a book of life. This molecular writing and reading is part of the cultural production of the Nuclear Age, its power amplified by the centuries-old theistic resonance of the book of life metaphor. Yet, as the author points out, these are just metaphors: analogies, not ontologies. Necessary and productive as they have been, they have their epistemological limitations. Deploying analyses of language, cryptology, and information theory, the author persuasively argues that, technically speaking, the genetic code is not a code, DNA is not a language, and the genome is not an information system (objections voiced by experts as early as the 1950s). Thus her historical reconstruction and analyses also serve as a critique of the new genomic biopower. Genomic textuality has become a fact of life, a metaphor literalized, she claims, as human genome projects promise new levels of control over life through the meta-level of information: control of the word (the DNA sequences) and its editing and rewriting. But the author shows how the humbling limits of these scriptural metaphors also pose a challenge to the textual and material mastery of the genomic book of life.
Author: Iain S. Thomas Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing ISBN: 1449499821 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
Ten years ago, I started writing this for you. I wrote it for you and only you. Since then, millions of other people have read it, but none have understood it the way you understand it. I set out to find you a long time ago and today, I'm so glad I finally have. Thank you for reading these words.
Author: Lee Siegel Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226757013 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
Who Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex—beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love. Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love. "Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.
Author: Steve Dorff Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation ISBN: 1540005011 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
(Book). One of the most successful songwriters and composers of the last 25 years, Steve Dorff has penned over 20 Top 10 hits for pop and country artists around the world, including Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion, Blake Shelton, Smokey Robinson, Kenny Rogers, Ray Charles, Anne Murray, Whitney Houston, George Strait, Dolly Parton, Judy Collins, Cher, Dusty Springfield, Ringo Starr, and Garth Brooks. He has scored for television shows, including Growing Pains , Major Dad , Murder She Wrote , Reba , and several films, including Any Which Way but Loose for which he penned the titular song, and more recently, he has embarked on Broadway (forthcoming musical Josephine ). Chronicling his four decades behind the music, Steve Dorff gives anecdotes, advice, and insights into his journey. The book follows Steve from his childhood in Queens to Manhattan to Nashville and to his eventual arrival in Los Angeles, California. Oftentimes, songs are attributed to the singers who perform them, but it is the songwriter who really knows the story behind the story from conception to execution. Full of heartfelt stories, hard-earned wisdom, and delightful wit, I Wrote That One, Too . . . is a great read for musicians, music fans, and whoever has chased their dreams and survived the surprising but often serendipitous turns in the road.
Author: Iain S. Thomas Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing ISBN: 1449499805 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
I Wrote This For You: Just The Words presents twice the number of entries with over 400 works from the internationally acclaimed poetry and photography project; including several new and never before seen poems. While focusing on the words from the project, new photography launches each section which speaks to the reader's journey through the world: Love Found, Being In Love, Love Lost, Hope, Despair, Living and Dying.
Author: Stephen Markley Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc. ISBN: 1402246471 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 479
Book Description
From the author of Ohio (Best Books of Summer 2018 Selection in Time, Vulture, and the New York Post) comes a brilliant, hilarious, and deeply touching memoir that blows the roof off the genre. Fed up with the complicated quest of trying to get a book published, Stephen Markley decided to cut to the chase and simply write a memoir about trying to publish a book--this book, to be precise. It's the most "meta" experiment he's ever untaken, and like a Mobius strip in book form, the concept is circular, self-indulgent, and--maybe, possibly, hopefully--brilliant. For fans of Dave Eggers and David Sedaris, Publish This Book is the modern day saga of an idealistic, ambitious, audacious, unyielding young writer who is tired of waiting his turn. Like any work that claims gleefully to be about nothing, it's really about pretty much everything--sex, drugs, politics, pop-culture, ex-girlfriends and sexy vampires. From the hope of early adulthood to the rage of life's many (unavoidable) disappointments, it is a story of overcoming the obstacles and discovering a happy ending at last. Most importantly, it's a story that will inspire readers to find their true voice in their work and in their life. Praise for Stephen Markley: "Markley seems clever and funny, but it may be his "fire" that ultimately makes him worthwhile." -- Literary Chicago "Compelling, emotionally resonant passages . . ." -- Publishers Weekly "Markley is a knockout storyteller" -- Kirkus Reviews
Author: Tim Kreider
Author: Donald Ostrowski
Author: Naomi S. Baron
Author: Lily E. Kay
Author: Iain S. Thomas
Author: Lee Siegel
Author: Steve Dorff
Author: 
Author: Iain S. Thomas
Author: Stephen Markley