Author: Marilyn Messik Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd ISBN: 178306191X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
"I was five when I discovered I could fly, sixteen when I killed a man. Both events were unsettling in their own way." It’s hard to know what’s normal, if you’re not, and it takes Stella a while to realise she’s in the definitely ‘not’ drawer. But we are who we are and we make adjustments to fit in – most of the time – and it’s only when she finds she’s not quite as unique as she thought, that things begin to acquire a whole new dimension. Forced to call on resources she didn’t know she possessed and thrust headlong into the violence of a situation for which nothing could have prepared her, Stella is suddenly face to face with the stark reality of medical experimentation and its horrifying consequences. But in a world of uncertainties, one thing’s beyond doubt – this hero stuff really isn’t her. Normal, or as near as damn it, is what she wants and if that means smothering her instincts and adjusting her expectations well, so be it. At least she’ll then know should she slip off the wagon occasionally, it’ll be through choice, not chance and to suit herself. Isn’t it a fact though that just when you think you’ve got yourself sorted, life turns round and bites you? Relatively Strange introduces a protagonist whose irreverent sense of humour, conviction she always knows best and inability to keep her mouth shut, will strike a chord with like-minded readers everywhere. Marilyn has been inspired by a number of authors, including Stephen King, Susan Hill and John Connolly.
Author: Nancy N. Rue Publisher: Zondervan ISBN: 031072791X Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
From bestselling author Nancy Rue comes a YA contemporary novel that combines coming-of-age drama with a rom-com series of adventures as one girl deals with her complicated family and first love. Jesse Hatcher is used to keeping everything together—from trying to manage her thoughts amidst her ADHD to helping her mom through bipolar “phases” and keeping the reality of the highs and lows—and their living situation—a secret. But when her supposedly dead father, Lou, appears and her mother becomes suicidal, her taped-together life comes undone. Soon Jesse is placed in Lou’s temporary custody, where she has everything but control. As she works her Dad-mandated job learning to make sushi with a chef intent on torturing her, she concocts a plan to get back to her real home. But then a cute boy named Rocky and the thrill of riding his motorcycle complicate things, and the book she found seems to have all the answers she doesn’t want to hear. Torn between what her mom wants and a life she might actually enjoy, Jesse is forced to make a crazy decision. Motorcycles, Burritos & One Strange Book: features a vibrant and witty protagonist dealing with the realities of a divided family and mental illness is a Christy award-winning novel that explores the ideas of self-worth and empowerment provides an inspirational message for those dealing with tough circumstances is the first book in the Real Life series
Author: Rachel Hadas Publisher: Paul Dry Books ISBN: 1589882504 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
"[A] thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness." —Lydia Davis In 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. Strange Relation is her account of "losing" George. Her narrative begins when George's illness can no longer be ignored, and ends in 2008 soon after his move to a dementia facility (when, after thirty years of marriage, she finds herself no longer living with her husband). Within the cloudy confines of those difficult years, years when reading and writing were an essential part of what kept her going, she "tried to keep track…tried to tell the truth." "If only all doctors and nurses and social workers who care for the chronically ill could read this book. If only patients and family members stricken with such losses could receive what this book can give them. While Strange Relation relates one illness and the life of one family, it is also, poetically, about all illnesses, all families, all struggles, all living. The art achieves the dual life of the universal and the particular, marking it as timeless, making it for us all necessary."—Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University "Rachel Hadas's own wonderfully resonant poems, along with the rich collection of verse and prose by other writers that she weaves into her story, clarify and illuminate over and over again this thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness—illness that, as she shows us so well, is at once frighteningly alien and also deeply a part of our unavoidable vulnerability as mortal beings. Beautifully written, totally engrossing, and very sad."—Lydia Davis "Strange Relation is a deeply moving, deeply personal, beautifully written exploration of how the power of grief can be met with the power of literature, and how solace can be found in the space between them."—Frank Huyler "A poignant memoir of love, creativity and human vulnerability. Rachel Hadas brings a poet's incisive eye to the labyrinth of dementia."—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of Medicine in Translation and Singular Intimacies "Like an elegy, Strange Relation is about loss and grief. Like all elegies, it also memorializes and celebrates. Rachel Hadas, in the course of her personal narrative, cites accounts of dementia, in its social and personal meanings."—Robert Pinsky "Brilliant and tough-minded, poignant but clear-headed, Rachel Hadas shines a steady light on her experience as the wife of an accomplished composer who, at a comparatively early age, descended into dementia. Strange Relation never sacrifices truth for easy answers. Instead, Hadas uses literature to chart a course through wrenching complexities. This lauded and exceptional poet shows how language itself, the very thing her husband loses, became her shield as she crossed the ravaged lands of decision-making, making new discoveries, new friends, and new sense of the world. Strange Relation snaps with bravery, intelligence, and Hadas' tart, candid wisdom."—Molly Peacock "Strange Relation is a beautifully written and piercingly honest account of life with a brilliant man as he descends into dementia, in his sixties."—Reeve Lindbergh
Author: Nicole Seymour Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252094875 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
In Strange Natures, Nicole Seymour investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, Seymour examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of "natural" categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. Seymour's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Todd Haynes's Safe, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, she delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.
Author: Marilyn Messik Publisher: Independently Published ISBN: 9781694739421 Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Sometimes the curtain between ordinary and extraordinary is the flimsiest of dividers! 1950s London, England. A baby girl was born - that was me, and my parents had no inkling I was different. Neither did I of course, and it was quite a while before it dawned on me that not everyone saw and heard as I did. My first proper memories are starting school, struggling to sift through what people thought, what they said, and what they actually meant - often three completely different things. And all that other stuff circling in people's heads, snatches of tunes and repetitive phrases sub-texted by overlapping emotions and sensations - happy, sad, cold, hot, sore throat, apprehensive, hungry, tired, worried, fearful. Emotions are the things that seep out the most, and then they tend to become tangled up in what's seeping out from others. It's not surprising I got a lot of headaches back then. One person is noisily discordant, several make a dreadful din, and honestly, output from a crowd is mind-aching. I had to learn swiftly and I did. I taught myself how to automatically tune out, barrier-build, and compensated as best I could by observing and mimicking the reactions of others because the trickiest thing was knowing what I should be hearing and understanding as opposed to what I shouldn't, and seeking guidance often got me even deeper into hot water. Who knew that some questions were fine whilst others generated the sort of bafflement that told me I'd crossed an invisible and constantly moving line. Luckily my family were on the paranoid side, and as they came to understand more about what I was and what I could do, paranoid proved politic. Actually, taking everything into account I think we all managed rather well, and it wasn't really anybody's fault that things took a turn for the dangerous before sliding into life-threatening. After all you have to learn to take the rough with the smooth. * * * "Love this series, a mix of genres beautifully written." ~ M A Comley, NYT & USA Today Bestseller * "Pitch perfect humour, beautiful sentences and a deadpan, matter of fact narration. A real, rare treat of a read."~ S.E. Lynes, Amazon #1 Author * "A Stephen King-like dark tale of strange occurrences." ~ Breakaway Reviewers * "Beautifully written, one of the most compelling characters ever." ~ For the Love of Books * "As if a John Wyndham character strayed into a McDermid novel." ~ Promoting Crime Fiction
Author: Charles Marsh Publisher: SPCK ISBN: 0281073147 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 594
Book Description
• This elegantly written biography offers the most intimate, detailed, rounded and supremely human portrait yet painted of the great Christian thinker and martyr • Draws on writings only recently made accessible - including the correspondence between Bonhoeffer and his teen-age fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer • Fresh insights into the duplicity into which Bonhoeffer was drawn, with intriguing quotes from the bogus diary and letters he composed to distract the Gestapo from his real activities • Packed with fascinating extracts from Bonhoeffer's own letters and papers, creating a vivid sense of the momentous times in which he lived, and of his innermost thoughts and feelings at any given moment 'A good biography takes a reader beyond the life of its subject into the times and places in which they lived. A great biography can leave us with the impression we know a stranger better than we know our friends. Charles Marsh's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer does all these things. No recent biographer of Bonhoeffer knows his theology or his historical and intellectual context better than Charles Marsh who has, for the past two decades, been the finest Bonhoeffer scholar of his generation. Yet none of this would matter if one did not want to turn the pages. Strange Glory tells Bonhoeffer's story with accuracy and insight but more than that, it is a joy to read.' Stephen J. Plant, Dean of Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Author: Michael S. Pritchard Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
Pritchard provides a deliberate and convincing argument for a starting point for the discussion of moral development, on in which self regard and empathy provide equally essential groundings for individual morality. Drawing essential elements from the work of Reid, Strawson, Rawls, Kohlberg, and Gilligan, he builds a comprehensive framework for tracing moral development from childhood--one that allows human morality to be grounded in both reason and emotion and that recognizes the importance to morality of justice and rights as well as caring and responsibility.
Author: Debbie Lacy Publisher: BookRix ISBN: 3739619767 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 14
Book Description
After a difficult birth by the mother, a child is cursed with a deformity then suddenly vanished but years later following the mother's death, secrets start to unfold and the truth is discovered.
Author: Marilyn Messik
Author: Nancy N. Rue
Author: Rachel Hadas
Author: Nicole Seymour
Author: Marilyn Messik
Author: Charles Marsh
Author: Michael S. Pritchard
Author: 
Author: Debbie Lacy
Author: Edward Stevens Robinson