Possessed By Memory

Author : Harold Bloom
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525520899
Total Pages : 544 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Possessed by Memory written by Harold Bloom and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood. Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens--and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things." As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."

Author : Harold Bloom
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300167601
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Anatomy of Influence written by Harold Bloom and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads readers through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years.

Author : Elif Batuman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 142993641X
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Possessed written by Elif Batuman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED—ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!—TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

Author : John Hollander
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781573226462
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Committed to Memory written by John Hollander and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of a hundred-and-some poems chosen specifically for memorization and for the particulary intense kind of silent reading with which a reader prepares to remember them.

Author : Harold Bloom
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525562478
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Possessed by Memory written by Harold Bloom and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wonderful. . . . Spectacular. . . . You feel the pulse of life, what poetry can bring to us if we let it." —The Philadelphia Inquirer "This audacious personal odyssey offers readers a cosmos of possibilities when contemplating what happens once we 'shuffle off this mortal coil.'" —The Christian Science Monitor "An elegiac meditation on a life lived through books." —O, The Oprah Magazine "The great critic revisits the literature that has meant most to him." —The New York Times Book Review Here is the daringly original literary critic's most personal book: a four-part spiritual autobiography in the form of brief, luminous readings of poetry, drama, and prose—much of which he has known by heart since childhood. As one of his own mentors, M. H. Abrams, has said, to read Bloom's commentaries is like "reading classic authors by flashes of lightning." Gone are the polemics; here Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but himself. In "A Voice she Heard Before the World Was Made," he offers startling meditations on foundational concerns of Biblical study. "In the Elegy Season" finds him coming to terms movingly, from a new vantage, with writers on whom he has brooded for much of his life. And with brio and bravura in "The Imperfect Is Our Paradise," Bloom ranges dazzlingly through twentieth-century American poetry, from Wallace Stevens to Amy Clampitt. Possessed by Memory, in short, is essential Bloom.

Author : Lynn Casteel Harper
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1948226294
Total Pages : 126 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Vanishing written by Lynn Casteel Harper and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.

Author : Claire North
Publisher : Redhook
ISBN 13 : 0316335932
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Touch written by Claire North and published by Redhook. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Touch is an electrifying thriller by the author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and 84K. He tried to take my life. Instead, I took his. It was a long time ago. I remember it was dark, and I didn't see my killer until it was too late. As I died, my hand touched his. That's when the first switch took place. Suddenly, I was looking through the eyes of my killer, and I was watching myself die. Now switching is easy. I can jump from body to body, have any life, be anyone. Some people touch lives. Others take them. I do both. More by Claire North:The Gameshouse84KThe End of the DayThe Sudden Appearance of HopeTouchThe First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Author : Harold Bloom
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195162218
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Map of Misreading written by Harold Bloom and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume in Bloom's series of works which reveal his theory of revisionism, "A Map of Misreading" demonstrates his theory that patterns of imagery in poems represent both a response to and a defense against the influence of precursor poems.

Author : Hua Hsu
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0593315200
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stay True written by Hua Hsu and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu “This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

Author : Harold Bloom
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300255810
Total Pages : 672 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles written by Harold Bloom and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry. "Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary minds."—Publishers Weekly “An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable”—Seamus Perry, Literary Review "Reading, this stirring collection testifies, ‘helps in staying alive.’“—Kirkus Reviews, starred review This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed weeks before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.” Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature,” he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.” In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself “edged by nothingness,” uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear‑eyed, this is among Harold Bloom’s most ambitious and most moving books.