The Two Kinds Of Decay

Author : Sarah Manguso
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1429940980
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Two Kinds of Decay written by Sarah Manguso and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names. There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities. But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening. At twenty-one, just starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, vanishing and then returning, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her nine-year struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.

Author : Sarah Manguso
Publisher : Graywolf Press
ISBN 13 : 1555979599
Total Pages : 104 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book 300 Arguments written by Sarah Manguso and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you. Bad art is from no one to no one. Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you whether you are. Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude. I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll escape the worst of it. —from 300 Arguments A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.

Author : Sarah Manguso
Publisher : Graywolf Press
ISBN 13 : 1555973361
Total Pages : 104 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ongoingness written by Sarah Manguso and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.” —The New Yorker In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary—it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. “Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict’s testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.” —The Paris Review “Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Author : Sarah Manguso
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374167249
Total Pages : 124 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Guardians written by Sarah Manguso and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the author's elegiac ode to love, death, and intimate friendship that describes how her life was profoundly changed by the suicide of a mentally ill friend and roommate with whom she shared poignant formative experiences.

Author : Niall Ferguson
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143125524
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Degeneration written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower, a searching and provocative examination of the widespread institutional rot that threatens our collective future What causes rich countries to lose their way? Symptoms of decline are all around us today: slowing growth, crushing debts, increasing inequality, aging populations, antisocial behavior. But what exactly has gone wrong? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues in The Great Degeneration, is that our institutions—the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail—are degenerating. With characteristic verve and historical insight, Ferguson analyzes the causes of this stagnation and its profound consequences for the future of the West. The Great Degeneration is an incisive indictment of an era of negligence and complacency—and to arrest the breakdown of our civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform.

Author : Sarah Manguso
Publisher : Hogarth
ISBN 13 : 0593241231
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Very Cold People written by Sarah Manguso and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The masterly debut novel from “an exquisitely astute writer” (The Boston Globe), about growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of small-town America. “Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”—The New York Times “Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend.”—The New Yorker ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping “My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.” For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield. As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.

Author : Eugene T. Motes
Publisher : iUniverse
ISBN 13 : 9781450277891
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Moral Decay of Society written by Eugene T. Motes and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Moral Decay of Society presents a summary of events that have taken place in Americas jaded recent history. To the point and possibly offensive to some, author Eugene T Motess essays aim to make people aware of what is happening around them. We Americans are under attack by our own country. We are told to worry about the War on Terrorism, and to accept the physical and mental dangers faced by men and women in our military service. Why should we continue to support a war overseas, when we cant even protect ourselves from the destruction and moral decline of our own country? It is this moral decay at home that Motes wishes to address. Parents are in a desperate battle to save their children from perverted musical artists and movie companies. Teens are being slaughtered by the millions because parents are blind and ignorant. Only parents can protect their children from Satan other terrible influences, including rock, rap, heavy metal, Eclipse, True Blood, and Harry Potter, as well as numerous others that are responsible for the condition of the United States today. Become a true parent to your children and help to stop The Moral Decay of Society.

Author : George Catlin
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 108 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shut Your Mouth written by George Catlin and published by . This book was released on 1869 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Catlin discusses how closing one's mouth during sleep and day to day will foster improvement in mental and physical condition. This edition contains all of the original illustrations the author made. Walking among and studying various Native American tribes in the 19th century, the author noticed that many of the elders possessed a serene and well-preserved appearance. The young members of the tribe seemed especially healthy, with an innate resistance to certain illnesses and congenital conditions. Seeing the tribe's members sleeping, he noted that they all did so with closed mouths. Catlin pondered whether this habit contributed to the physical vigor of the people, and investigated further. After venturing back to the towns of the Midwest, he attests to witnessing how terrible many people who had practiced mouth breathing throughout life appeared, and became deeply opposed to its practice. This book details how children and young people can be encouraged against mouth breathing, and notes how different the facial countenance appears between mouth breathing people and nose breathers. Today, the notion that mouth breathing promotes physical ugliness or decrepitude is wholly disavowed as an eccentric idea with no basis in fact. However, sleep researchers have demonstrated that breathing with the mouth open while asleep can result in more snoring and thus a lower quality of sleep and therefore health. Overall, one could venture that Catlin's ideas possess a certain merit, even if his book is an exaggeration. Although primarily known today as a painter and traveller who became an emissary of sorts to the Plains tribes, George Catlin was also an enthusiastic if occasional writer. He admired the Native American peoples for their traditions and distinctive appearance, and took to painting them - his marked talent led to their respect for his gifts, and they duly welcomed him with friendship.

Author : Jane Jacobs
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307425452
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dark Age Ahead written by Jane Jacobs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we’re at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs—renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities—pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on a vast frame of reference—from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland’s cultural rebirth—Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs’ career, but one of the most important works of our time.

Author : Christopher B. Leinberger
Publisher : Island Press
ISBN 13 : 1597267767
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Option of Urbanism written by Christopher B. Leinberger and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2010-03-18 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism visionary developer and strategist Christopher B. Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy—car manufacturing and the oil industry—this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma. Highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities for this type of development, The Option of Urbanism shows how the American Dream is shifting to include cities as well as suburbs and how the financial and real estate communities need to respond to build communities that are more environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable.