Atlas of an Anxious Man

Atlas of an Anxious Man
Author: Christoph Ransmayr
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9780857423146

In The Atlas of an Anxious Man, Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary--a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story. Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account follows Ransmayr across the globe: from the shadow of Java's volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle to Himalayan passes, and on to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific. Ransmayr begins again and again with, "I saw. . ." recounting to the reader the stories of continents, eras, and landscapes of the soul. Like maps, the episodes come together to become a book of the world--one that charts the life and death, happiness and fate of people bound up in images of breathtaking beauty. "One of the German language's most gifted young novelists."--Library Journal, on The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science

Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science
Author: Georges Didi-Huberman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2018-10-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022643950X

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929) is a prescient work of mixed media assemblage, made up of hundreds of images culled from antiquity to the Renaissance and arranged into startling juxtapositions. Warburg’s allusive atlas sought to illuminate the pains of his final years, after he had suffered a breakdown and been institutionalized. It continues to influence contemporary artists today, including Gerhard Richter and Mark Dion. In this illustrated exploration of Warburg and his great work, Georges Didi-Huberman leaps from Mnemosyne Atlas into a set of musings on the relation between suffering and knowledge in Western thought, and on the creative results of associative thinking. Deploying writing that delights in dramatic jump cuts reminiscent of Warburg’s idiosyncratic juxtapositions, and drawing on a set of sources that ranges from ancient Babylon to Walter Benjamin, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science is rich in Didi-Huberman’s trademark combination of elan and insight.

Anxious Journeys

Anxious Journeys
Author: Karin Baumgartner
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1640140115

The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon. Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.

Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition)

Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition)
Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2010-07-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307373576

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction Featuring a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

The Noonday Demon

The Noonday Demon
Author: Andrew Solomon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2014-09-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 145161103X

The author offers a look at depression in which he draws on his own battle with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, researchers, doctors, and others to assess the complexities of the disease, its causes and symptoms, and available therapies. This book examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations, around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. He takes readers on a journey into the most pervasive of family secrets and contributes to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition.

Other Globes

Other Globes
Author: Simon Ferdinand
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2019-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030149803

This volume challenges dominant imaginations of globalization by highlighting alternative visions of the globe, world, earth, or planet that abound in cultural, social, and political practice. In the contemporary context of intensive globalization, ruthless geopolitics, and unabated environmental exploitation, these “other globes” offer paths for thinking anew the relations between people, polities, and the planet. Derived from disparate historical and cultural contexts, which include the Holy Roman Empire; late medieval Brabant; the (post)colonial Philippines; early twentieth-century Britain; contemporary Puerto Rico; occupied Palestine; postcolonial Africa and Chile; and present-day California, the past and peripheral globes analyzed in this volume reveal the variety of ways in which the global has been—and might be—imagined. As such, the fourteen contributions underline that there is no neutral, natural, or universal way of inhabiting the global.

World Literature and the Postcolonial

World Literature and the Postcolonial
Author: Elke Sturm-Trigonakis
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-05-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3662617854

This volume approaches literary representations of post and neocolonialism by combining their readings with respective theoretical configurations. The aim is to cast light upon common characteristics of contemporary texts from around the world that deal with processes of colonization. Based on the epistemic discourses of postimperialism/postcolonialism, globalization, and world literature, the volume’s chapters bring together international scholars from various disciplines in the Humanities, including Comparative Cultural Studies, Slavic, Romance, German, and African Studies. The main concern of the contributions is to conceptualize an autonomous category of a world literature of the colonial, going well beyond established classifications according to single languages or center-periphery dichotomies. ​

Thinking Like an Iceberg

Thinking Like an Iceberg
Author: Olivier Remaud
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2022-06-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1509551484

When we imagine the polar regions, we see a largely lifeless world covered in snow and ice where icebergs drift listlessly through frozen waters, like solitary wanderers of the oceans floating aimlessly in total silence. But nothing could be further from the truth. This book takes us into the fascinating world of icebergs and glaciers to discover what they are really like. Through a series of historical vignettes recalling some of the most tragic and most exhilarating encounters between human beings and these gigantic pieces of matter, and through vivid descriptions of their cycles of birth and death, Olivier Remaud shows that these entities are teeming with many forms of life and that there is a deep continuity between iceberg life and human life, a complex web of reciprocal interconnections that can lead from the deadliest to the most vital. And precisely because there is this continuity, icebergs and glaciers tell us something important about life itself – namely, that it thrives in the most unexpected of places, even where there seems to be no life at all. At a time when we are increasingly aware that the melting of ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice is one of the many disastrous consequences of global warming, this beautiful meditation is a poignant reminder of the interconnectedness of all life and the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystems.

The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa

The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa
Author: Yvonne Zivkovic
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 1640140883

Shows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.

Atlas of the Heart

Atlas of the Heart
Author: Brené Brown
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0399592571

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her latest book, Brené Brown writes, “If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and be stewards of the stories that we hear. This is the framework for meaningful connection.” Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart! In Atlas of the Heart, Brown takes us on a journey through eighty-seven of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances—a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection. Over the past two decades, Brown’s extensive research into the experiences that make us who we are has shaped the cultural conversation and helped define what it means to be courageous with our lives. Atlas of the Heart draws on this research, as well as on Brown’s singular skills as a storyteller, to show us how accurately naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power—it gives us the power of understanding, meaning, and choice. Brown shares, “I want this book to be an atlas for all of us, because I believe that, with an adventurous heart and the right maps, we can travel anywhere and never fear losing ourselves.”