Shouting Down the Silence

Shouting Down the Silence
Author: David C Dougherty
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0252091019

Shouting Down the Silence presents the first complete biography of Stanley Elkin, a preeminent novelist who consistently won high marks from critics but whose complexities of style seemed destined to elude the popular acclaim he hoped to attain. From the publication of his second novel, A Bad Man, in 1967 to his death in 1995, Elkin was tormented by the desire for both material and artistic success. Elkin's novels were taught in colleges and universities, his fiction received high praise from critics and reviewers (two of his novels won National Book Critics Circle Awards), and his short stories were widely anthologized--and yet he was unable to achieve renown beyond the avant-garde, or to escape the stigma of being an "academic writer." He wanted to be Faulkner, but he had trouble being Elkin. Drawing on personal interviews and an intimate knowledge of Elkins's life and works, David C. Dougherty captures Elkin's early life as the son of a charismatic, intimidating, and remarkably successful Jewish immigrant from Russia, as well as his later career at Washington University in St. Louis. A frequent participant at the annual Bread Loaf Writers' conference, he was the friend--and sometime antagonist--of other important writers, particularly Saul Bellow, William Gass, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Coover. Despite failed attempts to bridge the gap from his academic post to wide popular success, Elkin continued to write essays, stories, and novels that garnered unerring praise. His was a classic dilemma of an intellectual aesthete loath to make use of the common devices of popular appeal. The book details the ambition, the success, the friction, and the foibles of a writer who won fame, but not the fame he wanted.

Shouting Down the Silence

Shouting Down the Silence
Author: David C. Dougherty
Publisher:
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780252035081

Shouting Down the Silence presents the first complete biography of Stanley Elkin, a preeminent novelist who consistently won high marks from critics but whose complexities of style seemed destined to elude the popular acclaim he hoped to attain. From the publication of his second novel, A Bad Man, in 1967 to his death in 1995, Elkin was tormented by the desire for both material and artistic success. Elkin's novels were taught in colleges and universities, his fiction received high praise from critics and reviewers (two of his novels won National Book Critics Circle Awards), and his short stories were widely anthologized--and yet he was unable to achieve renown beyond the avant-garde, or to escape the stigma of being an "academic writer." He wanted to be Faulkner, but he had trouble being Elkin. Drawing on personal interviews and an intimate knowledge of Elkins's life and works, David C. Dougherty captures Elkin's early life as the son of a charismatic, intimidating, and remarkably successful Jewish immigrant from Russia, as well as his later career at Washington University in St. Louis. A frequent participant at the annual Bread Loaf Writers' conference, he was the friend--and sometime antagonist--of other important writers, particularly Saul Bellow, William Gass, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Coover. Despite failed attempts to bridge the gap from his academic post to wide popular success, Elkin continued to write essays, stories, and novels that garnered unerring praise. His was a classic dilemma of an intellectual aesthete loath to make use of the common devices of popular appeal. The book details the ambition, the success, the friction, and the foibles of a writer who won fame, but not the fame he wanted.

Screaming in the Silence

Screaming in the Silence
Author: Lydia Kelly
Publisher: Worldmaker Media
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780982827321

Running away from a complicated life, Raleigh finds herself plunged into a nightmare. While hitchhiking across the country, she and her companion are struck by a car. Her friend is killed but Raleigh survives and her life is thrown into the hands of the three men involved in the accident. Bruised and in shock, Raleigh is locked in the basement of their remote country house, unsure of her fate. Kaden, one of her captors, is handsome and at times protective, and he convinces his friends to spare Raleigh's life to ransom her. But the safety he provides is only from his friends, and Raleigh must face his sinister intentions. Agreeing to become his lover in return for continued protection, she begins to see a tender and caring side of Kaden despite their short but violent history. As the ransom payment begins to unravel and Raleigh's life hangs in the balance, she wonders how much she can trust Kaden. Are the feelings she has developed for him genuine or a result of her situation? Does he truly care for her, as he claims, or does he just see her as a ransom payment? Screaming in the Silence is the harrowing, provocative story of a woman testing love in the most hostile of environments. It is a story you will never forget. Now, with a new, never-before read Epilogue, Screaming in the Silence is the official published version of the Internet hit that has been read hundreds of thousands of times.

Shouting Won't Help

Shouting Won't Help
Author: Katherine Bouton
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2013-02-19
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1429953373

For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was "the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century." Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown. Shouting Won't Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition. The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

How to Disappear

How to Disappear
Author: Akiko Busch
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1101980435

It is time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power? The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, autonomy, and voice. In our networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been more alluring. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and promote ourselves. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but from vast and pervasive technology companies that want to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life—for invisibility. Writing in rich painterly detail about her own life, her family, and some of the world’s most exotic and remote places, she savors the pleasures of being unseen. Discovering and dramatizing a wonderful range of ways of disappearing, from virtual reality goggles that trick the wearer into believing her body has disappeared to the way Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway finds a sense of affiliation with the world around her as she ages, Busch deliberates on subjects new and old with equal sensitivity and incisiveness. How to Disappear is a unique and exhilarating accomplishment, overturning the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness. Busch presents a field guide to invisibility, reacquainting us with the merits of remaining inconspicuous, and finding genuine alternatives to a life of perpetual exposure. Accessing timeless truths in order to speak to our most urgent contemporary problems, she inspires us to develop a deeper appreciation for personal privacy in a vast and intrusive world.

Appassionata

Appassionata
Author: Fannie Hurst
Publisher: Macmillan Company of Canada
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1926
Genre:
ISBN:

Shout Your Abortion

Shout Your Abortion
Author: Amelia Bonow
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1629635901

Following the U.S. Congress’s attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion became a viral conduit for abortion storytelling, receiving extensive media coverage and positioning real human experiences at the center of America’s abortion debate for the very first time. The online momentum sparked a grassroots movement that has subsequently inspired countless individuals to share their abortion stories in art, media, and community events all over the country, and to begin building platforms for others to do the same. Shout Your Abortion is a collection of photos, essays, and creative work inspired by the movement of the same name, a template for building new communities of healing, and a call to action. Since SYA’s inception, people all over the country have shared stories and begun organizing in a range of ways: making art, hosting comedy shows, creating abortion-positive clothing, altering billboards, starting conversations that had never happened before. This book documents some of these projects and illuminates the individuals who have breathed life into this movement, illustrating the profound liberatory and political power of defying shame and claiming sole authorship of our experiences. With Roe vs. Wade on the brink of reversal, the act of shouting one’s abortion has become explicitly radical, and Shout Your Abortion is needed more urgently than ever before.

Everybody's

Everybody's
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1078
Release: 1928
Genre: American periodicals
ISBN:

Things I Have Withheld

Things I Have Withheld
Author: Kei Miller
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 080215896X

Fourteen “thoughtful and impassioned” autobiographical essays exploring race, sex, gender, belonging, and alienation by an award-winning author (Kirkus Reviews). In a deeply moving, critical and lyrical collection of interconnected essays, award-winning writer Kei Miller explores the silences in which so many important things are kept. Miller examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it —”to risk words, to risk truth; and through the body and the histories those bodies inherit” the crimes that haunt them, and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice from a black, male, queer perspective. An almost disarmingly personal collection, Kei dissects his experiences in Jamaica and Britain, working as an artist and intellectual, making friends and lovers, discovering the possibilities of music and dance, literary criticism, culture, and storytelling. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of innovation and beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why, “our actions, defense mechanisms, imaginations and interactions” and those of the world around us. Praise for Things I Have Withheld Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction BOMB Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Best Book of 2021 at Slate and Buzzfeed Times (UK), 16 best philosophy and ideas books 2021 “Miller gives a searing voice to ‘the things’ I have been trying so hard to write” in this entrancing collection. . . . Sharp as blades, Miller’s words cut to the core.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “There’s no didacticism or sermons here, merely curiosity and sometimes anger and a deep commitment to speaking the uncomfortable truths we’d rather not hear. A bold and daring collection.” —Buzzfeed “This incisive collection of short essays serves as a tabernacle for stories untold, secrets, and reflections on race and sexuality. . . . Immediately arresting and consistently poignant, Miller’s essays engage with the urgency of gripping fiction and the authenticity of stunning poetry. An important voice of the Caribbean, who should be read together with the likes of Safiya Sinclair, Oonya Kempadoo, and Colin Channer.” —Booklist