Still Life and Other Stories

Still Life and Other Stories
Author: Junzo Shono
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2010-10-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1458761843

The 13 stories in this collection by Japanese writer Junzo Shono are linked by the daily life of a husband and wife and their children. The stories are like the back of a tapestry where threads seem to cross randomly. Births, weddings, school activities, a suicide attempt - all occur out of view. Readers understand crucial events through ordinary days. But these quiet tales have a cumulative power. Toys, birds, and playing cards relate to human lives as portents, parallels, parodies. The mother, with her secret sorrows, and the puzzled, bemused father savor reveries and survive unexplained misfortunes. Shono's vivid snapshot technique, the layering of images, events, and conversations, creates an effect Western readers may find more akin to an Ozu film crossed with haiku than to traditional short stories.

Still Life with Monkey

Still Life with Monkey
Author: Katharine Weber
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2018-08-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 158988129X

“A brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with heart.”―Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage “Rich and compelling . . . Her characters are vividly, achingly real, including the tiny, furry one at the novel’s center.”―Ann Packer, author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier “Stark and compelling . . . rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion.”―Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn’t sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become “a broken series of unsuccessful gestures.” Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan’s will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey―a tufted capuchin named Ottoline―to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan’s life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough? Katharine Weber is a masterful observer of humanity, and Still Life with Monkey, full of tenderness and melancholy, explores the conflict between the will to live and the desire to die.

Still Life

Still Life
Author: Rebecca Shirley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

The Still Life in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt

The Still Life in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt
Author: Elizabeth Hicks
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2010-08-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1443824607

This book explores the ways in which English writer A. S. Byatt’s visual still lifes (descriptions of real or imagined artworks) and what are termed “verbal still lifes” (scenes such as laid tables, rooms and market stalls) are informed by her veneration of both realism and writing. It examines Byatt’s adoption of the Barthesian concept of textual pleasure, showing how her ekphrastic descriptions involve consumption and take time to unfold for the reader, thereby highlighting the limitations of painting. It also investigates the ways in which Byatt’s still lifes demonstrate her debts to English modernist author Virginia Woolf, French writer Marcel Proust, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of nineteenth-century Britain. A number of Byatt’s verbal still lifes are read as semiotic markers of her characters, particularly with regard to economic status and class. Further, her descriptions uniting food and sexuality are perceived as part of her overall representation of pleasure. Finally, Byatt’s employment of vanitas iconography in many of her portrayals of death is discussed showing how her recurring motif of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” teases out the still life’s inherent tension between living passion and “cold” artwork.

Still Life & Other Stories

Still Life & Other Stories
Author: Amanda Catherine Moore
Publisher:
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2013
Genre: Short stories, American
ISBN:

Still Life & Other Stories consists of five short stories that vary widely in perspective, structure, setting, and theme. Three stories are written in close third, whereas "Many Worlds" and "The Lover" are written in the first person. Protagonists are male and female, teen-aged and adult. They range in age from 14, as with Zane in "Many Worlds," to 38 year-old Earl of "Mint Condition." The title story features an innovative structure that combines past and future in sections that are demarcated by changes in address, each address representing a formative experience in the life of the protagonist. "Islands" and "Mint Condition" are inspired by the devastating effects of the post-industrial American landscape on the people of rural, working-class areas whose livelihoods have depended on now vanishing industries. These settings are stark and homogenous, and the protagonists of both stories are eventually led to question the assumptions about gender and culture inherent to their communities. In fact, one of the collection's major thematic concerns is the nature of identity and the ways in which it is a social construct. The collection also interrogates the ways in which individuals experience the passage of time. Both teenagers and adults have to grow up fast, to adapt their hopes to the changing times and to the limits of earthly possibility.

Still Life with Fish and Other Stories

Still Life with Fish and Other Stories
Author: Laurence Klinger
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781401031848

Office clerks try to escape the reality of their tedious lives through the ancient art of archery. Two strangers trade fantasies under a fig tree in the center of the Universe. A prostitute is offered a small fortune to reveal her naked soul. Still life with fish is a book about people and their struggle to understand a world that is, at once, logical and absurd a fascinating journey charged with wisdom and imagination, tragedy and humor. Collectively, these stories form an inspiring mural of the human condition.

The Fuss About Queens and Other Stories

The Fuss About Queens and Other Stories
Author: Darius Cooper
Publisher: Om Books International
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2014
Genre: Short stories, Indic (English)
ISBN: 9384225606

The Fuss About Queens and Other Stories, a brilliant collection of short stories by Darius Cooper, delves into disparate universes, including the charming world of the Parsis in Mumbai, caught in a cultural and historical time warp, with the fire temple, the tower of silence, dusty tomes of Dostoevsky, and the British monarch’s portrait in a drawing room, set up with period furniture a truly stunning mosaic. Talking Points: Includes some of the finest short stories by the authorEach story provides a glimpse into the humanistic outlook of the writerEncompasses a variety of socially relevant themes that are close to the writer’s heart

Dear Science and Other Stories

Dear Science and Other Stories
Author: Katherine McKittrick
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2020-12-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478012579

In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

Modern British Women Writers

Modern British Women Writers
Author: Vicki K. Janik
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2002-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313016585

The 20th century witnessed several major cultural movements, including modernism, anti-modernism, and postmodernism. These and other means of understanding and perceiving the world shaped the literature of that era and, with the rise of feminism, resulted in a particularly rich body of literature by women writers. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries on 58 British women writers of the 20th century. Some of these writers were born in England, while others, such as Katherine Mansfield and Doris Lessing, came from countries of the former Empire or Commonwealth. The volume also includes entries for women of color, such as Kamala Markandaya and Buchi Emecheta. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes an overview of the writer's background, an analysis of her works, an assessment of her achievements, and lists of primary and secondary sources. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.