The Lacuna

The Lacuna
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 680
Release: 2009-11-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0571252656

**NOW INCLUDING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF DEMON COPPERHEAD** TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Lush.' Sunday Times 'Superb.' Daily Mail 'Elegantly written.' Sunday Telegraph From award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Demon Copperhead and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy. Born in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. When he starts work in the household of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo - where the Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky, is also being harboured as a political exile - he inadvertently casts his lot with art, communism and revolution. A compulsive diarist, he records and relates his colourful experiences of life with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in the midst of the Mexican revolution. A violent upheaval sends him back to America; but political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.

Lacuna

Lacuna
Author: Fiona Snyckers
Publisher: Europa Editions
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609457269

The traumatized central character of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is provocatively reimagined in this “surprising, subtle, and deeply challenging” novel (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Two years ago, Lucy Lurie was the victim of an act of sexual violence that devastated her life. Afterwards, she becomes obsessed with the author John Coetzee, whose acclaimed novel turned her brutal assault into a literary metaphor. Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself. She means to confront him. The Lucy in his novel, Disgrace, is passive and almost entirely lacking agency. Lucy means to right the record, for she is the lacuna that Coetzee left in his novel—the missing piece of the puzzle. Lucy plans to put herself back in the story, to assert her agency and identity. For Lucy Lurie will be no man’s lacuna. Lacuna is both a powerful feminist reply to the book considered to be Coetzee’s masterwork, and the moving story of one woman’s attempt to reclaim her identity after trauma. Winner of the Sala Novel Award Winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel

The Lacuna Effect

The Lacuna Effect
Author: Brett White
Publisher:
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2020-04-20
Genre:
ISBN:

Navigating the space between dreams and reality. The word "Lacuna" is Latin in origin and means "an unfilled space or gap". The Lacuna Effect is the impact that the unfilled spaces and gaps between our dreams and reality have on our lives, and specifically on our identity, purpose and belonging. This book is about hope when our identity, purpose and belonging is being challenged, threatened and questioned. The stories and insights shared in its pages are raw, emotional and real. My aim in sharing the pain, struggles and challenges of others is to inspire hope, encourage dreams and offer up some fresh perspectives on navigating through life's challenges. The truth is, we will all face a Lacuna experience of some description, at some point in our life, if we haven't already.

Pigs in Heaven

Pigs in Heaven
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061842214

Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts. Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption—their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and the heart. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

Unsheltered

Unsheltered
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062684744

New York Times Bestseller • Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, O: The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek “Kingsolver brilliantly captures both the price of profound change and how it can pave the way not only for future generations, but also for a radiant, unexpected expansion of the heart.” — O: The Oprah Magazine The acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize—returns with a story about two families, in two centuries, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men. A timely and "utterly captivating" novel (San Francisco Chronicle), Unsheltered interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval.

The Absent Image

The Absent Image
Author: Elina Gertsman
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 599
Release: 2021-06-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271089016

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

Shadowplay

Shadowplay
Author: Joseph O'Connor
Publisher: Europa Editions
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2020-06-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609455940

A West End theater in London is shaken up by the crimes of Jack the Ripper in this novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Star of the Sea. Henry Irving is Victorian London’s most celebrated actor and theater impresario. He has introduced groundbreaking ideas to the theater, bringing to the stage performances that are spectacular, shocking, and always entertaining. When Irving decides to open his own London theater with the goal of making it the greatest playhouse on earth, he hires a young Dublin clerk harboring literary ambitions by the name of Bram Stoker to manage it. As Irving’s theater grows in reputation and financial solvency, he lures to his company of mummers the century’s most beloved actress, the dazzlingly talented leading lady Ellen Terry, who nightly casts a spell not only on her audiences but also on Stoker and Irving both. Bram Stoker’s extraordinary experiences at the Lyceum Theatre, his early morning walks on the streets of a London terrorized by a serial killer, his long, tempestuous relationship with Irving, and the closeness he finds with Ellen Terry, inspire him to write Dracula, the most iconic and best-selling supernatural tale ever published. A magnificent portrait both of lamp-lit London and of lives and loves enacted on the stage, Shadowplay’s rich prose, incomparable storytelling, and vivid characters will linger in readers’ hearts and minds for many years. “A vibrantly imaginative narrative of passion, intrigue and literary ambition set in the garish heyday of a theater. . . . Artfully splicing truth with fantasy, O’Connor has a glorious time turning a ramshackle and haunted London playhouse into a primary source for Stoker’s Gothic imaginings.” —Miranda Seymour, The New York Times Book Review “A gorgeously written historical novel about Stoker’s inner life. . . . I wasn’t prepared to be awed by his prose, which is so good you can taste it. . . . O’Connor dazzles.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “And Mr. O’Connor’s main characters—Stoker, Irving and the beloved actress Ellen Terry—are so forcefully brought to life that when, close to tears, you reach this drama’s final page, you will return to the beginning just to remain in their company.” —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal “This novel blows the dust off its Victorian trappings and brings them to scintillating life.” —Publishers Weekly, PW Picks, Starred Review FINALIST 2019 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST 2020 DALKEY LITERARY AWARD 2020 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE

Madeleine Is Sleeping

Madeleine Is Sleeping
Author: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020-10-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374602158

A National Book Award Finalist, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's enchanting and inventive first novel is a groundbreaking, contemporary classic When a girl falls into a mysterious, impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer stumbles into the role of pornographer; a beautiful young wife grows to resemble her husband's viol. Madeleine, the dreamer, travels in their midst, trying to make sense of her own metamorphosis. She leaves home, joins a gypsy circus, and falls into an unexpected triangle of desire and love. Embracing the earthy and the ethereal, the comical and the poignant, Madeleine Is Sleeping is part fairy tale, part coming-of-age story, and above all, an adventure in the discovery of art, sexuality, community, and the self.

Lacuna Park

Lacuna Park
Author:
Publisher: Spbh Editions
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9781999814489

Sigmund Freud famously declared that 'every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance.' For Nicholas Muellner, the same could be said of every photograph. From his unique perspective as a writer/photographer, Muellner functions as both analyst and patient in this deep dive into the significance of pictures. -Alec Soth "A quite brilliant book. I devoured Nicholas Muellner's exquisite writing and perfectly constructed stream of bright consciousness in one sitting. It is a very generous book (it is an adventure) and I suspect that every reader will appreciate the open, personal, poetic and erudite call that Muellner gives to think through the meaning of photography at this juncture in history." -Charlotte Cotton Lacuna Park is a collection of written and visual essays by the influential American photographer, writer and curator Nicholas Muellner, best known for his photobooks The Amnesia Pavilions (named one of Time magazine's best photobooks of 2011) and In Most Tides an Island. The essays gathered here intertwine personal accounts, historical and contemporary criticism, fictional narrative and philosophical inquiry to ask: what is existentially at stake in the making and viewing of photographs? Created between 2009 and 2019, these writings reflect a decade of epochal shifts in the technologies and contexts of image-making: the growth of smartphones and the ascendance of social media, and the resulting transformations in visual and social culture. This innovative collection traces that historical evolution in image-making through Muellner's idiosyncratically emotional, humorous and melancholic visual and textual modes. Above all, in these critical and philosophical works, Muellner never abandons the position of the photographer: that person who marks their place in the world--as lover, citizen, artist and witness--by the optical device they hold in their hands. Lacuna Park contains all of Muellner's writings on photography. In addition to five new and previously unpublished essays, the collection includes selections published in now out-of-print and hard-to-find works, including a complete reprint of Muellner's 2009 book The Photograph Commands Indifference. Nicholas Muellner (born 1969) received a BA in comparative literature from Yale University and an MFA in Photography from Temple University. He is Associate Professor of Photography and Co-Director of the Image Text MFA at Ithaca College and the ITI Press.

Lacuna

Lacuna
Author: Nikki Asfur
Publisher:
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2021-06-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9781329186224

Lacuna is a collection of poems I have written throughout the years. Lacuna, meaning a blank space or missing part, is a book for young women struggling to make sense of everything they feel. My hope with this book is to help people like me feel comfortable in their vulnerability and to look at life with a deeper view.