Che's Afterlife


Book Description

In 1960, Cuban photographer Alberto Korda captured fabled revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in what has become history's most reproduced photo. Here Michael Casey tells the remarkable story of this image, detailing its evolution from a casual snapshot to an omnipresent graphic—plastered on everything from T-shirts to vodka to condoms—and into a copyrighted brand. As Casey follows it across the Americas and through cyberspace, he finds governments exploiting it and their dissenters attacking it, merchants selling it and tourists buying it. We see how this image is, ultimately, a mercurial icon that still ignites passion—and a reflection of how we view ourselves.




Che's Afterlife


Book Description

In 1960, Cuban photographer Alberto Korda captured fabled revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in what has become history's most reproduced photo. Here Michael Casey tells the remarkable story of this image, detailing its evolution from a casual snapshot to an omnipresent graphic—plastered on everything from T-shirts to vodka to condoms—and into a copyrighted brand. As Casey follows it across the Americas and through cyberspace, he finds governments exploiting it and their dissenters attacking it, merchants selling it and tourists buying it. We see how this image is, ultimately, a mercurial icon that still ignites passion—and a reflection of how we view ourselves.




Dark Horse


Book Description

My husband killed me.Instead of spending my immortal Afterlife pissed off and angry, I moved on. I became someone.Sure, that someone was a demon with the highest track record of reform, AKA punishment, in Hell. But who's bragging?I'm right on my way to retirement behind the pearly gates. Everything was going fine . . . until the Risk Witches saw a terrible vision.Three men. Each scarred in their own way, born with powers that haven't been seen in eons.Upper Management sent the best to correct their path. Angels. Poltergeists. Nothing worked.These men were too stubborn. Too bad. Too untamed...So they sent me.Roman. Ezra. Dorian.Combined, they have enough power to end the world-and they will.Unless I find a way to stop them first.Breaking people is my job. But this time...my job might break me.




37 Seconds


Book Description

“Riveting . . . inspiring. . . . the story of what happened to this woman when she died for 37 seconds will make you rethink how we all should live.” —Maureen Maher, CBS News correspondent, 48 Hours When she was pregnant with her second child, Stephanie Arnold had a sudden and overwhelming premonition that she would die during the delivery. Though she tried to tell the medical team and her family what was going to happen, neither the doctors nor her loved ones gave her warnings credence. Finding no physical indications that anything was wrong, they attributed her foreboding to hormones and anxiety. One member of the medical team did take her concerns seriously enough, and made the fateful decision to order extra units of blood “just in case.” Then, during the delivery, Stephanie suffered a rare Amniotic Fluid Embolism. She went into cardiac arrest and flat-lined for 37 seconds. She died. Using the supplementary blood, the medical team revived her, and she remained unconscious for more than six days. After months of recovery, Stephanie began to remember details of her experience, details she knew because she had witnessed the entire dramatic event, including her death, from outside her body—beside other spirits that were with her. In this remarkable true story, Stephanie recounts her harrowing journey and shares her surprising spiritual discoveries: we are not alone and have more loving help than we can imagine surrounding us. “Stephanie Arnold’s journalistic instincts made this remarkable happening a compelling reading experience.” —Dennis Swanson, President of Station Operations at Fox Television “Arnold’s amazing, enthralling, and revealing story . . . could redefine the way clergy, physicians, and scientists think about dying.” —Dr. Rachael Ross, co-host of The Doctors




Decay and Afterlife


Book Description

Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins. Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.




Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry


Book Description

Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.




Dirk Quigby's Guide to the Afterlife


Book Description

Hell's too full, so the Devil hires ad man Dirk Quigby to pen a travel guide enticing travelers to different afterlives: Hindu, Catholic, Protestant (that one's got a lot of subdivisions), Scientologist, and more. Instead of writing a boffo bestseller, Dirk unites all religions in a common goal: kill Dirk.




The City of Poetry


Book Description

What did it mean to be a poet in fourteenth-century Italy? What counted as poetry? In an effort to answer these questions, this book examines the careers of four medieval Italian poets (Albertino Mussato, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio) who wrote in both Latin and the Italian vernacular. In readings of defenses of poetry, speeches and letters on public laurel-crowning ceremonies, and other theoretical and poetic texts, this book shows how these poets viewed their authorship of poetic works as a function of their engagement in a human community. Each poet represents a model of the poet as a public intellectual - a poet-theologian - who can intervene in public affairs thanks to his authority within texts. The City of Poetry provides a new historicized approach to understanding poetic culture in fourteenth-century Italy which reshapes long-standing Romantic views of poetry as a timeless and sublimely inspired form of discourse.




Dante's New Life of the Book


Book Description

Dante's Vita nuova has taken on a wide variety of different forms since its first publication in 1294. How could one work have generated such different physical forms? Through examining the work's transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations, Eisner reconceives of the relationship between the work and its reception. Dante's New Life of the Book investigates how these different material manifestations participate in the work, drawing attention to its distinctive elements. Dante framed his book as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, and later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their interpretations of Dante's collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary. Traveling from Boccaccio's Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson's Cambridge, Rossetti's London, Nerval's Paris, Mandelstam's Russia, De Campos's Brazil, and Pamuk's Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante's strange poetic forms, including incomplete canzoni and sonnets with two beginnings, continue to challenge readers. Each chapter focuses on how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante's love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman. Numerous illustrations show the entanglement of the work's poetic form and its material survival. Eisner provides a fresh reading of Dante's innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work's survival in the world.




Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea


Book Description

How many Zavattinis are there? During a life spanning most of the twentieth century, the screenwriter who wrote Sciuscià, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D. was also a pioneering magazine publisher in 1930s Milan, a public intellectual, a theorist, a tireless campaigner for change within the film industry, a man of letters, a painter and a poet. This intellectual biography is built on the premise that in order to understand Zavattini's idea of cinema and his legacy of ethical and political cinema (including guerrilla cinema), we must also tease out the multi-faceted strands of his interventions and their interplay over time. The book is for general readers, students and film historians, and anyone with an interest in cinema and its fate.