Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture


Book Description

Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual.




Desire Street


Book Description

A searing anatomy of a New Orleans murder trial and a system of justice gone wrong. In a New Orleans supermarket parking lot in the fall of 1984 ,two disparate lives become inextricably bound for the next fourteen years. The first, the life of Delores Dye, a white housewife and grandmother. The second, a young black man with a gun in hand. Moments following their maybe not so chance encounter, Mrs. Dye lay dead on the sunbaked macadam, and the killer had made off with her purse, her groceries, and her car. Four days later, following a tip, authorities arrested a known drug dealer and father of five named Curtis Kyles. Kyles would then be tried for Mrs. Dye's murder an unprecedented five times, though he maintained his innocence throughout each trial. Convicted and sentenced to death in his second trial, he would spend fourteen years on death row. After a fifth jury was unable to reach a verdict, New Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., finally conceded defeat and dropped the murder charge. But the case slowly yielded a deeper drama: The crime turned out to have been the side effect of an intricately plotted act of revenge. That police and prosecutors may have been complicit in the vengeance that framed Kyles cuts to the heart of a system of justice for Southern blacks in the era since lynch mobs were shamed into obsolescence. A compellingly written legal drama that has at its heart passionate intrigue and justice gone awry. Desire Street is a 2006 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Fact Crime.




Death & Desire: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series


Book Description

Featuring an enemies-to-lovers romance and a savvy female P.I., this laugh-out-loud urban fantasy will keep you up all night. Angel of Death. Black market magic. When you’re Ashira Cohen, smart is the new kickass. When Ash is hired to solve her first murder, it seems like a perfectly normal, open-and-shut case of family feuds and bad blood. Until Ash discovers an evil magical artifact and her lead suspect is of the winged, white-robed, celestial variety. As if that weren't bad enough, if she can't find the perpetrator quickly, fourteen vials of lethal, ghostly magic will be sold to the highest bidder. Her quest to figure out her Jezebel powers and find the shadowy organization responsible for stripping teens of their magic isn't going any smoother, either. Can't a girl just pursue her dream career without getting caught up in a mysterious destiny or playing a dangerous Sherlock-Moriarty game with her annoyingly hot nemesis? But when Ash accidentally crosses the cunning and deadly Queen of Hearts, ruler of the magic black market, all those cases may go unresolved. Permanently. With the clock ticking, it’ll take all of Ash’s intelligence to survive with her moral center–and her head–intact. The game is afoot and failure is not an option. If you like KF Breene, Annabel Chase, and Heather G Harris, you’ll burn through this clever, fast-paced, sexy series! Join the investigation now.




The Gardens of Desire


Book Description

The Gardens of Desire is at once a model of literary interpretation and a groundbreaking psychocritical reading of a literary masterpiece, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Shedding new light on the origins of the creative impulse in general, and on the psychological origins of the Recherche in particular, the book illuminates the hidden associations between matricidal, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, homoerotic, and creative impulses as manifested in Proust's work. The book moves beyond traditional Freudian readings of Proust to consider the theories of Otto Rank, Jacques Derrida, and others, and provides provocative readings of the "privileged moments" that comprise many of the work's "critical cruxes," as well as a thought-provoking rereading of the novel's ending. Both elegant and accessible, this book boldly explores the violence of desire as it relates not only to Proust's narrator, but also to Proustian criticism itself, with its own violent desire to appropriate the essence of Proust's masterpiece.




Slave of Desire


Book Description

"Slave of Desire, through its analyses of various stories, reveals The 1001 Nights to be a very different sort of work, a sophisticated and subtle piece of literature that can provoke and disturb as much as it entertains and amuses.




In the garden of beasts


Book Description

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the 'New Germany,' she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance - and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.




All of This


Book Description

“Beautifully written, complex, provocative, painful, genuine...an unforgettable memoir.”—ROXANE GAY “Wonderfully lyrical and uncomfortably honest in a way that is so rare, yet so needed.”—JENNY LAWSON “Disturbing and profound, this intimate book also reveals the sometimes-labyrinthine nature of the bonds that unite people in love...A provocative and memorable work.”—Kirkus Reviews After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, writer Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of forty-four, he died. In All of This, Woolf chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own. Stunning, compelling, and brilliantly nuanced, All of This is one woman’s story of embracing the complexities of grief without shame—as a mother, a widow, and a sexual being—and emerging on the other side of a relationship with gratitude and relief.




Jerusalem, 1000–1400


Book Description

Medieval Jerusalem was a vibrant international center, home to multiple cultures, faiths, and languages. Harmonious and dissonant voices from many lands, including Persians, Turks, Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians, Copts, Ethiopians, Indians, and Europeans, passed in the narrow streets of a city not much larger than midtown Manhattan. Patrons, artists, pilgrims, poets, and scholars from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions focused their attention on the Holy City, endowing and enriching its sacred buildings, creating luxury goods for its residents, and praising its merits. This artistic fertility was particularly in evidence between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, notwithstanding often devastating circumstances—from the earthquake of 1033 to the fierce battles of the Crusades. So strong a magnet was Jerusalem that it drew out the creative imagination of even those separated from it by great distance, from as far north as Scandinavia to as far east as present-day China. This publication is the first to define these four centuries as a singularly creative moment in a singularly complex city. Through absorbing essays and incisive discussions of nearly 200 works of art, Jerusalem, 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven explores not only the meaning of the city to its many faiths and its importance as a destination for tourists and pilgrims but also the aesthetic strands that enhanced and enlivened the medieval city that served as the crossroads of the known world.




Death in Her Hands


Book Description

'This is a story about what might happen when a woman takes charge... A glorious visceral mystery' The Times While on her daily walk with her dog in the woods near her home, Vesta comes across a chilling handwritten note. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body. Shaky even on her best days, Vesta is also alone, and new to the area, having moved here after the death of her husband. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession: who was Magda and how did she meet her fate? From the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen comes this razor-sharp, chilling and darkly hilarious novel about the stories we tell ourselves and how we strive to obscure the truth. __________________________ PRAISE FOR DEATH IN HER HANDS: 'Routinely hailed as one of the most exciting young American authors working today' Guardian 'A new kind of murder mystery' New Yorker 'Dark, devious' Observer 'A fine line between shocking realism and the absurd' New Statesman 'A brilliant off-kilter detective story' Evening Standard 'A beautiful novel' Sunday Times




Structures of Desire


Book Description

This book examines representations of desire in British cinema during a period of turbulent change. In addition to investigating male-female desire in status quo "realist" films and in various "anti-realist" movements represented by Gainsborough Melodrama and the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the book also explores the various factors that affected utopian aspirations for a better postwar world and how these desires eventually became restrained by the dominant forces of conservative ideology. Structures of Desire provides new perspectives on previously recognized film movements such as Ealing Comedy and Gainsborough Melodrama while also offering analyses of interesting but neglected films such as Love on the Dole (1941), Perfect Strangers (1945), They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), The Bad Lord Byron (1949), and Madeleine (1950).