House of Incest


Book Description

The House of Incest, Anais Nin's famous prose poem, was first published in Paris in 1936 and immediately drew attention from the era's prominent writers, including Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. While written in English, it is considered a landmark work in the French surrealist tradition and one of the most unique books in 20th century literature.




Incest


Book Description

The trailblazing memoirist and author of Henry & June recounts her relationships with Henry Miller and others—including her own father. Anaïs Nin wrote in her uncensored diaries like they were a broad-minded confidante with whom she shared the liberating psychosexual dramas of her life. In this continuation of her notorious Henry & June, she recounts a particularly turbulent period between 1932 and 1934, and the men who dominated it: her protective husband, her therapist, and the poet Antonin Artaud. However, most consuming of all is novelist Henry Miller—a man whose genius, said Anaïs, was so demonic it could drive people insane. Here too, recounted in extraordinary detail, is the sexual affair she had with her father. At once loving, exciting, and vengeful, it was the ultimate social transgression for which Anaïs would eventually seek absolution from her analysts. “Before Lena Dunham there was Anaïs Nin. Like Dunham, she’s been accused of narcissism, sociopathy, and sexual perversion time and again. Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most . . . A woman who’d spent decades on the bleeding edge of American intellectual life, a woman who had been a respected colleague of male writers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sex writing. Like many great . . . experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” —The Guardian Includes an introduction by Rupert Pole




I Want To Show You More


Book Description

Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humour, Jamie Quatro’s debut short-story collection is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family. Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro’s hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations. Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children, and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse in their bed; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man. Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want To Show You More is the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction.




My Father's House


Book Description

She was a beautiful blond child, a quintessential Canadian teenager: she loved Saturday film matinees, giggled at pyjama parties, ran for student president, led the cheerleading squad, went steady with the right boy and married him, her proud father at her side. But from the age of seven Sylvia Fraser shared her body with a 'twin' who lived a separate life from her. This other self was created to do the things Sylvia was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do - the things her father made her do. As an adult, she had no recollection of a sexual relationship with her father, yet some connection always remained - pain, terror and guilt were never far from the surface. With tremendous power, candour and eloquence, Sylvia Fraser breaks through her amnesia to discover and embrace the self she left behind. MY FATHER'S HOUSE is at once a terrible account of a woman's coming of age and a lyric story of love and forgiveness.




House of Secrets


Book Description

The epic horrors of psychopathic mastermind Eddie Lee Sexton from the New York Times bestselling author who “knows how to dramatize true crime” (Elmore Leonard). For years, Eddie Lee Sexton ruled his large family like Charles Manson. The depraved patriarch dominated his ragged brood of twelve children mentally, physically, and sexually, and enforced every cruelty imaginable, from vicious beatings to raping his daughters and fathering their children. Finally, in 1992, Sexton’s eighteen-year-old daughter Machelle, seeking refuge in a women’s shelter, revealed the shocking, sordid details of her father’s abuse to authorities. As the law attempted to catch up to Eddie Lee Sexton, he moved his family to a mobile home in western Florida. Ultimately, Sexton’s efforts to escape prosecution led to two grisly murders in his own family. Yet Sexton’s sick genius almost helped him elude the justice he deserved. Lowell Cauffiel’s true-crime masterpiece vividly exposes the horrors of Eddie Lee Sexton’s psychosis and the shattered lives of those who survived. Includes sixteen pages of photos “An odyssey into American pathology . . . Deeply disturbing.” —Detroit Free Press “Incest, rape, murder, infanticide, torture, psychological abuse . . . House of Secrets is bedtime reading for devoted true crime fans!” —Booklist “A balanced and grimly engaging account of one of the weirdest domestic situations this side of the House of Usher.” —Publishers Weekly




House of Names


Book Description

* A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year * Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, St. Louis Dispatch From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children—“brilliant…gripping…high drama…made tangible and graphic in Tóibín’s lush prose” (Booklist, starred review). “I have been acquainted with the smell of death.” So begins Clytemnestra’s tale of her own life in ancient Mycenae, the legendary Greek city from which her husband King Agamemnon left when he set sail with his army for Troy. Clytemnestra rules Mycenae now, along with her new lover Aegisthus, and together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day of his return after nine years at war. Judged, despised, cursed by gods, Clytemnestra reveals the tragic saga that led to these bloody actions: how her husband deceived her eldest daughter Iphigeneia with a promise of marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifice her; how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus; how Agamemnon came back with a lover himself; and how Clytemnestra finally achieved her vengeance for his stunning betrayal—his quest for victory, greater than his love for his child. House of Names “is a disturbingly contemporary story of a powerful woman caught between the demands of her ambition and the constraints on her gender…Never before has Tóibín demonstrated such range,” (The Washington Post). He brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that we not only believe Clytemnestra’s thirst for revenge, but applaud it. Told in four parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is Orestes’s story, too: his capture by the forces of his mother’s lover Aegisthus, his escape and his exile. And it is the story of the vengeful Electra, who watches over her mother and Aegisthus with cold anger and slow calculation, until, on the return of her brother, she has the fates of both of them in her hands.




The Emotional Incest Syndrome


Book Description

From Dr. Patricia Love, a ground-breaking work that identifies, explores and treats the harmful effects that emotionally and psychologically invasive parents have on their children, and provides a program for overcoming the chronic problems that can result.




The Incest Diary


Book Description

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, the anonymous author of The Incest Diary was raped by her father. Beneath a veneer of normal family life, she grew up in and around this all-encompassing secret. Her sexual relationship with her father lasted, off and on, into her twenties. It formed her world, and it formed her deepest fears and desires. Even after she broke away, even as she grew into an independent and adventurous young woman, she continued to seek out new versions of the violence, submission and secrecy she had struggled to leave behind. In this graphic and harrowing memoir, the author revisits her early traumas and their aftermath - not from a clinical distance, but from deep within - to explore the ways in which her father's abuse shaped her, and still does. As a matter of psychic survival, she became both a sexual object and a detached observer, a dutiful daughter and the protector of a dirty secret. And then, years later, she made herself write it down. With lyric concision, in vignettes of almost unbearable intensity, this writer tells a story that is shocking but that will ring true to many other survivors of abuse. It has never been faced so directly on the page.




Incest


Book Description

How does incest in childhood affect personality development in adulthood? What conditions in the family encourage incestuous situations? What are typical characteristics of incestuous fathers? Until the publication of this book, many questions remained about the effects of incest in childhood on psychological functioning in later life. In this groundbreaking work, Meiselman examines all types of incestuous behavior and offers practical recommendations for detecting incest occurrences, handling cases, assessing individual and family incest problems, and making effective treatment interventions. "I can wholeheartedly recommend it to any professional who deals with patients, not only as the most comprehensive work available on this subject, but as a model of its kind".--Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.




The House We Grew Up In


Book Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of None of This Is True and Then She Was Gone comes an unforgettable saga that follows the Bird family and how one tragedy ripples throughout their lives for years. Meet the picture-perfect Bird family: pragmatic Meg, dreamy Beth, and towheaded twins Rory and Rhys, one an adventurous troublemaker, the other his slighter, more sensitive counterpart. Their father is a sweet, gangly man, but it’s their beautiful, free-spirited mother Lorelei who spins at the center. In those early years, Lorelei tries to freeze time by filling their simple brick house with precious mementos. Easter egg foils are her favorite. Craft supplies, too. She hangs all of the children’s art, to her husband’s chagrin. Then one Easter weekend, a tragedy so devastating occurs that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear the family apart. Years pass and the children have become adults, while Lorelei has become the county’s worst hoarder. She has alienated her husband and children and has been living as a recluse. But then something happens that beckons the Bird family back to the house they grew up in—to finally understand the events of that long-ago Easter weekend and to unearth the many secrets hidden within the nooks and crannies of home.