Interior States

Download or read book Interior States written by Meghan O'Gieblyn and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of The Believer Book Award for Nonfiction "Meghan O'Gieblyn's deep and searching essays are written with a precise sort of skepticism and a slight ache in the heart. A first-rate and riveting collection." --Lorrie Moore A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere. What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka "Flyover Country." She writes of her "existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still," and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture ("Hell"), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design ("Species of Origin"), the paradoxes of Christian Rock ("Sniffing Glue"), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages ("Midwest World"), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity ("Ghosts in the Cloud"). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.

Download or read book Interior States written by Christopher Castiglia and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Interior States Christopher Castiglia focuses on U.S. citizens’ democratic impulse: their ability to work with others to imagine genuinely democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. Castiglia contends that citizens of the early United States were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent and conflicted interiors of their own bodies. He describes how the human interior—with its battles between appetite and restraint, desire and deferral—became a displacement of the divided sociality of nineteenth-century America’s public sphere and contributed to the vanishing of that sphere in the twentieth century and the twenty-first. Drawing insightful connections between political structures, social relations, and cultural forms, he explains that as the interior came to reflect the ideological conflicts of the social world, citizens were encouraged to (mis)understand vigilant self-scrutiny and self-management as effective democratic action. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, as discourses of interiority gained prominence, so did powerful counter-narratives. Castiglia reveals the flamboyant pages of antebellum popular fiction to be an archive of unruly democratic aspirations. Through close readings of works by Maria Monk and George Lippard, Walt Whitman and Timothy Shay Arthur, Hannah Webster Foster and Hannah Crafts, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Castiglia highlights a refusal to be reformed or self-contained. In antebellum authors’ representations of nervousness, desire, appetite, fantasy, and imagination, he finds democratic strivings that refused to disappear. Taking inspiration from those writers and turning to the present, Castiglia advocates a humanism-without-humans that, denied the adjudicative power of interiority, promises to release democracy from its inner life and to return it to the public sphere where U.S. citizens may yet create unprecedented possibilities for social action.

Download or read book Interior Freedom written by Jacques Philippe and published by Scepter Publishers. This book was released on 2017-03-29 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interior Freedom leads one to discover that even in the most unfavorable outward circumstances we possess within ourselves a space of freedom that nobody can take away, because God is its source and guarantee. Without this discovery we will always be restricted in some way and will never taste true happiness. Author Jacques Philippe develops a simple but important theme: we gain possession of our interior freedom in exact proportion to our growth in faith, hope, and love. He explains that the dynamism between these three theological virtues is the heart of the spiritual life, and he underlines the key role of the virtue of hope in our inner growth. Written in a simple and inviting style, Interior Freedom seeks to liberate the heart and mind to live the true freedom to which God calls each one.

Download or read book What If This Were Enough? written by Heather Havrilesky and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018* *A Bustle Best Nonfiction Book of 2018* *One of Chicago Tribune's Favorite Books by Women in 2018* *A Self Best Book of 2018 to Buy for the Bookworm in Your Life* By the acclaimed critic, memoirist, and advice columnist behind the popular "Ask Polly," an impassioned collection tackling our obsession with self-improvement and urging readers to embrace the imperfections of the everyday Heather Havrilesky's writing has been called "whip-smart and profanely funny" (Entertainment Weekly) and "required reading for all humans" (Celeste Ng). In her work for New York, The Baffler, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic, as well as in "Ask Polly," her advice column for The Cut, she dispenses a singular, cutting wisdom--an ability to inspire, provoke, and put a name to our most insidious cultural delusions. What If This Were Enough? is a mantra and a clarion call. In its chapters--many of them original to the book, others expanded from their initial publication--Havrilesky takes on those cultural forces that shape us. We've convinced ourselves, she says, that salvation can be delivered only in the form of new products, new technologies, new lifestyles. From the allure of materialism to our misunderstandings of romance and success, Havrilesky deconstructs some of the most poisonous and misleading messages we ingest today, all the while suggesting new ways to navigate our increasingly bewildering world. Through her incisive and witty inquiries, Havrilesky urges us to reject the pursuit of a shiny, shallow future that will never come. These timely, provocative, and often hilarious essays suggest an embrace of the flawed, a connection with what already is, who we already are, what we already have. She asks us to consider: What if this were enough? Our salvation, Havrilesky says, can be found right here, right now, in this imperfect moment.

Download or read book What Happens at Night written by Peter Cameron and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A couple find themselves at a fading, grand European hotel full of eccentric and sometimes unsettling patrons in this "faultlessly elegant and quietly menacing" allegorical story that examines the significance of shifting desires and the uncertainty of reality (Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness). An unnamed American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby. It’s a difficult journey that leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child. On arrival, the couple checks into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open and the lobby populated with an enigmatic cast of characters ranging from an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse to a debauched businessman to an enigmatic faith healer. Nothing is as it seems in this baffling, frozen world, and the more the couple struggles to claim their baby, the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself. For readers of Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Strout, and Iris Murdoch, What Happens at Night is a "masterpiece" (Edmund White) poised on the cusp of reality, told by "an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).

Download or read book The Interior Design Reference & Specification Book written by Linda O'Shea and published by Rockport Publishers. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV In the world of interior design, thousands of bits of crucial information are scattered across a wide array of sources. The Interior Design Reference & Specification Book collects the information essential to planning and executing interior projects of all shapes and sizes, and distills it in a format that is as easy to use as it is to carry. You’ll also find interviews with top practitioners drawn across the field of interior design. —Fundamentals provides a step-by-step overview of an interiors project, describing the scope of professional services, the project schedule, and the design and presentation tools used by designers. —Space examines ways of composing rooms as spatial environments while speaking to functional and life-safety concerns. —Surface identifies options in color, material, texture, and pattern, while addressing maintenance and performance issues. —Environments looks at aspects of interior design that help create a specific mood or character, such as natural and artificial lighting, sound and smell. —Elements describes the selection and specification of furniture and fixtures, as well as other components essential to an interior environment, such as artwork and accessories. —Resources gathers a wealth of useful data, from sustainability guidelines to online sources for interiors-related research. /div

Download or read book Architectural Digest written by Marie Kalt and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unrivaled survey of the most exciting contemporary interior design across the globe, curated by the editors of ten international editions of Architectural Digest. Since 1920, Architectural Digest has celebrated design talents, innovative homes, and products--providing endless decoration, lifestyle, and travel inspiration. With ten global editions, the magazine is an authority renowned all over the world for publishing only the very best of today's interior design. In this new volume--spearheaded by AD France's editor in chief, Marie Kalt--the editors of Architectural Digest's international editions have teamed up to thoughtfully curate a collection of today's most exceptional interiors around the globe. These diverse residential spaces span from the United States and China, to France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Spain, India, Mexico, and the Middle East, presenting each country's unique "AD style manifesto" and the work of design luminaries such as Peter Marino, Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Jacques Grange, Joseph Dirand, and Bijoy Jain, to name a few. The featured projects range from Marc Jacobs's New York townhouse to Tommy Hilfiger's Connecticut abode and Seth Meyers's Manhattan duplex; a sumptuous eighteenth-century Italian villa and a Moroccan palace; Pierre Bergé's apartment and a hôtel particulier in Paris; a Majorca summer home; and a country house in Russia. Brimming with stunning images and rich international inspirations, this unparalleled compendium of global interiors is a must for every library of interior design.