Intimations

Download or read book Intimations written by Zadie Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 “While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential . . .’” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020 “Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air A New York Times Bestseller Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it? Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next. The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.

Download or read book Intimations written by Alexandra Kleeman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Haunting. . . . Wonderfully strange and eerie, Intimations outlines the confusion, loss, and anxieties that underlie the different stages of mortality, forcing us to re-examine the often unsettling realities of our existence.” — Buzzfeed “Brilliantly alive. . . . the world is parsed with a charming exactitude that magnifies all its latent marvels and especially horrors—the blacker and more peculiar these stories get, the funnier they are.” — New York Times Book Review From the celebrated author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, a thought-provoking, often unsettling story collection that consists, broadly, of narrative diagrams of the three main stages in a human life: birth, life, and death. Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. It was praised by the New York Times as "a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation." In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of "living" where we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and the death-y period toward the end where we sense it is ending and will end only partially understood, at best. The title is taken from one of the stories ("Intimation"), but is also a play on Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality"—only in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, but it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. The middle, "Living" section of the book, is fleshed out with a set of stories that borrow more from traditional realist fiction to illustrate the inner lives of the characters. At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as its characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house-party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood. Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, Intimations is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.

Download or read book Intimations of Modernity written by Louis A. Pérez Jr. and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis A. Perez Jr.'s new history of nineteenth-century Cuba chronicles in fascinating detail the emergence of an urban middle class that was imbued with new knowledge and moral systems. Fostering innovative skills and technologies, these Cubans became deeply implicated in an expanding market culture during the boom in sugar production and prior to independence. Contributing to the cultural history of capitalism in Latin America, Perez argues that such creoles were cosmopolitans with powerful transnational affinities and an abiding identification with modernity. This period of Cuban history is usually viewed through a political lens, but Perez, here emphasizing the character of everyday life within the increasingly fraught colonial system, shows how moral, social, and cultural change that resulted from market forces also contributed to conditions leading to the collapse of the Spanish colonial administration. Perez highlights women's centrality in this process, showing how criollas adapted to new modes of self-representation as a means of self-fulfillment. Increasing opportunities for middle-class women's public presence and social participation was both cause and consequence of expanding consumerism and of women's challenges to prevailing gender hierarchies. Seemingly simple actions--riding a bicycle, for example, or deploying the abanico, the fan, in different ways--exposed how traditional systems of power and privilege clashed with norms of modernity and progress.

Download or read book Intimations of Mortality written by Violet Weingarten and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 1978 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Intimations of Postmodernity written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-04-29 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thoughtful and illuminating book provides a major statement on the meaning and importance of postmodernity.

Download or read book Intimations of Nostalgia written by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the relationship between nostalgia and contemporary social issues. From history and political theory to marketing and media, each chapter discusses the way nostalgia has been presented within a specific disciplinary context and shows how nostalgia as a topic of research has evolved over time.

Download or read book Intimations of Mortality written by David Farrell Krell and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2006-04-17 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heidegger&’s thinking has an underlying unity, this book argues, and has cogency for seemingly diverse domains of modern culture: philosophy and religion, aesthetics and literary criticism, intellectual history and social theory. &“The theme of mortality&—finite human existence&—pervades Heidegger&’s thought,&” in the author&’s words, &“before, during, and after his magnum opus, Being and Times, published in 1927.&” This theme is manifested in Heidegger&’s work not &“as funereal melodramatics or as despair and destructive nihilism&” but rather &“as a thinking within anxiety.&” & Four major subthemes in Heidegger&’s thinking are explored in the book&’s four parts: the fundamental ontology developed in Being and Time; the &“lighting and clearing&” of Being, understood as &“unconcealment&”; the history of philosophy&—with emphasis on Heraclitus, Hegel, and Nietzsche&—interpreted as the &“destiny&” of Being; and the poetics of Being, explicated as the &“fundamental experience&” of mortality. & Neither an introduction nor a survey, this book is a close reading of a wide range of Heidegger&’s books, lectures, and articles&—including extensive material not yet translated into English&—informed by the author&’s conversations with Heidegger in 1974&–76. Each of the four subthemes is treated critically. The aim of the book is to push its interrogations of Heidegger&’s thought as far as possible, in order to help the reader toward an independent assessment of his work and to encourage novel, radically conceived approaches to traditional philosophical problems.