Seven Samurai Swept Away In A River

Download or read book Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River written by Jung Young Moon and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his inimitable, recursive, meditative style that reads like a comedic zen koan but contains universes, Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River recounts Korean cult writer's Jung Young Moon’s time spent at an artist’s and writers residency in small-town Texas. In an attempt to understand what a “true Texan should know,” the author reflects on his outsider experiences in this most unique of places, learning to two-step, musing on cowboy hats and cowboy churches, blending his observations with a meditative rumination on the history of Texas and the events that shaped the state, from the first settlers to Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. All the while, the author is asking what a novel is and must be, while accompanied by a fictional cast of seven samurai who the author invents and carries with him, silent companions in a pantomime of existential theater. Jung blends fact with imagination, humor with reflection, and meaning with meaninglessness, as his meanderings become an absorbing, engaging, quintessential novel of ideas.

Download or read book Trash written by Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trash interweaves the voices of three women with lived connections to the municipal garbage dump of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Aguilar Zéleny's Trash shows the complexities of survival and joy, love and violence for three women: a teenager abandoned by her guardian at the dump, a scientist doing research on the residents of the dump, and a transwoman living nearby who is the matriarch of a group of sex workers. Each one of the characters navigates family, abandonment, power, jealousy, greed, and multiple taboos around sexuality and gender violence. Their stories are linked by geography and by ideas of waste and abandonment. As Aguilar Zéleny explores these territories in her book, she asks crucial questions: Who is seen as disposable and why? How do women find their own means of survival and joy in the midst of a perilous sociopolitical context? What does it mean to live a life in a time of austerity and extreme violence? Trash is a critical intervention in Mexican literature.

Download or read book Herostories written by Kristín Svava Tomasdottír and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herostories reveals tales untold by most history books: the harrowing journeys and vital triumphs of nineteenth - and twentieth century midwifery in the vast landscape of Iceland. Composed from the memoirs and biographies of 100 Icelandic midwives, poet-historian Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s found poems illuminate the dangers and valor of birthwork. Forgoing traditional sagas of androcentric conquest, these poems center the adventures of ljósmæður, “mothers of light.” Tómasdóttir leverages epic elements—dashing mountain treks, rivers forded on horseback, unyielding compassion—to challenge how and by whom stories become legend. The follow-up to Tómasdóttir and Thors’ award-winning, PEN-nominated Stormwarning, Herostories documents the professional achievements of Iceland's first women to work outside the home, precursors to today’s midwives who remain central to contemporary health care on the island. Beyond archival recognition, the text's formally ambitious poetics render gender-based battles for literacy and education alongside narratives of selfless womanly caretaking, pressurizing the fundamental tensions between feminine self-actualization and the romanticized service of these trailblazing figures.

Download or read book Not One Day written by Anne Garréta and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Albertine Prize Finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards Finalist for the 2018 French American Foundation Translation Prize Available in a new edition, Anne Garréta's sensual portrayal of trysts past. A tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing, Not One Day is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta's intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, love, and desire. Garréta, author of the acclaimed genderless love story Sphinx and experimental novel In Concrete, vows to write every day about a woman from her past. With exquisite elegance, she revisits bygone loves and lusts, capturing memories of her past relationships in a captivating, erotic composition of momentary interactions and lasting impressions, of longing and of loss.

Download or read book The Ancestry of Objects written by Tatiana Ryckman and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young woman meets a man at a restaurant while eating alone and contemplating her own death. They exchange words only briefly, but by the end of the week he has entered her world with an intensity rivaled only by her desire to end her life. Told with the lyrical persistence of a Greek chorus, The Ancestry of Objects unravels the story of the unnamed narrator’s affair with David: married, graying, and ultimately a form of erotic power to which the narrator succumbs. As they meet more and more frequently, her thoughts move from their increasingly fraught encounters to her history with religion and the mystery of her absent mother, Ruth. The ghosts of her grandparents roam her ancestral house, sources of moral shame and reminders of the constant passage of time. Memories start, stop, and loop back in on themselves to form and unform her identity, with her beliefs, troubled past, and sexuality mixing feverishly in the face of oblivion. Nothing can fill the voids of time and loss; not God, not memory, not family, and certainly not love. At once intensely sensory and urgently erotic, The Ancestry of Objects parses the multiplicity of selves who become a part of us as we push to survive. This is Ryckman – a master of the obsessive, desirous, complex exhaustion of human relationships – in peak form.

Download or read book Kidnapped written by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, New York Times bestselling author and Russia’s greatest living absurdist, comes an elaborate family drama, social satire, and burlesque of twists, coincidences, and hijinks. Kidnapped is a madcap crime spree that caroms from crisis to crisis, through lands real and imagined. It tells the tale of Sergei Sertsov, not one but two boys from Moscow with more than just a name in common, and the women who go to great lengths to protect them. The story unfurls in a whirlwind of deceit and double crossing—babies are switched at birth, documents forged, palms greased, identities assumed, deaths faked, and authorities duped. Across decades and continents, the narrative veers from a trade office in tropical Handia, to Russia as it plunges through perestroika and into post-Soviet free fall, to a mansion in opulent Montegasco at the start of the twenty-first century. With a dizzying array of characters and settings, Kidnapped is a hilarious saga of determined women triumphing over their many oppressors to save the people they love.

Download or read book Diary of a Malayali Madman written by N. Prabhakaran and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of sensitive, world-bending human portraits from short story writer N. Prabhakaran. A research scholar whose notebook reveals a surreal pig farm... A psychologist in search of the truth about one of his clients... An aspiring writer who emulates Gogol... The unforgettable men and women in N. Prabhakaran's stories have an uncanny ability to expose the fault lines between the real and the unreal, the normal and the mad, as they explore their own inner worlds and psychic wounds. A pioneer of the post-modern aesthetic turn, N. Prabhakaran weaves the nitty-gritty of everyday, small-town lives into his imaginative tales. Set in northern Kerala, these five stories are steeped in folklore, nature, factional politics and the intricacies of human relationships. Brilliantly translated by Jayasree Kalathil, Diary of a Malayali Madman marks the very first time this major Indian writer's work is available in English.