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Elisa Gabbert's L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the
mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The
Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in
the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines
a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the
play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and
unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a
many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with
larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and
fear.
Literary Nonfiction. Elisa Gabbert's THE SELF UNSTABLE combines
elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble
our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and
sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the
absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to
provoke the reader's reflection--unsettling the role of truth and
interrogating the "I" in both literary and daily life: "The future
isn't anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only
disappear.""Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and
head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that
demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly,
perfectly precise."--Make Magazine..". smart and philosophically
dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its
own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror
which doesn't so much distort as endlessly reveal, ' like the
panopticon eye of a camera."--The Rumpus..". the dispassion about
the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely
sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and
reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all
perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node."--Gently
Read Literature
'A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery' Andrew Sean Greer,
author of Less 'Masterly... Her essays have a clarity and
prescience that imply a sort of distant, retrospective view, like
postcards sent from the near future' New York Times We stare at our
phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are
full of the phrase "Did you see?" The feeling that we're living in
the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to
know precisely how bad things have gotten. Poet and essayist Elisa
Gabbert's The Unreality of Memory consists of a series of lyrical
and deeply researched meditations on what our culture of
catastrophe has done to public discourse and our own inner lives.
In these tender and prophetic essays, she focuses in on our daily
preoccupation and favorite pasttime: desperate distraction from
disaster by way of a desperate obsession with the disastrous.
Moving from public trauma to personal tragedy, from the Titanic and
Chernobyl to illness and loss, The Unreality of Memory alternately
rips away the facade of our fascination with destruction and gently
identifies itself with the age of rubbernecking. A balm, not a
burr, Gabbert's essays are a hauntingly perceptive analysis of the
anxiety intrinsic in our new, digital ways of being, and also a
means of reconciling ourselves to this new world. 'One of those
joyful books that send you to your notebook every page or so,
desperate not to lose either the thought the author has deftly
placed in your mind or the title of a work she has now compelled
you to read.' Paris Review
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The Voyage Out (Paperback)
Virginia Woolf, Elisa Gabbert
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R389
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
Save R71 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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