|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the
pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in
the "invasive species crisis," Personhood reveals how the
unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is
too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack
of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird
Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite
us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to
control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived
experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique
literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to
our delusions of special status.
Leave to Remain is a faux spy-novel possessed by the spirit of
Janus: doubleness, duplicity, double-entendres, two-facedness,
bridges and doorways-as is only appropriate for a work composed by
two writers: one French, one American. Two-faced Janus resurrects
into a time-traveling adventure, a tour of double-agents,
double-speak, and double-dealings. In their earlier hybrid essay, A
Prank of Georges (2010), Thalia Field and Abigail Lang returned us
to "the primal force of language: naming" (Susan Howe). In Leave to
Remain, a weathered Janus pursues an elusive quest, responding to a
world of war, traitors, translations, and the slippery personal and
political terrain between friends and enemies. This silly and
deadly serious fiction-essay aims at nothing less than a full
inquiry into how monstrous we are when we define loyalties and
defend definitions, and how we are all double-agents seeking
meaning and intelligence. Unafraid of being both timeless and
timely, Leave to Remain challenges the reader to play in the world
of folded imagery and language.
An enthralling new work by one of America's foremost experimental
writers. Thalia Field's inventive new book explores the very
condition of being incarnate: how, invested with human form, we
experience both suffering and ecstasy from childhood to adulthood
to death. As with her previous book published by New Directions,
Point and Line (2000), Incarnate defies categorization: it
"industriously works the sparsely populated and as yet
underdeveloped borderlands between poetry, fiction, theater, and
contemporary classical music" (Review of Contemporary Fiction). In
Incarnate: Story Material, she continues to reach beyond borders,
examining how, trapped in our own stories, we act and react in a
world of solidity, perceiving something "other" close at hand. With
its amazing variety of poetic and prose-like forms, driven by a
fierce and playful intelligence, Incarnate: Story Material
challenges and moves us.
Bird Lovers, Backyard continues Thalia Field's interrogation of the
act of storytelling and her experimentation with literary genre.
Field's illuminating essays, or stories, in poetic form, place
scientists, philosophers, animals, even the military, in real and
imagined events. Her open questioning brings in subjects as diverse
as pigeons, chat rooms, nuclear testing, the building of the
Kennedy Space Center, the development of seaside beaches, Konrad
Lorenz, the American author and animal trainer Vicki Hearne, and
the Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger. Throughout, she intermingles
fact and fiction, probing the porous boundaries between human and
animal, calling into question "what we are willing to do with
words," and spinning a world where life is haunted by echoes. Story
and event survive through daring language, and the elegies of
history.
|
You may like...
Ab Wheel
R209
R149
Discovery Miles 1 490
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|