Native Moments

Native Moments
Author: Nic Schuck
Publisher: Panhandle Books
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1087936136

In the tradition of other great ex-patriot stories like The Sun Also Rises or All the Pretty Horses, Native Moments is a coming-of-age adventure set among the lush landscape of Costa Rica. After the death of his brother, Sanch Murray leaves for a surf trip as a way to cope and sets out on a quixotic search for an alternative to the American Dream. Set in 1999 Costa Rica, Sanch and his friend Jake Higdon wander the dirt roads of Tamarindo and surrounding areas chasing waves as a way to live out the romantic fantasy lifestyle of traveling surfers. Jake Higdon, six years Sanch's senior, takes on the role of the wise leader and Sanch as his young apprentice. Sanch's adventure leads to encounters with people who share world views he had never considered and could potentially shape his own changing perceptions about life. Through sometimes humorous episodes such as trying his hand as a matador at a roadside rodeo or in his not so humorous battle with dysentery, Sanch explores life's beauty and wonder alongside the darker undercurrents of humanity. Along his journey, Sanch befriends a shamanic traveler named Rob, young revolutionaries from Venezuela, numerous expatriates from around the world trying to escape whatever it is that keeps chasing them, and a beautiful local girl named Andrea, who Sanch suspects is a prostitute but can't help falling for.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction

Shapes of Native Nonfiction
Author: Elissa Washuta
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2019-06-28
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0295745770

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket. Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2019-05-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1984899023

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many other editions of Leaves of Grass, which reproduce various short, early versions, this Modern Library Paperback Classics "Death-bed" edition presents everything Whitman wrote in its final form, and includes newly commissioned notes.

In Walt We Trust

In Walt We Trust
Author: John Marsh
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2015-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1583674764

Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty: about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise: the poetry of Walt Whitman. Mired in personal and political depression, Marsh turned to Whitman—and it saved his life. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself is a book about how Walt Whitman can save America’s life, too. Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy) and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by showing how they emerged from Whitman’s life and times, and by recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and a kind of self-help you’re unlikely to encounter anywhere else.

Leaves of Grass (Complete Edition)

Leaves of Grass (Complete Edition)
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: e-artnow
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2020-12-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

Walt Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and re-writing Leaves of Grass, revising it multiple times until his death. The first edition was a small book of twelve poems and the last, a compilation of over 400. The poems of Leaves of Grass represent Whitman's celebration of his philosophy of life and humanity. His poetry praises nature and the individual human's role in it. Leaves of Grass (First Edition): Song of Myself A Song for Occupations To Think of Time The Sleepers I Sing the Body Electric Faces Song of the Answerer Europe the 72d and 73d Years of These States A Boston Ballad There Was a Child Went Forth Who Learns My Lesson Complete Great Are the Myths Leaves of Grass (Final Edition): Inscriptions One's-Self I Sing As I Ponder'd in Silence In Cabin'd Ships at Sea To Foreign Lands To a Historian To Thee Old Cause Eidolons For Him I Sing When I Read the Book Beginning My Studies Starting from Paumanok Song of Myself Children of Adam From Pent-Up Aching Rivers I Sing the Body Electric A Woman Waits for Me Spontaneous Me One Hour to Madness and Joy Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd Calamus Salut au Monde! Song of the Open Road Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Song of the Answerer Our Old Feuillage A Song of Joys Song of the Broad-Axe Song of the Exposition Song of the Redwood-Tree A Song for Occupations A Song of the Rolling Earth Birds of Passage A Broadway Pageant Sea-Drift By the Roadside Drum-Taps First O Songs for a Prelude Eighteen Sixty-One Beat! Beat! Drums! From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird Song of the Banner at Daybreak Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps Virginia—The West City of Ships The Centenarian's Story Cavalry Crossing a Ford Memories of President Lincoln By Blue Ontario's Shore Autumn Rivulets Proud Music of the Storm Passage to India Prayer of Columbus The Sleepers To Think of Time Whispers of Heavenly Death Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood From Noon to Starry Night Songs of Parting Sands at Seventy Good-Bye My Fancy