This Is The Night Our House Will Catch Fire A Memoir

Author : Nick Flynn
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2020-08-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781324005551

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This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire: A Memoir by Nick Flynn Pdf

A searing memoir on how childhood spills into parenthood from the critically acclaimed author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. When Nick Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to their house. The event loomed large in his imagination for years, but it’s only after having a child of his own that he understands why. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his feral childhood has him still in its reins, and forms his memories into lyrical bedtime stories populated by the both sinister and wounded Mister Mann. With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother’s suicide. This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire unravels the story of the fire that Flynn had to escape, and the ways in which, as an adult, he has carried that fire with him until it threatens to burn down his own house. Here Nick confronts his failings with fierce candor, even as they threaten to tear his family apart. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him he has “the ethics of a drowning man.” This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire takes us on the journey of a man struggling to hold himself together in prose that is raw and moving, sharp-edged and wry. Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas.

Author : Susannah Cahalan
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780141975351

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Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan Pdf

'My first serious blackout marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming days and weeks, I would never again be the same person ...' Susannah Cahalan was a happy, clever, healthy twenty-four-year old. Then one day she woke up in hospital, with no memory of what had happened or how she had got there. Within weeks, she would be transformed into someone unrecognizable, descending into a state of acute psychosis, undergoing rages and convulsions, hallucinating that her father had murdered his wife; that she could control time with her mind. Everything she had taken for granted about her life, and who she was, was wiped out. Brain on Fire is Susannah's story of her terrifying descent into madness and the desperate hunt for a diagnosis, as, after dozens of tests and scans, baffled doctors concluded she should be confined in a psychiatric ward. It is also the story of how one brilliant man, Syria-born Dr Najar, finally proved - using a simple pen and paper - that Susannah's psychotic behaviour was caused by a rare autoimmune disease attacking her brain. His diagnosis of this little-known condition, thought to have been the real cause of devil-possessions through history, saved her life, and possibly the lives of many others. Cahalan takes readers inside this newly-discovered disease through the progress of her own harrowing journey, piecing it together using memories, journals, hospital videos and records. Written with passionate honesty and intelligence, Brain on Fire is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your identity is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back. 'With eagle-eye precision and brutal honesty, Susannah Cahalan turns her journalistic gaze on herself as she bravely looks back on one of the most harrowing and unimaginable experiences one could ever face: the loss of mind, body and self. Brain on Fire is a mesmerizing story' -Mira Bartók, New York Times bestselling author of The Memory Palace Susannah Cahalan is a reporter on the New York Post, and the recipient of the 2010 Silurian Award of Excellence in Journalism for Feature Writing. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, and is frequently picked up by the Daily Mail, Gawker, Gothamist, AOL and Yahoo among other news aggregrator sites.

Author : Nick Flynn
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2016-02-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780571265411

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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn Pdf

Nick Flynn met his father when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this mystery father - self-proclaimed poet (and greatest American novelist since Mark Twain), descendant of the Romanov dynasty, alcoholic, and con-man doing time for bank robbery - but there had been no contact. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of the eerie trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other. With a raw authenticity, telling honesty and a dark but necessary humour, Nick Flynn's memoir breathes new life and vigour into the form. In passionate and playful prose Another Bullshit Night in Suck City illuminates the emotional and physical consequences of a relationship between father and son that exists, if at all, in a void.

Author : Nick Flynn
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2011-01-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780393077032

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The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir by Nick Flynn Pdf

"A beautiful, intelligent book that renders pain both ordinary and extraordinary into art."—Susanna Sonnenberg, San Francisco Chronicle In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn’s daughter’s birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in this memoir passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession—a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery—of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again.

Author : Jeannette Walls
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2007-01-02
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781416544661

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The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls Pdf

A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.

Author : Malena Ernman,Greta Thunberg,Beata Ernman,Svante Thunberg
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2020-03-05
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780241446751

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Our House is on Fire by Malena Ernman,Greta Thunberg,Beata Ernman,Svante Thunberg Pdf

The profoundly moving story of how love, courage and determination brought Greta Thunberg's family back from the brink 'Urgent, lucid, courageous ... a must-read message of hope ... It is a glimpse of a saner world' David Mitchell, Guardian This is the story of a happy family whose life suddenly fell apart, never to be the same again. Of two devoted parents plunged into a waking nightmare as their eleven-year-old daughter Greta stopped speaking and eating, and her younger sister struggled to cope. They desperately searched for answers, and began to see how their children's suffering reached far beyond medical diagnoses. This crisis was not theirs alone: they were burned-out people on a burned-out planet. And so they decided to act. Our House is on Fire shows how, amid forces that tried to silence them, one family found ways to strengthen, heal, and gain courage from the love they had for each other - and for the living world. It is a parable of hope and determination in an emergency that affects us all.

Author : Addie Zierman
Publisher : Convergent Books
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2013-10-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781601425461

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When We Were on Fire by Addie Zierman Pdf

In the strange, us-versus-them Christian subculture of the 1990s, a person’s faith was measured by how many WWJD bracelets she wore and whether he had kissed dating goodbye. Evangelical poster child Addie Zierman wore three bracelets asking what Jesus would do. She also led two Bible studies and listened exclusively to Christian music. She was on fire for God and unaware that the flame was dwindling—until it burned out. Addie chronicles her journey through church culture and first love, and her entrance—unprepared and angry—into marriage. When she drops out of church and very nearly her marriage as well, it is on a sea of tequila and depression. She isn’t sure if she’ll ever go back. When We Were on Fire is a funny, heartbreaking story of untangling oneself from what is expected to arrive at faith that is not bound by tradition or current church fashion. Addie looks for what lasts when nothing else seems worth keeping. It’s a story for doubters, cynics, and anyone who has felt alone in church.

Author : Edna O'Brien
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2013-04-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780316230360

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Country Girl by Edna O'Brien Pdf

"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."--National Public Radio When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.

Author : Amanda Lindhout,Sara Corbett
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2013-09-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781451651720

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A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout,Sara Corbett Pdf

BREAKING NEWS: Amanda Lindhout’s lead kidnapper, Ali Omar Ader, has been caught. Amanda Lindhout wrote about her fifteen month abduction in Somalia in A House in the Sky. It is the New York Times bestselling memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most remote places and then into captivity: “Exquisitely told…A young woman’s harrowing coming-of-age story and an extraordinary narrative of forgiveness and spiritual triumph” (The New York Times Book Review). As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself visiting its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark. Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is “a searingly unsentimental account. Ultimately it is compassion—for her naïve younger self, for her kidnappers—that becomes the key to Lindhout’s survival” (O, The Oprah Magazine).

Author : Jeanette Winterson
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2012-03-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780802194756

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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson Pdf

A New York Times bestseller: The “magnificent” memoir by one of the bravest and most original writers of our time—“A tour de force of literature and love” (Vogue). One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years” Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a “singular and electric” memoir about a life’s work to find happiness (The New York Times). It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, rose to haunt the author later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about the power of literature, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, or a life raft that supports us when we are sinking. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded story of the search for belonging—for love, identity, home, and a mother.

Author : Ravi Shankar
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : College teachers
ISBN : 0299335305

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Correctional by Ravi Shankar Pdf

Author : Larry Brown
Publisher : Algonquin Books
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2018-07-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781616208707

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On Fire by Larry Brown Pdf

NOW WITH A FOREWORD BY RON RASH AND AN APPRECIATION BY DWIGHT GARNER “One of the finest books I know about blue-collar work in America, its rewards and frustrations . . . If you are among the tens of millions who have never read Brown, this is a perfect introduction.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times On January 6, 1990, after seventeen years on the job, Larry Brown quit the Oxford, Mississippi, fire department to try writing full-time. In On Fire, he looks back on his life as a firefighter. His unflinching accounts of daily trauma—from the blistering heat of burning trailer homes to the crunch of broken glass at crash scenes—catapult readers into the hard reality that drove this award-winning novelist. As a firefighter and fireman-turned-author, as husband and hunter, and as father and son, Brown offers insights into the choices men face pursuing their life’s work. And, in the forthright style we expect from Larry Brown, his narrative builds to the explanation of how one man who regularly confronted death began to burn with the desire to write about life.

Author : Kelle Groom
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2012-04-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781451616699

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I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl by Kelle Groom Pdf

A memoir of addiction and grief, forgiveness, and survival from a poet who recovers from alcoholism only after she sees her child die of leukemia.

Author : Liz Murray
Publisher : Hachette Books
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2010-09-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781401396206

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Breaking Night by Liz Murray Pdf

In the vein of The Glass Castle, Breaking Night is the stunning memoir of a young woman who at age fifteen was living on the streets, and who eventually made it into Harvard. Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age fifteen, Liz found herself on the streets. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep. When Liz's mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York Times scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. Breaking Night is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman's indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds.

Author : William Styron
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2010-05-04
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781936317134

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Set This House on Fire by William Styron Pdf

A New York Times bestseller by the author of Sophie’s Choice: Two Americans search for the truth about a mysterious long-ago murder in Italy. Shortly after World War II, in the village of Sambuco, Italy, two men—Virginia attorney Peter Leverett and South Carolina artist Cass Kinsolving—crossed paths with Mason Flagg. They both had their own reactions to the gregarious and charismatic movie mogul’s son. For the impressionable Peter, it was something close to awe. For the alcoholic Cass, it was unsettled rage. Then, after the rape and murder of a peasant girl, Mason’s body was found at the base of a cliff—an apparent suicide. He’d been distraught, the authorities said, over committing such a heinous crime. Peter and Cass went their separate ways, and never spoke of it again. Now, years later, Peter is still haunted by what he knows—and by what he doesn’t. He’s sought out Cass in Charleston for closure, and something close to the truth. Together both men will share their tales of that terrible season in Italy, each with their own ghosts—and their own reasons to exorcise them. But neither Peter nor Cass is prepared for where this path of revenge, complicity, and atonement will take them. A profound exploration of the evil that men do, and what the innocent must endure to accommodate it, Set This House on Fire is more than a byzantine murder mystery, it’s “one of the finest novels of our times” from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner, Darkness Visible, and other modern classics (San Francisco Chronicle). This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.