The Insignificant Events In The Life Of A Cactus Pdf
Maximina
When 36-year-old physician Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, he knew he had little time left to live. The memoir of his final months spent coming to terms with the reality, When Breath Becomes Air, questions what it means to live in the face of death. Kalanithi reflects on the doctor-patient relationship during this difficult time--a theme that Atul Gawande also explores in Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Gawande, also a physician, takes a hard look at the role of the medical industry in aging and death, examining the ways end-of-life care have worked and not worked as medical technologies have advanced.
Where Kalanithi and Gawande look at life immediately preceding death, others focus on what comes after. Mary Roach touches on this in two of her books: Stiff, which explores the science of what happens to cadavers used in scientific research, and Spook, which provides a surprisingly scientific exploration of the afterlife. In her memoir Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Caitlin Doughty weaves together tales of her work at a crematory with research into death rituals and mythologies across history, encouraging readers to reconsider their attitudes towards death. Tom Jokinen details the modern funeral industry in his memoir, Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training, while Judy Melinick shares what a career as a medical examiner has taught her about how we live and how we die in Working Stiff.
Death may be an uncomfortable subject for many, but the wealth of literature on the subject speaks to our boundless fascination with it as an inevitable part of every life. After all, as the very wise (albeit fictional) Albus Dumbledore once said, "to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm
"It doesn't fit into an easy niche," said Paul Madonna, cartoonist, creator of the comic strip All Over Coffee and author of the novel Close Enough for the Angels, available now from Petty Curse Books. Madonna's first novel tells the story of a failed artist who has been a "one-hit wonder twice over." The book explores the nature of the creative process and is a blend of artistic media, with more than 100 ink-on-paper illustrations of locations in China, Japan and Thailand interspersed throughout the novel.
"It's not a graphic novel, it doesn't come from the comic world," explained Madonna. His comic strip, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle from 2004 to 2015 and was published in two collections by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, was likewise a sort of hybrid, blending poetry and ink-on-paper drawings in the conventions of a comic strip. He added that for much of his career, he has been creating things that "no one knows what to call."
At the heart of Close Enough for the Angels is Emit Hopper, who found sudden, fleeting success first as a musician in the 1980s and then as a literary darling in the 1990s. Twenty years on, he is the owner of a laundromat and has largely given up on his creative dreams. The story opens as Emit's lover Marie has been missing for more than a year. He takes a sudden journey to southeast Asia, and from there the narrative jumps between different stages of Emit's life and career while he unravels a mystery tied to a personal tragedy. The illustrations sprinkled throughout the novel, meanwhile, don't simply summarize scenes in the text.
"In a classic illustrated novel, you read on one page a scene of two people sitting at a cafe with the sun setting. You turn the page, and there is a picture of two people at a cafe with the sun setting out the window. That to me is redundant," said Madonna. He explained that the drawings in his book are a distinct part of the story, and though they are paired with the text in a tonal, emotional way, they don't simply replicate what the reader has just read.
"It's not obvious why we're reading this chapter and seeing this image," he said, adding that figuring out why a particular image is tied to a particular part of the text is something of a small puzzle for the reader to figure out.
Madonna began working on the project in 2010, and what he thought would be a two-year project turned into a six-year project. He first visited southeast Asia in 1999, and after falling in love with the region, "vowed to myself I would always go back and make something there." When Madonna was in the process of publishing his first All Over Coffee collection, he initially had a hard time of it, with publishers saying they loved his work but wouldn't publish the book because they thought it was regional and would sell only in the Bay Area. While most of the art in All Over Coffee did feature San Francisco, Madonna found that label frustrating, because he was receiving letters from and shipping art to readers all over the world. City Lights, which Madonna said understood that his work would have wider appeal, eventually published All Over Coffee and its follow-up, Everything Is Its Own Reward, but even though the latter collection featured drawings of more than a dozen cities, it was still considered by many to be a "San Francisco book."
"That frustrated me," remarked Madonna. "I decided the next one was not going to be a San Francisco book."
When it came to publishing Close Enough for the Angels, Madonna once again had some difficulties. He recalled that conventional publishers shied away from the large number of images in the project and were daunted by how expensive it would be to produce, and publishers more experienced with graphics did not want to take on a novel. He eventually decided to create 50 handmade copies of the book, to be sold as high-price art objects. Spurred on by that success, and while discussing the project over lunch with friend and Abrams Books sales representative Andrew Weiner, Madonna and Weiner decided to publish the book themselves. They created a two-person publishing company, Petty Curse Books, with one project: Close Enough for the Angels.
"It was a really interesting process," said Weiner. "The challenge was to find someone who could accommodate a single book." Weiner and Madonna found their way to Graphic Arts Books and Publishers Group West. Graphic Arts Books will distribute Close Enough for the Angels and host the book within its catalogue, and Ingram Publisher Services sales reps voted to have art from the book featured on the IPS catalogue cover. Added Weiner: "It's been a really great working relationship with them."
Madonna has no shortage of future plans: his first solo museum show is opening in 2018, and for that he's writing an autobiographical book about the creative process, and he's been meaning to do a third All Over Coffee collection for a while. And if Close Enough for the Angels proves popular, he has two more books about Emit Hopper in mind. Said Madonna: "The hope is it will get enough attention and interest, so that I can continue running with those next two books." --Alex Mutter
Susan Vreeland, whose novels explore art, artists and artistic inspiration, died on August 31 at age 71. She earned widespread acclaim for her second novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999), which follows a fictional Vermeer painting through centuries of ownership back to its conception. Vreeland uses eight short stories to track the Vermeer's owners, beginning with a remorseful professor whose Nazi father looted the work while rounding up Jews in Amsterdam. The next story tracks that doomed Dutch family, then moves further back in time to a farmer's wife, a Bohemian student and on to the pictured girl herself, with each person altering the painting's fate and being touched by its beauty.
Vreeland's other novels also portray artists and their work. The Passion of Artemisia (2002) fictionalizes the life of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656), a female Italian Baroque painter, while Luncheon of the Boating Party (2007) washes life into Renoir's famous impressionist painting, and Clara and Mr. Tiffany (2012) illuminates the long overshadowed woman who crafted Louis Comfort Tiffany's stained glass lamps. Vreeland's final novel, Lisette's List (2014), finds an aspiring art gallery apprentice and her husband in Vichy France, where she becomes immersed in post-impressionist art history. Girl in Hyacinth Blue was released in paperback by Penguin Books in 2000 ($15, 9780140296280). --Tobias Mutter
The Silence of the Spirits, the second novel by award-winning Afropean writer Wilfried N'Sonde, is the haunting story of a former African child soldier, Clovis Nzila, who makes his way into France illegally. Destitute and at the end of his rope, Clovis has spent an exhausting day avoiding the police. Feeling hopeless and with nothing to lose, he decides to jump onto a commuter train heading out of Paris. Sitting across from him on the train is Christelle, a red-haired, middle-aged woman heading home from her job as a nurses' aide at a Paris hospital. Sensing Clovis's distress, Christelle's "heart suddenly ignited... recognizing the pain from her own life in [his] eyes"; she wants to console him.
Their lives are so different, yet their pasts have much in common, including a shared history of violence, drawing them irresistibly toward each other. Over the next 24 hours, they joyfully discover comfort and solace in one another's company. Christelle brings Clovis "into her universe" and envelops him "in an aura of light." They enter "the epicenter of a magical vortex of curiosity, yearnings and desires." N'Sonde's lyrical prose, beautifully translated by Karen Lindo, is almost hypnotic in its intensity. It eventually forces the reader to bear witness to the atrocities committed by Clovis in the name of freedom, leaving us to wonder if he and Christelle can ever move beyond his violent past.
N'Sonde's broader message concerns hostility toward illegal immigrants and the danger for those who provide shelter to them. Originally written in 2009, this powerful story is narrated in Clovis's voice and unfolds through his desperate but hopeful eyes. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and freelance reviewer