Narratives
10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress without Losing my Edge, and Found Self-Help that Actually Works -- A True Story by
I wrote a memoir about a fidgety, skeptical newsman who reluctantly becomes a meditator to deal with his issues - and in the process of publishing it, I occasionally, to my embarrassment, found myself failing to practice what I preach. I was kind of like a dog that soils the rug, and the universe kept shoving my face into it. In 2014, Dan Harris published his memoir 10% Happier. The book--which describes his reluctant embrace of meditation after a drug problem, an on-air freak-out, and an unplanned "spiritual" journey--became an instant bestseller and Dan, to his own surprise, became a public evangelist for mindfulness. Hoist on My Own Petard is the story of what happens to Dan Harris after the runaway success of his memoir and the lessons he had to (re)learn in the process.
Call Number: BF161 .H29 2019 (Print Resource)Publication Date: 2019
Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents by
In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree. Twenty-five writers deftly explore a trait they've inherited from a parent, reflecting on how it affects the lives they lead today--how it shifts their relationship to that parent (sometimes posthumously) and to their sense of self. Apple, Tree's all-star lineup of writers brings eloquence, integrity, and humor to topics such as arrogance, obsession, psychics, grudges, table manners, luck, and laundry. Contributors include Laura van den Berg, S. Bear Bergman, John Freeman, Jane Hamilton, Mat Johnson, Daniel Mendelsohn, Kyoko Mori, Ann Patchett, and Sallie Tisdale, among others. Together, their pieces form a prismatic meditation on how we make fresh sense of ourselves and our parents when we see the pieces of them that live on in us.
Call Number: (Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2019
The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin by
Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work. When The Awakening was first published in 1899, critical outcry proved so vociferous that the novel was banned for decades. Now praised as a classic of early feminist literature, Kate Chopin's final work rejects conventional female roles and celebrates a woman's journey towards self-awareness. As the heroine, Edna Pontellier, awakens to her own desires, she begins to question her ideas about marriage, motherhood, society, art, and the nature of love itself. A milestone in American fiction, The Awakening is an unforgettably poignant novel of self-discovery that has inspired generations of readers. Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author's personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research. Read with confidence.
Call Number: PS1294.C63 A6 2000, PS1294.C45 A8 1970 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2014
The Bell Jar by
A beautifully designed Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition of this haunting American classic "It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." -- USA Today A realistic and emotional look at a woman who falls into the grips of insanity written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar an enduring classic.
Call Number: PS3566.L27 B44 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2013
The Bigger the Better, the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image, & Other Hazards of Being Female by
Getting undressed for the dreaded seventh-grade gym class. Feeling fascinated with, yet disgusted by, the fashion magazines full of perfect, unattainable bodies. Enduring the pain of a bikini wax or suffering the ramifications of overplucked brows.Like all women, the contributors to The Bigger the Better, the Tighter the Sweater have been there and lived to tell the tale. With laugh-out-loud essays on such topics as the hell of puberty fashion errors and triumphs rolls, jiggles, and dimples the positives and pitfalls of cosmetic surgery and beauty standards across different races and cultures, readers will feel that they are sitting down with their girlfriends for a funny, honest, and thought-provoking conversation about our complex relationships with our bodies. With smarts, wit, and style, this collection captures the double bind of beauty and body image that women contend with each day.
Call Number: BF697.5.B63 B54 2007 (Print Resource)Publication Date: 2007
The Color Purple by
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this novel about a resilient and courageous woman has become a Broadway show and a cultural phenomenon. A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband. In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters directly to God. The letters, spanning twenty years, record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment guided by the light of a few strong women. She meets Shug Avery, her husband's mistress and a jazz singer with a zest for life, and her stepson's wife, Sophia, who challenges her to fight for independence. And though the many letters from Celie's sister are hidden by her husband, Nettie's unwavering support will prove to be the most breathtaking of all. The Color Purple has sold more than five million copies, inspired an Academy Award-nominated film starring Oprah Winfrey and directed by Steven Spielberg, and been adapted into a Tony-nominated Broadway musical. Lauded as a literary masterpiece, this is the groundbreaking novel that placed Walker "in the company of Faulkner" (The Nation), and remains a wrenching--yet intensely uplifting--experience for new generations of readers. This ebook features a new introduction written by the author on the twenty-fifth anniversary of publication, and an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author's personal collection.
Call Number: Black Studies PS3573.A425 C6 1982, PN1997 .C7468 1985 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2011
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by
The New York Times-bestselling memoir of crippling depression and the struggle for recovery by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice. In the summer of 1985, William Styron became numbed by disaffection, apathy, and despair, unable to speak or walk while caught in the grip of advanced depression. His struggle with the disease culminated in a wave of obsession that nearly drove him to suicide, leading him to seek hospitalization before the dark tide engulfed him. Darkness Visible tells the story of Styron's recovery, laying bare the harrowing realities of clinical depression and chronicling his triumph over the disease that had claimed so many great writers before him. His final words are a call for hope to all who suffer from mental illness that it is possible to emerge from even the deepest abyss of despair and "once again behold the stars." 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.
Call Number: RC537 .S88 1990 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2010
Diary of a Misfit by
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, New York Public Library, Minneapolis Star Tribune Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life. "Most moving is Parks's depiction of a queer lineage, her assertion of an ancestry of outcasts, a tapestry of fellow misfits into which the marginalized will always, for better or worse, fit." --The New York Times Book Review When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks's life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother's youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own. For ten years, Parks traveled back to rural Louisiana and knocked on strangers' doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy's own diaries, trying to uncover what Roy was like as a person--what he felt; what he thought; and how he grappled with his sense of otherness. With an enormous heart and an unstinting sense of vulnerability, Parks writes about finding oneself through someone else's story, and about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us.
Call Number: HQ75.4.P36 A3 2022 (Print Resource)Publication Date: 2022
Dragonfish by Call Number: Asian American Studies PS3620.R363 D83 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2016
Full Catastrophe Living by
Merging the spirits of Don Quixote, Shakespearean fools, Theodore Roethke, Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, and the Marx Brothers, Zach Savich's first book does more than showcase the innovative fluency of its roving forms and moods: these poetic hybrids are not hothouse blossoms but minotaurs. With ebullient intelligence and high-stakes insistence on the panic, lust, and suffering of the sensual world, Full Catastrophe Living uses the self as an instrument to investigate art, love, and the hardest honesty. In meditations, songs, slapstick sequences, sonnets, narratives, and tightly carved fragments, Savich explores the conflicts between romance and reality, between inventing a new world and staying true to this one. Relishing both traditional and experimental poetics, he takes refreshing, ecumenical risks to show the "strange grace / of bells that ring with a rag's polishing." Like a Fourth of July band conductor guiding planes to land, his poetic wit alters what's real. This book will change the ways that readers think about poetry, language's expressive capacity, and the robust world around us.
Call Number: PS3619.A95 F85 2009 (Print Resource)Publication Date: 2009
Hyperbole and a Half : Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Call Number: Art & Architecture, World Comics Collection PN6727.B7568 H97 2013 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2013
A Little Life by
Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement--and a great gift for its readers. When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring act∨ JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome--but that will define his life forever. In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
Call Number: PS3625.A674 L58 2015 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2015
Looking for Alaska by Call Number: Curriculum Resources PZ7.G8233 Lo 2005 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2019
Mrs. Dalloway by
This masterpiece of modern literature by the author of Orlando is an intimate and probing account of a single day in the life of a London society woman. It's the spring of 1923 and Clarissa Dalloway must prepare her Westminster home for the guests she will receive this evening. As the wife of a Parliament Minister, proper decorum is of upmost importance, and she decides to buy the flowers herself. Walking through the streets of London, Clarissa's entire life swirls through her mind as Big Ben tolls out the passing hours of the day. On her journey, Clarissa will encounter friends and memories; regrets and dreams of what might have been. From her happy youth to the realities of World War I and the very logical reasons for marrying her husband, her stream of consciousness is evoked with lucidity and depth by one of the twentieth century's most important literary stylists. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is "conceived so brilliantly, dimensioned so thoroughly and documented so absolutely that her type, in the words of Constantin Stanislavsky, might be said to have been done 'inviolably and for all time'" (The New York Times). "Virginial Woolf is one of the few writers who changed life for all of us. Her combination of intellectual courage and painful emotional sensitivity created a new way of perceiving and living in the world." --Margaret Drabble This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Call Number: PR6045.O72 M7 1981 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2019
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind by
A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author's struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion's myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety's human toll--its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze--while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.
Call Number: RC531 .S758 2013 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2014
Nest by
Poetry. Asian-American. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is one of the very few poets writing in the United States today whose voice and writing style are immediately recognizable. In her new collection, NEST, the medium of her poetry continues to be the sentence. To the formalities of syntax and grammar she adds the structures of domestic architecture, isolation, health, desire, play, and family life. Her writing offers a unique poetics of metaphysics and manners. As always the poetry is sensuous and stunning, and Richard Tuttle has once again designed an arresting cover.
Call Number: Asian American Studies PS3552.E77 N47 2003 (Print Resource)Publication Date: 2003
Noruwei no mori ノルウェイの森 / 村上春樹 by Call Number: East Asian PL856.U673 N6 1987 (Print Resource)Publication Date: 1987
Norwegian Wood by Call Number: PL856.U673 N6713 2000 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2000
The Salt Eaters by Call Number: Main Library & Black Studies PS3552.A473 S35 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 1992
Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within by
Presents a first-of-its-kind, cross-cultural lens to mental illness through the inspiring story of Gayathri's thirty-year battle with depression. This literary memoir takes readers from her childhood in India where depression is thought to be a curse to life in America where she eventually finds the light within by drawing on both her rich Hindu heritage and Western medicine to spare. As a young girl in Bangalore, Gayathri was surrounded by the fragrance of jasmine and flickering oil lamps, her family protected by Hindu gods and goddesses. But as she grew older, demons came forth from the dark corners of her idyllic kingdom--with the scariest creatures lurking within her.The daughter of a respected Brahmin family, Gayathri began to feel different. "I can hardly eat, sleep, or think straight. The only thing I can do is cry unending tears." Her parents insisted it was all in her head. Because traditional Indian culture had no concept of depression as an illness, no doctor could diagnose and no medicine could heal her mysterious malady.This memoir traces Gayathri's courageous battle with the depression that consumed her from adolescence through marriage and a move to the United States. It was only after the birth of her first child, when her husband discovered her in the backyard "clawing the earth furiously with my bare hands, intent on digging a grave so that I could bury myself alive," that she finally found help. After a stay in a psych ward she eventually found "the light within," an emotional and spiritual awakening from the darkness of her tortured mind.Gayathri's inspiring story provides a first-of-its-kind cross-cultural view of mental illness--how it is regarded in India and in America, and how she drew on both her rich Hindu heritage and Western medicine to find healing.
Call Number: RG852 .R36 2014 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2014
She's Come Undone by
In this New York Times bestselling extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. "Mine is a story of craving: an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered...." Meet Dolores Price. She's thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up. In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably lovable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections. She's Come Undone includes a promise: you will never forget Dolores Price.
Call Number: PS3562.A433 S54 1992 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2011
The Surrendered by Call Number: PS3562.E3347 S87 2010 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2010
A Tale for the Time Being by
A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki--shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award "A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be." In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox--possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki's signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
Call Number: PS3565.Z45 T35 2013 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2013
Thirteen Reasons Why / Th1rteen R3asons Why by Call Number: Curriculum Resources PZ7.A8155 Th 2007 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2011
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 by Call Number: (Electronic Resource)ISBN: 0307429504Publication Date: 2000
The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B by Call Number: Curriculum Resources PZ7.T6458 Unl 2015 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2015
When We Collided by
"It is a book I wish could have written, but am so much better for having read." --Julie Murphy, #1New York Timesbestselling author ofDumplin' A thought-provoking, emotionally-compelling romance featuring a girl, a boy, and the love that has the power to save or destroy them. Seventeen year-old Jonah Daniels has lived in Verona Cove, California, his whole life, and only one thing has ever changed: his father used to be alive, and now he is not. With a mother lost in a deep bout of depression, Jonah and his five siblings struggle to keep up their home and the restaurant their dad left behind. But at the start of summer, a second change rolls in: Vivi Alexander, the new girl in town. Vivi is in love with life. Charming and unfiltered, she refuses to be held down by the medicine she's told should make her feel better. After meeting Jonah, she slides into the Daniels' household seamlessly, winning over each sibling with her imagination and gameness. But it's not long before Vivi's zest for life begins to falter. Soon her adventurousness becomes all-out danger-seeking. Through each high and low, Vivi and Jonah's love is put to the test . . . but what happens when love simply isn't enough?
Call Number: Curriculum Resources PZ7.L87736 Wh 2016 (Print Resource)Publication Date: 2016
Wintergirls by Call Number: Curriculum Resources PZ7.A54385 Wi 2009 (Print and Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2009
The Woman in White (Open Access Book) by
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, the first Victorian 'sensation novel' and one of the earliest mystery novels in English, weaves multiple narratives into a thrilling and suspenseful tale of mistaken identity and dark desires. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with notes and an introduction by Matthew Sweet.The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, the 'Napoleon of crime', who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collins's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel and its serialisation history.Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter William Collins. In 1846 he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn, where he gained the knowledge that was to give him much of the material for his writing. From the early 1850s he was a friend of Charles Dickens, who produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. Of his novels, Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).If you enjoyed The Woman in White, you might like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, also available in Penguin Classics.
Call Number: (Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 2003
The Yellow Wallpaper (Open Access Book) by
Part of The Wadsworth Casebooks for Reading, Research, and Writing Series, this new title provides all the materials a student needs to complete a literary research assignment in one convenient location.
Call Number: (Electronic Resource)Publication Date: 1998
