Deep Skin

'Pure genius. Absolutely brilliant' Shari Lapena 'A twisted thriller, reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith' Ian Rankin IBA Crime Fiction Book of the Year Winner 2018 ___________ WINNER of the Dead Good Books Award for the Book That You Can't Put Down! She's not who you think she is . . . 'I could probably have been an actress. It is not difficult to pretend to be somebody else. Isn't that what I've been doing for most of my life?' Cordelia Russell has been living on the French Riviera for twenty-five years, passing herself off as an English socialite. But her luck, and the kindness of strangers, have run out. The arrival of a visitor from her distant past shocks Cordelia. She reacts violently to the intrusion and flees her flat to spend a drunken night at a glittering party. As dawn breaks she stumbles home through the back streets. Even before she opens her door she can hear the flies buzzing. She did not expect the corpse inside to start decomposing quite so quickly . . . ___________ 'Bloody brilliant!' Denise Mina 'Extraordinary' A.J. Finn 'The finest psychological thriller writer currently at work' Tammy Cohen 'Dark, brutal and brilliant' Colette McBeth 'Absorbing, beautifully written' The Times, Crime Books of the Year 'Every bit as amazing as her first two [novels]' Lisa Jewell 'Dazzling . . . chilling, mesmerising and, ultimately, devastating. Pure storytelling genius' Mark Edwards

Elizabeth Bishop, who constructed poems of crystalline visual accuracy, is often regarded as the most painterly of twentieth-century American poets. In Deep Skin, Peggy Samuels explores Bishop's attraction to painters who experimented with dynamic interactions between surface and depth. She tells the story of the development of Bishop's poetics in relation to her engagement with mid-century art, particularly the work of Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, and Alexander Calder.Contemporary conversations about the visual arts circulating among art historians and reviewers shaped Bishop's experience and illuminated aesthetic problems for which she needed to find solutions. The book explores in particular the closest intellectual context for Bishop, her friend Margaret Miller, who worked as a research associate and later associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Samuels traces a complex and rich four-way metaphor in her portrait of Bishop's methods: surface of verse, surface of painting, skin, and interface between mind and world.The visual arts helped Bishop to develop a new model for lyric: the surface of verse becomes a threshold that opens in two directions--to nature and to the interior of the poet. Bishop's poetics is very much about the touch of the materials of the mind and world inside the materiality of verse. Translating and revising some of the concepts from the visual arts in her own linguistic medium, she begins to experiment with modulation, absorption, and incorporation across multiple registers of experience.

Timo Carl presents alternatives to curtain wall facades and other flat boundaries creating autonomous spaces. He investigates facade typologies with multiple material layers to strategize the relationship between buildings and their environment. By revisiting Le Corbusier ́s seminal brise soleil an alternative reading of the modern project emerges: one that is not based on classical compositional rules, but instead on the dynamic relationships with environmental forces. Finally, an exciting series of project-based investigations sets out innovative ways in which novel deep skins combine energy-conscious performance with the poetics of architecture.

Why do Latinos with light skin complexions earn more than those with darker complexions? Why do African American women with darker complexions take longer to get married than their lighter counterparts? Why did Michael Jackson become lighter as he became wealthier and O.J. Simpson became darker when he was accused of murder? Why is Halle Berry considered a beautiful sex symbol, while Whoopi Goldberg is not? Skin Deep provides answers to these intriguing questions. It shows that although most white Americans maintain that they do not judge others on the basis of skin color, skin tone remains a determining factor in educational attainment, occupational status, income, and other quality of life indicators. Shattering the myth of the color-blind society, Skin Deep is a revealing examination of the ways skin tone inequality operates in America. The essays in this collection-by some of the nation's leading thinkers on race and colorism-examine these phenomena, asking whether skin tone differentiation is imposed upon communities of color from the outside or is an internally-driven process aided and abetted by community members themselves. The essays also question whether the stratification process is the same for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Skin Deep addresses such issues as the relationship between skin tone and self esteem, marital patterns, interracial relationships, socioeconomic attainment, and family racial identity and composition. The essays in this accessible book also grapple with emerging issues such as biracialism, color-blind racism, and 21st century notions of race in the U.S. and in other countries.

Racial differences are rooted in biological reality, right? That’s certainly what a small group of anthropologists, psychologists and pundits would have you believe. Portraying themselves as brave defenders of the inconvenient truth, this group took the revival of ‘race science’ from alt-right online message boards into mainstream academic journals. They seek to justify raging social inequalities from poverty to incarceration rates with a simple message: some people are just born to be poor. There’s just one problem… race science isn’t real. The first Europeans had dark skin and black curly hair. Culture was born in Africa, not Western Europe. Gavin Evans examines the latest research on how intelligence develops and laying out new discoveries in genetics, palaeontology, archaeology and anthropology to unearth the truth about our shared past. Skin Deep stands up to the pseudo-science deployed to justify colonial rule, the apartheid regime and the vast inequalities that persist today. As race dominates the political agenda, it’s time to put the hateful myths about it to bed.

Traces the evolution of the black female body in the American imagination

Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types, and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia and in Europe, with names, dates, and locations erased so that individual women came to be anonymized as 'gins' and 'lubras.' The book identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination even after conflicting records emerged. The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued in the book. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Skin Deep shows how the industrialization of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep. *** "Impressively researched, written, organized and presented...highly recommended for community and academic library Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, and Colonial History reference collections." --Midwest Book Review, MBR Bookwatch: October 2016, Helen's Bookshelf [Subject: Cultural History, Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, Colonial Studies]