Fragments From The History Of Loss

The Anthropocene’s urgent message about imminent disaster invites us to forget about history and to focus on the present as it careens into an unthinkable future. To counter this, Louise Green engages with the theoretical framing of nature in concepts such as the “Anthropocene,” “the great acceleration,” and “rewilding” in order to explore what the philosophy of nature in the era of climate change might look like from postcolonial Africa. Utilizing a practice of reading developed in the Frankfurt school, Green rearranges narrative fragments from the “global nature industry,” which subjugates all aspects of nature to the logic of capitalist production, in order to disrupt preconceived notions and habitual ways of thinking about how we inhabit the Anthropocene. Examining climate change through the details of everyday life, particularly the history of conspicuous consumption and the exploitation of Africa, she surfaces the myths and fantasies that have brought the world to its current ecological crisis and that continue to shape the narratives through which it is understood. Beginning with African rainforest exhibits in New York and Cornwall, Green discusses how these representations of the climate catastrophe fail to acknowledge the unequal pace at which humans consume and continue to replicate imperial narratives about Africa. Examining this history and climate change through the lens of South Africa’s entry into capitalist modernity, Green argues that the Anthropocene redirects attention away from the real problem, which is not human’s relation with nature, but people’s relations with each other. A sophisticated, carefully argued call to rethink how we approach relationships between and among humans and the world in which we live, Fragments from the History of Loss is a challenge to both the current era and the scholarly conversation about the Anthropocene.

What is it about ruins that are so alluring, so puzzling, that they can hold some of us in endless wonder over the half-erased story they tell? In this elegant book, Robert Harbison explores the captivating hold these remains and broken pieces—from architecture, art, and literature—have on us. Why are we, he asks, so suspicious of things that are too smooth, too continuous? What makes us feel, when we look upon a fragment, that its very incompletion has a kind of meaning in itself? Is it that our experience on earth is inherently discontinuous, or that we are simply unable to believe in anything whole? Harbison guides us through ruins and fragments, both ancient and modern, visual and textual, showing us how they are crucial to understanding our current mindset and how we arrived here. First looking at ancient fragments, he examines the ways we have recovered, restored, and exhibited them as artworks. Then he moves on to modernist architecture and the ways that it seeks a fragmentary form, examining modern projects that have been designed into existing ruins, such as the Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy and the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. From there he explores literature and the works of T. S. Eliot, Montaigne, Coleridge, Joyce, and Sterne, and how they have used fragments as the foundation for creating new work. Likewise he examines the visual arts, from Schwitters’ collages to Ruskin’s drawings, as well as cinematic works from Sergei Eisenstein to Julien Temple, never shying from more deliberate creators of ruin, from Gordon Matta-Clark to countless graffiti artists. From ancient to modern times and across every imaginable form of art, Harbison takes a poetic look at how ruins have offered us a way of understanding history and how they have enabled us to create the new.

Even though she thinks Caleb's mom blames her for his accidental death two months ago, Jessa agrees to pack up her ex-boyfriend's bedroom, but every item she touches makes Jessa question what she knows about his death, his family, and their year-long relationship.

A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author of Atlas of Remote Islands A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Winner of the Warwick Prize Winner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize Longlisted for the International Booker Prize Each disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific—shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss. With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.

With over one million books sold in her career, Joyce Rupp presents her newest undertaking: a unique collection of daily meditations that draw from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other sources, offering wisdom and insight about the God who is beyond all names. Bestselling author Joyce Rupp once again proves herself a wise and gentle spiritual midwife, drawing forth 365 names of God from the world’s spiritual treasury. Fragments of Your Ancient Name—whose title comes from a poem by German mystic Rainer Maria Rilke—assembles a remarkable collection of reflections for each day of the year. This unique and profound devotional will heighten awareness of the many names by which God is known around the world. Whether drawing from the Psalms, Sufi saints, Hindu poets, Native American rituals, contemporary writers, or the Christian gospels, Rupp stirs the imagination and the heart to discover a new dimension of God. Each name is explored in a ten-line poetic meditation and is complemented by a simple sentence that serves as a reminder of the name of God throughout the day.

Much of what is known about the past often rests upon the chance survival of objects and texts. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the fragments of medieval manuscripts re-used as bookbindings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such fragments provide a tantalizing, yet often problematic glimpse into the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages. Exploring the opportunities and difficulties such documents provide, this volume concentrates on the c. 50,000 fragments of medieval Latin manuscripts stored in archives across the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. This large collection of fragments (mostly from liturgical works) provides rich evidence about European Latin book culture, both in general and in specific relation to the far north of Europe, one of the last areas of Europe to be converted to Christianity. As the essays in this volume reveal, individual and groups of fragments can play a key role in increasing and advancing knowledge about the acquisition and production of medieval books, and in helping to distinguish locally made books from imported ones. Taking an imaginative approach to the source material, the volume goes beyond a strictly medieval context to integrate early modern perspectives that help illuminate the pattern of survival and loss of Latin manuscripts through post-Reformation practices concerning reuse of parchment. In so doing it demonstrates how the use of what might at first appear to be unpromising source material can offer unexpected and rewarding insights into diverse areas of European history and the history of the medieval book.

Wounds Fragments Derelict is Carlos Gabriel Kelly's debut poetry collection. These poems comprise a narrative of love and loss. Throughout the collection, Kelly weaves poetic fragments into a narrative expressing the torment of a relationship that clings to the heart even with the passage of time. As the speaker conjures his world seen through the prism of lost love, ghosts populate a landscape in which heartbreak prevents any possibility of moving forward. In these fragments, romantic, bold, and erotic verse speaks to the heart, its repetitions rattling the bones with carefully composed meter. Kelly also inventively takes advantage of the full page to create non-traditional forms for his poems. With honesty, poignancy, and romantic flair, he distills the most exhilarating highs and heartbreaking lows of life and love into evocative lines that will become etched in the reader's mind.

For the first time—and in the best translation ever—the complete Book of Disquiet, a masterpiece beyond comparison The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An “autobiography” or “diary” containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa’s entire writing life.