The Blind Man

With over 100 of her best poems plus George Elliott Clarke's essay on the achievement of Rita Joe, The Blind Man's Eyes confirms Joe's place in Canadian literature. From a homeless child who led a blind beggar door-to-door, Rita Joe emerged as spokesperson for her nation and for the individual's heart. Her much anthologized poems and rare autobiography have riveted her message to the Canadian conscience, revealing both the Mi'kmaq people and the universal artist's heart of this Elder.

The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show the features of a man, apparently blind, who begs for money at a religious site in Paris, frequented by tourists. In perceiving this stranger and the images his appearance projects, he begins to imagine what this man’s life is like and how he perceives the world around him. Written in journal form, the book narrates Desjarlais’s pursuit of the man portrayed in the photographs. He travels to Paris and tries to meet with him. Eventually, Desjarlais becomes unsure as to what he sees, hears, or remembers. Through these interpretive dilemmas he senses the complexities of perception, where all is multiple, shifting, spectral, a surge of phantasms in which the actual and the imagined are endlessly blurred and intertwined. His mind shifts from thinking about photographs and images to being fixed on the visceral force of apparitions. His own vision is affected in a troubling way. Composed of an intricate weave of text and image, The Blind Man attends to pressing issues in contemporary life: the fraught dimensions of photographic capture; encounters with others and alterity; the politics of looking; media images of violence and abjection; and the nature of fantasy and imaginative construal. Through a wide-ranging inquiry into histories of imagination, Desjarlais inscribes the need for a “phantasmography”—a writing of phantasms, a graphic inscription of the flows and currents of fantasy and fabulation.

New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is close to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, at times it seems as if the whole world has gone mad. Trying, as always, to keep some kind of peace, their legendary nickel-plated Colts very much in evidence, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings, beatings, and riots that threaten to tear Harlem apart.

‘Love is not consolation, it is light’ From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil comes a novel set in the months after 9/11, when Western armies invaded Afghanistan—a story of love, hope and grief, of uncorrupted faith and of what it means to be alive. Jeo and his foster-brother Mikal leave their home in Pakistan to help care for wounded Afghans. Within hours of entering the wide-horizoned Afghan landscape, Mikal and Jeo are separated and, emerging from the carnage, Mikal begins his search for Jeo. But his deepest wish is to return home—to the young woman he loves and who loves him, Jeo’s wife. The Blind Man’s Garden maps a place both phantasmally beautiful and chilling. Taking us on a journey from Al Qaeda’s hideouts in Waziristan and American-built military prisons to a family left behind—Mikal’s and Jeo’s blind, regretful father, Jeo’s resolute wife and her superstitious mother—it unflinchingly examines war and brotherhood, devastation, separation and remorse, while celebrating the redemptive power of nature, art and literature.

NOW A MAJOR TV DRAMA ON SKY ATLANTIC. The first crime novel in Robert Wilson’s Seville series, featuring the tortured detective Javier Falcon.

A New York Times Editors' Choice A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2021 A writer’s humorous and often-heartbreaking tale of losing his sight—and how he hid it from the world. At age sixteen, James Tate Hill was diagnosed with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that left him legally blind. When high-school friends stopped calling and a disability counselor advised him to aim for C’s in his classes, he tried to escape the stigma by pretending he could still see. In this unfailingly candid yet humorous memoir, Hill discloses the tricks he employed to pass for sighted, from displaying shelves of paperbacks he read on tape to arriving early on first dates so women would have to find him. He risked his life every time he crossed a street, doing his best to listen for approaching cars. A good memory and pop culture obsessions like Tom Cruise, Prince, and all things 1980s allowed him to steer conversations toward common experiences. For fifteen years, Hill hid his blindness from friends, colleagues, and lovers, even convincing himself that if he stared long enough, his blurry peripheral vision would bring the world into focus. At thirty, faced with a stalled writing career, a crumbling marriage, and a growing fear of leaving his apartment, he began to wonder if there was a better way.

Discover the secret history of America's submarine warfare in this fast-paced and deeply researched chronicle of adventure and intrigue during the Cold War that reads like a spy thriller. Blind Man's Bluff is an exciting, epic story of adventure, ingenuity, courage, and disaster beneath the sea. This New York Times bestseller reveals previously unknown dramas, such as: The mission to send submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables. How the Navy's own negligence may have been responsible for the loss of the USS Scorpion, a submarine that disappeared, all hands lost, in 1968. The bitter war between the CIA and the Navy and how it threatened to sabotage one of America's most important undersea missions. The audacious attempt to steal a Soviet submarine with the help of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and how it was doomed from the start. A magnificent achievement in investigative reporting, Blind Man's Bluff reads like a spy thriller, but with one important difference -- everything in it is true.

Art Seamans writes the book I See, Said the Blind Man from a perspective of having been both sighted at one time and now visually handicapped. The book consists of a series of essays in which the author both describes what having age-related macular degeneration is like and offers advice to both the visually handicapped and those who associate with visually-handicapped people. The reader should have the sensation of sitting with the author over a cup of coffee while he reminisces and philosophizes about the experience of blindness. The author describes many of his own experiences and refers to a number of other books written by and about blind people. The reader will find in the book serious passages and slightly humorous ones, for the author does not hold himself to any mechanical or unitary vision of what it means to be blind. Chapters include description of his becoming visually-handicapped, his experiences at the San Diego Center for the Blind, thoughts on what it means to see and not see, rules and etiquette for both the sighted and visually handicapped, and a review of other books written by blind people.