This haunting collection reveals the inner longings of a wide swath of humanity—of differing ages, sexualities, ethnicities—who hover on the brink of life-altering realizations and face outcomes as dangerous as they are uncertain. An immigrant grandmother who sells roses to gay customers at a West Hollywood bar; a deaf-mute masseur and sex worker plying his trade; a transient nesting in the lilac bushes of a New England college campus—these are a few of the characters in Conditions of Precarity who find their existences at grave risk in a world in which every choice impacts an uncertain future. Exquisitely wrought stories. Boone's range of character, setting and development is remarkable, as is his ability to inhabit so convincingly his large cast of characters. T.C. Boyle, author World’s End and Drop City * I was struck while reading these stately understated stories by the camouflaged velocity of the epiphanies, the turns in the turns. These are aggressively graceful fictions that sneak up on you. There, that sting of the bullet that comes moments before you register the muzzle flash or even hear the report of the shot fired. This work packs that kind of punch—kinetically energetic in a potential energy drag. Yes, I found myself on edge, on that kind of edgy edge. Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne * Conditions of Precarity is abundant with beauty. Joseph Boone has written a collection that reminds us of our small moments of grace, moments that affirm our connections and moments that illuminate our humanity in these precarious times. Each story is a wondrous meditation of longing, desire, joy—or the will to reach for more. Read this brilliant collection. It will never let you go. Dana Johnson, author of In the Not Quite Dark and Elsewhere, California * Conditions of Precarity is an atlas of longing and desire populated by characters whose sensitivity, wonder, and abiding optimism afford them the capacity to be surprised, to explore, to change. With these ten stories, ranging in style from the gothic to the farcical to the tragic, set in wildly different terrains—the rural South, the Yorkshire moors, college towns, the Hollywood Hills–Boone puts on full display his abundant talent for charting all of the libidinal currents of the world, all of its varieties of love. Peter Gadol, author of Silverlake Life and The Stranger Game * All of these stories put us at the terrifying center of precarity—the searing vulnerabilities of childhood, of sexuality within hostile environments, even within the storied precarity of certain literary masterpieces—but always the reader's sturdy perch is Joseph Allen Boone's gorgeous prose. Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow and She *
The place of the Middle East in European heterosexual fantasy is well documented in the works of Edward Said and others, yet few have considered the male Anglo-European (and, later, American) writers, artists, travelers, and thinkers compelled to represent what, to their eyes, seemed to be an abundance of erotic relations between men in the Islamicate world. Whether feared or desired, the mere possibility of sexual contact with or between men in the Middle East has covertly underwritten much of the appeal and practice of the enterprise of Orientalism, frequently repeating yet just as often upending its assumed meanings. Traces of this undertow abound in European and Middle Eastern fiction, diaries, travel literature, erotica, ethnography, painting, photography, film, and digital media. Joseph Allen Boone explores these vast representations, linking European art to Middle Eastern sources largely unfamiliar to Western audiences and, in some cases, reproduced in this volume for the first time.
Paper edition of the 1987 release. Boone (English, Harvard) focuses on the role that the myth of romantic marriage and its attendant ideologies of gender have played in the evolution of the Anglo- American novel over the past three centuries. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism. To illuminate why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, Boone deploys a supple mode of analysis that reveals how the cultural exchanges between Middle East and West have always been reciprocal and often mutual, amatory as well as bellicose. Whether examining European accounts of Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman homoerotic genres and their European imitators, or unlocking the homoerotic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable study models an ethics of crosscultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today. A contribution to studies in visual culture as well as literary and social history, The Homoerotics of Orientalism draws on primary sources ranging from untranslated Middle Eastern manuscripts and European belles-lettres to miniature paintings and photographic erotica that are presented here for the first time.
This haunting collection reveals the inner longings of a wide swath of humanity—of differing ages, sexualities, ethnicities—who hover on the brink of life-altering realizations and face outcomes as dangerous as they are uncertain. An immigrant grandmother who sells roses to gay customers at a West Hollywood bar; a deaf-mute masseur and sex worker plying his trade; a transient nesting in the lilac bushes of a New England college campus—these are a few of the characters in Conditions of Precarity who find their existences at grave risk in a world in which every choice impacts an uncertain future. Exquisitely wrought stories. Boone's range of character, setting and development is remarkable, as is his ability to inhabit so convincingly his large cast of characters. T.C. Boyle, author World’s End and Drop City * I was struck while reading these stately understated stories by the camouflaged velocity of the epiphanies, the turns in the turns. These are aggressively graceful fictions that sneak up on you. There, that sting of the bullet that comes moments before you register the muzzle flash or even hear the report of the shot fired. This work packs that kind of punch—kinetically energetic in a potential energy drag. Yes, I found myself on edge, on that kind of edgy edge. Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne * Conditions of Precarity is abundant with beauty. Joseph Boone has written a collection that reminds us of our small moments of grace, moments that affirm our connections and moments that illuminate our humanity in these precarious times. Each story is a wondrous meditation of longing, desire, joy—or the will to reach for more. Read this brilliant collection. It will never let you go. Dana Johnson, author of In the Not Quite Dark and Elsewhere, California * Conditions of Precarity is an atlas of longing and desire populated by characters whose sensitivity, wonder, and abiding optimism afford them the capacity to be surprised, to explore, to change. With these ten stories, ranging in style from the gothic to the farcical to the tragic, set in wildly different terrains—the rural South, the Yorkshire moors, college towns, the Hollywood Hills–Boone puts on full display his abundant talent for charting all of the libidinal currents of the world, all of its varieties of love. Peter Gadol, author of Silverlake Life and The Stranger Game * All of these stories put us at the terrifying center of precarity—the searing vulnerabilities of childhood, of sexuality within hostile environments, even within the storied precarity of certain literary masterpieces—but always the reader's sturdy perch is Joseph Allen Boone's gorgeous prose. Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow and She *
Litvak demonstrates that private experience in the novels of Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, and James is a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities. He suggests that the theatricality which pervades these novels enforces social norms while introducing opportunities for novelists to resist them. This approach encourages a rethinking of the genre and its cultural contexts in all their instability and ambivalence.
From Christian believers in the Apocalypse and the Rapture to New Age enthusiasts of prophecies concerning the year 2012, Doomsday lore has been a part of culture, a myth that colors how we perceive the world. Why do we remain obsessed with Doomsday myths even when they fail to materialize? What if we haven’t recognized the true message of these myths? Blending history, psychology, metaphysics, and story, philosopher and author Joseph Felser explores the spiritual questions raised by these enduring myths. Along the way he consults the work of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Black Elk, Wovoka, Itzhak Bentov, Jane Roberts, Seth, Hermann Hesse, Ingo Swann, David Bohm, Fred Alan Wolf, J. Allen Boone, William James, and Robert Monroe through ever-widening circles of understanding. Felser suggests that our obsession with “The End of the World” hides a repressed, healthy longing for reconciliation with our inner and outer worlds--with nature and our own natural spirituality. He urges us to recognize and act upon that longing. When we begin to listen to nature’s voice and pay heed to our own dreams--including visions, intuitions, and instinctive promptings--the greatest revolution in all history will unfold. We can create a future of our own choosing, a beginning rather than an ending.
Wild seashores and woodlands calm and refresh our spirits. Contact with nature enhances our wholeness and well-being. The powerful, compelling exercises in this book can help readers become immersed in nature’s joyful and healing presence. Read The Sky and Earth Touched Me in a garden, backyard, or park. Part One is designed for personal practice; Part Two can be shared with a friend or a group. Practice these exercises, and discover invaluable nature awareness principles.
The classic follow-up to the bestselling The Crack in the Cosmic Egg • Explains the process of acculturation and the mechanisms that create our self-limiting “cosmic egg” of consensus reality • Reveals how our biological development innately creates a “crack” in our cosmic egg--leaving a way to return to the unencumbered consciousness of childhood • Explores ways to discover and explore the “crack” to restore wholeness to our minds and reestablish our ability to create our own realities In this classic follow-up to his bestselling The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Joseph Chilton Pearce explains the process of acculturation and the mechanisms that create our self-limiting “cosmic egg” of consensus reality. Laying the groundwork for his later classic Magical Child, Pearce shows that we go through early childhood connecting with the world through our senses. With the development of language and the process of acculturation not only do our direct experiences of the world become much less vivid but our innate states of nonordinary consciousness become suppressed. Trapped in a specific cultural context--a “cosmic egg”--we are no longer able to have or even recognize mystical experiences not mediated by the limitations of our culture. Motivated primarily by a fear of death, our enculturation literally splits our minds and prevents us from living fully in the present. Drawing from Carlos Castaneda’s writings about Don Juan and the sense of “body-knowing,” Pearce explores the varieties of nonordinary consciousness that can help us return to the unencumbered consciousness of our infancy. He shows that just as we each create our own cosmic egg of reality through cultural conditioning, we also innately create a “crack” in that egg. Ultimately certain shifts in our biological development take place to offset acculturation, leaving an avenue of return to our primary state. Pearce examines the creation of the “egg” itself and ways to discover its inherent cracks to restore wholeness to our minds, release us from our fear of death, and reestablish our ability to create our own realities through imagination and biological transcendence.
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