Bryn Mawr Authors
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi
Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and renowned memoirist, is one of the most widely read writers of post-World War II Italy. His works are characterized by the lean, dispassionate eloquence with which he approaches his experience of incarceration in Auschwitz. His memoirs--as well as his poetry and fiction and his many interviews--are often taught in several fields, including Jewish studies and Holocaust studies, comparative literature, and Italian language and literature, and can enrich the study of history, psychology, and philosophy.
The first part of this volume provides instructors with an overview of the available editions, anthologies, and translations of Levi's work and identifies other useful classroom aids, such as films, music, and online resources. In the second part, contributors describe different approaches to teaching Levi's work. Some, in presenting Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, and The Drowned and the Saved, look at the place of style in Holocaust testimony and the reliability of memory in autobiography. Others focus on questions of translation, complicated by the untranslatable in the language and experiences of the concentration camps, or on how Levi incorporates his background as a chemist into his writing, most clearly in The Periodic Table.
Artist and the Orchard
Artist Linda Hoffman saved an orchard and reshaped her life at Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. When she moved to the farm she didn't know anything about apple-growing. More than twenty years later, the farm is one of the few organic pick-your-own orchards in New England, as well as a hub for a thriving community of visual artists, writers, and spiritual seekers. Hoffman, the mother of three children, a Zen practitioner, and a breast cancer survivor, has now written about her extraordinary journey in The Artist and the Orchard: A Memoir.
Ayia Sotira
Bad Animal
Bad Animal is a collection of poems about the body, about violence, about safety, a meditation on love, sex, and death. It explores the body's changing relationship to desire in the aftermath of incredible sexual trauma, and how we societally reconcile the beauty of the world we live in with intense emotional pain. Bad Animal is a collection of poems that remind the reader we are all made of flesh and bone and while flesh is temporary and fragile, bone is hard and resilient: both are needed to be whole. Nature is present throughout these poems which echoes the real world-a world that needs both vulture and carcass, a world that needs both dark and light.
***
Oh, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal is a marvelously macabre and bewitching book! Here is a poet who plunges headlong into haunting intersections of faith, nature, sex, and violence, evoking for us the allures and the horrors of death, enlivening the body and stirring up questions about the future. Conjuring a world where Danger sometimes wears the face of Pleasure, and vice versa, these poems unfold a menagerie of incisive, visceral images you won't soon forget. Bratt-Pfotenhauer's language glows and pulses like an ember in the dark.Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat Bad Animal is fierce, smart, knows language as a kind of mating dance with the reader, a lever into the interior, and a demon possession. It's aware of its body as text and texture, a source of hurt and a source of rapture. It has a hawk heart and a crow mind. Bad Animal is memorable for its avidity, its "renegade" desire, its scholarship of "little violences". It puts you under a spell. It gallops inside you.
Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liar's Club
Airea D. Matthews, author of Simulacra & Bread and Circus
Badass Grief
by Jennifer Hassel BMC '79
Badass Grief is for those who want to translate grief into action or live a bigger, braver life by reaching beyond self-imposed limitations.
When she looked for ways to remember her dead husband, Jennifer found suggestions to buy something, a one-and-done task. Longing to keep Mark's memory alive, she chose a different method-practicing his fearless approach to life. First, she gets a motorcycle license. In the following years, she wears a bikini in a Las Vegas fitness contest, attends trapeze school, tries heli-skiing, and becomes a registered nurse.
Eventually, Jennifer realizes she has the strength to live on her own terms-alone. Then, a former boyfriend gets in touch, and Jennifer faces the scariest challenge of all. Can she find lasting love again?
Barcelona
by Gary W. McDonogh - Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities
Book of Boy
A Newbery Honor Book * Booklist Editors' Choice * BookPage Best Books * Chicago Public Library Best Fiction * Horn Book Fanfare * Kirkus Reviews Best Books * Publishers Weekly Best Books * Wall Street Journal Best of the Year * An ALA Notable Book
A young outcast is swept up into a thrilling and perilous medieval treasure hunt in this award-winning literary page-turner by acclaimed bestselling author Catherine Gilbert Murdock. The Book of Boy was awarded a Newbery Honor. "A treat from start to finish."--Wall Street Journal
Boy has always been relegated to the outskirts of his small village. With a hump on his back, a mysterious past, and a tendency to talk to animals, he is often mocked by others in his town--until the arrival of a shadowy pilgrim named Secondus. Impressed with Boy's climbing and jumping abilities, Secondus engages Boy as his servant, pulling him into an action-packed and suspenseful expedition across Europe to gather seven precious relics of Saint Peter.
Boy quickly realizes this journey is not an innocent one. They are stealing the relics and accumulating dangerous enemies in the process. But Boy is determined to see this pilgrimage through until the end--for what if St. Peter has the power to make him the same as the other boys?
This epic and engrossing quest story by Newbery Honor author Catherine Gilbert Murdock is for fans of Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale and Grace Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, and for readers of all ages. Features a map and black-and-white art by Ian Schoenherr throughout.
Book of Growing
Brief Guide to Brief Writing
Brightwood Code
