In The Belly Of Her Ghost

Colin Dayan grew up destined to be a southern debutante, but instead became a leading academic with an acerbic and yet emotionally haunted take on her extravagant parents and exotic youth.

In this courageous memoir, Elizabeth Heineman “illuminates the complex emotional landscape of stillbirth—putting into frank and poetic words the unspeakable experience of simultaneously grieving and mothering a baby who has died” (Deborah L. Davis). Ghostbelly is Elizabeth Heineman’s personal account of a home birth that goes tragically wrong—ending in a stillbirth—and the harrowing process of grief and questioning that follows. It’s also Heineman’s unexpected tale of the loss of a newborn: before burial, she brings the baby home for overnight stays. Does this sound unsettling? Of course. We’re not supposed to hold and caress dead bodies. But then again, babies aren’t supposed to die. Interwoven with her own accounts of mourning, Heineman examines the home-birth and maternal health-care industry, the isolation of midwives, and the scripting of her own grief. With no resolution to sadness, Heineman and her partner learn to live in a new world: a world in which they face each day with the understanding of the fragility of the present.

Reprint. Originally published: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

In this original and provocative book, Colin Dayan tackles head-on the inexhaustible world, at once tender and fierce, of dogs and humans. We follow the tracks of dogs in the bayous of Louisiana, the streets of Istanbul, and the humane societies of the United States, and in the memories and myths of the humans who love them. Dayan reorients our ethical and political assumptions through a trans-species engagement that risks as much as it promises. She makes a powerful case for questioning what we think of as our deepest-held beliefs and, with dogs in the lead, unsettles the dubious promises of liberal humanism. Moving seamlessly between memoir, case law, and film, Dayan takes politics and animal studies in a new direction—one that gives us glimpses of how we can think beyond ourselves and with other beings. Her unconventional perspective raises hard questions and renews what it means for any animal or human to live in the twenty-first century. Nothing less than a challenge for us to confront violence and suffering even in the privileged precincts of modernity, this searing and lyrical book calls for another way to think the world. Theoretically sophisticated yet aimed at a broad readership, With Dogs at the Edge of Life illuminates how dogs—and their struggles—take us beyond sentimentality and into a form of thought that can make a difference to our lives.

Colin Dayan meditates on the connection between her personal and family history and her relationship with animals in this lyrical memoir about her upbringing in the South. Unraveling memories alongside family documents and photographs, Animal Quintet takes a raw look at racial tensions and relations in a region struggling to change while providing a disquieting picture of a childhood accessible only through accounts of the non-human, ranging from famed Southern war horses led by Civil War generals and doomed Spanish fighting bulls to the lowly possum hunted by generations of Southerners. Placing the reader in the mind's eye of a writer still grappling with her own mixed identity and unsettled past, the book is uniquely capable of transporting one's imagination across time and place, mirroring the natural behavior of remembrances with its feeling of dislocation and non-linear movement. Regional folk songs about old gray mares and possums hiding in trees intermingle with stories and confidences shared by the household's African-American nanny, enclosing the reader in a chorus composed of otherwise lost voices. Presented in a such a way that it simultaneously longs for the past and attempts to keep it at arm's length, Animal Quintet achieves a haunting, nostalgic quality rare to memoirs focused on ancestral and personal identity.

Why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural style Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. "Flow" is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today’s intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.

“Mothers never die. Children love to resurrect us in they stories.” Folktales and spirits animate this lively and unforgettable coming-of-age tale of two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn grappling with their mother’s illness, their father's infidelity, and the truth of their family's past Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father’s violence and their mother’s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home. But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know—and reckon with a family secret buried in the past. A tale told from the perspective of a mischievous narrator, featuring the Rolling Calf who haunts butchers, Mama Dglo who lives in the ocean, a vain tiger, and an outsmarted snake, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is set in a world as alive and unpredictable as Helen Oyeyemi’s. Telling of the love between sisters who don’t always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, What happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

Everything's gone wrong. The battleship Timora has crashed into Earth on its arrival, leaving INA stranded on a planet occupied and controlled by mechanized invaders she shouldn't be able to feel with her empathic senses...but she does. Worse, rather than searching for the man she loves, she’s stuck with a vengeful platoon sergeant she hates more than anything in the universe. In this hard-hitting, near-future military science-fiction thriller, the author behind the Better Hero Army name pens an unforgettable new twist on the sixth sense.

When Cassie Taylor talks, ghosts listen. Brooding songwriter Luke Rivers wants to give his recently found daughter a normal home, but his new house is haunted by a ghost with an attitude. Cassie has an attitude too †even before someone tries to kill her. He wants conventional. She wants acceptance. No wonder she thinks men are hard and dead people are easy.

Some places have a history so dark it stains the soil. Orphan Rock is one of them. For years, the Northamm family has served the Crooked Woman. Bound by sinister magic, they commit unspeakable acts to save themselves and the ones they love from something wicked that’s stirring beneath the dirt. Harpies in the hills. Demons in the dark. Lonely girls who command giant earthworms that tunnel between worlds… Anything goes in this twisted tale of monsters, mayhem, and revenge. A contemporary dark fantasy with elements of horror, Chad Ryan’s Ghost River is a gritty and desolate journey into the peaks and gulches of the human spirit. ADVISORY: This story is for mature readers. Ghost River explores sensitive subject matter, including graphic violence/death, disturbing imagery, misogyny, domestic abuse, child abuse, racism, kidnapping, and sexual assault. Read with caution.