The Story Of Original Loss

This book explores the universal human existential trauma of "original loss," a trauma the author describes as arising from our primal, human evolutionary loss of experiencing ourselves as innately belonging to, and instinctively at home within, the larger natural world. In this trauma arose our existential awareness of impermanence and mortality along with the need to mourn that loss in order to create a sense of belonging and identity. The book describes how the invention of art and group ritual became the collective ways we mourn our shared existential loss. It describes as well how it is the art within the psychoanalytic practice that enables both patient and analyst to grieve their individual versions of our shared original loss. Drawing on the work of Winnicott, Loewald and Ogden, as well as art theory and religion, this book offers a new perspective on the intersection of metaphorical artistic thinking and psychoanalysis. This book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars of poetic, visual and muscial metaphor, creativity, evolution and history of art.

Family is power. The Original vampire family swore it to each other a thousand years ago. They pledged to remain together always and forever. But even when you're immortal, promises are hard to keep. After a hurricane destroyed their city, Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah Mikaelson have rebuilt New Orleans to even greater glory. The year is 1766. The witches live on the fringes in the bayou. The werewolves have fled. But still, Klaus isn't satisfied. He wants more. He wants power. But when Klaus finally finds a witch who will perform a spell to give him what he desires most, she secretly uses Klaus to unleash a curse—one that brings back hundreds of her ancestors—and begins a war to reclaim New Orleans. As the siblings fight off the attack, only one thing's for certain—the result will be a bloodbath.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize: An “extraordinary” novel “lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender” (The New York Times Book Review). In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered old judge wants only to retire in peace. But his life is upended when his sixteen-year-old orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s chatty cook watches over the girl, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai’s new-sprung romance with her tutor, the household descends into chaos. The cook witnesses India’s hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju’s intertwining lives. In a grasping world of colliding interests and conflicting desires, every moment holds out the possibility for hope or betrayal. Published to extraordinary acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. She illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters and “uncannily beautiful” prose (O: The Oprah Magazine). “A book about tradition and modernity, the past and the future—and about the surprising ways both amusing and sorrowful, in which they all connect.” —The Independent

A funny, fresh, and brilliantly insightful collection of stories from a beloved writer, with a new introduction by Francine Prose Johanna Kaplan’s beautifully written stories first burst on the literary scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today they have retained all of their depth, surprise, and humor—their simultaneously scathing, hilarious, and compassionate insight into character and behavior. From Miriam, home from school with the measles, to Louise, the daughter of a family that fled Vienna for the Dominican Republic, to Naomi, a young psychiatrist, her heroines are fierce, tender, funny, and cuttingly smart. At once specific to a particular period, place, and milieu—mainly, Jewish New York in the decades after World War II—Kaplan’s stories resonate with universal significance. In this new collection, which includes both early and later stories, unforgettably vivid characters are captured in all of their forceful presence and singularity, their foolishness and their wisdom, their venality and their nobility, while, hovering in the background, the inexorable passage of time and the unending pull of memory render silent judgment. In its pitch-perfect command of dialogue matched with interwoven subtleties of insight and feeling and a masterful control of language, Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary is itself a timeless collection of the finest work by one of the most extraordinary talents of our age.

An Amazon Best of the Month Selection for May 2018 A slyly funny coming-of-age novel about a young woman fumbling her way into the mysteries of loss and the travails of adulthood as she tries to make sense of a vanished mother's legacy. When 22-year-old Olivia learned that her mother had only months to live, she pulled up roots, leaving Vassar and her career plans far behind to be with her mother for her last days. And yet, just four months after her mother's death, everyone in Olivia's family already seems ready to move on. Her brothers are settled comfortably in careers and families of their own; her father has already started to date again, inviting a woman named June on a family trip. Still reeling from the loss, Olivia looks for a new start of her own, throwing herself headlong into Manhattan's fast-moving media world, where she is alternately demeaned by bosses and pursued by men. But as Olivia tries to piece together an adulthood without her mother to guide her, she makes a shocking discovery: a secret romantic correspondence her mother had with a man who only signed each letter “F.” As she tries to untangle the mystery of F, Olivia will journey halfway across the world, to an ashram in rural India, on a quest that will reconfigure everything Olivia thought she knew about her family and her own place in an increasingly complex world. A profoundly moving and keenly observed contemplation of the debts we owe to the past and the ways we discover our futures, Alternative Remedies for Loss is the rare sort of book that can break and mend your heart in a single and unforgettable read.

Presents a guide for dealing with grief and loss, detailing five steps of healing that can lead to a lifestyle alignment with personal values and new possibilities for a re-engaged life. --Publisher's description.

The death of a baby, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal loss, or the death of an older child, is the worst experience a parent can endure. This book includes twenty-six heart-wrenchingly honest essays by parents who convey their personal challenges and the ways they coped during the first twelve months of child loss.

Fiction. Winner of the Florida Authors and Publishers Association Award. Winner of a Royal Palm Literary Award. Winner of the Chicago Public Library's 21st Century Award. Winner of a Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction. Winner of the International Latino Book Award in Most Inspirational Fiction. Amina Gautier's THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and won't let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives... that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon....Gautier's stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."