Bøger af Colin Hamilton

A dazzling array of metafictions, Colin Hamilton's The Discarded focuses on the lonely work of a solitary librarian assigned to the discard room. This hidden basement space is piled high with books purged from the stacks above. Many have been damaged, defaced, or made irrelevant by time. Others simply sat untouched for years before being thrown out to make room for glossy new arrivals.From the heap of discards, the librarian salvages his own idiosyncratic collection: a detective novel in which a damsel-in-distress insists she's been murdered; A Guide to Universal Grasping, the "Ulysses of technical manuals;" a biography of David Markson written in the fragmented style of his experimental novels; an anthology of anthro-reptilian eroticism; a children's book memorializing winter for those raised in an overheated world; a book of essays, The Hell of Insects, by entomologists who've been spoken to by their subjects; and a history of book burning.With Borgesian panache, The Discarded interweaves stories about imaginary books with reflections on libraries, both real and dreamt. Hamilton's nuanced collection asks a seemingly simple question: In an age of decreasing literacy, disposable content, and banned books, what do we preserve and what do we discard?

Winner of The Big Moose Prize. Raised in a town that prizes poets above doctors and astronauts, the narrator of THE THIRTEENTH MONTH is a constant reader, and it is through books-real and imagined-that he experiences the world, from the libraries of Dar es Salaam to the dead-end streets of Cleveland. While he believes he is being prepared to write himself, he is ultimately called to a different, less romantic task-helping his increasingly demented mother die.Bruno Schulz described a thirteenth month as an unnatural time when "one may be touched by the divine finger of poetry." Hamilton shows that touch to be both divine and troubling. Elegantly structured, THE THIRTEENTH MONTH follows the elusive thread between the books we read, the actions we take and the people we become.

This text provides a fascinating approach to the widely studied area of individual differences and in particular sex differences. The book looks at perception, attention, memory, language and other cognitive domains, with each chapter outlining the processes involved before explaining the relationship between each sex and cognitive performance.