Bøger af Mary Cappello

Foreword Book of the Year Award Independent Publishers Award (IPPY) Lambda Literary Award Finalist Publishing Triangle Award Finalist GAMMA Award, Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southwest for ¿Getting the News,¿ The Georgia Review, Summer 2009 Notable Essay of the Year Citation in Best American Essays 2010 for ¿Getting the News¿ Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Guerilla Girls On Tour and by WILLA: Women in Literary Arts and LettersAn extended meditation on the nature of love and the nature of time inside illness, Called Back is both a narrative and non-narrative experiment in prose. The book moves through the standard breast cancer treatment trajectory (diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation), with the aim of discovering unexpected vectors of observation, meaning and desire inside each phase of the typically mandated four-part ritual. A lyrical feminist critique of living with cancer at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, the book looks through the lens of cancer to discover new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away. Offering original exegeses of the work of Marsden Hartley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust, Called Back relies on these artists¿ queer aesthetics to tease the author back to life. What might a person tutored as a reader of signs ¿see¿ inside breast cancer¿s paces, protocols, and regimes? What does the experience occlude, and what can we afford to liberate? The first chapter paves the way for the book¿s central emphases: a meditation on the nature of ¿news¿ and the new, on noticing, on messages¿including those that the body itself relies upon in the assumption of disease¿and the interpretive methods we bring to them in medical crisis. Language is paramount for how we understand and act on the disease, how we imagine it, how we experience it, and how we treat it, Cappello argues. Working at the borders of memoir, literary nonfiction, and cultural analysis, Called Back aims to displace tonal and affective norms¿ infantilizing or moralizing, redemptive, sentimental or cute¿with reverie, rage, passionate intensity, intelligence, and humor.

Los Angeles Times BestsellerMary Cappello[s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed. MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected PoemsA wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book. SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little StrangerWithout awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeysfrom Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic textto decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.

Product DescriptionAn American half-dollar. A beaded crucifix. Tooth roots shaped like a tiny pair of pants. A padlock. Scads of peanut kernels and scores of safety pins. A metallic letter Z. A toy goat and tin steering wheel. A Perfect Attendance Pin. One of the most popular attractions in Philadelphia's world-famous Mtter Museum is the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection: a beguiling set of drawers filled with thousands of items that had been swallowed or inhaled, then extracted nonsurgically by a pioneering laryngologist using rigid instruments of his own design. How do people's mouths, lungs, and stomachs end up filled with inedible things, and what do they become once arranged in Jackson's aura-laden cabinet? What drove Dr. Chevalier Jackson's peculiar obsession not only with removing foreign bodies from peoples upper torsos but also with saving and cataloging the items that he retrieved?Animating the space between interest and terror, curiosity and dread, award-winning author Mary Cappello explores what seems beyond understanding: the physiology of the human swallow, and the poignant and baffling psychology that compels people to ingest non-nutritive things. On a quest to restore the narratives that haunt Jacksons uncanny collection, she discovers that all things are secretly edible. Combining original research with a sympathetic and evocative sensibility, Cappello uncovers a history of racism and violence, of forced ingestion and "e;hysteria,"e; of class and poverty that left children to bank their familys last quarters in their mouths. Here, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who grew up to be the father of endoscopy.Advance Praise"e;Swallow is a surprising and original work. It is biography on the slant, a meditation that transcends boundaries and genres, written with scholarship, humor, and panache. I urge you to take this journey."e; Ricky Jay "e;I was astonished and delightedgrabbed by the throat, indeedby this most remarkable book, which took me down a thousand little red lanes, and laid out in excruciating and fascinating detail all those myriad of itemscorks to safety pins to draughts of lye and three-foot swordsthat have managed to pass down there too. It is a wonderful and bizarre book: gorge yourself on it, and gulp. Simon Winchester, author of Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean "e;Swallow is a wonderful, intriguing book, a fascinating glimpse into a true medical pioneer and a life's work. Mary Cappello delves into what it means to ingest things we werent meant to eat, and how the line between our bodies and foreign bodies can sometimes blur. Every object tells a story, and the stories here are marvelous."e; Colin Dickey, author of Crankiolepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for GeniusAbout the AuthorMary Cappello's three previous books of literary nonfiction are Awkward, a Los Angeles Times bestseller; Called Back, a critical memoir on cancer that won a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award; and the memoir Night Bloom. A recipient of the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative and the Dorothea LangePaul Taylor Prize from Duke Universitys Center for Documentary Studies, she is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow) and currently a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. She lives in Providence.