Focusing on innovative works by Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston and Winterson, the author analyzes how they each represent the self as unique, collectively "other," and inclusively human, and how these conflicting aspects of selfhood interact.

The classic nature memoir of Cape Cod in the early twentieth century, “written with simplicity, sympathy, and beauty” (New York Herald Tribune). When Henry Beston returned home from World War I, he sought refuge and healing at a house on the outer beach of Cape Cod. He was so taken by the natural beauty of his surroundings that his two-week stay extended into a yearlong solitary adventure. He spent his time trying to capture in words the wonders of the magical landscape he found himself in thrall to. In The Outermost House, Beston chronicles his experiences observing the migrations of seabirds, the rhythms of the tide, the windblown dunes, and the scatter of stars in the changing summer sky. Beston argued: “The world today is sick to its thin blood for the lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” Nearly a century after publication, Beston’s words are more true than ever.

Rewrite your story—and this time, you make the rules. Were you the victim of childhood bullying based on your identity? Do you carry those scars into adulthood in the form of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dysfunctional relationships, substance abuse, or suicidal thoughts? If so, you’re not alone. Our cultural and political climate has reopened old wounds for many people who have felt “othered” at different points in their life, starting with childhood bullying. This breakthrough book will guide you as you learn to identify your deeply rooted fears, and help you heal the invisible wounds of identity-based childhood rejection, bullying, and belittling. In The Healing Otherness Handbook, Stacee Reicherzer—a nationally known transgender psychotherapist and expert on trauma, otherness, and self-sabotage—shares her own personal story of childhood bullying, and how it inspired her to help others heal from the same wounds. Drawing from mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), Reicherzer will help you gain a better understanding of how past trauma has limited your life, and show you the keys to freeing yourself from self-defeating, destructive beliefs. If you’re ready to heal from the past, find power in your difference, and live an authentic life full of confidence—this handbook will help guide you, step by step.

Hinting at Rimbaud’s provocative dictum that “I is an other,” this anthology discusses a wide-ranging array of twentieth-century and contemporary minority American modes of life writing, prompted by the following questions: Who (else) hides behind this “I” that the author-narrator-character “contractually” claims to be? What generic, aesthetic, political and socio-cultural issues are at stake in a conception of the self as other? The essays analyze autobiographical works from major Native American writers (John Milton Oskison and Louise Erdrich), an African American music-hall artist (Josephine Baker) and writers (John Edgar Wideman and Ta-Nehisi Coates), Caribbean American writers (Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat), and Asian American writers (Ruth Ozeki, Cathy Park Hong, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Loung Ung). They shed light on autobiography as a collaborative writing and reading practice, rather than as a self-oriented genre, probing the “relational” dimension of life writing. Building on the feminist theorization of relationality and the political and aesthetic power of relational bonds, they put forward the necessarily intersubjective dynamics of minority American “self-conceptions” which originate in the writers’ experiences of otherness. The articles highlight that the relational ethnic self characteristically inhabits the liminal spaces where modes of life writing overlap and can thrive in dialogical intertextual readings. They foreground the subversive, cathartic, and memorializing potential of minority American modes of “other-writing” whose ontological dimension is manifest in the writers’ quest for a sense of repossession and agency, beyond communal boundaries. Contributing to the up-to-date critical discussion on relationality, not as a genre, but rather as a reading and “a storytelling practice,” they examine the ways it participates in a global, transcultural approach to ethno-racial issues in the United States.

From Hugo and Nebula winning author David Brin comes this extraordinary collection of tales and essays about the near and distant future, as humans and other intelligences encounter the secrets of the cosmos - and of their own existence. In The Giving Plague, a virus, transmitted by blood donation, begins to change humanity. In Dr. Pak's Preschool, a woman discovers that her baby has been called to work while still in the womb. In Natulife, a married couple finds their relationship threatened by the wonders of virtual reality. In Sshhh... the arrival of benevolent aliens on Earth leads to frenzied madness as humans rush to conceal their secret 'talent.' In Bubbles, a sentient starcraft reaches the limits of the universe - and dares to go beyond. What happens when an urban archaeologist discovers a terrible secret under the landfills of Los Angeles? Will there still be a purpose for "biologicals" when cybernetic humans become mighty and smart? Come explore these and another dozen startling and provocative tomorrows with a modern master of science fiction. Table of Contents The Giving Plague Myth Number 21 Dr. Pak's Preschool Detritus Affected The Dogma of Otherness Piecework Natulife Science vs. Magic Sshhh... Those Eyes What to Say to a UFO Bonding to Genji The Warm Space Whose Millennium? Bubbles Ambiguity What Continues...And What Fails... The New Meme

A literary icon’s “singular and beautiful” memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn (The New Yorker). A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new. With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to “the city,” the mysterious, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned. Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer. “The whole texture, color, and sound of life in this tenement realm . . . is revealed as tapestried, as dazzling, as full of lush and varied richness as an Arabian bazaar.” —The New York Times

Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another", but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.

This Reader collects in a single volume some of the most influential essays written by Barbara Johnson over the course of her thirty-year career as a pioneering literary theorist and cultural critic. Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a brilliant student of the Yale School of literary criticism and as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. She went on to lead the way in extending the insights of structuralism and poststructuralism into newly emerging fields now central to literary studies, fields such as gender studies, African American studies, queer theory, and law and literature. Stunning models of critical reading and writing, her essays cultivate rigorous questioning of universalizing assumptions, respect for otherness and difference, and an appreciation of ambiguity. Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.