FICTION · POETRY
Ai
Also known as: Ai, Pelorhankhe Ai Ogawa
Ai Ogawa born as Florence Anthony, was an American poet and educator. She won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems. Ai is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. - Wikipedia
Most acclaimed
Dread
Door voortdurend veranderende technologie en groeiende communicatienetwerken groeien de menselijke keuzes en mogelijkheden. Maar iedere technologische vernieuwing kent ook zijn tegenvoeter: de militaire, administratieve, existentiële crash; de catastrofe ligt op de loer. Virilio: 'de vernieuwing van het schip betekende eveneens een nieuwe vorm van schipbreuk'. Die immanente, moeilijk te duiden dreiging roept een gevoel op van 'dread'. 'Dread' is een essentieel en in potentie productief aspect van ons bewustzijn, een bepalend kenmerk van de huidige condition humaine. Nauw verwant aan begrippen als angst en vrees, wordt 'dread' ook geassocieerd met de 'duizeling van de vrijheid' zoals geformuleerd door Søren Kierkegaard in 1844. Hoe duister en fatalistisch de connotaties ook zijn, 'dread' stelt ons door een dialectisch proces van omzichtigheid en transgressie, van verlamming en overdrive in staat om ons de wereld spectaculair anders voor te stellen en toont ons daarmee inzichten in het ondenkbare of onzegbare.
Sin
1986
What is sin? Is it simply wrongdoing? Why do its effects linger over time? In this sensitive, imaginative, and original work, Gary Anderson shows how changing conceptions of sin and forgiveness lay at the very heart of the biblical tradition. Spanning nearly two thousand years, the book brilliantly demonstrates how sin, once conceived of as a physical burden, becomes, over time, eclipsed by economic metaphors. Transformed from a weight that an individual carried, sin becomes a debt that must be repaid in order to be redeemed in God's eyes. Anderson shows how this ancient Jewish revolution in thought shaped the way the Christian church understood the death and resurrection of Jesus and eventually led to the development of various penitential disciplines, deeds of charity, and even papal indulgences. In so doing it reveals how these changing notions of sin provided a spur for the Protestant Reformation. Broad in scope while still exceptionally attentive to detail, this ambitious and profound book unveils one of the most seismic shifts that occurred in religious belief and practice, deepening our understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience."- Jacket.
Vice
1999
Juliana drew the line at becoming a harlot. She had already begun the week as a bride...and ended it as a murderess. She was sure no one would believe that she'd hit her elderly groom with a bed warmer and knocked him quite dead by accident. So she did the only thing she could - she ran. Yet now she was in no position to turn down a shocking proposition from the dangerously handsome Duke of Redmayne: that she become one man's wife and another man's mistress - his mistress. Could she play such a role? Could she live up to such a bargain? And once she had tasted the pleasures of Redmayne's bed, would she ever want anything else.