![]() ![]() The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison." At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. "I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. Please note the image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect. ![]() In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. ![]() When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. ![]() ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Written to recipients such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Burroughs son, Billy Burroughs Jr., these letters shed new light on the writer's controversial artistic process and literary experimentation, as well as his complex personal life. Now, in this long anticipated collection, editor Bill Morgan takes readers through Burroughs correspondence from the early sixties through the mid-seventies, in more than three hundred letters that document Burroughs steady drift away from the Beat circle and that witness an era in which he became the center of a new coterie of creative people who would establish his reputation as an influential artistic and cultural leader beyond the literary world, toward multimedia. ![]() Burroughs was one of the twentieth century's most iconoclastic literary and artistic figures, an inimitable writer whose groundbreaking work in novels such as Junky and Naked Lunch forever altered the shape of American culture. ![]() ![]() Eleven sonnets he wrote to impress a girl in high school were all later found and attributed to Shakespeare. He was the inspiration for both the epic poem “Beowulf†and the motion picture-Raiders of the Lost Ark-, and is single-handedly responsible for repelling the Martian Invasion of 1938 that occurred in Grovers Mills, New Jersey. In 2008, while surfing Hawaii’s Keauwaula Beach, he thought up a viable way to maintain cold fusion that would also solve world hunger, but forgot all about it when he ran into actress Yvonne Strahvorski back on the beach and she offered to buy him a drink. ![]() He made his first writing sale at age seventeen to a local newspaper, and at the age of nineteen he completed his quadruple-PhD studies in English literature, archaeology, quantum physics, and interpretive dance. Peter Clines grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and–inspired by comic books, Star Wars, and Saturday morning cartoons–started writing at the age of eight with his first epic novel, LIZARD MEN FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. I get labeled a cross-genre writer a lot of the time. Peter Clines | Bending the boundaries: Crossing Genres in Fiction ![]() ![]() Scavenger classes: pure-finders, toshers, mudlarks, and others in the recycling business Mudlarks: children who scavenge junk that toshers don't want ![]() ![]() Pure-finder: someone who finds dogshit and sells it to tanners to use in the leathermaking processs Miasmatist: someone who believes that bad-smelling air rather than germs or bacteria cause disease (Florence Nightingale was a miasmatist) Johnson explains that a key question in the development of civilization has always been "What are we going to do with all this shit?" This book dramatically improved my vocabulary regarding topics related to 1850s London. ![]() This book is about cholera, and as a result, the author uses an impressive number of words for shit-including excrement, ordure, human waste, and the Victorian euphemism night soil. WARNING: Do not read this review if you are squeamish. ![]() |