Bøger udgivet af Counterpoint

Being the son of counter-culture author William S. Burroughs is bound to be a trial. After all, the man who frequented lesbian dives and had a fascination with firearms couldn't possibly make that great of a father. Perhaps inevitably, William Jr. (called Billy) referred to himself as "cursed from birth" and in the book of the same name editor David Ohle collects parts of Billy's third and unfinished novel Prakriti Junction, his last journals and poems, and correspondence and conversations to recreate this tortured life. Endowed with the sufferings — but not the patience — of Job, Billy's life was often characterized by tragedy and frustration, although there were also pockets of success and levity. More than just the memoir of a casualty of the Beat Generation, Cursed From Birth provides rare insight in Billy's father, as well as his scene, friends, and times. It also provides an all-too-familiar story of familial difficulties that anyone with difficult parents can understand and appreciate.

A hostage-taker hides a shocking secret in “a breakneck literary thriller that combines the worlds of conspiracy theory [and] reality TV.”—National Post Without warning, a man, armed with explosives, seizes a television studio taking over a hundred terrified hostages. He offers no motive. And he makes just a single curious demand. The only person he’ll speak to is Thom Pegg, a once honored investigative journalist turned disgraced tabloid reporter. As surprised as anyone, and pressured to comply by authorities, Pegg reluctantly enters the fray as the chosen confidante. From outside, the enthralling drama is revealed through the eyes of two very different people: Eve, an Olympic gold medalist and local hero; and a mysterious renegade street artist known only as Rabbit. As 24/7 media coverage helps to feed the public’s paranoia with reckless rumor, the lives of three strangers are brought inexorably together in an unfathomable and chaotic endgame. In this “unforgettable . . . exhilarating, at-times alarming read” (Atssa York), prize-winning author Timothy Taylor paints a powerful picture of the sinister side of our interconnected world. The result is “an ambitious . . . wonderful novel—a thought-provoking and challenging story that will . . . change the way you look at our celebrity-driven culture” (The Vancouver Sun).

Live Nude Elf chronicles Reverend Jen's two-year stint as sex columnist for nerve.com; she details her "sexperiments,” ranging from harrowing (working as a live nude girl at "Wiggles”) to embarrassing (fellatio school) to transcendent (reaching a mystical state through tantric sex). Along the way there is transvestitism, female ejaculation, opium smoking, and heartbreak.In the Rev's "art star” world, where a young bisexual boy named Orion has sex with a jar of mayonnaise, the more mundane acts of romance-kissing, buying dinner for a lover, and just making eye contact in the sack-become rare and subversive. The experiments, orgies, balloon fetish parties, a stint as the "lube girl” on a porn set, the "lab partners,” and the late nights begin to wear on the Reverend, who craves normalcy, and the columns change their tone: Jen takes care of a friend's baby, navigates yuppie bars trying to snag a millionaire hubby, and dates a silver fox, "someone older, distinguished, wealthy, and simply grooving with the eternal now.”After a decade of New York City affairs, Jen unexpectedly falls in love and must decide: Does the life required of an artist and a sex columnist preclude her from monogamous romantic love?

Recognized by readers of his novel, The Taqwacores, as the godfather of American Muslim punk, Michael Muhammad Knight is a voice for the growing number of teenagers who choose neither side of the “Clash of Civilizations.” Knight has now written his personal story, a chronicle of his bizarre and traumatic boyhood and his conversion to Islam during a turbulent adolescence.Impossible Man follows a boy’s struggle in coming to terms with his father—a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist who had threatened to decapitate Michael when he was a baby—and his father’s place in his own identity. It is also the story of a teenager’s troubled path to maturity and the influences that steady him along the way. Knight’s encounter with Malcolm X’s autobiography transforms him from a disturbed teenager engaged in correspondence with Charles Manson to a zealous Muslim convert who travels to Pakistan and studies in a madrassa. Later disillusioned by radical religion, he again faces the crisis of self-definition.For all its extremes, Impossible Man describes a universal journey: a wounded boy in search of a working model of manhood, going to outrageous lengths to find it.

Over the last 160 years, a great dilemma has been hatching out of Western spiritual consciousness. In our modern existence, we have lost faith in the traditional routes by which human beings have come to experience the Divine, and an acceptance of oneself as having a place in the order of the universe. In Spiritual Atheism, Steve Antinoff argues that the dilemma burning within the West has been given its most fundamental expression by Kirilov in Dostoyevskys The Possessed: "e;God is necessary, and so must exist . . . Yet I know that he doesnt exist, and cant exist . . . But don't you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?"e; According to Antinoff, spiritual atheism begins with three realizations: that our experience of ourselves and our world leaves us ultimately dissatisfied, that our dissatisfaction is intolerable and so must be broken through, and that there is no God. Continuing where such writers as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris left off, Antinoff's unique and prescient take on deity and spirituality makes this book a critical contribution to the understanding of the quest for salvation and enlightenment in a world full of chaos and need.

By 1929, the brief, brilliant career of Bix Beiderbecke??self?taught cornetist, pianist, and composer??had already become legend. From the summer of '26 at Hudson Lake, Indiana, when his genius blazed forth with a strange, doomed incandescence, Bix's career tragically reflected the chaotic impulses of a country suddenly awash in wealth, power, and a profound cynicism. Shy, elusive, inarticulate, Bix was beloved by both the raccoon?coated campus crowd and the men who nightly played alongside him. He is still celebrated in a yearly festival in his hometown of Davenport, Iowa.And that is where the novel begins, Davenport and the Bix Fest. Then it travels back in time to focus on the highlights of a meteoric career: a Capone?controlled nightclub in 1926; the grueling cross?country tours with Paul Whiteman's Symphonic Jazz orchestra; the disastrous Whiteman trip to California to make the first all?color talkie musical; the stock market crash of 1929 that finds Bix in an asylum, victim of the era's signature product, bootleg gin; and finally, Bix's dying efforts to combine his piano compositions into a suite that would be the pinnacle of his life's work and his evocation of his time and place.Colored by some of the age's most popular characters??Maurice Ravel, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Clara Bow?? 1929 brilliantly illuminates a period in history, personified in the gifted, compelling, and melancholy figure of Bix Beiderbecke.

David Markson was a writer like no other. In his novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating" and earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson created his own personal genre. With crackling wit distilled into incantatory streams of thought on art, life, and death, Markson's work has delighted and astonished readers for decades.Now for the first time, three of Markson's masterpieces are compiled into one page–turning volume: This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. In This Is Not a Novel, readers meet an author, called only "Writer," who is weary unto death of making up stories, and yet is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages and getting somewhere. Vanishing Point introduces us to "Author," who sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with note cards into a novel. In The Last Novel, we find an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") who announces that, since this will be his final effort, he possesses "carte blanche to do anything he damn well pleases."United by their focus on the trials, calamities, absurdities and even tragedies of the creative life, these novels demonstrate David Markson's extraordinary intellectual richness—leaving readers, time after time, with the most indisputably original of reading experiences.

Jared Yates Sexton's latest is an outlaw expedition into America through the guise of the savage and unprecedented 2016 presidential campaign.

A bold work of nonfiction that examines the ways that survivors, witnesses, and post-war generations talk about and shape traumatic experiences.

An evocative historical novel that explores the rising influence of Dickenss work in mid-19th century London through the journey of a young womans struggle against poverty and injustice.In the winter of 1836, a young journalist named Charles Dickens held an infant in his arms. Only eight months of age, Ruby Spriggs was living under the most deplorable conditions that existed in London. Crushing poverty seemed her only future.Through the intervention of kind patrons, the child blossoms into a young woman instilled with a love of learning and books. But the forces that Dickens fought against for most of his life threaten to destroy her.At the heart of The Bakers Tale is Ruby Spriggs; Edwin Chatfield, the young man who would be her lover; Alexander Murd, the scheming coal baron who would destroy them; Abraham Hart, a dwarf who befriends Ruby in a faraway land; and Octavius Joy, a 19th-century philanthropist cut from unique cloth.Meticulously researched and masterfully told, The Bakers Tale recreates the voice of beloved author Charles Dickens in gorgeous prose brimming with the atmosphere of historical London. It's a gripping tale of obsession, corruption, hope, and love instilled with the unequaled passion of Dickenss social conscience.

Recently widowed, unhappily stuck on a pricey whiplash tour of Italy, Elizabeth Berman comes face to face with the first documented painting of a teardrop in human history, and in the presence of that tearful mother, and the arresting company of the renowned and anonymous women painted by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, she wakes up to the possibility that she is not lost.Mitchell left me everything, just as he promised. "Everything," he liked to say during his last month on the sofa, "everything will be yours," as if it wasn't yet. I was left with that and two adult children who could not tolerate my sitting in my home by myself—admittedly, rather too often in a capacious pink flannel nightgown and the green cardigan Mitchell was wearing on the afternoon he died.That's how Elizabeth winds up on a tour better suited to her late–husband, a Dante scholar. Mitchell masterminded the itinerary as a surprise for their thirty–fifth wedding anniversary.Itching to leave as soon as she arrives in Padua, Elizabeth's efforts to book a ticket home are stymied by her aggressively supportive children, the ministrations of an incomprehensibly Italian hotel staff, and the prospect of forfeiting the sizable

Arm yourself against my dawn, which may at any moment cast you and Harry into obscurity, Alice James writes her brother William in 1891. In Judith Hooper's magnificent novel, zingers such as this fly back and forth between the endlessly articulate and letter–writing Jameses, all of whom are geniuses at gossiping.And the James family did, in fact, know everyone intellectually important on both sides of the Atlantic, but by the time we meet her in 1889, Alice has been sidelined and is lying in bed in Leamington, England, after taking London by storm.We don't know what's wrong with Alice. No one does, though her brothers have inventive theories, and the best of medical science offers no help. So, with Alice in bed, we travel to London and Paris, where the James children spent part of their unusual childhood. We sit with her around the James family's dinner table, as she – the youngest and the only girl – listens to the intellectual elite of Boston, missing nothing. The book is accompanied by Hooper's Afterword,"What was Wrong with Alice?," an analysis of the varied psychological ills of the James family and Alice's own medical history.

In the fateful month of March 2000, shortly after opening a hugely successful show in New York that unveiled the more nefarious financial connections of Presidential candidate George W. Bush, the hugely ambitious Conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio, an apparent suicide. With museums lining up to buy his work, and the fame he had sought relentlessly at last within his reach, speculation about whether his death was suicide or murder has titillated the art world ever since. Lombardi was an enigma who was at once a compulsive truth-teller and a cunning player of the art game, a political operative and a stubborn independent, a serious artist and a Merry Prankster, a metaphysicist if not a scientist.Lombardi's spidery, elusive diagrams describing the evolution of the shadow-banking industry from a decades-old alliances between intelligence agencies, banking, government and organized crime, may have made him unique in art history as the only artist whose primary subject, the CIA, has turned around and studied him and his art work. Exhaustively researched, this is the first comprehensive biography of this immensely contradictory and brilliantly original artist whose pervasive influence in not only the art world, but also in the world of computer science and cyber-security is only now coming to light.

In the last one hundred years, imported water has transformed the environment of the Golden State and its quality of life, with land ownership patterns and real estate boosterism dramatically altering both urban and rural communities. The key to this transformation has been expanded access to water from the Eastern Sierra, the Colorado River, and Northern California rivers. "Whoever brings the water, brings the people," wrote engineer William Mulholland, under whose leadership the process of growth through irrigation began. Now, using first–person voices of Californians to reveal the resulting changes, author David Carle concludes that it may be time to stop drowning the California dream of the good life with imported water. Using oral histories, contemporary newspaper articles, and autobiographies, Carle explores the historic changes in California, showing how imported water has shaped the pattern of population growth in the state. Because water choices remain the primary tool for shaping California's future, Carle also argues that it is possible to improve both the state's damaged environment and the quality of life if Californians will step out of this historic pattern and embrace limited water supplies as a fact of life in this naturally dry region.

"e;Award-winning writer Bahrami is a delightful guide in this thoroughly enjoyable look into the research and recovery of a group of Neandertal remains in the French Dordogne region . . . Her wide interests in travel, memoir, food, wine, and more make this exceedingly engaging title more like a French version of Under the Tuscan Sun."e; -Booklist (starred review)Centered in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, one of Europe's most concentrated regions for Neandertal occupations, Caf Neandertal features the work of archaeologists doing some of the most comprehensive and global work to date on the research, exploration, and recovery of our ancient ancestors, shedding a surprising light on what it means to be human.

Four decades ago aged twenty the author experienced what he calls a negative satori, a fundamental and irrefutable realization not of enlightenment, but of himself as a predicament only enlightenment could resolve. This, shaped by the hammer blows of a singular American professor, Richard DeMartino, brought him to Zen, and to Japan. Yet over time, of far greater import than his bungling efforts were the wonderful occupants of the Zen world he encountered: Toyoshima-san, the meditation Prometheus whose superhuman efforts astounded and inspired all while he remained impaled on the cliffs edge; the Thief, chief monastery monk who stole the world from whoever he encountered and whose yawns and the brushing of his teeth shot sparks of Absolute Meaning; Hisamatsu, the great lay Zen Master who at age 16 overheard a doctor tell his mother hed be dead in six months, only to awaken ten years later and become the most delighted man in Japan; Bunko, the monk kind to others but ferocious with himself, whose daily state of Oneness in meditation left him dissatisfied because despite all exertion he could not crush it to pieces and break beyond it.These are among the sitters for the portraits in Reports From the Zen Wars, Steve Antinoffs attempt to bear witness to what for him has been The Greatest Show on Earth, price of admission one lotus position.

In the early seventies, some of us were shot like stars from our parents homes. This was an act of nature, bigger than ourselves. In the austere beauty and natural reality of Hells Canyon of Eastern Oregon, one hundred miles from pavement, Pam, unable to identify with her parents world and looking for deeper pathways has a chance encounter with returning Vietnam warrior Skip Royes. Skip, looking for a bridge from survival back to connection, introduces Pam to the vanishing culture of the wandering shepherd and together they embark on a four-year sojourn into the wilderness. From the back of a horse, Pam leads her packstring of readers from overlook to water crossing, down trails two thousand years old, and from the vantages she chooses for us, we feel the edges of our own experiences. It is a memoir of falling in love with a place and a man and the price extracted for that love.Written with deep lyricism, Temperance Creek is a work of haunting beauty, fresh and irreverent and rooted in the grit and pleasure of daily life. This is Pams story, but the courage and truth in the telling is part of our human experience. Seen through a slower more primary mirror, one not so crowded with objectivity, Pams memoir, is a kind of home-coming, a family reunion for shooting stars.

I had always thought that when I was around 84 and Robin was 80 we could collaborate on a book about the golden years of his career where he could look at my photographs and reminisce about the events and his feelings at the time. Unfortunately, that book was never to be . . . .Photographer Arthur Grace first met Robin Williams in April 1986, at a comedy club in Pittsburgh where Williams was working to polish what would eventually become his award-winning special Evening at the Met. The two hit it off immediately, and thus blossomed a close friendship that carried them through their increasingly successful careers. Told through a series of stunning photographs of Williams taken by Grace over the course of this decades-long partnership, Robin Williams: A Singular Portrait offers a touching and up-close look at the real Robin Williamsthe manic and happy, the pensive and weary, the engaged and disengaged, a true portrait of one of Americas greatest comics and most beloved actors.For the millions of people around the globe that Robin Williams has touched, these images, more than 150 photographs, a glorious mixture of stunning color and resonating black and white presented in exhibit format, will be something to embrace and cherish, not simply because of their exclusivity, but because of their intimacy and their honesty.

In this powerful debut story collection, veteran travel write and climber Daniel Arnold brings to life the men and women—complete with their scars and dark corners—whose lives are defined by the mountains they climb. The characters who populate Snowblind are obsessed with the jagged beauty and driven by the physical ricks of dangerous summits. Their climbs end not on heights, but in the psychological aftermath, when their compulsions crash back into reality.Deep in Alaska, a fanatic soloist seeks her way back through the wilderness when her pilot fails to pick her up after a triumphant climb. In a climbers' hostel in Argentina, a young mountaineer tries to explain abandoning his fallen partner in a blizzard on Aconcagua. On K2, an anarchist fails to fit in on a modern Himalayan expedition—with disastrous results. Tension fills Arnold's stories, both from the finely crafted, sweaty–palmed drama of the climbs he imagines, and also from the cracks that open in each of his characters' psyches.Snowblind is a dose of old world adventure writing made modern for a new generation fascinated by the mystique of climbing. For both serious climbers and those who may never tie onto a rope the thrill of these stories, complete

This a hilarious memoir of Clancy Sigal’s escapades as a young Hollywood agent on the Sunset Strip, peddling writers and actors in a blacklist-crazed “golden age” movie industry of the 1950s. Atom bomb tests light up the night sky, and everyone is either naming names or getting named in the McCarthy witch hunt. By day a fast-talking salesman, at night he’s the point person of a small circle of anarchistic oddballs. He’s dogged by two FBI agents who want to be set up with starlets and have a screen test. They trail him as he goes from studio to studio hustling clients like Humphrey Bogart, Donna Reed, Jack Palance, Peter Lorre and Stanwyck. Barred from a studio he brazenly uses a bolt cutter to break through the chainlink fence to make a deal.Black Sunset’s riproaring ribald style belongs to a hardboiled school that includes Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler. He is one of the few remaining witnesses and reporters of this absurd and terrifying time.

Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign.A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker's tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing "Rockford Files" reruns on the passenger seat; and a girl returns to her childhood home to spy on its new inhabitants, not realizing they are aware of her surveillance; a Poe–obsessed medical examiner constructs ornate scenes in an attempt to provoke hope in the forgotten lives of a dark and desperate city.Told through Rock's imaginative and wholly original voice, these are haunted tales about fascination, transformation, and the relationship between the two.

Surprise Attack explores sixty plus years of military and terror threats against the United States. It examines the intelligence tools and practices that provided warnings of those attacks and evaluates the United States' responses, both in preparedness – and most importantly – the effectiveness of our military and national command authority.Contrary to common claims, the historical record now shows that warnings, often very solid warnings, have preceded almost all such attacks, both domestic and international. Intelligence practices developed early in the Cold War, along with intelligence collection techniques have consistently produced accurate warnings for our national security decision makers. Surprise Attack traces the evolution and application of those practices and explores why such warnings have often failed to either interdict or intercept actual attacks.Going beyond warnings, Surprise Attack explores the real world performance of the nation's military and civilian command and control history – exposing disconnects in the chain of command, failures of command and control and fundamental performance issues with national command authority.America has faced an ongoing series of threats, from the attacks on Hawaii and the Philippines in 1941, through the crises and confrontations of the Cold War, global attacks on American personnel and facilities to the contemporary violence of jihadi terrorism. With a detailed study of those threats, the attacks related to them, and America's response, a picture of what works – and what doesn't – emerges. The attacks have been tragic and we see the defensive preparations and response often ineffective. Yet lessons can be learned from the experience; Surprise Attack represents a comprehensive effort to identify and document those lessons.

In 1995, Wendell Berry’s Roots to the Earth was published in portfolio form by West Meadow Press. The wood etchings of celebrated artist and wood engraver, Wesley Bates, were printed from the original wood blocks on handmade Japanese paper. In 2014, this work was reprinted at Larkspur Press, along with additional poems. It is now with great pleasure that Counterpoint reproduces this collaborative work for trade publication, as well as expanding it with the inclusion of a short story, “The Branch Way of Doing,” and additional engravings by Bates.In his introduction to the 2014 collection, Bates wrote: "As our society moves toward urbanization, the majority of the population views agriculture from an increasingly detached position. . . In his poetry [Berry] reveals tenderness and love as well as anger and uncertainty. . . The wood engravings in this collection are intended to be companion pieces to. . . the way he expresses what it is to be a farmer."

Tom Pohrt spent years gathering poems by Wendell Berry that he thought children might read and appreciate, making sketches to accompany his selection. Terrapin is the result, a volume of twenty–one poems with dozens of sketches, drawings, and watercolors. In full color, we have not only a volume of staggering beauty but a consummate example of the collaborative effort that is fine bookmaking; the perfect gift for children, grandchildren, or anyone who remains a lover of the book as physical object.

In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculturea journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist-anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re-creation of the nations political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players.In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called free; the anxieties and occasional terrors of late-night, drug-fueled visits of biker gangs looking to party; and his own quest for the next high. His road through revolution brought him to adulthood and to his major role as a political strategist: from radical communard to the chairman of the California Arts Council, from a street theater apprentice to a motion-picture star.