Beautiful Terrible Ruins

Beautiful Terrible Ruins PDF Author: Dora Apel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813574099
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

Beautiful Terrible Ruins

Beautiful Terrible Ruins PDF Author: Dora Apel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813574099
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book

Book Description
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins PDF Author: Jess Walter
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241963001
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The No. 1 New York Times Bestseller Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio. The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before. Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach. 'Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times 'A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor' Booklist 'Hilarious and compelling' Esquire

Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins PDF Author: Jess Walter
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780061928178
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—Jess Walter’s “absolute masterpiece” (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author): the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 and resurfaces fifty years later in contemporary Hollywood. The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet. Hailed by critics and loved by readers of literary and historical fiction, Beautiful Ruins is the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962...and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.

A Great and Terrible Beauty

A Great and Terrible Beauty PDF Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0731814908
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
It's 1895, and after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's being followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls - and their foray into the spiritual world - lead to?

Risk of Ruin

Risk of Ruin PDF Author: Arnold Snyder
Publisher: Huntington Press Inc
ISBN: 1935396609
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
SHE’S GOD. HE’S A GAMBLER. IT’S A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN … OR HELL? Risk of Ruin is a love story unlike any you’ve ever read—dark, disturbing, irreverent, some might say sacrilegious—while protagonists Bart and Stacy may be the most compelling misfits to go on the lam since Bonnie and Clyde. The first work of fiction to be released by well-known gambling expert and author Arnold Snyder, Risk of Ruin is a provocative story of crime, passion, rebellion, and possible redemption that attempts to answer a question that has tormented gambling men since Adam placed that all-in bet on Eve: Is she worth the risk?

Beauty Among Ruins

Beauty Among Ruins PDF Author: J'nell Ciesielski
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 0785233571
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
In Ciesielski’s latest sweeping romance, an American heiress finds herself in Scotland amid the fallout of the Great War, and a wounded Scottish laird comes face-to-face with his past and a woman he never could have expected. American socialite Lily Durham is known for enjoying one moment to the next, with little regard for the consequences of her actions. But just as she is banished overseas to England as a “cure” for her frivolous ways, the Great War breaks out and wreaks havoc. She joins her cousin in nursing the wounded at a convalescent home deep in the wilds of Scotland at a crumbling castle where its laird is less than welcoming. Alec MacGregor has given his entire life to preserving his home of Kinclavoch Castle, but mounting debts force him to sell off his family history bit by bit. Labeled a coward for not joining his countrymen in the trenches due to an old injury, he opens his home to the Tommies to make recompense while he keeps to the shadows. But his preference for the shadows is shattered when a new American nurse comes streaming into the castle on a burst of light. Lily and Alec are thrown together when a series of mysterious events threatens to ruin the future of Kinclavoch. Can they put aside their differences to find the culprit before it’s too late, or will their greatest distraction be falling in love? Praise for Beauty Among Ruins “An atmospheric, engrossing romance for fans of Downton Abbey and Somewhere in France. A real gem!” —Aimie K. Runyan, internationally bestselling author “A satisfying and highly enjoyable read that I recommended for readers of historical fiction, mystery, and romance.” —Tea Cooper, author of The Woman in the Green Dress World War I historical romance Full-length stand-alone novel Book length: 113,000 words Includes discussion questions for book clubs

The Light in the Ruins

The Light in the Ruins PDF Author: Chris Bohjalian
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307743926
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant comes a spellbinding novel of love, despair, and revenge—set in war-ravaged Tuscany. 1943: Tucked away in the idyllic hills of Tuscany, the Rosatis, an Italian family of noble lineage, believe that the walls of their ancient villa will keep them safe from the war raging across Europe. But when two soldiers—a German and an Italian—arrive at their doorstep asking to see an ancient Etruscan burial site, the Rosatis’ bucolic tranquility is shattered. 1955: Serafina Bettini, an investigator with the Florence Police Department, has successfully hidden her tragic scars from WWII, at least until she’s assigned to a gruesome new case—a serial killer who is targeting the remaining members of the Rosati family one by one. Soon, she will find herself digging into past secrets that will reveal a breathtaking story of moral paradox, human frailty, and the mysterious ways of the heart.

Exquisite Materials

Exquisite Materials PDF Author: Abigail Joseph
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 1644531704
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book's four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse episodes converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous objects of the Victorian world-and to the social practices surrounding them-reveals the boundaries and influences of queer forms of identity and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment. In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.

Imagery of Lynching

Imagery of Lynching PDF Author: Dora Apel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813534596
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Outside of the classroom and scholarly publications, lynching has long been a taboo subject. Nice people, it is felt, do not talk about it, and they certainly do not look at images representing the atrocity. In Imagery of Lynching, Dora Apel contests this adopted stance of ignorance. Through a careful and compelling analysis of over one hundred representations of lynching, she shows how the visual documentation of such crimes can be a central vehicle for both constructing and challenging racial hierarchies. She examines how lynching was often orchestrated explicitly for the camera and how these images circulated on postcards, but also how they eventually were appropriated by antilynching forces and artists from the 1930s to the present. She further investigates how photographs were used to construct ideologies of "whiteness" and "blackness," the role that gender played in these visual representations, and how interracial desire became part of the imagery. Offering the fullest and most systematic discussion of the depiction of lynching in diverse visual forms, this book addresses questions about race, class, gender, and dissent in the shaping of American society. Although we may want to avert our gaze, Apel holds it with her sophisticated interpretations of traumatic images and the uses to which they have been put.

Daughters of Ruin

Daughters of Ruin PDF Author: K. D. Castner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481436651
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
As a war begins, four princesses of enemy kingdoms who were raised as sisters must decide where their loyalties lie: to their kingdoms, or to each other.