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Christian Livermore grew up a shy little girl in a turbulent family sunk in poverty, violence, substance abuse and mental illness. She ate government cheese, suffered from malnutrition and struggled to defend her body against threats both outside the house and within it. And even though she made it out, she has suffered a lifetime of consequences since: excruciating health problems, fear and shame. Especially shame. In We Are Not Okay, Livermore's deeply personal and moving essays explore what it means to grow up poor in America and ask whether it is possible to outrun the shame it grinds into your bones. She excoriates the inhumanity in how the United States treats its poor and asks the nation to confront how growing up poor in America brutalizes us and warps our perspective on ourselves, on other people and on the world.
A young teen’s parents mutilated her, ignored her and sold her to a sideshow, where she met the first person in the world who is nice to her. A young girl is waiting on her fifteenth birthday for the mother she hasn't seen in two years to arrive and take her out to celebrate. Will she come? Bluet waits and worries, and while she waits, her married English teacher boyfriend Tate keeps calling for her to meet him around the block: they have an even bigger problem to worry about. An adolescent girl on Halloween night, an encounter with older boys in masks, and the giddy and sometimes frightening approach of sexual awakening. And a young woman from Ukraine whose mother marries her off to an American man called Albert through a matchmaking service. Albert gets himself a beautiful young wife, and Alina consoles herself with at least getting a fresh start in America. Neither of them is prepared for what they actually get.
A survey of the motif of the revenant, showing how medieval themes and motifs persist today.
The proliferation of books and films about the "undead", those literally returning from the grave, in modern popular culture has been commented on as a recent phenomenon, but it is in fact a storytelling tradition going back more than a millennium. It drew on and was influenced by Christian eschatology, gathered momentum in medieval ecclesiastical chronicles, such as those written by Caesarius of Heisterbach, and then migrated into imaginative literature - famously in John Lydgate's Dance of Death - and art. But why did revenant stories and imagery take such a hold in the Middle Ages? And why has that fascination held on into today's world?
This book offers a history of these revenant narratives, demonstrating how modern horror is haunted by past literature and exploring the motif of the risen dead as a focus of cultural anxiety and literary effort. The author examines the long arc of revenant tales from antiquity and the Middle Ages through the Reformation and into modernity, tracing their uncanny similarities and laying bare the rich traditions of narrative, theme, motif, supernatural belief and eschatological fears and preoccupations.