Download Free Unblinking Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Unblinking and write the review.

An unflinching look at race, class, life after death, disability, and family. Of Lisa Lenzo's first collection, Charles Baxter wrote: "Lenzo's stories have a strong pulse of feeling and a sly intelligence, and her angels, children, and lovers have an eerie radiance, a hard-won wisdom, that you can spot on any page of this book." In Unblinking, Lenzo's angels, lovers, and children are back—older, sometimes wiser, and shedding new light. All ten stories in Unblinking take place in or circle back to Detroit and portray both the beauty and grit of the city and its inhabitants. In "Up in the Air," a blues musician cherishes his memory of falling from a tree — "the utter sweetness of falling, of floating, almost still" — even though his downward plunge has left him seriously disabled. The narrator of "In the White Man's House," recalls a high school basketball game, torn by racial division, and the distress of his teenaged friend who strove to be "blacker." In "Losing It," a disgruntled angel tries to help a nurse control his outbursts of comic and fruitless anger. And in "Marching," an old white man, who now has great difficulty walking, remembers marching fifty miles with Martin Luther King Jr. Despite the hardships they experience, the characters in the collection find pleasure and solace in what this lovely planet has to offer. By turns playful and grave, told with humor and candor, these down-to-earth and heavenly stories will both surprise with fresh insight and remind the reader of what they already know. Unblinking is a short story collection for any lover of contemporary fiction looking for that strong pulse of feeling.
Everyone is watching. Minka Stanis just wants to be left alone—impossible since the Eyes record and broadcast every moment of her day. Then a humiliating incident in the high school cafeteria makes her the laughingstock of her tower city, and life behind the glass walls becomes unbearable. When the intriguing new boy at school tells her about a place away from the gaze of the cameras, Minka plots her escape from the towers. But the Shuttered Lands are across the desert, and going there will mean leaving everything she’s ever known behind. Fresh out of tower training, Zedd Fincher is settling into his dream job. When he gets assigned to edit Minka Stanis’s Stream footage, he spins her every misstep into a string of hit clips. As Minka’s fame grows, so do Zedd’s feelings for her. But a crisis at home brings the darker side of his work into focus. And Zedd soon learns editing other people’s lives has consequences. As Minka is thrust unwillingly into the spotlight and Zedd’s life begins to unravel, only one thing is certain: The Eyes are always watching.
The poems in One Unblinking Eye cast a steady and serious gaze at life outside the beltways. Whether testifying at a prayer meeting in Indiana, tramping the backwoods of northern New England, or working on an oil derrick in the Gulf, the inhabitants of these poems live on the margins of society. "They are the left-behind, odd-manneredones/Who speak in starts," Norman Williams writes of the last residents of a West Virginia mining town. Describing the woods of central Maine, he speaks of "lives ... scraped from sides/Of deer and garden plots; where double-wides,/On concrete pads abut a hard-pan road." It is the art of these poems to convince the reader that these lives matter. There is desperation here, and madness, but there is an equal measure of determination and faith. In one poem, Mr. Williams writes of a fisherman haunted by his daughter's death, who "casts his line/In hopes a flash and strike will draw him back." These words describe the poet's method as well. The work in this collection is built on a supple metrical foundation; it is filled with glancing rhymes and wordplay; and it is touched off by striking images. It is, in other words, composed with care, and it richly rewards a careful reading. Norman Williams writes in Burlington, Vermont, where he works as an attorney. His first book, The Unlovely Child, was published by Alfred A. Knopf to enthusiastic reviews. Anthony Hecht wrote that "the voice of these poems is marvelously modulated, low-key in its acceptances, modest in its exultations, steady and unintoxicated in its long vision. It is my fixed conviction that with his first book he has fashioned a landmark in our literature, and sounded a uniquely American note with beautiful certainty." With his second book, more than fifteen years in the making, Norman Williams reafirms the truth of that assessment.
In Rane Arroyo's poetry we hear echoes of Whitman, Lorca, Neruda. But more important, we hear Arroyo's own song of self rendered with a lyricism that belies its astonishing and redolent honesty. The Buried Sea: New and Selected Poems is a powerful addition to the American literary landscape. --Connie May Fowler.