Bøger udgivet af Catapult

The only thing the writers in this book have in common is that they've exchanged sex for money. They're PhDs and dropouts, soccer moms and jailbirds, $2,500-a-night call girls and $10 crack hos, and everything in between. This anthology lends a voice to an underrepresented population that is simultaneously reviled and worshipped.Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys is a collection of short memoirs, rants, confessions, nightmares, journalism, and poetry covering life, love, work, family, and yes, sex. The editors gather pieces from the world of industrial sex, including contributions from art-porn priestess Dr. Annie Sprinkle, best-selling memoirist David Henry Sterry (Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent), sex activist and musical diva Candye Kane, women and men right off the streets, girls participating in the first-ever National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth, and Ruth Morgan Thomas, one of the organizers of the European Sex Work, Human Rights, and Migration Conference.Sex is a billion-dollar industry. Meet the real people who are its flesh and blood.

A thought-provoking reassessment of religious faith and progressive politics from an author whose “wonderful writing is both a surprise and a relief” (Naomi Klein). In All My Bones Shake, author and political activist Robert Jensen sheds light on the spiritual unrest at the root of our nation’s current political, economic, cultural, and ecological chaos. While popular media has reduced the issue of faith to a talking-heads debate between atheists and believers, Jensen shows the conflict to be far more complex. While fundamentalists on both sides have fought to an intellectual standstill and moderates seem content to ignore the battle, Jensen pushes for a progressive approach to theological questions, offering a path of faith that doesn’t negate the modern scientific world or threaten the rights of marginalized people. More than a simple study of the religious debate in America, All My Bones Shake marks a new communion: a way to use theology to create a sustainable society and meet the uncertainty of our lives with confidence.

Pasha Malla knows joy in all of its weird, unsettling, and wondrous forms. In their humor, warmth, and rigorous honesty, his stories clearly capture something odd and beautiful: the unmistakable feeling of empathy. From young couples fighting through the emotional trauma of the modern world to children navigating wayward, forbidden paths of a fantasized adulthood, Malla presents characters deeply entrenched in the familiar and hearts that slowly open to reveal the pain and unexpected love that life accumulates. "The Withdrawal Method" offers worlds where Niagara Falls has run dry, where people's skin can be shed in a single piece, and where ancient frustrated chess masters invent machines that unexpectedly alter the course of history. Reminiscent of Lorrie Moore, Haruki Murakami, and George Saunders, these stories are haunting, captivating, and constructed with a poise and precision that reach beyond technical skill. Malla's is an assured new voice; his smooth, mature style is punctuated by bursts of wild humor and enlivened by endlessly inventive storytelling. As individual narratives, these stories speak to each side of the protean human psyche, but when taken together they address with full understanding the fragility of our lives.

What is a jaded rock journalist doing dodging landmines to talk to mercenaries and terrorists? And what kind of conversation can a man who prefers hunting for perfect three-minute pop songs and tubes of beer have with devotees of fasting and ferocity?Sarajevo. Jerusalem. Kabul. Belfast. Kosovo. Gaza. Basra. New York City. Every place where recent history advertises the stubbornness, intolerance, bloodlust, and cowardice that sully our collective record, there the intrepid Andrew Mueller goes, skidding around the globe from failed state to ravaged war zone to desolate no-man's-land to try to unpick why we humans seem so prone to plucking war from the jaws of peace.En route, he meets various influential panjandrums (Al Gore, Gerry Adams, Bono, Paddy Ashdown), any number of assorted warlords and revolutionaries, and a sprinkling of peacemakers and do-gooders. He also manages to get shot at, locked up, and taken on a tour by one of the world's most infamous terrorist organizations. It's like a Bond film with much, much less sex, and might appear for that and other reasons to be substantially a story of disappointment. Yet it's a surprisingly sunny book given the mire in which he finds himself.

Upending Christianity's popular notion of Jesus the comforter, the good shepherd, the Lord, and the Savior, this completely new exploration of Mark's Life of Jesus reexamines the image presented in this earliest of the New Testament gospels--the mysterious stranger, the singular, abandoned, and solitary figure--and rethinks the current role of Western culture through a radically altered view of Christianity. The existential Jesus has no interest in sin, and his focus is not on an afterlife. He is anti-church, anti-establishment, anti-family, and anti-community; a teacher, with himself his only student, he gestures enigmatically from within his own torturous experience, inviting the reader to walk in his shoes and ask the question, "Who am I?"This book argues that Jesus is the West's great teacher on the nature of being. Incorporating a new translation of the Gospel of Mark from its original Greek, this radical reinterpretation identifies the philosophical and cultural significance of Jesus in the modern world, based on his life, actions, and reflections.

Historically, a love of cooking has been left to those considered far from cool: suburbanite Betty Crockers toiling over a hot stove. But the new youth-culture sensibility has taken over, merging the axiom "You are what you eat" with its updated mantra "You are who you listen to." "Lost in the Supermarket"--yes, named for the 1979 hit by The Clash--is a creative compendium of recipes that reclaims the kitchen for the hip crowd. At once a meditation on the connection between food and music and a great culinary resource, this cookbook is full of the favorite recipes of some of indie rock's elite. In chapters on both daily dishes and special event grub, contributions from such indie notables as Animal Collective, Black Dice, Sunset Rubdown, and Country Teasers are included, giving readers plenty to groove on, whether they're in it for the tunes or the tastes or both.

'Nathan Coulter' begins Wendell Berry's sequence of novels about the citizens of Port William, Kentucky-a setting that is taking its place alongside Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and Winesburg, Ohio, as one of our most distinctive and recognizable literary locales.

The wildly varied essays in Not-Knowing combine to form a posthumous manifesto of one of America's masters of literary experiment. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two previously unpublished; and meditations on everything from Superman III to the art of rendering "Melancholy Baby" on jazz banjolele. This is a rich and eclectic selection of work by the man Robert Coover has called "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."

Frederick Langlois could be that geeky 17-year-old found in every high school -- the one who closely clutches his poem-filled notebook, who feels a bit too deeply, who's just a little too old for his years. But Frederick isn't in high school. He's in a hospital ward with other critically ill adolescents, dying of bone cancer. "Mercury Under the Tongue" chronicles his short stay there, from his distant but friendly relationship with his therapist through comic moments in the ward and his emergent friendships with other teenage patients. Some survive, others are lost, and at the end, Frederick must make a final reckoning with himself and his family, one that is at once dispassionate and deeply felt. Avoiding both misty stoicism and made-for-TV bathos, the book exposes the fallible body as the humanizing factor that grounds spirited adolescent talk, creating a believable, likable protagonist while weaving a compelling, lyrical story.

An acclaimed author, abetted by a noted artist, serves the dish on Select, the famous Montparnasse caf that for nearly nine decades has been so vital to Paris and its intellectual denizens: from Hemingway, Beauvoir, Picasso, James Baldwin, and George Plimpton to the writers and artists of today.