Lynn C. Miller - Böcker

In ""Death of a Department Chair"", protagonist Miriam Held recounts the events of the previous fall when she was suspected of killing Isabel Vittorio, the chair of her department and her former lover. The controversial and contrary Vittorio was, at the time of her death, attempting to block the hire of a brilliant African American female professor. Already under siege for her attempts to increase diversity on campus, Miriam is forced to defend her reputation and her life. As she searches for the truth, Miriam amasses evidence that leaves few friends and colleagues free from suspicion. Both a classic whodunit and a witty satire, ""Death of a Department Chair"" dramatizes how communities can create the very climate of mistrust and paranoia that victimizes them.

Every person has a story to tell, but few beginners know how to uncover their story's narrative potential. And despite a growing interest among students and creative writers, few guides to the genre of memoirs and creative nonfiction highlight compelling storytelling strategies. Addressing that gap, authors Lynn C. Miller and Lisa Lenard-Cook have provided a compact, accessible guide to memoir writing that shows how an aspiring memoir writer can use storytelling tools and tactics borrowed from fiction to weave personal experiences into the shape of a story.Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir offers an overview of the building blocks of memoir writing. Individual chapters focus on key issues and challenges, such as the balance between the remembering narrator and the experiencing narrator, the capacity to honour the subjective voice, the occasion of telling (why does this narrator tell this story now?), creating an organically functional structure for a particular story, and taking the next steps with a written memoir. Drawing on their combined years of experience teaching memoir writing, authoring works of fiction and nonfiction, and working in autobiographical performance, Miller and Lenard-Cook provide a practical guide whose core philosophy is motivated by a key word: story.

The characters—young and old, queer and straight, contemporary and historical—who inhabit Lynn C. Miller’s stories often find themselves in defining moments and crisis situations. As they search through the archives of memory, truth, and experience, they seek to understand not only the past and present but themselves.Stretching the definition of “archive,” Miller builds interconnected webs that surprise, much like the seemingly random papers collected in a box of materials. Fraught relationships, mistaken identities, mysterious disappearances, and the search for love play out in these stories. Friendships are celebrated, ex-husbands cross the line, and Gertrude Stein attempts to write her memoir. An unusual collection that proves greater than the sum of its parts, The Lost Archive will haunt readers with the intensity of its vision.

Alex Ross, a thirty-year-old psychologist, enjoys the benefits of a close-knit family: her mother and aunt are twins married to two close friends, and Alex and her cousins, Rolf and Stephen, grew up as if they were siblings. When Rolf is killed in a car accident, Alex’s entire family spins into grief and chaos. Nathaniel, a mysterious art museum curator, soon enters their lives and seems to offer the family solace. Frannie, Rolf’s mother, becomes infatuated with the young man; Alex, who split with her long-term girlfriend in the aftermath of Rolf’s death, finds herself deeply attracted to him. Only Stephen mistrusts Nathaniel—but he soon becomes consumed with the nationwide financial crisis threatening the family’s stability. Will Alex choose Nathaniel over her loyalty to Stephen? Torn between competing desires, fueled by her lifelong but unexamined love of Rolf, she must turn her own training as a psychologist on herself in order to find peace amid the turmoil.

Although neural network models have had a dramatic impact on the cognitive and brain sciences, social psychology has remained largely unaffected by this intellectual explosion. The first to apply neural network models to social phenomena, this book includes chapters by nearly all of the individuals currently working in this area. Bringing these various approaches together in one place, it allows readers to appreciate the breadth of these approaches, as well as the theoretical commonality of many of these models. The contributors address a number of central issues in social psychology and show how these kinds of models provide insight into many classic issues. Many chapters hint that this approach provides the seeds of a theoretical integration that the field has lacked. Each chapter discusses an explicit connectionist model of a central problem in social psychology. Since many of the contributors either use a standard architecture or provide a computer program, interested readers, with a little work, should be able to implement their own variations of models. Chapters are devoted to the following topics and models: * the learning and application of social categories and stereotypes; * causal reasoning, social explanation, and person perception;* personality and social behavior; * classic dissonance phenomena; and * belief change and the coherence of large scale belief systems.