A collection of essays by an international group of scholars, The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature addresses the vast cultural and discursive construction that trauma has become in recent decades. Unravelling aspects of representing, narrating, testifying to trauma and of sharing or conveying traumatic non-experience, many of the essays offer new perspectives on traditionally central topics of trauma studies, including shellshock, sexual abuse, the Holocaust, AIDS and 9/11, or on canonical trauma texts, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings. Some authors take issue with the at least partly commercially-motivated canonisation of trauma fiction, and with the automatic linking of certain textual features with traumatic experiences. In other essays, trauma works as an interpretative device that allows us to see otherwise familiar texts like Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and the fiction of Beckett and Agota Kristof in a new light. Other contributors interrogate less obvious cultural and artistic representations – including First World War British painting, Jean-Richard Bloch’s wartime writings, Félix González-Torres’s candy-spills, the photography of Peter Piller and Ori Gersht, and recent American television comedy – in the context of trauma, while one author explores her own artistic practice as part of the working through of traumatic experiences. The Edges of Trauma differs from other volumes concerned with trauma and art in that it gathers together essays on both literature and visual art. These essays are concerned with the relationship between trauma and art, traumatic non-experience and aesthetic experience; exploring how the non-experience of trauma finds its way into artistic representations.

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

A top expert on human trauma argues that we vastly overestimate how common PTSD is and fail to recognize how resilient people really are After 9/11, mental health professionals flocked to New York to handle what everyone assumed would be a flood of trauma cases. Oddly, the flood never came. In The End of Trauma, pioneering psychologist George A. Bonanno argues that we failed to predict the psychological response to 9/11 because most of what we understand about trauma is wrong. For starters, it’s not nearly as common as we think. In fact, people are overwhelmingly resilient to adversity. What we often interpret as PTSD are signs of a natural process of learning how to deal with a specific situation. We can cope far more effectively if we understand how this process works. Drawing on four decades of research, Bonanno explains what makes us resilient, why we sometimes aren’t, and how we can better handle traumatic stress. Hopeful and humane, The End of Trauma overturns everything we thought we knew about how people respond to hardship.

Surgery needs skill. Skill needs knowledge. Knowledge of tricks, moves, and tools. This book is about such knowledge. Expert authors have contributed technical pearls, gained by years of experience. The short “how-I-do-it” chapters offer the reader a quick and effective guide that will be invaluable when addressing any penetrating injury. The book is not intended to serve as a comprehensive volume of pathophysiology and management in trauma; rather the goal is to provide practical solutions on how to treat injuries surgically. It describes the steps that you must take when, in the middle of the night, confronted with devastating bleeding, you will have only one chance to save a life!

This book will help you take a badly wounded patient to the operating room, organize yourself and your team, do battle with some vicious injuries and come out with the best possible result. It is a practical guide to operative trauma surgery for residents and registrars, for general surgeons with an interest in trauma, and for isolated surgeons operating on wounded patients in military, rural or humanitarian settings. A surgical atlas may show you what to do with your hands but not how to think, plan and improvise. Here you will find practical advice on how to use your head as well as your hands when operating on a massively bleeding trauma patient. The first part of this book presents some general principles of trauma surgery. The second part is about trauma surgery as a contact sport. Here we show you how to deal with specific injuries to the abdomen, chest, neck and peripheral vessels. The single most important lesson we hope you will derive from this book is to always keep it simple because, in trauma surgery, the simple stuff works.

Trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people; it is the bedrock of our psychology. Death and illness touch us all, but even the everyday sufferings of loneliness and fear are traumatic. In The Trauma of Everyday Life renowned psychiatrist and author of Thoughts Without a Thinker Mark Epstein uncovers the transformational potential of trauma, revealing how it can be used for the mind's own development. Epstein finds throughout that trauma, if it doesn't destroy us, wakes us up to both our minds' own capacity and to the suffering of others. It makes us more human, caring and wise. It can be our greatest teacher, our freedom itself, and it is available to all of us. Western psychology teaches that if we understand the cause of trauma, we might move past it while many drawn to Eastern practices see meditation as a means of rising above, or distancing themselves from, their most difficult emotions. Both, Epstein argues, fail to recognize that trauma is an indivisible part of life and can be used as a tool for growth and an ever deeper understanding of change. When we regard trauma with this perspective, understanding that suffering is universal and without logic, our pain connects us to the world on a more fundamental level. Guided by the Buddha's life as a profound example of the power of trauma, Epstein's also closely examines his own experience and that of his psychiatric patients to help us all understand that the way out of pain is through it.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-277) and index.