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Representations of Loss in Irish Literature (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
By Eugene O'Brien, Deirdre Flynn. 2018
This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented…
in Irish writing. It focuses on how literature is ideally suited to expressions and understanding of the nature of loss, given its ability to access and express emotions, sensations, feelings, and the visceral and haptic areas of experience. Dealing with feelings and with sensations, poems, novels and drama can allow for cathartic expressions of these emotions, as well as for a fuller understanding of what is involved in loss across all situations. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in Irish Studies, loss, memory, trauma, death, and cultural studies.The Clouds
By Juan Saer, Hilary Dobel. 2016
Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language --Ricardo Piglia What Saer presents marvelously is…
the experience of reality and the characters attempts to write their own narratives within its excess --BookforumIn modern-day Paris Pich n Garay receives a computer disk containing a manuscript--which might be fictional or could be a memoir--by Doctor Real a nineteenth-century physician tasked with leading a group of five mental patients on a trip to a recently constructed asylum Their trip which ends in disaster and fire is a brilliant tragicomedy thanks to the various insanities of the patients among whom is a delusional man who greatly over-estimates his own importance and a nymphomaniac nun who tricks everyone--even the other patients--into sleeping with her Fascinating as a faux historical novel and written in Saer s typically gorgeous Proustian style The Clouds can be read as a metaphor for exile--a huge theme for Saer and a lot of Argentine writers--as well as an examination of madness Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation The author of numerous novels and short-story collections including Scars and La Grande Saer was awarded Spain s prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event Five of his novels are available from Open Letter Books Hilary Vaughn Dobel has an MFA in poetry and translation from Columbia University She is the author of two manuscripts and in addition to Saer she has translated work by Carlos PintadoShadow Man
By Jeffrey Fleishman. 2012
Foreign correspondent James Ryan was there whenever the world changed: in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in the former…
Soviet bloc. But now he can't remember these events; he can't recall anything long-term, except the summer of his fifteenth year following his mother's death. It was the summer his father told him to call him Kurt. The summer the mysterious and enchanting Vera burst into their lonely, quiet lives. The summer his own world opened, then irrevocably changed.James, at fifty-two, suffers from a severe case of early onset Alzheimer's. The novel unravels James's predicament through the clear glimpses he retains of that long ago summer, and through the desperate attempts of his wife and his nurse to bring him back to the present, if only for stolen moments. Each has her motives: his wife trying not to lose the man with whom she shared so much - wars, death, love, loss of a child, history. And his nurse, the half sister he never knew he had, needing James's adolescent memory to understand the biological father and mother she never met. Told from the perspective of a man betrayed by his own mind, Shadow Man is a novel of identity and suspense that travels across continents and deep into the pasts that make us each who we are. It explores the power of memory to heal and to mask, and of the limits of unconditional love. Set in Philly and the eastern shore of yesteryear, in the Middle East, and throughout Eastern Europe, Fleishman's trademark descriptive but spare lyricism shines. Shadow Man is a touching and haunting novel perhaps most similar to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though it is a work of fiction. From the Trade Paperback edition.Kafka's Hat
By Chantal Bilodeau, Patrice Martin. 2013
Multiple plot lines interweave with twentieth-century literary allusions as hapless bureaucrat P. attempts to secure delivery of a valuable cultural…
relic. Patrice Martin's ticklish tip of the hat to the writing of Franz Kafka also evokes the literary techniques of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Paul Auster.Polymath Patrice Martin is a writer, musician, and politician who is a former clerk in Canada's House of Commons, and currently is a Gatineau city councilor. He confesses his working life in government bureaucracy helped shape this, his first novel.Chantal Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal, Quebec.Maleficium
By David Homel, Fred A. Reed, Martine Desjardins. 2009
Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth century…
Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie dares to violate the sanctity of the confessional in this confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afflicted with a debilitating malady or struck with a crippling deformity, relates his encounter with an enigmatic young woman whose lips bear a striking scar.As these men penetrate deep into the exotic Orient, each falls victim to his own secret vice. One treks through Ethiopia in search of wingless locusts. Another hunts for fly-whisks among the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Yet others bargain for saffron in a Srinagar bazaar, search for the rarest frankincense, and pursue the coveted hawksbill turtle in the Sea of Oman. Two more seek the formula for sabon Nablus in Palestine or haggle over Persian carpets in the royal gardens of Shiraz. The men's individual forms of punishment, revealed through the agency of the young woman, are wrought upon their bodies.Baroque in its complexity, Kafka-like in its inexorable mechanics, Maleficium by turns astonishes, amuses, and beguiles. Then author Martine Desjardins's Vicar Savoie-as in any confession worth its communion wafer-saves the best (or worst) for last.Maleficium won the Prix Jacques Brossard and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award (French Fiction), the Prix des libraires du Québec, the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie, and the Prix France-Québec.Yosl Rakover Talks to God
By Zvi Kolitz. 1999
A dying Jew's last words to God -- a text that is regarded as the greatest piece of writing to…
have emerged from the Holocaust -- the story of how it came to be written, and the afterlife of both the author and his creation.As the German tanks destroy the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the few remaining fighters, Yosl Rakover, writes out his last words to God, seals the text in a glass bottle, and thrusts it into the rubble before preparing to die. The text surfaces in Europe in the 1950s, is passed from hand to hand, is broadcast on Radio Berlin -- where it is acclaimed by Thomas Mann as a religious masterpiece -- is anthologized and translated into many languages.But what is hailed as the most important testament of the Holocaust is in fact a short story, written in 1946 for a Yiddish newspaper by a remarkable young Jew, Zvi Kolitz, in Buenos Aires, where he had gone to raise money for the Jewish underground in the struggle to establish the State of Israel. The Borgesian story of what happened to the text and to Kolitz in the fifty years since, and the detective work of German journalist Paul Badde that resulted in their eventual rejoining, form the second part of this fascinating book. And in an afterword, the great French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas's meditation on the text is answered in a commentary by Leon Wieseltier.Already an acclaimed bestseller in Europe, Yosl Rakover Talks to God restores a blazing artifact of twentieth-century writing to its true setting.Yann Andrea Steiner
By Mark Polizzotti, Marguerite Duras. 1992
Dedicated to Duras' companion with whom she spent her last decade of life, Yann Andréa Steiner is a haunting dance…
between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between Duras and the young Yann Andréa and a seaside romance observed - or imagined - by the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper, a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his sister's murder at the hands of a German soldier. Memory blurs into desire as the summer of 1980 flows into 1944. An enigmatic elegy of history, creation, and raw emotion.Gate of the Sun
By Humphrey Davies, Elias Khoury. 2006
Gate of the Sun is the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. After their country is torn apart in…
1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut. We enter a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many. Stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee, of the massacres that followed, of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived, and of love. Khalil--like Elias Khoury--is a truth collector, trying to make sense of the fragments and various versions of stories that have been told to him. His voice is intimate and direct, his memories are vivid, his humanity radiates from every page. Khalil lets his mind wander through time, from village to village, from one astonishing soul to another, and takes us with him. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.Dreams and Stones
By Bill Johnston, Magdalena Tulli. 2004
Dreams and Stones is a small masterpiece, one of the most extraordinary works of literature to come out of Central…
and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. In sculpted, poetic prose reminiscent of Bruno Schulz, it tells the story of the emergence of a great city. In Tulli's hands myth, metaphor, history, and narrative are combined to magical effect. Dreams and Stones is about the growth of a city, and also about all cities; at the same time it is not about cities at all, but about how worlds are created, trans- formed, and lost through words alone. A stunning debut by one of Europe's finest new writers.Grass for My Pillow
By Saiichi Maruya, Dennis Keene. 1966
First published in Japanese in 1966, the debut novel of the critically acclaimed author of Singular Rebellion is an unusual…
portrait of a deeply taboo subject in twentieth-century Japanese society: resistance to the draft in World War II. In 1940 Shokichi Hamada is a conscientious objector who dodges military service by simply disappearing from society, taking to the country as an itinerant peddler by the name of Sugiura until the end of the war in 1945. In 1965, Hamada works as a clerk at a conservative university, his war resistance a dark secret of the past that present-day events force into the light, confronting him with unexpected consequences of his refusal to conform twenty years earlier.The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction
By Reshmi Dutta-Flanders. 2017
This book introduces readers to linguistic stylistic analysis and combines both literary and linguistic analysis to explore suspense in crime…
fiction. Employing critical linguistics, discourse analysis and functional grammar, it demonstrates that suspense in plot-based stories is created through non-linear, causative presentation of the narrative. The author investigates how plot sequence is manipulated to ensure the reader cannot resolve the order of events until the end of the tale. From two-dimensional circumstantial detection in mystery stories to three-dimensional re-evaluation of offender orientation, she uses a linguistic-based stylistic framework to analyse offender motive. She also employs a 'discourse-based' frame analysis to examine the plot structure of crime stories for micro context and set-up scenarios, demonstrating that it is the unravelling of these devices that creates the suspense in murder mysteries and thrillers alike. Finally, she shows how grammaticization of the offending-self reveals an embedded diegetic space in the offender engagement discourse, provoking an intellectual and affective response and reshaping our overall outlook of the crime in the story. This book will appeal to researchers and students from literary and non-literary backgrounds looking for theoretical and practical advice on the linguistic stylistic approach to reading texts.The Peacekeeper's Wife
By Kevin Eze. 2015
The Peacekeeper's Wife explores lives torn by war, both far and near, strange and foreign, yet deep in the lives…
left behind. When Issa was sent as one of the several thousands to the peacekeeping mission in the Congo, Malika, his newly wedded wife, watched and waited in helpless horror, entangled in someone else's war. As Issa guarded the UN base, barring rebels from raping children, and patrolling borders of a rich ruined territory, back home in Segol, Malika felt the weight of separation, descending to a gradual but forceful emotional abyss. Fatimata, her mother-in-law, pained by the absence of a son, accused her of being a witch and sent her to Bintou, the marabout. The conflict between Malika and Fatimata escalated drawing fire from their mutual longing. The Peacekeeper's Wife deftly captures the human catastrophe of wars and migration in faraway lands through the excruciating loss and loneliness of estranged families, burdened by the separation from loved ones.Teaching Crime Fiction (Teaching the New English)
By Charlotte Beyer. 2018
More than perhaps any other genre, crime fiction invites debate over the role of popular fiction in English studies. This…
book offers lively original essays on teaching crime fiction written by experienced British and international scholar teachers, providing vital insight into this diverse genre through a series of compelling subjects. Taking its starting-point in pedagogical reflections and classroom experiences, the book explores methods for teaching students to develop their own critical perspectives as crime fiction critics, the impact of feminism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism on crime fiction, crime fiction and film, the crime short story, postgraduate perspectives, and more.Comics & Media
By Hillary L. Chute, Patrick Jagoda. 2014
The past decade has seen the medium of comics reach unprecedented heights of critical acclaim and commercial success. Comics &…
Media reflects that, bringing together an amazing array of contributors--creators and critics alike--to discuss the state, future, and potential of the medium. Loaded with full-color reproductions of work by such legends as R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Lynda Barry, the book addresses the place of comics in both a contemporary and historical context. Essays by such high-profile figures as Tom Gunning, N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and W. J. T. Mitchell address a stunning range of topics, including the place of comics in the history of aesthetics, changes to popular art forms, digital humanities, and ongoing tensions between new and old media. The result is a substantial step forward for our understanding of what comics are and can be, and the growing place they hold in our culture.The Blacker the Ink
By John Jennings, Craig Fischer, Frances Gateward, Rebecca Wanzo, William Lafi Youmans, Kinohi Nishikawa, Blair Davis, Nancy Goldstein, Daniel F. Yezbick, Sally Mcwilliams, James J. Zeigler, Qiana Whitted, Reynaldo Anderson, Hershini Bhana Young, Robin Means Coleman, Patrick F. Walter, Consuela Francis, Andre Carrington. 2015
When many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and spandex-wearing super-heroes. Perhaps,…
inevitably, these images are of white men (and more rarely, women). It was not until the 1970s that African American superheroes such as Luke Cage, Blade, and others emerged. But as this exciting new collection reveals, these superhero comics are only one small component in a wealth of representations of black characters within comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels over the past century. The Blacker the Ink is the first book to explore not only the diverse range of black characters in comics, but also the multitude of ways that black artists, writers, and publishers have made a mark on the industry. Organized thematically into "panels" in tribute to sequential art published in the funny pages of newspapers, the fifteen original essays take us on a journey that reaches from the African American newspaper comics of the 1930s to the Francophone graphic novels of the 2000s. Even as it demonstrates the wide spectrum of images of African Americans in comics and sequential art, the collection also identifies common character types and themes running through everything from the strip The Boondocks to the graphic novel Nat Turner. Though it does not shy away from examining the legacy of racial stereotypes in comics and racial biases in the industry, The Blacker the Ink also offers inspiring stories of trailblazing African American artists and writers. Whether you are a diehard comic book fan or a casual reader of the funny pages, these essays will give you a new appreciation for how black characters and creators have brought a vibrant splash of color to the world of comics.I Was There the Night He Died
By Ray Robertson. 2014
"Ray Robertson is an irrepressible voice, with brass balls, and a heart of gold. I Was There the Night He…
Died is a hilarious, moving, insightful, and timely piece of modern realism, delightfully void of literary pretension. Here, at last, is a novel that rocks and rolls."-Jonathan Evison, author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving"So," she says. "Who died tonight?"Sam Samson, meet Samantha. Sam's a novelist: his dad has Alzheimer's, his mother died of stroke, his wife was killed seventeen months ago in a car crash. Samantha, eighteen, is a cutter. She lives across the street from Sam's parents' house. Marijuana and loneliness spark an unlikely friendship, which Sam finds hard to navigate, especially as his dad's condition worsens and the money for his care suddenly vanishes. Yet somehow, between a record player and a park bench, through late-night conversations about the deaths of Sam's musical heroes, and ultimately through each other, Sam and Samantha learn to endure the things they fear most.Starring a 40-something writer who stumbles through the small town he thought he'd left behind forever, and a marooned teenager who wishes she were anywhere else, I Was There The Night He Died is a saucy, swaggering look at loss, love, and the redeeming power of music in the twenty-first century.Praise for Ray Robertson,A Women's National Book Association Great Group Reads Author, 2013Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize, 2011and the Trillium Prize, 2008 "Ray Robertson is the Jerry Lee Lewis of North American Letters."-Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners "Both playful and profound, laced with insight from music to history, politics to literature, high to low culture."-National Post "Robertson's art is as character-driven as Mordecai Richler's ... he wants us all to behave better and doesn't care who he angers along the way."-Globe and MailThe Little Review "Ulysses"
By James Joyce, Robert Scholes, Sean Latham, Mark Gaipa. 2015
James Joyce's Ulysses first appeared in print in the pages of an American avant-garde magazine, The Little Review, between 1918…
and 1920. The novel many consider to be the most important literary work of the twentieth century was, at the time, deemed obscene and scandalous, resulting in the eventual seizure of The Little Review and the placing of a legal ban on Joyce's masterwork that would not be lifted in the United States until 1933. For the first time, The Little Review "Ulysses" brings together the serial installments of Ulysses to create a new edition of the novel, enabling teachers, students, scholars, and general readers to see how one of the previous century's most daring and influential prose narratives evolved, and how it was initially introduced to an audience who recognized its radical potential to transform Western literature. This unique and essential publication also includes essays and illustrations designed to help readers understand the rich contexts in which Ulysses first appeared and trace the complex changes Joyce introduced after it was banned.Junebug
By Maureen Mccoy. 2004
"I was raised zero-parent," says hormone-addled 17-year-old Junebug Host, "what the newspapers call it when your mother is in prison…
and the father was just a sperm."Junebug has been visiting her mother in Ellisville Reformatory for Women ever since she was five years-old, when beauty queen Theresa Host calmly stepped out of their trailer with an axe and inexplicably bludgeoned a neighbor to death. But during the summer of Junebug's high school graduation--and the summer of her first wildly passionate affair--with a snake-smooth greaser 20 years her senior--Theresa reels in her oversexed daughter, and shatters her world, by suddenly announcing the motive she had kept to herself since the day of the murder: an act of vengeance for a crime in which Junebug was intimately involved. "I did it for you," she tells Junebug, who is thrown into a ferment of memory and guilt.Set in the outsized landscape of far-western Nebraska, a nebulous region little known in contemporary fiction, and peopled by characters whose extreme individuality is exceeded only by their eccentricity--born again Fundamentalist snake charmers, housewives making ends meet with phone sex 900-number businesses, a 300-pound New Age priestess and the traveling meat salesman who worships her, as well as the all-female inmate population of the Ellisville Reformatory, Junebug is a novel with the intensity of the mother/daughter bond itself, with all its wildness, tragedy and depth.Maureen McCoy is the author of three previous novels, Diving Blood, Summertime, and Walking After Midnight (Poseiden/Simon & Schuster). She received her MFA from the Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, and is a Professor of English at Cornell. Among her many awards are the James Michener Award, the Wurlitzer Foundation Award, and the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in the Humanities, chosen by Toni Morrison.A Question Mark Above the Sun
By David Koepsell, Eric Lorberer, Kent Johnson. 2012
"At the end of last year, an extraordinary work of detective criticism briefly appeared, despite legal threats. Kent Johnson's A…
Question Mark Above the Sun (Punch Press) movingly speculates that Kenneth Koch forged one of Frank O'Hara's greatest poems as a posthumous tribute to his friend. A noir-ish middle also recounts some very funny run-ins with the English avant-garde. Shame on the poets who forced its redaction and suppression." - Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Times Literary Supplement, including a previous edition of A Question Mark Above the Sun as one of its 2011 Books of the YearWhat you have in your hands is a kind of thought-experiment. It proffers the idea that a radical, secret gesture of poetic mourning and love was carried out by Kenneth Koch in memory of his close friend Frank O'Hara. I present the hypothesis as my own very personal expression of homage for the two great poets. The proposal I set forward here, nevertheless, is likely to make some readers annoyed, perhaps even indignant. Some already are. A few fellow writers, even, have worked hard through legal courses to block this book's publication. The forced redaction of key quotations herein (replaced by paraphrase) is one result of their efforts.In this self-described "thought experiment"-part fiction, part literary detective work, and always daring-Kent Johnson proposes a stunning rewrite of literary history. Suppressed upon initial release, this is a one-of-a-kind book by one of our most provocative contemporary authors.Kent Johnson is the author, translator, or editor of over thirty books of poetry and criticism, including Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala Publications, 1991), Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1998), and his most recent collection of poems, Homage to the Last Avante-Garde (Shearsman Books, 2008). Best known for his radical ideas about authorship, scholarship, and experimentation, it was with his translations of Hiroshima survivor poet Araki Yasusada that Johnson became both celebrated and castigated. Only after Yasusada's poems were published in American Poetry Review did readers learn there was no Yasusada, and that Johnson was not a translator on this project, but the author. Johnson is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation. He lives in Illinois, where he is a faculty member in English and Spanish at Highland Community College.High Strung
By Quinn Dalton. 2003
Years after running away from America and the secrets surrounding her mother's death, Merle Winslow winds up editing low-end adult…
novels at X Publishing in West London. Paired with a diplomat's son who has a fondness for hash cigarettes and sex toys, she is, as she puts it, "underfed, sexually exhausted, pornographically overwhelmed." But disappointment in love isn't the only thing that sends Merle back to the hometown she's tried for so long to forget. There is also her sneaking suspicion that she never really left her old life; she's simply dragged it along with her, "like an outfit that was ill-fitting and too revealing, but impossible to get rid of." She lands in ratty temporary housing in Florence, Ohio, with no car, no phone, and no idea of what to do next. Worse, she's reminded at every turn of her own secretive youth and her mother's days as an accused Vietnam agitator -- a legacy that still haunts the town as well as their family. As she retraces the story of her parents' troubled marriage, Merle realizes disturbing new truths about her mother's life and discovers that her stodgy father might be falling in love after years of living alone. She looks to her brother, Olin, for help. But he's shaky too, having abandoned a lucrative job marketing novelty meat thermometers for his aspirations in performance art. It's not until she finds herself believing in a local charter pilot's affections, a man who nurses a failing plane, that she lets go of the questions still resting on a dark curve of road in her heart. In vivid cinematic prose, High Strung balances humor on the rough edge of loss, regret, and wounded family love. Through it all, Merle Winslow's wry but hopeful voice reminds us of how we tell ourselves the story of our lives, real and imagined. Her travels -- back to her hometown and through her family's past -- lead us to the crossroads of place and memory. With this debut novel, award-winning writer Quinn Dalton proves a generous storyteller with an innate understanding of pace and passion. She assures us once and for all that the questions of love are the most important questions of our lives.