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Showing 161 - 180 of 582 items
By Will Browning, R jean Ducharme. 2011
Sixteen-year-old Miles has run away from home, inviting his childhood companion, the fourteen-year-old Inuit orphan Chateaugué, to join him in…
a rented flat opposite Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Montreal. There they construct a chaste life for themselves, living as brother and sister. They spend their days riding bicycles wildly through the streets of the city, dodging the automobiles that symbolize for them the adult world they despise, a world that has dominated the landscape with its roadmaps of social discourse. They spend hours at the library, laughing with disdain at how the classics have become venerated, how their authors' words and turns of phrase have become confused with the things and actions they signify. Enthralled by the works of the "mad" poet Nelligan, Miles begins a journal, determined to free language from the constraints of convention, but finds he cannot write anything without immediately conjuring up its opposite.To escape the boredom that history seems to have decreed shall be re-enacted endlessly by all grown-ups, Miles and Chateaugué enter into a suicide pact to preserve their childhood freedom and purity from the debasement of the adult roles pre-ordained for them.Destitute after spending what little money they have, Miles goes to a bar in search of a drink, where he is seduced by an older woman, and suddenly finds himself both attracted and repelled by the pleasures and debasements of the flesh. Having stepped out of their world of childhood innocence, can he return to Chateaugué and consummate their vows, or is this brush with experience irrevocable?Written in a style that echoes the work of Arthur Rimbaud and William S. Burroughs, Ducharme's vision is darkly prophetic of a world that has lost its innocence, and on which "our lady of good help" now only gazes with an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile.By Philip Roth. 2013
On March 19, 2013, a distinguished group of writers and critics gathered at the Newark Museum's Billy Johnson Auditorium in…
Newark, New Jersey, to celebrate the extraordinary career and lasting literary legacy of Philip Roth on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This keepsake volume gathers remarks from the evening's speakers, a fitting tribute to the only living novelist whose work is collected in the Library of America series. Here you'll find Jonathan Lethem, hilariously recounting his first consciousness-raising encounter with Roth's work through the Kafkaesque novel The Breast; Hermione Lee, tracing the Shakespearian themes in Roth's books, from Portnoy's Complaint to The Humbling; Alain Finkielkraut, offering a deep reading of Roth's final novel, Nemesis; Claudia Roth Pierpont, assessing Roth's portrayal of women in such books as Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain; Edna O'Brien, recalling her long friendship with Roth; and the author himself, offering a quintessentially Rothian valediction.By John Patrick Shanley. 2016
'What I admire most is that his plays are beautifully well made, economical, sharp and coherent. He's not a misanthrope,…
but he's in pursuit of why people behave as badly as they do along with having a great compassion for them. That's an unusual and interesting combination.'--Tony Kushner, on John Patrick ShanleyWhen a troubled but gifted boy from the South Bronx finds himself shipped off to a private school in New Hampshire, the adjustment to the alien environment will lead to his ultimate dissolution or redemption. Teachers in the affluent institution do not know what to make of the new boisterous student, though the challenge really lies in his self-perception. Like his most celebrated play, Doubt, the author has based this new work on his own personal experiences of growing up as a teenager in the South Bronx and his time spent at a prep school in New England. Shanley has created an elemental study of a young's man search for his place in the world.John Patrick Shanley's plays include Outside Mullingar, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, and Dirty Story, along with his "Church and State" trilogy, Doubt, Defiance, and Storefront Church. For his play Doubt, he received both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He has nine films to his credit, including the five-time Oscar-nominated Doubt, and Moonstruck, which received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The Writers Guild of America awarded Shanley the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing.By Bill Johnston, Magdalena Tulli. 2007
A single streetcar line runs around the sleepy suburban square of an unnamed city. One day--out of nowhere--a group of…
hapless refugees pour from the streetcar and set up camp in the square. The residents grow hostile to the disruption and chaos, and eventually take matters into their own hands... Flaw is Tulli's most intense and personally motivated work to date, while still retaining the signature mind-and word-play so admired by critics and her growing readership.By Hope Nicholson. 2017
A woman's place is saving the universe. Think comic books can’t feature strong female protagonists? Think again! In The Spectacular…
Sisterhood of Superwomen you’ll meet the most fascinating exemplars of the powerful, compelling, entertaining, and heroic female characters who’ve populated comic books from the very beginning. This spectacular sisterhood includes costumed crimebusters like Miss Fury, super-spies like Tiffany Sinn, sci-fi pioneers like Gale Allen, and even kid troublemakers like Little Lulu. With vintage art, publication details, a decade-by-decade survey of industry trends and women’s roles in comics, and spotlights on iconic favorites like Wonder Woman and Ms. Marvel, The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen proves that not only do strong female protagonists belong in comics, they’ve always been there.By Glen S. Close. 2018
This book examines the central significance of sexualized female corpses in modern and contemporary Hispanic and Anglophone crime fiction. Beginning…
with the foundational detective fictions of the nineteenth century, it draws from diverse subgenres to describe a transatlantic tradition of necropornography characterized by lascivious interest in female cadavers, dissection, morgues, femicide, and snuff movies. Hard-boiled and police procedural classics from the U.S. and the U.K. are juxtaposed with texts by established Spanish and Spanish American genre masters and with obscure works that prefigure the contemporary transmedial boom in corpse-centered fictions. The rhetoric and aesthetics of necropornographic crime fiction are related to those of popular crime journalism and forensic-science television dramas. This study argues that crime fiction has long fixated disproportionately on the corpses of beautiful young white women and continues to treat their deaths and autopsies as occasions for male visual pleasure, male subjective self-affirmation and male homosocial bonding.British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation makes an original contribution to the field of British Romantic Hellenism…
(and Romanticism more broadly) by emphasizing the diversity of Romantic-era writers’ attitudes towards, and portrayals of, Modern Greece. Whereas, traditionally, studies of British Romantic Hellenism have predominantly focused on Europe’s preoccupation with an idealized Ancient Greece, this study emphasizes the nuanced and complex nature of British Romantic writers’ engagements with Modern Greece. Specifically, the book emphasizes the ways that early nineteenth-century British literature about contemporary Greece helped to strengthen British-Greek intercultural relations and, ultimately, to situate Greece within a European sphere of influence.By Michael J. Blouin. 2018
Mass-Market Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 1972–2017 tracks the transformation of liberal thought in the contemporary United States…
through the unique lens of the popular paperback. The book focuses on cultural shifts as they appear in works written by some of the most widely-read authors of the last fifty years: the idea of love within a New Economy (Danielle Steel), the role of government in scientific inquiry (Michael Crichton), entangled political alliances and legacies in the aftermath of the 1960s (Tom Clancy), the restructured corporation (John Grisham), and the blurred line between state and personal empowerment (Dean Koontz). To address the current crisis, this book examines how the changed character of American liberalism has been rendered legible for a mass audience.By Edward Barnaby. 2018
Have industrial-age technologies and visual discourses transformed us into spectators of the real, and can realist fiction make that transformation…
visible to us? This book brings Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and an array of cultural criticism into dialogue with novels by Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Rushdie, Carey and Barnes to foreground literary realism’s critique of visual culture, including Gothic architectural revival, neoclassicism, tourism, historical pageantry, postcolonial cinema and photography, museums, preservationism, urbanism and artisanal neo-folk movements. Barnaby advances the concept of meta-spectacle to distinguish realist fiction that engages ethically with visual discourses from realist-ic fiction that reproduces the visible veneer of reality for aesthetic consumption. He highlights the limitations of artistic critiques of spectacle, considers their resilience toward a culture industry that continuously repackages iconoclasm as iconicity, and reflects upon the process of reorienting the reader to comprehend realist gestures. By heightening the capacity to recognize our own immersion within objectified representations of the real, Realist Critiques of Visual Culture demonstrates how literary realism remains vital within a society that is so deeply invested in visually replicating and archiving lived experience.By Yael Shapira. 2018
Inventing the Gothic Corpse shows how a series of bold experiments in eighteenth-century British realist and Gothic fiction transform the…
dead body from an instructive icon into a thrill device. For centuries, vivid images of the corpse were used to deliver a spiritual or political message; today they appear regularly in Gothic and horror stories as a source of macabre pleasure. Yael Shapira’s book tracks this change at it unfolds in eighteenth-century fiction, from the early novels of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, through the groundbreaking mid-century works of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, to the Gothic fictions of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and Minerva Press authors Isabella Kelly and Mrs. Carver. In tracing this long historical arc, Shapira illuminates a hidden side of the history of the novel: the dead body, she shows, helps the fledgling literary form confront its own controversial ability to entertain. Her close scrutiny of fictional corpses across the long eighteenth century reveals how the dead body functions as a test of the novel’s intentions, a chance for novelists to declare their allegiances in the battle between the didactic and the “merely” pleasurable.By Oana-Celia Gheorghiu. 2018
This book argues that twenty-first-century neorealist fiction is inspired by political and journalistic discourses and, along with them, constitutes one…
of the many representations of the attacks on September 11 and their outcomes. Adopting a neorealist stance, this book is placed at the intersection of realism and fiction, with often reference to what is perceived as objective writing (media and political texts), not at all so divorced from the practice of literary writings on the event that shook the world on September 11, 2001.By Mark Axelrod-Sokolov. 2018
This book examines one work dealing with madness from each of five prominent authors. Including discussion of Fowles, Hamsun, Hesse,…
Kafka, and Poe, it delineates the specific type of madness the author associates with each text, and explores the reason for that - such as a historical moment, physical pressure (such as starvation), or the author’s or his narrator’s perspective. The project approaches the texts it explores from the perspective of a writer of fiction as well as from the perspective of a critic, and discusses them as unique manifestations of literary madness. It is of particular significance for those interested in the interplay of fiction, literary criticism, and psychology.By Peter Garratt, Arthur Rose, Stefanie Heine, Naya Tsentourou, Corinne Saunders. 2019
This open access book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range…
of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, Fin de Siècle Aesthetics, American Poetics and the Postcolonial Novel, this book offers the first transhistorical study of breath in literature. At the same time, it shows how the study of breath in literature can contribute to recent developments in the Medical Humanities.By Paul Shepherd. 2005
[A] haunting novel. . . . This book brims with the poetry of the working class, seldom sung lyrics of…
working men and women.--from the introduction by Larry Woiwode"Shepherd is a master craftsman, and the subtlety of his art, the unassuming elegance of its architecture, rendered me spellbound and finally grateful. I don't think I shall ever forget this fine book, its honest, guileless voice leading me along into the fire."--Bob Shacochis"A riveting exploration of what it is to be an outsider even in your own head. Shepherd has written a gripping story of childhood angst--psychologically thrilling, lyrically exact."--Janet BurrowayLevi Revel is a boy in danger of losing his family and maybe his mind. He's in awe of his father, Everest, a majestic dreamer, a master builder, a man with a violent, secret past. As the family moves from state to state, Levi hears solace in the voice of God, a voice that sends him preaching from treetops and roofs.But the family begins to fall apart, and as Levi enters adolescence, he hears more troubling things: other voices, terrifying sounds, warnings. When Everest takes him on a high-speed, cross-country chase to win back Levi's mother--by force if necessary--Levi realizes how much danger they all are in.Tender and frightening, this debut novel takes readers across America, through the eyes and ears of a child whose family is haunted by a past they can't outrun. From a boy lost in a world of imaginary voices and chilling destruction to a young man who can rebuild steeples, the story Levi tells is the triumph of persistence over moments of isolation and despair.Paul Shepherd lives in Tallahassee, Florida.By Fran ois Lelord. 2014
Una as0mbrosa historia de descubrimiento personal. Un increíble viaje en busca de la felicidad. Érase una vez un joven psiquiatra…
francés llamado Hector que se sentía vacío, pues sabía muy bien que, a pesar de su buena voluntad, no era capaz de conseguir que la gente fuera feliz. Ser un buen profesional y tener un buen ojo para indicar el tratamiento adecuado no le llenaba. Necesitaba algo más.Pensó que, si hallaba el origen de la infelicidad, podría desvelar el secreto de las personas felices. También se planteó una larga serie de preguntas sobre la felicidad: ¿Por qué soñamos con alcanzarla? ¿Qué es más importante, el éxito o la relación con los demás? ¿Depende de las circunstancias personales o de una particular forma de ver las cosas?A raíz de estas cuestiones, Hector inició un viaje que lo llevó de China al continente africano, pasando por Estados Unidos... Estaba dispuesto a llegar hasta el fin del mundo para obtener una respuesta.«Una novela deliciosamente naíf, un pasatiempo iconoclasta que te reconcilia con el mundo. En vez de dar lecciones anticuadas de moral, Lelord nos ofrece una definición de felicidad diferente.» L'Express«Una caja replena de delicias filosóficas, cuyo efecto es sorprendentemente gozoso.»The Independent«Un libro que seducirá hasta al lector más erudito y contenido.»Cosmopolitan«Una historia magistral cuyo protagonista, tras la búsqueda en profundidad de valores, emerge como un fenomenal aventurero.» Aachener ZeitungBy Bill Harris. 2018
In the twenty-five linked short stories in his collection, I Got to Keep Moving, celebrated Detroit author Bill Harris vividly…
and deftly describes the inner and outer lives of a wide cast of characters as they navigate changing circumstances in the southern United States, pre- and post-Civil War. Addressing vital aspects of life—hope, family, violence, movement, and memory—I Got to Keep Moving is as mesmerizing as it is revealing. A veritable Canterbury Tales, the book follows a group of African Americans, beginning in the 1830s on a plantation in the fictional town of Acorn, Alabama, as they head north, and ending in the Midwest in the 1940s. The opening section contains nine stories that investigate the events that compelled the party to migrate. The second section consists of fifteen stories focusing on the life and travels of Pearl Moon and her blind son, and introduces the reader to a range of individuals—a white southern prison guard and his family, an ex-cowboy and expert marksman from Oklahoma, and the owner and entertainers of an "All Colored" traveling minstrel show, to name a few—during their quest to find a place for themselves. The third section, written in three voices of surviving members of the Nettles family, observes the truth of memory and the importance of who gets to tell and preserve it. Harris gives readers an unfiltered look into the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, while demonstrating the strength and complexity of the players involved. Readers of fiction, especially those interested in short fiction and African American fiction, will find this stunning and unique collection a welcome addition to their libraries.By Michela Baldo. 2019
This book examines the concept of translation as a return to origins and as restitution of lost narratives, and is…
based on the idea of diaspora as a term that depicts the longing to return home and the imaginary reconstructions and reconstitutions of home by migrants and translators. The author analyses a corpus made up of novels and a memoir by Italian-Canadian writers Mary Melfi, Nino Ricci and Frank Paci, examining the theme of return both within the writing itself and also in the discourse surrounding the translations of these works into Italian. These ‘reconstructions’ are analysed through the lens of translation, and more specifically through the notion of written code-switching, understood here as a fictional tool which symbolizes the translational movements between different points of view. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation and interpreting, migration studies, and Italian and diasporic writing.By Becky Thomas, Monica Sweeney, John McCann. 2014
Explore four of Shakespeare’s comedies like never before-with LEGO bricks! This book presents Shakespeare’s most delightful comedies, A Midsummer Night’s…
Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Tempest, in one thousand amazing color photographs. This unique adaptation of the world’s most famous plays stays true to Shakespeare’s original text, while giving audiences an exciting new perspective as the stories are retold with the universally beloved construction toy.Get caught up in hilarious misadventures as brick Puck leads the lovers astray through the brick forests of Athens. Watch Cupid kill with traps in the plot to marry Beatrice and Benedict. Marvel at the changing disguises of the men vying for brick Bianca’s affections, and feel the churn of the ocean as Prospero sinks his brother’s ship into the brick sea. These iconic stories jump off the page with fun, creative sets built brick by brick, scene by scene!This incredible method of storytelling gives new life to Shakespeare’s masterpieces. With an abridged form that maintains original Shakespearean language and modern visuals, this ode to the Bard is sure to please all audiences, from the most versed Shakespeare enthusiasts to young students and newcomers alike!By Nuria Labari. 2019
Una novela rompedora que disecciona el mito de la maternidad desde una nueva perspectiva y que enriquece el debate sobre…
la ambivalencia que genera esta experiencia en la identidad femenina contemporánea. «Prepárate para leer un libro como nunca has leído antes, que rompe las convenciones de lo narrativo y lo biográfico, de los valores no sólo tradicionales, sino también de los alternativos. Un libro de humor, de amor y de dolor, tan embriagante como un vino fuerte y tan tumultuoso como la vida. A decir verdad, no concibo que pueda haber alguien a quien no le guste.» Rosa Montero La protagonista de esta novela tiene treinta y cinco años y es estéril cuando la Idea de ser madre se le mete en el cuerpo "como un cáncer". Cinco años y dos hijas después cree haberlo ganado y perdido todo. Es entonces cuando decide escribir una historia a vida o muerte, un duelo entre la escritoraque fue y la madre en que se ha convertido. Si gana la madre, el libro será un diario sobre su maternidad y una parte de la escritora morirá en el intento. Si gana la escritora, la ficción le arrebatará su propia historia al elevar su maternidad a lo universal. En ese caso, será la escritora quien fulmine a la madre. El resultado es un relato apabullante y siempre ambivalente sobre una experiencia definitiva donde humor, amor y horror se convierten en hilos de la misma trenza. La protagonista examina el mito (pero también el timo) de la maternidad, dialogando abiertamente con todas las voces del pasado que de una manera u otra han alimentado su condición de mujer (y en consecuencia de madre): desde la legendaria homínida Lucy, "madre de la humanidad" hasta la Cenicienta, pasando por Platón, Teresa de Jesús, Darwin, Maupassant o Simone de Beauvoir. En esta novela donde convergen la ficción, la autobiografía y el ensayo, la protagonista trata su propia y palpitante maternidad como un cadáver al que disecciona en directo ante el inevitable estupor del lector. Una invitación abierta a todos los hombres y mujeres que se atrevan a entrar en la mente y el cuerpo de una madre. «Hay muchas maneras de hablar de la maternidad, pero la de Nuria Labari es profundamente original y brillante. Esta novela es una explosión, un viaje intelectual a través de los instintos más primarios y del amor más humano. Nuria Labari ha escrito un libro necesario sobre un tema universal.» Lara Moreno De su anterior novela, Cosas que brillan cuando están rotas, se ha dicho:«Una historia contada en el filo de la navaja, una crónica novelada que indaga en el dolor y en la maldad, pero también en el amor, la solidaridad y la esperanza.»TodoLiteratura «Con una escritura limpia, veloz y punzante, que se mete en el alma del lector desde el principio, la novela de Labari deja un poso para la reflexión sobre el dolor y un espacio para comprender y socorrer al individuo frágil y contingente en medio de la sociedad de hoy.»El ConfidencialThis study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the…
nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city’s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area’s marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury’s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual “fraction” known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.