Download or read book Booth written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of the Year Real Simple • AARP • USA Today • NPR • Virginia Living Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth—breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one—is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war. As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country’s leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy. Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.
Download or read book A Companion to American Fiction 1865 1914 written by Robert Paul Lamb and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of scholars, students, and interested general readers. An exceptionally broad-ranging and accessible Companion to the study of American fiction of the post-civil war period and the early twentieth century Brings together 29 essays by top scholars, each of which presents a synthesis of the best research and offers an original perspective Divided into sections on historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors Covers a mixture of canonical and the non-canonical themes, authors, literatures, and critical approaches Explores innovative topics, such as ecological literature and ecocriticism, children’s literature, and the influence of Darwin on fiction
Download or read book Postmodern American Fiction written by Paula Geyh and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1998 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects works by sixty-eight authors, including William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Art Spiegelman, Lynda Barry, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Douglas Coupland
Download or read book Stoner written by John Williams and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--
Download or read book American Dirt Oprah s Book Club written by Jeanine Cummins and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "También de este lado hay sueños. On this side, too, there are dreams. Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with four books he would like to buy--two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia's husband's tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia--trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier's reach doesn't extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to? American Dirt will leave readers utterly changed when they finish reading it. A page-turner filled with poignancy, drama, and humanity on every page, it is a literary achievement."--
Download or read book If God Meant to Interfere written by Christopher Douglas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.
Download or read book The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction written by Tessa Roynon and published by BAAS Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an invaluable survey of the allusions to ancient Greek and Roman culture in the work of seven major modern American novelists: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Marilynne Robinson.
Download or read book American Fiction in the Cold War written by Thomas H. Schaub and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schaub presents American fiction in the political climate of its time. Through the 1930s, he portrays authors as typically left of center and becoming disillusioned with communism as a result of Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler. Subsequent authors embraced a His general discussion comes to focus on the works of Barth, O'Connor, Ellison, and Mailer. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book A Confederacy of Dunces written by John Kennedy Toole and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twenty First Century American Fiction written by Joshua Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the most exciting trends in 21st century US fiction's genres, themes, and concepts.
Download or read book Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism written by Bryan M. Santin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.
Download or read book The Family A Read with Jenna Pick written by Naomi Krupitsky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Instant New York Times bestseller A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick A captivating debut novel about the tangled fates of two best friends and daughters of the Italian mafia, and a coming-of-age story of twentieth-century Brooklyn itself. Two daughters. Two families. One inescapable fate. Sofia Colicchio is a free spirit, loud and untamed. Antonia Russo is thoughtful, ever observing the world around her. Best friends since birth, they live in the shadow of their fathers’ unspoken community: the Family. Sunday dinners gather them each week to feast, discuss business, and renew the intoxicating bond borne of blood and love. But the disappearance of Antonia’s father drives a whisper-thin wedge between the girls as they grow into women, wives, mothers, and leaders. Their hearts expand in tandem with Red Hook and Brooklyn around them, as they push against the boundaries of society’s expectations and fight to preserve their complex but life-sustaining friendship. One fateful night their loyalty to each other and the Family will be tested. Only one of them can pull the trigger before it’s too late.
Download or read book From Ashes to Song written by Hilary Hauck and published by . This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 1911 in Piedmont, Italy. Pietro has at last captured the melody of the harvest on his clarinet, but before he can share his music, a deadly disease sweeps through the countryside, forcing his family to burn their vineyard to stop its spread. The loss is too much for Pietro's grandfather, and by morning, Pietro has lost two of the most precious things in life-his grandfather and the vineyard. Adrift with grief, Pietro travels to America and takes a job in a Pennsylvania coal mine where his musician's hands blister and his days are spent in silence until one day, the beautiful voice and gentle heart of his friend's wife stirs a new song within him. As Pietro draws inspiration from Assunta, his gift for music returns. But when tragedy strikes and Pietro is to blame, he is forced to confront the consequences of his admiration for another man's wife, all while fighting for the love he never thought he'd find. Inspired by true events, From Ashes to Song is a story of unconventional love, hope, and the extraordinary gifts brought to America by ordinary people in the great wave of immigration.
Download or read book Form and Fable in American Fiction written by Daniel Hoffman and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.
Download or read book Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction written by Keith Byerman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-05-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.
Download or read book Ecosickness in Contemporary U S Fiction written by Heather Houser and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings, and as efforts to prevent ecological and human degradation aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between ecological and bodily endangerment and uses affect and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of modern U.S. novels and memoirs, this study demonstrates the mode’s crucial role in shaping thematic content and formal and affective literary strategies. Examining works by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how these authors unite experiences of environmental and somatic damage through narrative affects that draw attention to ecological phenomena, organize perception, and convert knowledge into ethics. Traversing contemporary cultural studies, ecocriticism, affect studies, and literature and medicine, Houser juxtaposes ecosickness fiction against new forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction recasts recent narrative as a laboratory in which affective and perceptual changes both support and challenge political projects.
Download or read book Sensational Designs written by Jane Tompkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986-05-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative book, Jane Tompkins seeks to move the study of literature away from the small group of critically approved texts that have dominated literary discussion over the decades, to allow inclusion of texts ignored or denigrated by the literary academy. Sensational Designs challenges comfortable assumptions about what makes a literary work a "classic."
