Download or read book An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom written by Jonathan Russell Clark and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does Bolaño's masterpiece hint at his own life, or is the author himself a literary invention? Literary Nonfiction. After Devouring 2666 by Roberto Bola�o on the New York City subway, Jonathan Russell Clark does what any good literary critic would do�he reads everything by Bola�o he can get his hands on. But the more he learns about the writer's unlikely life, the less it makes sense. Bola�o cultivated ambiguities and false identities, almost as if he were laying a trap for his future biographers. Clark's investigation into Bola�o's magnum opus is a stumble through a labyrinth where fiction and self-mythologizing converge. This book is part of a new series from Fiction Advocate called Afterwords. "A Sontag-worthy encapsulation of another writer."--Christopher Wood, The Quarterly Conversation "If you have read 2666 and loved it, like most people who've read 2666, then AN OASIS OF HORROR IN A DESERT OF BOREDOM is something of a must-read."--D. F. Lovett

Download or read book 2666 written by Roberto Bolaño and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 1053 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

Download or read book Last Evenings on Earth written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of the "failed generation" set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe.

Download or read book Dracula written by Elizabeth Miller and published by Parkstone International. This book was released on 2019-09-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transylvanian mystique and legendary hauntedness surround the most infamous Bram Stoker’s protagonists, forming a legacy that allows the myth to continue into modern times, maintaining a cultish following, yet broadening to a general fascination. Intrigued by evil and gore, Stoker developed a literary presence that was effortlessly translated to screen by the likes of Murnau, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Francis Ford Coppola. Dracula became such an obsession as it embodied a taboo subject matter: the desire for blood and sex. Filled with extraordinary pictures of the Count, his literary companions, and the movie idols, this is a treasure only to be read by daylight!

Download or read book Scoundrel Time written by Lillian Hellman and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2000-07-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1952, Hellman joined the ranks of intellectuals and artists called before Congress to testify about political subversion. Terrified yet defiant, Hellman refused to incriminate herself or others, and managed to avoid trial. Nonetheless the experience brought devastating controversy and loss. First published in 1972, her retelling of the time features a remarkable cast of characters, including her lover, novelist Dashiell Hammett, a slew of famous friends and colleagues, and a pack of "scoundrels" -- ruthless, ambitious politicians and the people who complied with their demands.

Download or read book An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom written by Brian Maguire and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The War Nerd Iliad written by and published by Feral House. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We recognize the names: Achilles, Odysseus, Zeus, and Apollo. We're taught that The Iliad is a foundational text of civilization. But who has really read the text? Until now, The Iliad was hijacked by academics and used to bludgeon schoolchildren as a boring-yet- mandatory reading. Poet, novelist, essayist, and former teacher John Dolan revisits this ancient tale and restores it to its ancient glory. The Greeks and Trojans are still fighting. The gods are still interfering. But in Dolan's version, you'll be amazed at how funny, raw, and terrifying this doomed world of war really is. He strips away clunky, archaic language to reveal the true meaning and themes that animate this tale of war and futility. John Dolan's work under the nom de guerre "Gary Brecher The War Nerd" has been met with both acclaim and controversy. Dolan's version of The Iliad is sapped of the usual saccharine romance attributed to "heroes" and lets the action tell the story. Regardless of attributed name, Dolan/Brecher is an astute observer of modern warfare who now turns that keen analysis to the most classical of documented battles, The Iliad. John Dolan now works with Mark Ames (of eXile fame) to produce the Radio War Nerd weekly podcast on military matters. Born in Denver, Colorado, Dolan currently lives in Macedonia.

Download or read book The Nature of Love Volume 3 written by Irving Singer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-02-27 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final volume of Singer's trilogy discusses ideas about love in the work of writers ranging from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy to Freud, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Shaw, and others in the contemporary world. Irving Singer's trilogy The Nature of Love has been called "majestic" (New York Times Book Review), "monumental" (Boston Globe), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" (Nous), "wise and magisterial" (Times Literary Supplement), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking [that] is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" (Christian Science Monitor). In the third volume, Singer examines the pervasive dialectic between optimistic idealism and pessimistic realism in modern thinking about the nature of love. He begins by discussing "anti-Romantic Romantics" (focusing on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy), influential nineteenth-century thinkers whose views illustrate much of the ambiguity and self-contradiction that permeate thinking about love in the last hundred years. He offers detailed studies of Freud, Proust, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, and Santayana, and he maps the ideas about love in Continental existentialism, particularly those of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Singer finally envisages a future of cooperation between pluralistic humanists and empirical scientists. This last volume of Singer's trilogy does not pretend to offer the final word on the subject, any more than do most of the philosophers he discusses, but his masterful work can take its place beside their earlier investigations into these vast and complex questions.

Download or read book Nazi Literature in the Americas written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-29 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A playful and entirely original novel masquerading as a mini-encyclopedia of nonexistent Nazi literature, Bolano's work is a tour de force of black humor.

Download or read book Long Division written by Kiese Laymon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).

Download or read book How to Start Writing and When to Stop Advice for Writers written by Wislawa Szymborska and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once kind and hilarious, this compilation of the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s advice to writers is illustrated with her own marvelous collages In this witty “how-to” guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories,” she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave—anonymously—for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life. She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. “I sigh to be a poet,” Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. “I groan to be an editor,” Szymborska responds. Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry’s “prosaic side”: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?” This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike. Perhaps you could learn to love in prose.

Download or read book Something New Under the Sun written by Alexandra Kleeman and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and environmental collapse in “a darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality” (Time) LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Vulture, Thrillist, Literary Hub “An urgent novel about our very near future, and a deeply addictive pleasure.”—Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies Novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Los Angeles to oversee the film adaptation of one of his books and try to impress his wife and daughter back home with this last-ditch attempt at professional success. But California is not as he imagined. Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are everywhere, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick finds an unlikely partner in Cassidy Carter—the cynical starlet of his film—and the two investigate the sun-scorched city, where they discover the darker side of all that glitters in Hollywood. Something New Under the Sun is an unmissable novel for our present moment—a bold exploration of environmental catastrophe in the age of alternative facts, and “a ghost story not of the past but of the near future” (The New York Times).

Download or read book Skateboard written by Jonathan Russell Clark and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. How did the skateboard go from a menacing fad to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide juggernaut possible. Skateboarders are their own historians, which means the real history of skating exists not in archives or texts but in a hodgepodge of random and iconic videos, tattered photographs, and, mostly, in the blurry memories of the people who lived through it all. From California beaches to Tokyo 2020, the skateboard has outlasted its critics to form a global community of creativity, camaraderie, and unceasing progression. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Download or read book The Women I Love written by Francesco Pacifico and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity, from the author of Class and The Story of My Purity Marcello, an editor and poet, is on the brink of his forties. Like everyone in his life, including his sister-in-law, he’s writing a novel. This novel. This novel will be about women. Love. Growing older. Maybe even taking responsibility. But unfortunately for Marcello, the women in his life resist definition. They flit and flicker constantly between archetype and actuality: sirens and saviors, subordinates and savants, vixens and villains. So Marcello cannot write plainly about love. Instead, he tries to write into the complexities of his many relationships: Eleonora, the junior editor, his former protegeé and sometime lover; Barbara, his claustrophobic girlfriend; his estranged gay sister; his elegant mother. Fresh, frank, and painfully cool, Francesco Pacifico’s The Women I Love dives nakedly into gender, sex, and power. Set in a vivid and alcoholic Italy, it acknowledges and subverts the narrow ways canonical male writers gaze at, and somehow fail to see, women—illuminating the possibility of equity between people in love, in bed, in work, and in life.

Download or read book Alcoholics Anonymous written by Bill W. and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 75th anniversary e-book version of the most important and practical self-help book ever written, Alcoholics Anonymous. Here is a special deluxe edition of a book that has changed millions of lives and launched the modern recovery movement: Alcoholics Anonymous. This edition not only reproduces the original 1939 text of Alcoholics Anonymous, but as a special bonus features the complete 1941 Saturday Evening Post article “Alcoholics Anonymous” by journalist Jack Alexander, which, at the time, did as much as the book itself to introduce millions of seekers to AA’s program. Alcoholics Anonymous has touched and transformed myriad lives, and finally appears in a volume that honors its posterity and impact.

Download or read book Mona written by Pola Oloixarac and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Both a wicked satire of the literary élite and an exploration of art and violence . . . Terrifying, brilliant, and dangerous." —The New Yorker Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she is something of an anthropological curiosity—a woman writer of color treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings—she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity. When she is nominated for “the most important literary award in Europe,” Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, so she trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. Now she is stuck in the company of all her jet-lagged—and mostly male—competitors, arriving from Japan, France, Armenia, Iran, and Colombia. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and private resentments, stab rivals in the back, and hop in bed together. All the while, Mona keeps stumbling across the mysterious traces of a violence she cannot explain. As her adventures in Scandinavia unfold, Mona finds that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up with them in the middle of nowhere. In Mona, Pola Oloixarac paints a hypnotic, scabrous, and ultimately jaw-dropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she does and does not belong. A survivor of both patronization and bizarre sexual encounters, Mona is a new kind of feminist. But her past won’t stay past, and strange forces are working to deliver her the test of a lifetime.

Download or read book Mud and Stars written by Sara Wheeler and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the writers of the golden age as her guides—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others—Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nationalities, religions, and languages in the Caucasus. Bypassing major cities as much as possible, she goes instead to the places associated with the country’s literary masters. Wheeler weaves these writers’ lives and works around their historical homes, giving us rich portraits of the many diverse Russias from which these writers spoke. Illustrated with both historical images and contemporary snapshots of the people and places that shaped her journey, Mud and Stars gives us timely, witty, and deeply personal insights into Russia, then and now. One of Smithsonian’s Ten Best Travel Books of the Year