Download or read book Personal Days written by Ed Park and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels. There’s Pru, the former grad student turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety stalks him in his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jack II, who distributes unwanted backrubs–aka “jackrubs”–to his co-workers. On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin. Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and wondered: “Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?” Praise for PERSONAL DAYS "Witty and appealing...Anyone who has ever groaned to hear 'impact' used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls 'a layoff narrative' for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park's book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn't a journalist think there can't be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now." —The New York Times Book Review "Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated." —"Three First Novels that Just Might Last," —Time A "comic and creepy début...Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?" —The New Yorker "The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22—a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence."—Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times "In Personal Days Ed Park has crafted a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always adroit novel about office life...Sharp and lovely language." —Newsweek "A warm and winning fiction debut." — Publishers Weekly "I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope." — Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan "The funniest book I've read about the way we work now." –William Poundstone, author of Fortune's Formula "Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan vernacular." —Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai

Download or read book Hemingway Deadlights written by Michael Atkinson and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A witty, literate, and action-filled debut, Hemingway Deadlights catches the famed author in his later years, battling to solve the injustices in a flawed world. It is 1956 and Hemingway has spent much of the year at his home in Key West, hiding from tourists and autograph hunters. But a friend's sudden death rouses Papa from his idyll. To say that the cause of death is suspicious is to put it lightly. It's not every day that a part-time smuggler is impaled on a harpoon. "Neatly captures the personality and uproarious lifestyle of an American literary icon. ... A mystery sure to please Hemingway aficionados." - Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Fin de mill naire French Fiction written by Ruth Cruickshank and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The turn of the millennium in France coincided with a number of tangible crises and apocalyptic discourses, and with the growth of the mass media and global market, further generating and manipulating crisis. In this original, wide-ranging but closely analytical study, Cruickshank contextualizes and reads the work of four influential writers of prose fiction —- Angot, Echenoz, Houellebecq, and Redonnet —- teasing out each one's response to this convergence. She suggests that the recurrent fictional and cultural trope of the turning point has both aesthetic and critical potential. Bringing together analyses spanning literature, thought, and culture, she identifies and critiques the ways in which, on the eve of the twenty-first century, different theoretical and fictional approaches confront the manipulation of crisis discourses. Drawing on a 'long twentieth century' of crisis thinking, Cruickshank counters the perception that a postmodern model of perpetual crisis is culturally dominant, and establ

Download or read book Dictionnaire Napoleon written by Jean F. Tulard and published by . This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Contemporary French Cultural Studies written by William Kidd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of French culture has long ceased to be purely centred on literature. Undergraduate French courses now embrace all forms of cultural production and consumption, and students need to have a broad knowledge of everything from day-time TV and the latest detective novels to debates about national identity and immigration policies. This stimulating text is an introduction to the full range of contemporary French culture. Written by a group of leading academics both within and outside France, each chapter focuses on a topic from the French cultural scene today. Starting with an overview of resources for further information (both in print and online), the text discusses the varied forms of French cultural expression and looks critically at what 'Frenchness' itself means. The book also explores examples of cultural production ranging from sport, media and literature to theatre, cinema, festivals and music. An essential resource for students and scholars alike, this text provides detailed material and analysis, as well as a launch-pad for further study.

Download or read book Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist written by Carlton Lake and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1990 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author recounts his experiences in building collections of rare books and manuscripts of French literature, and reveals little-known facts about French artists, composers, and writers.

Download or read book Composition as Explanation written by Gertrude Stein and published by Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation" delves into the intricate relationship between language and artistic expression. Published in 1926, the essay explores Stein's unique approach to writing and challenges conventional perceptions of composition. With a distinctive prose style, she reflects on the nature of creativity, emphasizing the significance of repetition and abstraction. Stein's work serves as both an exploration of her own artistic process and a broader commentary on the essence of language in shaping our understanding of art.

Download or read book Rewriting the Past written by William VanderWolk and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1997 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrick Modiano (1945-) has published seventeen novels over the past twenty-seven years and is considered one of France's foremost writers. His first three works, dealing principally with the German occupation of France during World War II, are generally considered to have led to a reconsideration of the Gaullist myth which endured for twenty-five years after the war. Along with Marcel Ophuls's film, The Sorrow and the Pity, Modiano's novels opened French eyes to the more ambiguous role played during the occupation by the average French citizen. His subsequent novels have continued to probe the relationship between history, memory and fiction. This study will be of interest to readers of French fiction and history as it looks at their relation-ship to memory and shows that the three are inextricably linked in a way that enriches our understanding of our past, whether it be collective or personal. Modiano, while seemingly obsessed with his own past, in fact indicates an opening toward the future by attempting to put the past to rest in his fiction.

Download or read book Playboy Helmut Newton written by Helmut Newton and published by Chronicle Books (CA). This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following "Playboy's" celebrated 50th anniversary "Photographs" and "Cartoons" comes an arresting retrospective of Helmut Newton, one of the 20th century's most influential photographers. 150+ photos in color and b&w.

Download or read book Piano written by Jean Echenoz and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Delmarc is a famous concert pianist who finds that even death cannot cure his problems, as a brief stay in a rather luxurious purgatory leads to a trip to hell, where he tries to piece together his old life and at last track down his long lost love.

Download or read book Nurturing the Nation written by Lisa Pollard and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-01-31 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book French Autobiography written by Michael Sheringham and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-scale study of French autobiography. Whereas earlier critics have engaged primarily in theoretical discussion of the genre, or in analyses of individual works or authors, Michael Sheringham identifies sixteen key autobiographical texts and situates them in the context ofan evolving set of challenges and problems.Informed by a sophisticated awareness of recent theoretical debates, Sheringham conceives autobiography as a distinctively open form of writing, perpetually engaged with different forms of `otherness'. Manifestations of the Other in the autobiographical process - from the reader, who incarnatesother people, to ideology, against which individual truth must be pitted, to the potential otherness of memory itself - are traced through a scrutiny of the `devices and desires' at work in a range of texts from Rousseau's Confessions, to Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard and Sartre's Les Mots. Otherwriters examined include Chateaubriand, Gide, Green, Leiris, Leduc, Gorz, Barthes, Perec, and Sarraute.French Autobiography: Devices and Desires represents both the first attempt to assemble a canon in one volume and a strikingly original contribution to the theory of autobiography.

Download or read book French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years written by Colin Davis and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors examine some of the most popular and some of the most challenging of texts that emerged during Francois Mitterrand's presidency. They relate these texts to the dominant literary and cultural trends of the period.

Download or read book Uncertain Territories written by Inge E. Boer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing and theorizing the concept of the boundaries through literary works, visual objects and cultural phenomena, this book argues against the reification of boundaries as fixed and empty non-spaces that simply divide the world. Expanding on her previous work on gender and Orientalism, Inge Boer takes us into uncertain territories of fashion and art, tourism and travel, skilfully engaging the ambivalence of boundaries, as both protecting and confining, as bringing distinction while existing by virtue of their ability to be transgressed. In her close readings of that boundaries as desert, as frame, as home (or lack of it), Boer shows that boundaries are spaces within, through, and in the name of which negotiations take place. They are not lines but spaces ; neither fixed nor empty but flexible and inhabited. With the publication of this book, Boer’s intellectual legacy stretches beyond her untimely passing. The writings that she left behind can be said to have inaugurated the future of her work, presented in the latter part by several of Boer’s intellectual companions. In their original essays, the contributors elaborate on Boer’s theme of boundaries as spaces where opposition yields to negotiation. Committed to the artefact as cultural stimulant, as the embodiment of thought, their analyses span a multitude of artefacts and media, ranging from literature to photography, to art installation and presentation, to film and song. Fanning out from Boer ‘s central focus – Orientalism – to other places of contestation, boundaries are shown to mediate the relationship between self and other ; they are, ultimately, spaces of encounter.

Download or read book The Women s Awakening in Egypt written by Beth Baron and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1892 and 1920 nearly thirty Arabic periodicals by, for, and about women were produced in Egypt for circulation throughout the Arab world. This flourishing women's press provided a forum for debating such topics as the rights of woman, marriage and divorce, and veiling and seclusion, and also offered a mechanism for disseminating new ideologies and domestic instruction. In this book, Beth Baron presents the first sustained study of this remarkable material, exploring the connections between literary culture and social transformation. Starting with profiles of the female intellectuals who pioneered the women's press in Egypt--the first generation of Arab women to write and publish extensively--Baron traces the women's literary output from production to consumption. She draws on new approaches in cultural history to examine the making of periodicals and to reconstruct their audience, and she suggests that it is impossible to assess the influence of the Arabic press without comprehending the circumstances under which it operated. Turning to specific issues argued in the pages of the women's press, Baron finds that women's views ranged across a wide spectrum. The debates are set in historical context, with elaborations on the conditions of women's education and work. Together with other sources, the journals show significant changes in the activities of urban middle- and upper-class Egyptian women in the decades before the 1919 revolution and underscore the sense that real improvement in women's lives--the women's awakening--was at hand. Baron's discussion of this extraordinary trove of materials highlights the voices of the female intellectuals who championed this awakening and broadens our understanding of the social and cultural history of the period.

Download or read book The Production of the Muslim Woman written by Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author investigates the configurations of power implicated in the production of the discourses on the 'muslim woman' in the West and North Africa. She argues that as a single category, the 'muslim woman' is an 'invention', whether in the Western discourses of Orientalism (Isabelle Eberhardt) and psychoanalytic feminism (De Beauvoir, Irigaray, Cixous and Lacan), or in the discourses of islamic feminism (Djebar and Mernissi) and Maghrebian nationalism (Habib Bourguiba and Tahar al Haddad).

Download or read book Guignol s Band written by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1969 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Guignol's Band, first published in France in 1943, Céline explores the horror of a disordered world.