Download or read book Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction written by David Coughlan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines representations of the specter in American twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction. David Coughlan’s innovative structure has chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, particularly within the context of his 1993 text, Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter—that is, without ghost writing.
Download or read book The Fortress of Solitude written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-09-07 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review EDITORS' CHOICE. From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, comes the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. "A tour de force.... Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Walker in the City, and Call it Sleep." --The New York Times Magazine "One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings it to a story worth telling." --Time
Download or read book The Ghost Writer written by Philip Roth and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1979 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel in Roth's Zuckerman Bound trilogy, The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E.I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life. --From publisher description.
Download or read book Impersonation written by Heidi Pitlor and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “By turns revealing, hilarious, dishy, and razor-sharp, Impersonation lives in that rarest of sweet spots: the propulsive page-turner for people with high literary standards.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers Allie Lang is a professional ghostwriter and a perpetually broke single mother to a young boy. Lana Breban is a powerhouse lawyer, economist, and advocate for women’s rights. With aspirations of running for office, Lana and her staff have decided she needs help softening her public image. That’s when Allie is hired to write Lana’s memoir about her life as a mother. Allie believes she knows the drill: she has learned how to inhabit the lives of others and tell their stories better than they can. But soon Allie’s childcare arrangements unravel; she falls behind on her rent; her subject, Lana, is frustratingly aloof; and Allie’s boyfriend decides to go on a road trip toward self-discovery. As a writer for hire and a mother, Allie has gotten too used to being accommodating. At what point will she speak up for all that she deserves? Impersonation tells a timely, insightful, and bitingly funny story of ambition, motherhood, and class.
Download or read book Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books written by and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The politics of male friendship in contemporary American fiction written by Michael Kalisch and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors – including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole – this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.
Download or read book Addis Ababa Noir Akashic Noir written by Maaza Mengiste and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addis Ababa is a sprawling melting pot of cultures where rich and poor live side by side in relative harmony—until they don't. Maaza Mengiste’s story “Dust, Ash, Flight” has won the 2021 Edgar Award for Best Short Story, presented by the Mystery Writers of America “Several of the 14 stories here, most of them striking and accomplished, involve post-revolution loss, guilt and revenge. Some are surreal—fitting for a culture where, as Mengiste writes in her introduction, ‘there are men who live in the mountains of Ethiopia and can turn into hyenas.'” —Washington Post Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Maaza Mengiste, Adam Reta, Mahtem Shiferraw, Linda Yohannes, Sulaiman Addonia, Meron Hadero, Mikael Awake, Lelissa Girma, Rebecca Fisseha, Solomon Hailemariam, Girma T. Fantaye, Teferi Nigussie Tafa, Hannah Giorgis, and Bewketu Seyoum.
Download or read book The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction written by Catherine Morley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.
Download or read book Ghost Wall written by Sarah Moss and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Southern Living Best New Book of Winter 2019; A Refinery29 Best Book of January 2019; A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at The Week, Huffington Post, Nylon, and Lit Hub; An Indie Next Pick for January 2019 “Ghost Wall has subtlety, wit, and the force of a rock to the head: an instant classic.” —Emma Donoghue, author of Room "A worthy match for 3 a.m. disquiet, a book that evoked existential dread, but contained it, beautifully, like a shipwreck in a bottle.” —Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker A taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior The light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside. In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie’s father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs—particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice? A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors.
Download or read book American Ghost written by Janis Owens and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A compelling, deeply rewarding novel from a unique southern storyteller, American Ghost is Janis Owens' richly woven story about how unresolved family history and the racial tensions of the past threaten a love affair between two young Floridians"--
Download or read book The Untimely Present written by Idelber Avelar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche's notion of the untimely, Benjamin's theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning. Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature's declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today's foremost Latin American writers--such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the 'untimely' quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.
Download or read book Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction written by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Food Studies and American literary scholarship, Piatti-Farnell investigates the significances of food and eating in American fiction, from 1980 to the present day. She argues that culturally-coded representations of the culinary illuminate contemporary American anxieties about class gender, race, tradition, immigration, nationhood, and history. As she offers a critical analysis of major works of contemporary fiction, Piatti-Farnell unveils contrasting modes of culinary nostalgia, disillusionment, and progress that pervasively address the cultural disintegration of local and familiar culinary values, in favor of globalized economies of consumption. In identifying different incarnations of the "American culinary," Piatti-Farnell covers the depiction of food in specific categories of American fiction and explores how the cultural separation that molds food preferences inevitably challenges the existence of a homogenous American identity. The study treads on new grounds since it not only provides the first comprehensive study of food and consumption in contemporary American fiction, but also aims to expose interrelated politics of consumption in a variety of authors from different ethnic, cultural, racial and social backgrounds within the United States.
Download or read book What We Owe written by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde and published by HarperVia. This book was released on 2018 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compressed, visceral novel about exile, dislocation, and the emotional minefields between mothers and daughters.
Download or read book Cultural Haunting written by Kathleen Brogan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this text, Kathleen Brogan makes the case that the recent preoccupation with ghosts stems not from a lingering interest in Gothic themes, but instead from a whole new genre in American literature that she calls 'the story of cultural haunting'.
Download or read book Ghostwritten written by David Mitchell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia. What is the common thread of coincidence or destiny that connects the lives of these nine souls in nine far-flung countries, stretching across the globe from east to west? What pattern do their linked fates form through time and space? A writer of pyrotechnic virtuosity and profound compassion, a mind to which nothing human is alien, David Mitchell spins genres, cultures, and ideas like gossamer threads around and through these nine linked stories. Many forces bind these lives, but at root all involve the same universal longing for connection and transcendence, an axis of commonality that leads in two directions—to creation and to destruction. In the end, as lives converge with a fearful symmetry, Ghostwritten comes full circle, to a point at which a familiar idea—that whether the planet is vast or small is merely a matter of perspective—strikes home with the force of a new revelation. It marks the debut of a writer of astonishing gifts.
Download or read book Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction written by Aliki Varvogli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders. Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.
Download or read book How to Write what You Want and Sell what You Write written by Skip Press and published by Career PressInc. This book was released on 1995 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not loaded with theory, Skip's invaluable book contains concise, easily understood and applied advice for both writing and marketing any kind of book, article, story, play, screen-play, report, proposal or anything else you can think of.How to Write What You Want and Sell What You Write is for every writer or wannabe who needs to sort out his or her desires, capabilities and strengths and, even more importantly, learn the particular formats for the kind of writing in which he or she is interested.
