Download or read book Laura Warholic written by Alexander Theroux and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2007-12-21 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant satire from one of the great novelists of his time. In his first novel in nearly twenty years, Alexander Theroux, National Book Award Nominee, returns with a compendious satire, a bold and inquisitorial circuit-breaking examination of love and hate, of rejection and forgiveness, of trust and romantic disappointment, of the terrors of contemporary life. Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic, who, repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, but she exemplifies all that Eugene considers wrong with contemporary America (of which the publishing profession and its recognizable denizens serves as a microcosm)a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with inventive and relentless satire. Nostalgic for the old days and old manners, a way of life lost to grace, loving from afar a mysterious beauty named Rapunzel Wisht, Eugene fights against the rising tide of stupidity, focusing on Laura in the hope that by saving her he can validate his ethical beliefs. But feckless Laura and the colorful but bizarre cast of characters surrounding Eugenebrilliant bigots, nihilists, Generation-X slackers and zanies of all sexual persuasionsthreaten to pull him under, leading to the novel's unforgettable conclusion, a climax of betrayal and redemption of Dostoevskyan power.
Download or read book Darconville s Cat written by Alexander Theroux and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 1996-04-15 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conflicts between love and hate, good and evil, and life and art are explored in a portrait of Alaric Darconville, a twenty-nine-year-old professor at Quinsy College--a women's college in Virginia--who falls in love with and is jilted by one of his students
Download or read book Estonia written by Alexander Theroux and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any journey with Alexander Theroux is an education. Possessed of a razor-sharp and hyperliterate mind, he stands beside Thomas Pynchon as one of the sharpest cultural commentators of our time. So when he decided to accompany his wife ― the artist Sarah Son-Theroux ― on her Fulbright Scholarship to Estonia, it occasioned this penetrating examination of a country that, for many, seems alien and distanced from the modern world. For Theroux, the country and its people become a puzzle. His fascination with their language, manners, and legacy of occupation and subordination lead him to a revelatory examination of Estonia’s peculiar place in European history. All the while, his trademark acrobatic allusions, quotations, and digressions ― which take us fromHamlet through Jean Cocteau to Married… with Children ― render his travels as much internal and psychical as they are external and physical. Through these obsessive references to Western culture, we come to appreciate how insular the country has become, yet also marvel at its fierce individuality and preternatural beauty ― such is the skill of Theroux’s gaze. This travelogue of his nine months abroad also brims with anecdotes of Theroux’s encounters with Estonian people and ― in some of its most bitterly comedic episodes ― his fellow Americans whom he at times feels more alienated from than the frosty, humorless Europeans. Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery is as biting and satirical as it is witty and urbane; as curious and lyrical as it is brash and irreverent. It marks a new highlight in an already stellar career and a book that continues Fantagraphics’ exceptional line of prose works.
Download or read book The Grammar of Rock written by Alexander Theroux and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2013-02-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist and critic Alexander Theroux analyzes the pop song. National Book Award nominee, critic and one of America’s least compromising satirists, Alexander Theroux takes a comprehensive look at the colorful language of pop lyrics and the realm of rock music in general in The Grammar of Rock: silly song titles; maddening instrumentals; shrieking divas; clunker lines; the worst (and best) songs ever written; geniuses of the art; movie stars who should never have raised their voice in song but who were too shameless to refuse a mic; and the excesses of awful Christmas recordings. Praising (and critiquing) the gems of lyricists both highbrow and low, Theroux does due reverence to classic word-masters like Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, lyricists as diverse as Hank Williams, Buck Ram, the Moody Blues, and Randy Newman, Dylan and the Beatles, of course, and more outré ones like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Fall (even Ghostface Killa), but he considers stupid rhymes, as well ― nonsense lyrics, chop logic, the uses and abuses of irony, country music macho, verbal howlers, how voices sound alike and why, and much more. In a way that no one else has ever done, with his usual encyclopedic insights into the state of the modern lyric, Theroux focuses on the state of language ― the power of words and the nature of syntax ― in The Grammar of Rock. He analyzes its assaults on listeners’ impulses by investigating singers’ styles, pondering illogical lunacies in lyrics, and deconstructing the nature of diction and presentation in the language. This is that rare book of discernment and probing wit (and not exclusively one that is a critical defense of quality) that positively evaluates the very nature of a pop song, and why one over another has an effect on the listener.
Download or read book Early Stories written by Alexander Theroux and published by Tough Poets Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville's Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. Both Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat were nominated for the National Book Award. Early Stories, the first book of Theroux's fiction to be published in fourteen years, constitutes an addition to one of modern American literature's most lauded and entertaining bodies of work. It is also the first volume in his story triad (Fables and Later Stories soon to follow). Nobody writing today has a keener instinct for obsession, hypocrisy, sexual jealousy, envy, human folly, the lineaments of vanity, greed, and romantic disappointment, and, yes, grace. A feast of comic joy awaits you in this long-awaited collection. Here, the sword arm of satire is swung high! We encounter an intractable woman who refuses to divulge the secret to her spaghetti sauce. A tourist discovers a modern Nestor in an English pub. An idealistic teacher who is also a broken-hearted lover leaves us speechless over his overwhelming fixation. A hide-bound feminist goes to Italy to learn pasta making. A beautiful Bostonian, becoming a fashion model, achieves a much different goal. What is the effect of summer camp on a sensitive youngster? How does a hunt in Cracow for the alpenstock of great Copernicus end up a comic farce? Does a young boy with a genius IQ fulfill his promise? What happens when a collector discovers the rarest autograph in American letters? Nothing prepares the reader for the twists and turns of these unsparing but brilliantly plotted stories. Language is, however, the subject, the splendid gift of one of the nation's word-masters, a magician who fashions words out of his fingertips. Satire, it is said, swipes off the noggin but leaves the head in place. Here, the head still manages to find its voice-to our great and continuing pleasure.
Download or read book Swell written by Corwin Ericson and published by Dark Coast Press. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Off the coast of a tiny island a mysterious package goes missing. Rival whaling factions reignite an ancient feud when their paths cross. Korean smugglers want to open a bed and breakfast. A privacy expert sets in motion her plan to create a cell phone network using migrating whales. . . . And Orange Whippey doesn't like any of it.
Download or read book The Enigma of Al Capp written by Alexander Theroux and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2002-01-02 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award-nominated author of Darconville's Cat and Three Wogs delivers this slender-yet-rich monograph on the controversial life of cartoonist Al Capp, creator of Li'l Abner. "The left eventually broke his heart," wrote John Updike of Capp. A genuine American mythmaker and celebrated funnyman, Capp used his strip for years to expose greed, corruption and social injustice, while bringing belly laughs and dramatic suspense to the lives of millions of people every day. Theroux, however, dives head-first into the often glossed-over side of Capp, delivering a keen (but not without compassion) analysis of Capp's degeneration into a bitter, disillusioned, conservative extremist, who began using his strip in later years to attack the very causes he once championed. This is a rich and compelling investigation into the psyche of a paradoxical American icon, who at the height of his fame was one of America's highest-paid and most well-known entertainers, gracing the cover of Time and other magazines, and franchising Li'l Abner into film, theater, radio, merchandising and more. Illustrated throughout with examples of Capp's cartoons.
Download or read book Against the Day written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 1541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.” —The New York Times Book Review “Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant.” —USA Today “Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling.” —The Boston Globe Spanning the era between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, and constantly moving between locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all), Against the Day unfolds with a phantasmagoria of characters that includes anarchists, balloonists, drug enthusiasts, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, spies, and hired guns. As an era of uncertainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.
Download or read book Sea Above Sun Below written by George Salis and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upside-down lightning, a group of uncouth skydivers, resurrections, a mother's body overtaken by a garden, aquatic telepathy, a peeling snake-priest, and more. Sea Above, Sun Below is influenced by Western myths, some Greek, some with Biblical overtones, resulting in a fusion of fantastic dreams, bizarre yet beautiful nightmares, and multiple narrative threads that form a tapestry which depicts the fragility of characters teetering on the brink of madness.
Download or read book The Recognitions written by William Gaddis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 969 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most distinctive, accomplished novelists of the last century. The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a New England minister, who forsakes religion to devote himself to painting, only to despair of his inspiration. In expiation, he will paint nothing but flawless copies of his revered old masters—copies, however, that find their way into the hands of a sinister financial wizard by the name of Recktall Brown, who of course sells them as the real thing. Dismissed uncomprehendingly by reviewers on publication in 1955 and ignored by the literary world for decades after, The Recognitions is now established as one of the great American novels, immensely ambitious and entirely unique, a book of wild, Boschian inspiration and outrageous comedy that is also profoundly serious and sad.
Download or read book The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas written by Rick Harsch and published by . This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two young men are caught in the crosshairs of shady government operations, mafias, and billionaires. A multi-generational family drama unfolds into an observation of violence in American History: from the Oregon Trail, to the nuclear age, the Vietnam War, and a post-9/11 world.
Download or read book Woodcutters written by Thomas Bernhard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-23 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiercely observed, often hilarious, and “reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg” (The New York Times Book Review), this exquisitely controversial novel was initially banned in its author’s homeland. A searing portrayal of Vienna’s bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an ‘artistic dinner’ hosted by a composer and his society wife—a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day. Reflections on Joana’s life and suicide are mixed with these denunciations until the famous actor arrives, bringing an explosive end to the evening that even the writer could not have seen coming.
Download or read book The Way of Florida A Novel written by and published by . This book was released on 2025-02-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Strange Case of Edward Gorey written by Alexander Theroux and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from a multitude of reference and his own personal relationship to Gorey, literary heavyweight Alexander Theroux has accomplished an amazing feat of illuminating the real Edward Gorey with ambiguity, wit, fervor and reverence, combined with honest and clear-eyed appraisals of his work. No Gorey fan can be without it. Black-and-white illustrations and photographs throughout.
Download or read book Einstein s Beets written by Alexander Theroux and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2017-05-10 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britney Spears loathes meatloaf and “all lumpy stuff.” Arturo Toscanini hated fish. Ayn Rand despised salads. Alexander Theroux’s Einstein’s Beets is a study of the world of food and food aversions. The novelist and poet probes the secret and mysterious attitudes of hundreds of people―mostly famous and well-known―toward eating and dining out, hilariously recounting tales of confrontation and scandalous alienation: it contains gossip, confession, embarrassment, and perceptive observations.
Download or read book The Novel An Alternative History written by Steven Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the pre-modern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these pre-modern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining-The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.
Download or read book The Primary Colors written by Alexander Theroux and published by Owl Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating cultural history, these splendid essays on the three primary colors--blue, yellow, and red--extend to the artistic, literary, linguistic, botanical, cinematic, aesthetic, religious, scientific, culinary, climatological, and emotional dimensions of each color. QBPC Selection.
