Download or read book Minimalism and the Short Story Raymond Carver Amy Hempel and Mary Robison written by Cynthia Whitney Hallett and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses minimalism as demonstrating a parallel poetic to that of the short story, and analyzes many works of short fiction by Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel and Mary Robison which reflect this relationship. This book traces the evolution of literary minimalism as a by-product of the short story.
Download or read book Why Did I Ever written by Mary Robison and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tense, moving, and hilarious . . . [A] dark jewel of a novel.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She's back and forth between Melanie, her secluded Southern town, and L.A., where she has a weakening grasp on her job as a script doctor. Having been sacked by most of the studios and convinced that her dealings with Hollywood have fractured her personality, Money Breton talks to herself nonstop. She glues and hammers and paints every item in her place. She forges loving inscriptions in all her books. Through it all, there is her darling puzzling daughter who lives close by but seems ever beyond reach, and her son, the damaged victim of a violent crime under police protection in New York. While both her children seem to be losing all their battles, Money tries for ways and reasons to keep battling. Why Did I Ever is a book of piercing intellect and belligerent humor. Since its first publication in 2002 it has had a profound impact, not only on Robison’s devoted following, but on the shape of the contemporary novel itself.
Download or read book Believe Them written by Mary Robison and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Robison uses a minimalist discipline and barely ruffled surfaces, but her hidden pictures of childhood and other states of vulnerability are boundless in their emotion." —The Los Angeles Times Book Review The eleven stories in Believe Them, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker, depict Mary Robison's sly, scatty world of plotters, absconders, ponderers, and pontificators. Robison's take on her characters is sharp, cool, astringently ironic, and her language vibrates with edginess and nerve. With what John Barth has called her ""enigmatic superrealism,"" Robison flashes entire lives by us in small, stunning moments—odd, skewed outtakes from real life. Believe Them confirms Mary Robison's place as one of America's most original writers.
Download or read book Will You Please Be Quiet Please written by Raymond Carver and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-05-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first collection of stories from “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) breathed new life into the American short story, showing us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people. "[Carver's stories] can ... be counted among the masterpieces of American Literature." —The New York Times Book Review "One of the great short story writers of our time—of any time." —The Philadelhpia Inquirer "The whole collection is a knock out. Few writers can match Raymond Carver's entwining style and language." —The Dallas Morning News
Download or read book Minimalism and Affect in American Literature 1970 2020 written by Oliver Haslam and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-09-05 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizes the development of a minimalist mode in American fiction since 1970, frequently seen to interrogate US postmodernity. Minimalism and Affect in American Literature, 1970-2020 responds to existing studies of literary minimalism by pursuing three original and interrelated objectives. It provides a more inclusive and precise definition of minimalism that enables further inquiry into the mode. It also exposes the presence of minimalism beyond critical demarcations that attempt to limit the aesthetic to a particular school, medium, movement, form or decade. Finally, it argues that writers of American literary minimalism are uniquely privileged in their ability to formalize precarity and threatening cultural currents into the fragile construct that is ordinary life. Building upon theories of affect and the everyday, Minimalism and Affect in American Literature, 1970-2020 analyses minimalist aesthetics within the works of canonical minimalists alongside writers more frequently associated with other movements. Through readings of Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Raymond Carver, Paul Auster and Don DeLillo, among others, and cultural phenomena ranging from sedation to telephony, this book exposes the persistence and political importance of minimalism within American literature from the 20th century into the 21st.
Download or read book An Amateur s Guide to the Night written by Mary Robison and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mary Robison's short stories are short, subtle, and substantial . . . Her ironic sense of detail bursts from every sentence." —Vogue An Amateur's Guide to the Night stands as a perfect example of Mary Robison's beloved narrative style: purposeful, clipped, and devastating in its restraint. Reflecting on the life of disaffected youth, these stories speculate on how they often manage to remain deferent towards the rest of society—and document how spectacularly they often fail. "These thirteen stories are glimpses from a moving train into lit parlors, dinettes, bedrooms and dens . . . Think of Robison as the engineer, blowing the whistle, calling the stops and starts; invisible when you want to ask her why we're stalled here in the middle of nowhere, between stations, jobs, relationships and decisions." —Los Angeles Times
Download or read book There Must Be Some Mistake written by Frederick Barthelme and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fiftyish graphic designer forced into retirement discovers, via a parade of unlikely events, that it may still be a lovely day in the neighborhood, by "the master of the low-key epiphany." (The New Yorker). Wallace Webster lives alone in Kemah, Texas at Forgetful Bay, a condo development where residents are passing away at an alarming rate. As he monitors events in the neighborhood, Wallace keeps in touch with his ex-wife, his grown daughter, a former coworker for whom he has much averted eyes, and a somewhat exotic resident with whom he commences an off-beat affair. He sifts through the curious accidents that plague his neighbors, all the while reflecting on his past and shortening future. Required to reflect upon his own mortality, he wonders if "settling for" something less than he aspired to is a kind of cowardice, or just good sense. Beneath the arresting repartee and the ever-present and often satisfying banality of our modern lives -- from Google searches to real life mysteries on TV -- lies Frederick Barthelme's affection for and curiosity about our human condition. There Must be Some Mistake is warm and wry, beautifully written, and completely irresistible.
Download or read book Companion to Literature written by Abby H. P. Werlock and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 859 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the previous edition:Booklist/RBB "Twenty Best Bets for Student Researchers"RUSA/ALA "Outstanding Reference Source"" ... useful ... Recommended for public libraries and undergraduates."
Download or read book Reasons to Live written by Amy Hempel and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1995-07-20 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hempel's now-classic collection of short fiction is peopled by complex characters who have discovered that their safety nets are not dependable and who must now learn to balance on the threads of wit, irony, and spirit.
Download or read book Double Down written by Frederick Barthelme and published by HMH. This book was released on 2001-05-21 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An exquisitely crafted memoir” by two brothers who lost their parents, lost their inheritance—and almost lost their freedom (The Wall Street Journal). Frederick Barthelme and his brother Steven were both accomplished, respected writers with stable adult lives when they lost both of their parents in rapid succession. They had already lost their other brother, just a few years earlier. Suddenly they were on their own, emotionally unmoored—and unprepared for what would happen next. Their late father had been a prominent architect, and the brothers were left with a healthy inheritance. Over the following several years, they would lose close to a quarter million dollars in the gambling boats off the Mississippi coast. Then, in a bizarre twist, they were charged with violating state gambling laws, fingerprinted, and thrown into the surreal world of felony prosecution. For two years these widely publicized charges hung over their heads, shadowing their every step. Double Down is the wry, often heartbreaking story of how Frederick and Steven Barthelme got into this predicament. It is also a reflection on the allure of casinos and the pull and power of illusions that can destroy our lives if we aren’t careful. “One of the best firsthand accounts ever written about organized gambling. Like Goodman Brown, taking a walk with a hooded stranger into the darkness of the New England woods, the Barthelme brothers suddenly find themselves inside the maw of the monster. The compulsion to control, to intuit the future, to be painted by magic, could not be better or more accurately described.” —James Lee Burke “Beautifully evoking the gamblers’ addiction, their mesmerizing account is best read as a novel Camus might have imagined, with the writer/protagonists as their own lost characters. A work of high art; enthusiastically recommended.” —Library Journal
Download or read book A Theory of Minimalism written by Marc Botha and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The explosion of minimalism into the worlds of visual arts, music and literature in the mid-to-late twentieth century presents one of the most radical and decisive revolutions in aesthetic history. Detested by some, embraced by others, minimalism's influence was immediate, pervasive and lasting, significantly changing the way we hear music, see art and read literature. In The Theory of Minimalism, Marc Botha offers the first general theory of minimalism, equally applicable to literature, the visual arts and music. He argues that minimalism establishes an aesthetic paradigm for rethinking realism in genuinely radical terms. In dialogue with thinkers from both the analytic and continental traditions – including Kant, Danto, Agamben, Badiou and Meillassoux – Botha develops a constellation of concepts which together encapsulate the transhistorcial and transdisciplinary reach of minimalism. Illustrated by a range of historical, canonical and contemporary minimalist works of different media, from the caves of early Christian ascetics to Samuel Beckett's late prose, Botha offers a bold and provocative argument which will equip readers with the tools to engage critically with past, present and future minimalism, and to recognize how, in a culture caught between the poles of excess and austerity, minimalism still matters.
Download or read book Waveland written by Frederick Barthelme and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-05-04 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set amidst the tatters of post-Katrina Gulf Coast Mississippi, Waveland is a brilliantly observed portrait of our times from one of the most incisive novelists at work today. Partially retired architect Vaughn Williams does what he can to remain "viable." Battling the doldrums of midlife, he teaches an occasional class, reads the newspapers, scours the Internet, and thinks obsessively about his late father. When his ex-wife seeks refuge from her hotheaded boyfriend, Vaughn and his girlfriend, Greta, agree to let her move in, perhaps a little too cavalierly. Add in Vaughan’s annoyingly successful younger brother, who carries a torch for Vaughn’s ex-wife, and lingering suspicions about Greta’s involvement in her husband’s murder and the result is an emotionally resonant tale of mortality, love, regret, and redemption that only Barthelme could unwind.
Download or read book Sing to It written by Amy Hempel and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKER AWARD ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 “All the tawdry details I’m dying for are in these stories, but they’re given out like old sweaters—without shame, without guile. Amy Hempel is the writer who makes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this way—hiding, alone, obsessed—and that’s ok.” —Miranda July From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection—her first in over a decade. Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her Collected Stories published more than a decade ago, is a literary event. These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Mary Robison s Yours written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Mary Robison's "Yours," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book American Literary Minimalism written by Robert C. Clark and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Many of the authors Robert Clark discusses have yet to be recognized for their individual contributions to the emergence and continuing vitality of the movement. School of Images is organized based on chronology and lines of influence. In the introduction, Clark offers a definition of the mode and then describes its early stages. He then explores six works that reflect the core characteristics of the mode: Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, Raymond Carver's Cathedral, Susan Minot's Monkeys, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. In the conclusion, he discusses contemporary authors and filmmakers whose work represents the ongoing evolution of the category"-- Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Dog of the Marriage written by Amy Hempel and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Hempel's compassion, intensity, and illuminating observations have made her one of the most distinctive and admired modern writers. In three stunning books of stories, she has established a voice as unique and recognizable as the photographs of Cindy Sherman or the brushstrokes of Robert Motherwell. The Dog of the Marriage, Hempel's fourth collection, is about sexual obsession, relationships gone awry, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life. In "Offertory," a modern-day Scheherazade entertains and manipulates her lover with stories of her sexual encounters with a married couple as a very young woman. In "Reference # 388475848-5," a letter contesting a parking ticket becomes a beautiful and unnerving statement of faith. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman driving to New York sends a series of cryptically honest postcards to an old lover. And the title story is a heartbreaking tale about the objects and animals and unmired desires that are left behind after death or divorce. These nine stories teem with wisdom, emotion, and surprising wit. Hempel explores the intricate psychology of people falling in and out of love, trying to locate something or someone elusive or lost. Her sentences are as lean, original, and startling as any in contemporary fiction.
Download or read book Tell Me written by Mary Robison and published by Counterpoint Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction
