Download or read book The Goss Women written by R. V. Cassill and published by . This book was released on 2017-12-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The frenzy of a long life has cooled for Dean Goss. The maverick leader of American art hs settled down amid riches and fame after the death of his beautiful second wife. But his gifted son Jason becomes enchanted by a radiant and barbaric girl with a genius for disruption. The troubled Jason shows off this girl to his father - and the calm of his life's end is shattered for Dean Goss. Again he is swept into updrafts of creative and erotic forces. To ride these frenzied currents up beyond mortal ken is a challenge for a titan. The artist claims his greatness by accepting the gamble."A deep and exciting exploration of sex and creative energy. . . One of our finest American writers."James Dickey"R.V. Cassill is our D.H. Lawrence; The Goss Women is his Women in Love with hooded, fierce touches of The Plumed Serpent."D. Keith Mano"It's magic, a pure pleasure to read and a rich experience to remember."George Garrett

Download or read book The Wife Next Door written by R. V. Cassill and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2018-03 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NOIR CLASSIC: WHEN BAD LUCK hit them, the Redmans always had a party to celebrate it. Tom Redman refused to let trouble beat them. If he and Amelia had a financial setback, he insisted on spending whatever was left in a reckless flurry of buying. "It's like turning into a skid when you're driving," Tom said. "You twist the wheel and step on the gas. You have to break your way through trouble. If you freeze up and sit still, you get permanently snowed under." Because he was young, clever and gifted, this reckless policy had always seemed to work for him. At least it hadn't ruined him yet.

Download or read book Clem Anderson written by R. V. Cassill and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best novel I know of on the subject of writing, or on the condition of being a writer.” —Richard Yates Widely recognized as R. V. Cassill’s masterpiece, Clem Anderson is the story of an author whose astonishing talents are outmatched only by his capacity for self-destruction. Arrogant, untrustworthy, moody, and narcissistic, Clem is also a brilliant artist capable of astonishing feats of alchemy: His pen magically transforms real life into the stuff of great literature. But the rising tide of literary success is dangerous ground for a personality as unstable as Clem’s, and when he dies at the age of forty, alone and disgraced, it is up to his few remaining friends to pick up the pieces. The most steadfast and empathetic of these survivors is Dick Hartsell, a former classmate and fellow writer who has long walked in Clem’s shadow. Commissioned by a movie studio to publish a memorial article about his doomed friend, Hartsell struggles to capture the man’s unruly existence in this tidy format. So he sets out to write a novel called Clem Anderson, detailing his eponymous hero’s epic rise and fall. From a rural midwestern childhood to early fame as an undergraduate poet to the intoxicating expatriate literary scene in post–World War II Paris and an unhappy romance with a Hollywood starlet, Hartsell tells the story of Anderson’s life. The result is a work of art as singular and unforgettable as its ill-fated subject.

Download or read book Dormitory Women written by R. V. Cassill and published by . This book was released on 2018-02-26 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: R. V. Cassill attempts (and successfully) an even more ambitious study in psycho-pathology in Dormitory Women. It's a serious and completely terrifying account of the flight of a 17-year-old girl from almost-normal adolescent fantasy ("I am a princess ... I can make things happen to people") into full psychosis. The university background is admirably realized and the novel well-conceived and well-written. Previously known to readers of little magazines and Foley annuals, Cassill shows here that he can combine paperback storytelling at its strongest with subtle literary quality.- Anthony Boucher - New York Times

Download or read book Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement written by Margaret Earley Whitt and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the civil rights era, masses of people marched in the streets, boycotted stores, and registered to vote. Others challenged racism in ways more solitary but no less life changing. These twenty-three stories give a voice to the nameless, ordinary citizens without whom the movement would have failed. From bloody melees at public lunch counters to anxious musings at the family dinner table, the diverse experiences depicted in this anthology make the civil rights movement as real and immediate as the best histories and memoirs. Each story focuses on a particular, sometimes private, moment in the historic struggle for social justice in America. Events have a permanent effect on characters, like the white girl in "Spring Is Now" who must sort through her feelings about the only black boy in her school, or the black preacher in "The Convert" who tells a friend, "This thing of being a man . . . The Supreme Court can't make you a man. The NAACP can't do it. God Almighty can do a lot, but even He can't do it. Ain't nobody can do it but you." If a character survives--and some do not--the event can become a turning point, a vision for a better world. The sections into which the stories are grouped parallel the news headlines of the day: School Desegregation (1954 on), Sit-ins (1960 on), Marches and Demonstrations (1963 on), and Acts of Violence. In the last section, Retrospective, characters look back on their personal involvement with the movement. Twenty writers--eleven black and nine white--are represented in the collection. Ten stories were written during the 1960s. That the others were written long after the movement's heyday suggests the potency of that time as a continuing source of creative inspiration.

Download or read book My Sister s Keeper written by R. V. Cassill and published by . This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark, psychological journey worthy of Dostoyevsky. - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Download or read book The Happy Marriage written by R. V. Cassill and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beautifully rendered and psychologically astute tales of life, family, and art from a true American master “The Sunday Painter,” a surprisingly comic tale, is the account of an amateur artist whose obsession with distilling his work to its most basic form—light—leads to a mental breakdown. “The First Day of School” is a moving and intimately observed portrait of the courage summoned by an African American family in the early days of integration. In “The Covenant,” a thirteen-year-old boy is confronted with his own mortality and instinctually redirects his anger and confusion elsewhere—the first lesson of adulthood. Beneath the deceptively anecdotal narration of “The Swimmers at Pallikula” lie deep truths about the absurdity of life and death and the eternal struggle for self-knowledge.As the editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, a founder of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), and a longtime teacher at the University of Iowa, Purdue University, and Brown University, R. V. Cassill influenced generations of American authors. In The Happy Marriage and Other Stories, this expert craftsman is at his most varied and vital.

Download or read book The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction written by Richard Bausch and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2006-01 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classroom standard for readers and aspiring writers of fiction, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction offers the most comprehensive, engaging selection of classic and contemporary stories in the field.

Download or read book A Community of Writers written by Robert Dana and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With these words, written long before his Iowa Writers' Workshop became world famous, much imitated, and academically rich, Paul Engle captured the spirit behind his beloved workshop. Now, in this collection of essays by and about those writers who shared the energetic early years, Robert Dana presents a dynamic, informative tribute to Engle and his world. The book's three sections mingle myth and history with style and grace and no small amount of humor. The beginning essays are given over to memories of Paul Engle in his heyday. The second group focuses particularly on those teachers—Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Kurt Vonnegut, for example—who made the workshop hum on a day-to-day basis. Finally, the third section is devoted to storytelling: tall tales, vignettes, surprises, sober and not-so-sober moments. Engle's own essay, "The Writer and the Place," describes his "simple, and yet how reckless" conviction that "the creative imagination in all of the arts is as important, as congenial, and as necessary, as the historical study of all the arts." Today, of course, there are hundreds of writers' workshops, many of them founded and directed by graduates of the original Iowa workshop. But when Paul Engle arrived in Iowa there were exactly two. His indomitable nature and great persuasive powers, combined with his distinguished reputation as a poet, loomed large behind the enhancement of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. This volume of fine and witty essays reveals the enthusiasm and drive and sheer pleasure that went into Iowa's renowned workshop.

Download or read book The Plastic Age written by Percy Marks and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2021-03-16T20:30:32Z with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Plastic Age can be read as an exposé on the moral failings of undergraduates in Jazz Age New England, as described through the four-year experience of a young man at the fictional Sanford College. Students enroll at Sanford to “acquire culture,” and do so at an age when they are “plastic” in the sense that they are changeable and meant to be transformed by the experience. But, not all of the lessons of a college education are in the curriculum. To a student reader of the 1920s, Marks’ novel would have looked more like a moral tale, critique, and guide to navigating the challenges, pitfalls, and possibilities of higher education. Marks was an English instructor at Brown University at the time of publication but also had experience teaching at MIT and Dartmouth from which to draw his descriptions of campus life. The book was popular, the second best selling novel of 1924. It inspired two motion pictures. But it was also controversial. The novel was banned in Boston and Marks was removed from his teaching position at Brown the next year. College administrators saw the novel’s setting as a thinly-veiled version of their own school and the novel’s portrayal of college life hit too close to home. A Sanford English instructor seems to convey the author’s view when he says: “Some day, perhaps, our administrative officers will be true educators; … our faculties will be wise men really fitted to teach; … our students will be really students, eager to learn, honest searchers after beauty and truth.” But what Marks sees instead are uninspired teaching and advising, superficial learning, pervasive smoking, prohibition-era drinking, vice, gambling, billiards, institutionalized hazing, excessive conformity, and a campus life that molds its students into less serious people. The author seeks elevation but sees regression. Some of the norms and expectations of the 1920s may seem dated to the modern reader, but important themes endure. Marks went on to write 19 additional books and late in his career, returned to teaching literature at the University of Connecticut. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Download or read book R V Cassill written by Kay Cassill and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Happy Marriage written by Ronald Verlin Cassill and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1966 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "These seven stories discover something of what lies beneath the ordinary surfaces of decent people," says George P. Elliott in his introduction to this volume. "Mr. Cassill's characters are for the most part," he continues, "white respectable Middle-Western Protestants, and their way of life is lethal enough. But his heresy is to treat them as possible human beings who in fact do go on living as we live - dreadfully troubled but possible, human, living." Cassill obviously incorporates in his best work all the uncommon qualities listed by Elliott, plus quite a few more: psychological precision, sociological understanding and philosophical thrust, not to mention a command of organic form in the short story and a remarkable range of flexible styles.

Download or read book Doctor Cobb s Game written by R. V. Cassill and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Saint Jack written by Paul Theroux and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Flowers, saint or sinner, caught a passing bumboat into Singapore and got a job as a water-clerk to a Chinese ship chandler. Now, on the side, he offers girls (indeed 'anything, anything at all') to tourists, sailors, residents and expatriates, but he is haunted by his lack of worldly success and his fifty-three years weigh heavily on him. So when he agrees to act as blackmailer for the faintly sinister American, Edwin Shuck, in a plot against a general from Vietnam, he has high, not to mention wild, hopes of triumph. These are the outrageous confessions of an ingenious con man in the seedy and unforgettable world of expatriates amidst imperial ruins.

Download or read book Klynt s Law written by Elliott Baker and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1976 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Savage Night written by Jim Thompson and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jake Winroy had no looks, no education, and little else before he'd worked his way to the top of a million-dollar-a-month horse-betting ring. But when the state's latched onto his game, the feds take a bite and the lawyer fees eat away at the rest, all Jake's got left is the bottle and a beautiful wife whose every word is ugly. Jake's to be the top witness in a major case against organized crime -- if he hasn't already kicked the bucket before the trial has its day in court. But an enigmatic mafioso known only as The Man has a plan to make dead certain Jake never gets the chance to testify. The Man's hired Charlie "Little" Bigger, a hit man barely five feet tall, to infiltrate the Winroy residence as a tenant and murder Winroy in cold blood. To Little, it seems like the easiest job on Earth. Until he lays eyes on the beautiful and dangerous Fay and the Winroy's young housemaid Ruth, a woman as sensual as she is vulnerable. Savage Night is Jim Thompson at his most unpredictable and deeply suspenseful, in a claustrophobic thriller of one man's fractured mind.

Download or read book Pretty Leslie written by R. V. Cassill and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “jolting, disturbing” novel from “a writer of the first rank,” about a midcentury housewife’s secret sexual drives (The New York Times). Beautiful, intelligent, and charming, Leslie Daniels is the wife of a successful Illinois physician. To her friends and family, she appears to be happily living the American dream. But there is another side to Leslie, one propelled by lust and unsettling impulses that run completely counter to her comfortable midwestern routine. So far, Leslie has managed to keep her unwholesome appetites in check, but when her husband travels out of town to attend a medical conference, she takes the opportunity to commit her first act of adultery. What ensues is a stunning plunge into the depths of desire and despair as Leslie realizes that, once freed from the boundaries of convention, her urges can never again be contained or satisfied. Hailed by the New York Times as a “novel of unusual power” about “a spiritual sister to Dostoevsky’s ‘underground man,’ ” Pretty Leslie is a testament to the astonishing powers of R. V. Cassill’s imagination. It is also, from first page to last, a thrilling, unrelenting, and absolutely unforgettable sexual drama.