Download or read book The Lute and the Scars written by Danilo Kis and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written between 1980 and 1986, the six stories that constitute The Lute and the Scars (as well as an untitled piece by the author, included here as "A and B") were transcribed from the manuscripts left by Danilo Kiš following his death in 1989. Like the title story, many of these texts are autobiographical. Others resurrect protagonists belonging to Kiš’s fellow Central European novelists, allowing readers to identify, perhaps, depending on the level of obfuscation, fantasy,and historical accuracy, figures dreamed up by Ödön von Horváth and Endre Ady ("The Stateless"), by the Yugoslavian Nobel laureate Ivo Andric (“Debt”), and by Piotr Rawicz. Against a background of oppressive regimes and political exile, readers will find that the never-ending debate between death and writing continues unabated in these stories—death as allegory or as a voluntary symbolic act, and writing as the one impregnable defense, writing as the only possible means of survival.
Download or read book William T Vollmann written by Christopher K. Coffman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This fascinating, massive, wide-ranging collection that editors Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes have gathered together into William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion will soon be recognized as one of those rare critical books for which that egregiously overused term 'groundbreaking' is fully justified." —Larry McCaffery, from the preface of William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion The essays in this collection make a case for regarding William T. Vollmann as the most ambitious, productive, and important living author in the US. His oeuvre includes not only outstanding work in numerous literary genres, but also global reportage, ethical treatises, paintings, photographs, and many other productions. His reputation as a daring traveler and his fascination with life on the margins have earned him an extra-literary renown unequaled in our time. Perhaps most importantly, his work is exceptional in relation to the literary moment. Vollmann is a member of a group of authors who are responding to the skeptical ironies of postmodernism with a reinvigoration of fiction’s affective possibilities and moral sensibilities, but he stands out even among this cohort for his prioritization of moral engagement, historical awareness, and geopolitical scope. Included in this book in addition to twelve scholarly critical essays are reflections on Vollmann by many of his peers, confidantes, and collaborators, including Jonathan Franzen, James Franco, and Michael Glawogger. With a preface by Larry McCaffery and an afterword by Michael Hemmingson, this book offers readings of most of Vollmann’s works, includes the first critical engagements with several key titles, and introduces a range of voices from international Vollmann scholarship.
Download or read book Scar written by Sara Mesa and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-25 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sonia meets Knut in an online literary forum and begins a long-distance relationship with him that gradually turns to obsession. Though Sonia needs to create distance when Knut becomes too absorbing, she also yearns for a less predictable existence. Alternately attracted to and repulsed by Knut, Sonia begins a secret double life of theft and betrayal in which she will ultimately be trapped for years.
Download or read book The Prince Of Fire written by Radmila Gorup and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2014-08-09 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1998 Misha Djordjevic Award for the best book on Serbian culture in English.Editors Gorup and Obradovic have collected stories from thirty-five outstanding writers in this first English anthology of Serbian fiction in thirty years. The anthology, representing a great variety of literary styles and themes, includes works by established writers with international reputations, as well as promising new writers spanning the generation born between 1930 and 1960. These stories may lead to a greater understanding of the current events in the former Yugoslavia.
Download or read book Death of Lysanda written by Yitzhak Orpaz and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Death of Lysanda collects two macabre novellas by one of Israel's greatest poets. In the title piece, we meet Naphtali Noi, a recently divorced proofreader, critic, and "creative" taxidermist, given to hallucinations and soon perhaps to add murder to his hobbies. Ants tells the story of a married couple, Jacob and Rachel, who discover that an army of the titular insects is threatening to destroy their rooftop apartment—but Rachel seems to be on their side rather than her husband's. In fragmented prose halfway between the Old Testament and the playful experiments of Julio Cortázar, these tales take to pieces the psyches of two men—and a nation—at war with themselves.
Download or read book The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan written by Tanguy Viel and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tanguy Viel's parody/pastiche of the American novel is subtle and experimental; it tells a story at the same time as it implicitly poses questions about the narrative structure it is deploying." —The French Review In The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, disappearance is both a theme and a stylistic device. Indeed, this publication narrates the disappearance of Dwayne Koster, who, fascinated by the story of Jim Sullivan, commits suicide in the New Mexico desert which was the setting of the rocker’s disappearance in 1975. But this novel is for the most part set in the metanarrative tale of its own genesis, and, as a result, is partially eclipsed: its -fictitious- author doesn’t relate it in its entirety and keeps adding bits and pieces of first drafts and preliminary sketches to his text, thus blurring its boundaries. Tanguy Viel’s work can therefore be perceived as a double response, existential and aesthetic, to the question of the end.
Download or read book Maya Pill written by German Sadulaev and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the traditions of Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, German Sadulaev's follow-up to his acclaimed I am a Chechen! is set in a twenty-first century Russia, phantasmagorical and violent. A bitingly funny twenty-first century satire, The Maya Pill tells the story of a mid-level manager at a frozen-food import company who comes upon a box of psychotropic pills that's accidentally been slipped into a shipment. He takes one, and disappears down the rabbit hole: entering the mind of a Chinese colleague; dreaming that he is one of the rulers of an ancient kingdom; even beleiving he is in negotiations with the devil. A mind-expanding companion to the great Russian classics, The Maya Pill is strange, savage, bizarre, and uproarious.
Download or read book Turbid Rivers written by Ch'ae Man-Sik and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-23 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turbid River was written just before Ch’ae Man-Sik was arrested in 1938 by the Japanese colonial government. Like the two novels that followed (Peace Under Heaven and Frozen Fish), Turbid River is a realistic portrayal of life in Korea under Japanese colonization. The tragic story of a woman’s life, the novel is also a penetrating look into the objectification of women.
Download or read book Stingray written by Kim Joo-Young and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-16 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by critics, Stingray has been described by its author as "a critical biography of my loving mother." With his father having abandoned his family for another woman, Se-young and his mother are forced to subsist on their own in the harsh environment of a small Korean farming village in the 1950s. Determined to wait for her husband's return, Se-young's mother hangs a dried stingray on the kitchen doorjamb; to her, it's a reminder of the fact that she still has a husband, and that she must behave as a married woman would, despite all. Also, she claims, when the family is reunited, the fish will be their first, celebratory meal together. But when a beggar girl, Sam-rae, sneaks into their house during a blizzard, the first thing she does is eat the stingray, and what follows is a struggle, at once sentimental and ideological, for the soul of the household.
Download or read book Generation of Vipers written by Philip Wylie and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 1996-09-01 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps the most vitriolic attack ever launched on the American way of living - from politicians to professors to businessmen to Mom to sexual mores to religion - Generation of Vipers - ranks with the works of De Tocqueville and Emerson in defining the American character and malaise.
Download or read book When Adam Opens His Eyes written by Jang Jung-il and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1990, this is a sensational and highly controversial novel by one of Korea’s most electrifying contemporary authors, which plows through contemporaneous Korean mores with aplomb. First published in 1990, this is a sensational and highly controversial novel by one of Korea’s most electrifying contemporary authors. A preposterous coming-of-age story, melding sex, death, and high school in a manner reminiscent of some perverse collision between Georges Bataille and Beverly Cleary, the narrator of this book plows through contemporaneous Korean mores with aplomb, bound for destruction, or maturity—whichever comes first.
Download or read book Leningrad written by Igor Vishnevetsky and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Closing the gap between the contemporary Russian novel and the masterpieces of the early Soviet avant-garde, this masterful mixture of prose and poetry, excerpts from private letters and diaries, and quotes from newspapers and NKVD documents, is a unique amalgam of documentary, philosophical novel, and black humor. Revolving around three central characters—a composer; his lover, Vera; and Vera's husband, a naval officer intercepting enemy communications—we are made witness to the inhuman conditions prevailing during the Siege of Leningrad, against a background of starvation and continuous bombing. In their wild attempts to survive, the protagonists hold on to their art, ideals, and sentiments—hoping that these might somehow remain uncorrupted despite the Bolsheviks, Nazis, and even death itself.
Download or read book The Girl in the Photograph written by Lygia Fagundes Telles and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles's most acclaimed novel is a journey into the inner lives of three young women, each revealing her secrets and loves, each awaiting a destiny tied to the colorful and violent world of modern Brazil. Sensual and wealthy Lorena dreams of a tryst with a married man. Unhappy Lia burns with a frantic desire to free her imprisoned fiancé. Glamorous Ana Clara, unable to escape her past, falls toward a tragedy of drugs and obsession. Intimate and unforgettable, The Girl in the Photograph creates an extraordinary picture of the wonder and the darkness that come to possess a woman's mind, and stands as one of the greatest novels to come out of Brazil in the late twentieth century.
Download or read book Narcisse on a Tightrope written by Olivier Targowla and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called "cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.) But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world. Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually summons the will to try. What follows is an account of this naïve and timid patient’s adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. An endearing misfit in the tradition of Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump, Narcisse is destined to totter precariously on the highwire of his existence. Will we see him fall? A quirky fable that pokes holes in the accepted mental health verities and pleads for a touch of madness. With an introduction by Warren Motte.
Download or read book The Secret Crypt written by Salvador Elizondo and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1968, The Secret Crypt is something of a cult classic in Mexican literature. Elizondo’s impassioned, breathless prose launches the reader into a labyrinth that is also a hall of mirrors. Here, we find a small group of characters who are part of an underground sect called Urkreis, one of whose aims is to discover the identity of the sect’s founder, known only as “the Imagined.” The identities of narrator, author, and characters blur into one another as the narrative moves between the two worlds of the novel and the author writing the novel—an unclassifiable masterpiece containing initiation rites, sacrificial murder, conspiracy, and delirium.
Download or read book Job Boj written by Jorge Guzman and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in alternating voices, Jorge Guzman's JOB BOJ is a captivating novel that explores the progression from melancholy to happiness, or vice versa. The delicate interplay between a light-hearted narrator and a brooding, introspective one draws the reader in to question identity. Are they the same man? Two different periods from the same life? Or are they two separate people? The reader is left to judge. While the novel is a superb masterclass in structure and innovation, JOB BOJ is a "rich and absorbing entertainment."
Download or read book And Still the Earth written by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to São Paulo, Brazil, in the not too distant future. Water is scarce, garbage clogs the city, movement is restricted, and the System—sinister, omnipotent, secret—rules its subjects' every moment and thought. Here, middle-aged Souza lives a meaningless life in a world where the future is doomed and all memory of the past is forbidden. A classic novel of "dystopia," looking back to Orwell's 1984 and forward to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, And Still the Earth stands with Loyola Brandão's Zero as one of the author's greatest, and darkest, achievements.
