Download or read book The Odd Plight of Adonis Licht written by David Perlstein and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Odd Plight of Adonis Licht Perception and reality collide in a dark, witty fable combining a reversal of Franz Kafkas The Metamorphosis with overtones of Jerzy Kosinskis Being There. Adonis Licht, a nondescript museum art curator, is a loner whose closest friend is a mute bag lady shrouded in black. After sleeping four straight days, Adonis awakens to find himself handsome and athletic beyond his wildest dreams. Adoniss career takes off. Beautiful women come on to him. He becomes a media figure. Yet he finds it difficult to reconcile his striking looks and celebrity with his former selfthe quiet, awkward scholar whose painful past haunts him. A sixteenth-century masterpiece and relationships with a coworker, his ravishing manager, and a journalist carry Adonis on an emotional roller coaster. Despite a catastrophe at the museum, his star continues to rise. When tragedy strikes, Adonis discovers that fantasy has a dark side.
Download or read book Big Truth written by David Perlstein and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astronaut turning eighty suffers a disturbing encounter. A hard-charging lawyer levitates. Satan makes a cruel wager with God. America bans stand-up comedy. Thus begins a journey toward self-discovery, concluding with four childhood friends taking a road trip fifty years after the last time they were all together and laying their relationships bare. Twenty-five stories set in California, Oregon, New York, Israel and India examine ambition, loss, friendship, parenthood, memory and aging to consider elusive—and often painful—truths.
Download or read book The Short Pun Intended Redemptive Life of Little Ned written by David Perlstein and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2023-04-13 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in the twentieth century, three children of poor Jewish immigrants stagger beneath the grueling promise of the American Dream. Nate Cohen, the pint-size, angry son of an alcoholic San Francisco prizefighter and Bohemian mother, becomes a parttime criminal. Working at a restaurant, he hurls bacon grease at an anti-Semitic employee and flees the city. As Ned Christianson, he cooks on cattle ranches in Northern California and Wyoming. After sleeping with a rancher’s daughter, Ned joins a Wild West show. Kayleh Rubenstein, a red-headed tailor’s daughter, becomes the child vaudeville star Clara Robbins. Her Uncle Henry (Zeev) manages her then sells her contract to a vaudeville star who abuses her and, when she finally resists, destroys her career. Clara descends into liquor and morphine. Jake Orlinsky, a New York orphan, performs as the child-magician Joseph Hartwig in a saloon below a brothel. After losing his job, he picks pockets and entertains on the street. Harry Houdini briefly befriends him. Following a fatal run-in at a New York nightclub, Jake escapes to California. The three young performers, all hiding their Jewish identities, meet at San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Clara and Joseph have a brief affair. All go south to Los Angeles, ultimately seeking careers in silent films. Through the ex-gunfighter and lawman Wyatt Earp, Ned and Joseph are hired for a western—and get fired. Clara becomes the kept woman of a series of Hollywood executives and is raped at the home of Fatty Arbuckle. A murder prompts Ned and Joseph to leave Los Angeles. A suicide sends Clara north. They reunite in San Francisco where two violent events lead to tragedy and redemption.
Download or read book TAKING STOCK written by David Perlstein and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2024-04-08 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gripping novel of loss and regret, Steve Goldman, about to turn 80, has just buried his wife Evelyn. Alone in his San Francisco home, he ponders his future, wonders if loneliness awaits him as a widower. For that matter, will he want to share his remaining years with another woman? If so, will he be worthy? Steve undergoes the challenging process of taking stock of his life—the good he’s done and the bad. Digging deep into his memory, he examines his relationships with Evelyn, his daughters, women in his post-college/post-army years and his “blood-brother” childhood friends from New York. The scales tip back and forth, influenced by achievements and kindnesses, betrayals and pain.
Download or read book Lola Flores written by David Perlstein and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hottest female nightclub star in 1930s Havana guards two secrets: She is a Polish-born American Jew, and she has a penis. Lola Flores, a musically gifted transgender woman, lives in constant fear of discovery while battling inner demons. Days before the 1929 Wall Street crash, 19-year-old pianist Albert Sobel fakes drowning in New York’s East River. As Lola Torres, she rides the Havana Special to Key West only to be assaulted by the train’s conductor. In politically unstable Havana, a Jewish nightclub proprietress tied to the American mob offers Lola a job. A transgender man, Fernando Fallon, designs her trademark floral hat and becomes her lifelong platonic companion. Lola is preyed on by the nightclub owner then a senior government official. The notorious gangster Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, unaware she is trans, takes her under his wing. In Nazi Berlin with bandleader Xavier Cugat, Lola meets the ill-fated transgender Danish woman Lili Elbe. Revolution in Cuba drives Lola back to New York. Depression-era Broadway brings a role in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, support by columnist Walter Winchell and spying in Havana for the FBI. World War Two Hollywood produces a glittering but brief film career, a tragic love affair and a hushed reunion with a sister. After Siegel’s 1947 murder in Los Angeles, Lola and Fernando flee to San Francisco. There they meet Christine Jorgensen, the first woman to successfully undergo gender reassignment. In 1953, Lola confronts McCarthyism while defending friend Lucille Ball from charges of Communist activity. On the set of I Love Lucy in 1954, Lola collapses. Dying, she recalls arriving in New York Harbor at age two and her father’s ironic words.
Download or read book 2084 written by David Perlstein and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After its second revolution, America is nothing—and everything—to joke about. The U.S.A. is history. In 2044, the Covenantal States of America constitutes a white-Christian autocracy echoing George Orwell’s banned classic, 1984. Washington pushes back against armed rebels, humor ridiculing tyranny and mushrooming graffiti referencing Orwell’s novel in the form of 2084. Sam Klein, a member of the Minyan, a clandestine group of stand-up comics, organizes a July Fourth comedy protest while his Indian-American wife Indira, a native Californian, faces deportation. The Fourth, celebrating an America made great yet again, brings unexpected fireworks.
Download or read book Hyperion Or the Hermit in Greece written by Friedrich Hölderlin and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friedrich Hölderlin's only novel, Hyperion (1797-99), is a fictional epistolary autobiography that juxtaposes narration with critical reflection. Returning to Greece after German exile, following his part in the abortive uprising against the occupying Turks (1770), and his failure as both a lover and a revolutionary, Hyperion assumes a hermitic existence, during which he writes his letters. Confronting and commenting on his own past, with all its joy and grief, the narrator undergoes a transformation that culminates in the realisation of his true vocation. Though Hölderlin is now established as a great lyric poet, recognition of his novel as a supreme achievement of European Romanticism has been belated in the Anglophone world. Incorporating the aesthetic evangelism that is a characteristic feature of the age, Hyperion preaches a message of redemption through beauty. The resolution of the contradictions and antinomies raised in the novel is found in the act of articulation itself. To a degree remarkable in a prose work of any length, what it means is inseparable from how it means. In this skilful translation, Gaskill conveys the beautiful music and rhythms of Hölderlin's language to an English-speaking reader.
Download or read book Greek Homosexuality written by Kenneth James Dover and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250 1900 written by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 1126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Reception of the Legend of Hero and Leander written by Brian Oliver Murdoch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-05-27 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the literary reception of the originally Greek love-story of Hero and Leander, examining the nature of the tale and demonstrating its longevity and huge popularity from classical times to the present, in a great variety of different genres. Chapters consider the classical versions (Ovid, Musaios, Martial), medieval and renaissance versions in various European languages, folk and literary ballads (and even a pop song), the lyric, dramatic versions, settings to music, burlesques and travesties in all genres, modern reflections of the story in (experimental) literary forms.
Download or read book Mighty Lewd Books written by J. Peakman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-06-24 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mighty Lewd Books describes the emergence of a new home-grown English pornography. Through the examination of over 500 pieces of British erotica, this book looks at sex as seen in erotic culture, religion and medicine throughout the long eighteenth-century, and provides a radical new approach to the study of sexuality.
