Download or read book The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction written by M.A. Orthofer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A user-friendly reference for English-language readers who are eager to explore contemporary fiction from around the world. Profiling hundreds of titles and authors from 1945 to today, with an emphasis on fiction published in the past two decades, this guide introduces the styles, trends, and genres of the world's literatures, from Scandinavian crime thrillers and cutting-edge Chinese works to Latin American narco-fiction and award-winning French novels. The book's critical selection of titles defines the arc of a country's literary development. Entries illuminate the fiction of individual nations, cultures, and peoples, while concise biographies sketch the careers of noteworthy authors. Compiled by M. A. Orthofer, an avid book reviewer and the founder of the literary review site the Complete Review, this reference is perfect for readers who wish to expand their reading choices and knowledge of contemporary world fiction. “A bird's-eye view of titles and authors from everywhere―a book overfull with reminders of why we love to read international fiction. Keep it close by.”—Robert Con Davis-Udiano, executive director, World Literature Today “M. A. Orthofer has done more to bring literature in translation to America than perhaps any other individual. [This book] will introduce more new worlds to you than any other book on the market.”—Tyler Cowen, George Mason University “A relaxed, riverine guide through the main currents of international writing, with sections for more than a hundred countries on six continents.”—Karan Mahajan, Page-Turner blog, The New Yorker

Download or read book Review of Contemporary Fiction XVI 1 written by John O'Brien and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1996-01-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Review's aesthetic focus has been called many things--postmodern, experimental, avant-garde, metafictional, subversive--but in bringing this aesthetic to a wider audience it also seeks to expose the artificial barriers that exist between and within cultures. To this end, The Review has a special affinity for the works of foreign writers who may otherwise go unread in the United States, as well as American writers whose work has gone unchampioned in their own country. An extensive book review section also covers recent works of innovative writing. Above all, The Review of Contemporary Fiction attempts to expand readers' notions of what fiction is and what it can do.

Download or read book What We Owe written by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde and published by HarperVia. This book was released on 2018 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compressed, visceral novel about exile, dislocation, and the emotional minefields between mothers and daughters.

Download or read book Arkwright written by Allen Steele and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nathan Arkwright is a famous science fiction writer who is convinced that humanity cannot survive on Earth. His Arkwright Foundation dedicates itself to creating a colony in deep space. Fueled by Nathan's legacy, generations of Arkwrights are drawn together, and pulled apart, by the enormity of the task and weight of their name.

Download or read book Necessary Errors written by Caleb Crain and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal • Slate • Kansas City Star • Flavorwire • Policy Mic • Buzzfeed “Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth.”—James Wood, The New Yorker The exquisite debut novel by the author of Overthrow that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague It’s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He’s arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them—including Jacob himself. Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain’s prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood—the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world—and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change.

Download or read book Outline written by Rachel Cusk and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. One of The New York Times' Top Ten Books of the Year. Named a A New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, The Independent, Glamour, and The Globe and Mail A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss. Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people's motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.

Download or read book Reading as Therapy written by Timothy Aubry and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do Americans read contemporary fiction? This question seems simple, but is it? Do Americans read for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation? To satisfy their own insatiable intellectual curiosities? While other forms of media have come to monopolize consumers’ leisure time, in the past two decades book clubs have proliferated, Amazon has sponsored thriving online discussions, Oprah Winfrey has inspired millions of viewers to read both contemporary works and classics, and novels have retained their devoted following within middlebrow communities. In Reading as Therapy, Timothy Aubry argues that contemporary fiction serves primarily as a therapeutic tool for lonely, dissatisfied middle-class American readers, one that validates their own private dysfunctions while supporting elusive communities of strangers unified by shared feelings. Aubry persuasively makes the case that contemporary literature’s persistent appeal depends upon its capacity to perform a therapeutic function. Aubry traces the growth and proliferation of psychological concepts focused on the subjective interior within mainstream, middle-class society and the impact this has had on contemporary fiction. The prevailing tendency among academic critics has been to decry the personal emphasis of contemporary fiction as complicit with the rise of a narcissistic culture, the ascendency of liberal individualism, and the breakdown of public life. Reading as Therapy, by contrast, underscores the varied ideological effects that therapeutic culture can foster. To uncover the many unpredictable ways in which contemporary literature answers the psychological needs of its readers, Aubry considers several different venues of reader-response—including Oprah’s Book Club and Amazon customer reviews—the promotional strategies of publishing houses, and a variety of contemporary texts, ranging from Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner to Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He concludes that, in the face of an atomistic social landscape, contemporary fiction gives readers a therapeutic vocabulary that both reinforces the private sphere and creates surprising forms of sympathy and solidarity among strangers.

Download or read book Women and Men written by Joseph McElroy and published by . This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York - from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages, rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American, in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.

Download or read book The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction written by Paul Crosthwaite and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary British and American fiction is defined by financial markets' power over the global publishing industry and the global economy.

Download or read book The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction written by Martyn Bone and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2005-06-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place? Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South. Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.

Download or read book The Review of Contemporary Fiction written by Gert Jonke and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2005-01-04 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Review of Contemporary Fiction is a tri-quarterly journal that features critical essays on fiction writers whose work resists convention and easy categorization.

Download or read book Fake Accounts written by Lauren Oyler and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE A wry, provocative and very funny debut novel about identity, authenticity and the self in the age of the internet ‘I loved it’ Zadie Smith ‘Brilliant, very funny’ Guardian ‘Prepare to feel very seen’ I-D

Download or read book The Sky Above Us written by Natalie Lund and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A compelling, well-voiced look at how teenagers deal with tragedy." -- School Library Journal "Powerfully crafted and captivating." --Midwest Book Review From the author of We Speak in Storms comes a compelling mystery about three friends searching for the truth in the aftermath of a plane crash. The morning after their senior year beach party, Izzy, Cass, and Janie are woken by a thundering overhead. Then they and their classmates watch in shock as a plane crashes into the water. When the passengers are finally recovered, they are identified as Izzy's twin brother, Israel, Cass's ex-boyfriend, Shane, and Janie's best friend, Nate. But Izzy can feel when her brother is in pain, and she knows he's not really dead. So she, Cass, and Janie set out to discover what actually happened that day--and why the boys were on the plane. Told in alternating timelines and points of view, this powerful and captivating novel follows the three boys in the weeks leading up to that fateful flight, and the girls they left behind as they try to piece together the truth about the boys they loved and thought they knew. A spellbinding story about the ripple effects of tragedy, the questions we leave unanswered, and the enduring power of friendship. Praise for The Sky Above Us: "Achingly human with hints of magic, this tale of loss in its many forms builds a compelling mystery." --Booklist "Lund proves adept at smoothly navigating a complicated plot, building and holding suspense, and creating easily relatable, multidimensional characters." --Publishers Weekly "A bruising look at loss from many angles." --BCCB "A deftly written and simply spellbinding story about the ripple effects of tragedy, the questions we leave unanswered, and the enduring power of friendship." --Midwest Book Review

Download or read book Sweetpea written by C.J. Skuse and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TV series starring Ella Purnell now on Sky Atlantic! The last person who called me ‘Sweetpea’ ended up dead...

Download or read book Contemporary Drift written by Theodore Martin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to call something “contemporary”? More than simply denoting what’s new, it speaks to how we come to know the present we’re living in and how we develop a shared story about it. The story of trying to understand the present is an integral, yet often unnoticed, part of the literature and film of our moment. In Contemporary Drift, Theodore Martin argues that the contemporary is not just a historical period but also a conceptual problem, and he claims that contemporary genre fiction offers a much-needed resource for resolving that problem. Contemporary Drift combines a theoretical focus on the challenge of conceptualizing the present with a historical account of contemporary literature and film. Emphasizing both the difficulty and the necessity of historicizing the contemporary, the book explores how recent works of fiction depict life in an age of global capitalism, postindustrialism, and climate change. Through new histories of the novel of manners, film noir, the Western, detective fiction, and the postapocalyptic novel, Martin shows how the problem of the contemporary preoccupies a wide range of novelists and filmmakers, including Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Vikram Chandra, China Miéville, Kelly Reichardt, and the Coen brothers. Martin argues that genre provides these artists with a formal strategy for understanding both the content and the concept of the contemporary. Genre writing, with its mix of old and new, brings to light the complicated process by which we make sense of our present and determine what belongs to our time.

Download or read book Check Please Book 2 Sticks Scones written by Ngozi Ukazu and published by First Second. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of the second half of the mega-popular webcomic series of the same name, Check, Please!: Sticks and Scones is the last in Ngozi Ukazu's hilarious and stirring two-volume coming-of-age story about hockey, bros, and trying to find yourself during the best four years of your life. Perfect for fans of the hit series Heartstopper! Eric Bittle is heading into his junior year at Samwell University, and not only does he have new teammates—he has a brand new boyfriend! Bitty and Jack must navigate their new, secret, long-distance relationship, and decide how to reveal their relationship to friends and teammates. And on top of that, Bitty's time at Samwell is quickly coming to an end...It's two full hockey seasons packed with big wins and high stakes!

Download or read book Literature Against Criticism written by Martin Paul Eve and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel’ of the mid-twentieth century. Martin Paul Eve’s engaging and far-reaching study explores the novel's contribution to the ongoing displacement of cultural authority away from university English. Spanning the works of Jennifer Egan, Ishmael Reed, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Waters, Percival Everett, Roberto Bolaño and many others, Literature Against Criticism forces us to re-think our previous notions about the relationship between those who write literary fiction and those who critique it.