Download or read book Childish Things written by Valéry Larbaud and published by Sun & Moon. This book was released on 1994 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inventing the Victorians written by Matthew Sweet and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.

Download or read book Gauguin written by Philippe Dagen and published by Tate. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illustrated book, focuses on Gauguin's use of narrative, both as inspiration and fuel for his work and as a tool to create a personal mythology around himself as an artist

Download or read book Games of Consequence written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Good Sex Illustrated written by Tony Duvert and published by Semiotext(e). This book was released on 2007-11-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title offers a scathing view of sex manuals for children and society's hypocrisy of over sex that argues for the rights of children to their own bodies and their own sexuality. Written in the wake of May 1968 and Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Tony Duvert's Good Sex Illustrated (Le bon sexe illustre) was part of the miraculous moment when sexuality could turn the world upside down and reveal social hypocrisy for what it was. Bitterly funny and unabashedly anarchistic, Good Sex Illustrated openly declares war on mothers, family, psychoanalysis, morality, and the entire social construct, through a close reading of sex manuals for children. Published in 1973, one year after Duvert won the prestigious Prix Medicis, it proved that accolades had not tempered his scathing wit or his approach to such taboo topics as pedophilia. This translation, by award-winning author Bruce Benderson, will belatedly introduce English-speaking audiences to the most infamous gay writer from France since Jean Genet first hit the scene in the 1940s.

Download or read book Diary of an Innocent written by Tony Duvert and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in English, Duvert's shocking novel about a sexual adventurer among a tribe of adolescent boys in Northern Africa. "I'd find it amusing if, in a few centuries, the only thing that our descendents condescend to retain of our artistic production, the only thing in which they'll see worlds to admire, to penetrate, the only thing that they'll show off as precious in immense museums after having flushed down the toilet all our acknowledged masterpieces, the only thing that will give them nostalgia and love for us will be our porn."—from Diary of an Innocent Exiled from the prestigious French literary circles that had adored him in the 1970s, novelist Tony Duvert's life ended in anonymity. In 2008, nineteen years after his last book was published, Duvert's lifeless body was discovered in the small village of Thoré-la-Rochette, where he had been living a life of total seclusion. Now for the first time, Duvert's most highly crafted novel is available in English. Poetic, brutally frank, and outright shocking, Diary of an Innocent recounts the risky experiences of a sexual adventurer among a tribe of adolescent boys in an imaginary setting that suggests North Africa. More reverie than narrative, Duvert's Diary presents a cascading series of portraits of the narrator's adolescent sexual partners and their culture, and ends with a fanciful yet rigorous construction of a reverse world in which marginal sexualities have become the norm. Written with gusto and infused with a luminous bitterness, this novel is more unsettling to readers today than it was to its first audience when published in French in 1976. In his openly declared war on society, Duvert presents a worldview that offers no easy moral code and no false narrative solution of redemption. And yet no reader will remain untouched by the book's dazzling language, stinging wit, devotion to matters of the heart, and terse condemnation of today's society.

Download or read book Take Another Little Piece of My Heart written by Pamela Des Barres and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pamela Des Barres spent the sexual revolution on the ramparts as the celebrated "queen of the groupies" and chronicled her adventures with the high priests of rock in her best seller I'm With the Band. Affectionate, subversive, and funny, it was hailed by The New York Times as representing "something honorable and loving ... about the sexual honesty of modern women." It became an underground classic, an emblematic memoir of the 1960s generation.