Download or read book Conversations with E L Doctorow written by E. L. Doctorow and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow's characters spark an unparalleled urgency in the novelist's re-creations of history. In his work the American dream and the values his characters try to live by turn to madness and ashes. Within this collection Doctorow explores the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with shifting points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the modernist heritage to which readers have become accustomed. But he stresses that these techniques are always subordinate to the telling of a good story and the creation of memorable characters.
Download or read book Homer Langley written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Beautiful and haunting . . . one of literature’s most unlikely picaresques, a road novel in which the rogue heroes can’t seem to leave home.”—The Boston Globe SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Booklist Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers—wars, political movements, technological advances—and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves. Praise for Homer & Langley “Masterly.”—The New York Times Book Review “Doctorow paints on a sweeping historical canvas, imagining the Collyer brothers as witness to the aspirations and transgressions of 20th century America; yet this book’s most powerfully moving moments are the quiet ones, when the brothers relish a breath of cool morning air, and each other’s tragically exclusive company.”— O: The Oprah Magazine “A stately, beautiful performance with great resonance . . . What makes this novel so striking is that it joins both blindness and insight, the sensual world and the world of the mind, to tell a story about the unfolding of modern American life that we have never heard in exactly this (austere and lovely) way before.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Wondrous . . . inspired . . . darkly visionary and surprisingly funny.” —The New York Review of Books “Cunningly panoramic . . . Doctorow has packed this tale with episodes of existential wonder that cpature the brothers in all their fascinating wackiness.”—Elle
Download or read book Andrew s Brain written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This brilliant novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, SLATE, AND THE TELEGRAPH Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew’s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” Praise for Andrew’s Brain “Too compelling to put down . . . fascinating, sometimes funny, often profound . . . Andrew is a provocatively interesting and even sympathetic character. . . . The novel seamlessly combines Doctorow’s remarkable prowess as a literary stylist with deep psychological storytelling pitting truth against delusion, memory and perception, consciousness and craziness. . . . [Doctorow] takes huge creative risks—the best kind.”—USA Today “Cunning [and] sly . . . This babbling Andrew is a casualty of his times, binding his wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, bits of story, whatever his spinning mind can unspool for him. One of the things that makes [Andrew] such a terrific comic creation is that he’s both maddeningly self-delusive and scarily self-aware: He’s a fool, but he’s no innocent.”—The New York Times Book Review “A tantalising tour de force . . . a journey worth taking . . . With exhilarating brio, the book plays off . . . two contrasting takes on mind and brain. . . . [Andrew’s Brain encompasses] an astonishing range of modes: vaudeville humour, tragic romance, philosophical speculation. . . . It fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair.”—The Sunday Times (London) “Dramatic . . . cunning and beautiful . . . strange and oddly fascinating, this book: a musing, a conjecture, a frivolity, a deep interrogatory, a hymn.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Provocative . . . a story aswirl in a whirlpool of neuroscience, human relations, loss, guilt and recent American history . . . Doctorow reveals his mastery in the sheen of a text that is both window and mirror. Reading his work is akin to soaring in a glider. Buoyed by invisible breath, readers encounter stunning vistas stretching to horizons they’ve never imagined.”—The Plain Dealer “Andrew’s ruminations can be funny, and his descriptions gorgeous.”—Associated Press “[An] evocative, suspenseful novel about the deceptive nature of human consciousness.”—More “A quick and acutely intelligent read.”—Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book Conversations with E L Doctorow written by E. L. Doctorow and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doctorow's novels imagine the great moments of American history - the Old West, the Depression - as backdrops for tales of moral pain and injustice. In these interviews, Doctorow explores the themes of his work.
Download or read book All the Time in the World written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a master of modern American letters comes an enthralling collection of brilliant short fiction about people who, as E. L. Doctorow notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world.” Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous classics, All the Time in the World is resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow.
Download or read book The March written by E. L. Doctorow and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 2005 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last years of the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting a 60-mile wide swath of pillage and destruction. That event comes back in this magisterial novel. High school & older.
Download or read book Ragtime written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
Download or read book The Waterworks written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2007-05-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction.” –The Washington Post Book World One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.” “Startling and spellbinding . . . The waters that lave the narrative all run to the great confluence, where the deepest issues of life and death are borne along on the swift, sure vessel of [Doctorow’s] poetic imagination.” –The New York Times Book Review “Hypnotic . . . a dazzling romp, an extraordinary read, given strength and grace by the telling, by the poetic voice and controlled cynical lyricism of its streetwise and world-weary narrator.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “A gem of a novel, intimate as chamber music . . . a thriller guaranteed to leave readers with residual chills and shudders.” –Boston Sunday Herald “Enthralling . . . a story of debauchery and redemption that is spellbinding from first page to last.” –Chicago Sun-Times “An immense, extraordinary achievement.” –San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Walkaway written by Cory Doctorow and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kirkus' Best Fiction of 2017 From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death. "Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle." —William Gibson Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza—known to his friends as Hubert, Etc—was too old to be at that Communist party. But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be—except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society—and walk away. After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter—from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system. It’s still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it’s war – a war that will turn the world upside down. Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multi-generation SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years...and the very human people who will live their consequences. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Book of Daniel written by E. L. Doctorow and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2015-04 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents pay a visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment. After a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Decades later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives.
Download or read book Lives of the Poets written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innocence is lost to unforgettable experience in these brilliant stories by E. L. Doctorow, as full of mystery and meaning as any of the longer works by this American master. In “The Writer in the Family,” a young man learns the difference between lying and literature after he is induced into deceiving a relative through letters. In “Wili,” an early-twentieth-century idyll is destroyed by infidelity. In “The Foreign Legation,” a girl and an act of political anarchy collide with devastating results. These and other stories flow into the novella “Lives of the Poets,” in which the images and themes of the earlier stories become part of the narrator’s unsparing confessions about his own mind, offering a rare look at the creative process and its connection to the heart.
Download or read book World s Fair written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Award • “Marvelous . . . You get lost in World’s Fair as if it were an exotic adventure. You devour it with the avidity usually provoked by a suspense thriller.”—The New York Times Hailed by critics from coast to coast and by readers of all ages, this resonant novel is one of E.L. Doctorow’s greatest works of fiction. It is 1939, and even as the rumbles of progress are being felt worldwide, New York City clings to remnants of the past, with horse-drawn wagons, street peddlers, and hurdy-gurdy men still toiling in its streets. For nine-year-old Edgar Altschuler, life is stoopball and radio serials, idolizing Joe DiMaggio, and enduring the conflicts between his realist mother and his dreamer of a father. The forthcoming Word’s Fair beckons, an amazing vision of American automation, inventiveness, and prosperity—and Edgar Altschuler responds. A marvelous work from a master storyteller, World’s Fair is a book about a boy who must surrender his innocence to come of age, and a generation that must survive great hardship to reach its future. Praise for World’s Fair “Something close to magic.”—Los Angeles Times “World’s Fair is better than a time capsule; it’s an actual slice of a long-ago world, and we emerge from it as dazed as those visitors standing on the corner of the future.”—Anne Tyler “Doctorow has managed to regain the awed perspective of a child in this novel of rare warmth and intimacy. . . . Stony indeed in the heart that cannot be moved by this book.”—People “Fascinating . . . exquisitely rendered details of a lost way of life.”—Newsweek “Wonderful reading.”—USA Today
Download or read book Billy Bathgate written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To open this book is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers.
Download or read book Loon Lake written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-09-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hero of this dazzling novel by American master E. L. Doctorow is Joe, a young man on the run in the depths of the Great Depression. A late-summer night finds him alone and shivering beside a railroad track in the Adirondack mountains when a private railcar passes. Brightly lit windows reveal well-dressed men at a table and, in another compartment, a beautiful girl holding up a white dress before her naked form. Joe will follow the track to the mysterious estate at Loon Lake, where he finds the girl along with a tycoon, an aviatrix, a drunken poet, and a covey of gangsters. Here Joe’s fate will play out in this powerful story of ambition, aggression, and identity. Loon Lake is another stunning achievement of this acclaimed author. “Powerful . . . [a] complex and haunting meditation on modern American history.” –The New York Times “A genuine thriller . . . a marvelous exploration of the complexities and contradictions of the American dream . . . Not under any circumstances would we reveal the truly shattering climax.” –The Dallas Morning News “A dazzling performance . . . [Loon Lake] anatomizes America with insight, passion, and inventiveness.” –The Washington Post Book World “Hypnotic . . . tantalizes long after it has ended.” –Time “Compelling . . . brilliantly done.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch “A masterpiece.” –Chicago Sun-Times
Download or read book The Shakespeare Wars written by Ron Rosenbaum and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Ron Rosenbaum] is one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.” –David Remnick In The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum gives readers an unforgettable way of rethinking the greatest works of the human imagination. As he did in his groundbreaking Explaining Hitler, he shakes up much that we thought we understood about a vital subject and renews our sense of excitement and urgency. He gives us a Shakespeare book like no other. Rather than raking over worn-out fragments of biography, Rosenbaum focuses on cutting-edge controversies about the true source of Shakespeare’s enchantment and illumination–the astonishing language itself. How best to unlock the secrets of its spell? With quicksilver wit and provocative insight, Rosenbaum takes readers into the midst of fierce battles among the most brilliant Shakespearean scholars and directors over just how to delve deeper into the Shakespearean experience–deeper into the mind of Shakespeare. Was Shakespeare the one-draft wonder of Shakespeare in Love? Or was he rather–as an embattled faction of textual scholars now argues–a different kind of writer entirely: a conscientious reviser of his greatest plays? Must we then revise our way of reading, staging, and interpreting such works as Hamlet and King Lear? Rosenbaum pursues key partisans in these debates from the high tables of Oxford to a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in a strip mall in the Deep South. He makes ostensibly arcane textual scholarship intensely seductive–and sometimes even explicitly sexual. At an academic “Pleasure Seminar” in Bermuda, for instance, he examines one scholar’s quest to find an orgasm in Romeo and Juliet. Rosenbaum shows us great directors as Shakespearean scholars in their own right: We hear Peter Brook–perhaps the most influential Shakespearean director of the past century–disclose his quest for a “secret play” hidden within the Bard’s comedies and dramas. We listen to Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as he launches into an impassioned, table-pounding fury while discussing how the means of unleashing the full intensity of Shakespeare’s language has been lost–and how to restore it. Rosenbaum’s hilarious inside account of “the Great Shakespeare ‘Funeral Elegy’ Fiasco,” a man-versus-computer clash, illustrates the iconic struggle to define what is and isn’t “Shakespearean.” And he demonstrates the way Shakespearean scholars such as Harold Bloom can become great Shakespearean characters in their own right. The Shakespeare Wars offers a thrilling opportunity to engage with Shakespeare’s work at its deepest levels. Like Explaining Hitler, this book is destined to revolutionize the way we think about one of the overwhelming obsessions of our time.
Download or read book More Writers Company written by Eleanor Wachtel and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-03-11 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with Isabel Allende, Martin Amis, John Berger, Harold Bloom, E.L. Doctorow, Amitav Ghosh, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, Oliver Sacks, Carol Shields, Jeanette Winterson and more.
Download or read book Drinks Before Dinner written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-unavailable work by one of America's most eminent writers. Drinks Before Dinner, called “witty and provocative” by the New York Times, is E.L. Doctorow’s only play. A tour-de-force of language and ideas concerning the individual’s role in and response to contemporary America, Drinks Before Dinner revolves around a dinner party for the economically privileged. As Doctorow writes in his introduction, “[This play] deals in general statements about the most common circumstances of our lives, the numbers of us, the cars we drive, the television we watch, the cities we live in, our contraception and our armaments, and our underlying sense of the apocalypse. . . .”
