Atomik Aztex

Atomik Aztex PDF Author: Sesshu Foster
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 087286846X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In the alternate universe of this glitteringly surreal first novel, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is visited by visions of a parallel world run by the Europeans, where consumerism reigns supreme. Aztecs armed with automatic weapons, totemic powers and blood sacrifice conquer and colonize 1940s Europe, as ghosts of the world wars emerge to haunt contemporary Los Angeles. Atomik Aztex is a hilarious read. A potent concoction, with influences from graphic novels, along with Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the paranoia of Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs, and an outrageous cyber-Aztlán mix reminiscent of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Sesshu Foster is the author of the critically acclaimed City Terrace Field Manual.

Atomik Aztex

Atomik Aztex PDF Author: Sesshu Foster
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 087286846X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In the alternate universe of this glitteringly surreal first novel, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is visited by visions of a parallel world run by the Europeans, where consumerism reigns supreme. Aztecs armed with automatic weapons, totemic powers and blood sacrifice conquer and colonize 1940s Europe, as ghosts of the world wars emerge to haunt contemporary Los Angeles. Atomik Aztex is a hilarious read. A potent concoction, with influences from graphic novels, along with Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the paranoia of Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs, and an outrageous cyber-Aztlán mix reminiscent of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Sesshu Foster is the author of the critically acclaimed City Terrace Field Manual.

World Ball Notebook

World Ball Notebook PDF Author: Sesshu Foster
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A genre-breaking adventure: narrative prose poems filled with awe, yearning, acerbic wit, and crystalline observations.

ELADATL

ELADATL PDF Author: Sesshu Foster
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868257
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
A breathtaking free fall into the long-buried (and fictional) history of a utopian era in American lighter-than-air travel, as told by its death-defying, aero-acrobatic heroes. "Foster and Romo's 'real fake dream' of the future-past history of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is a superb and loving phantasmagoria that gobbles up real histories for breakfast and spits out the seeds."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles—some as large as one thousand feet long—was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. ELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history, replete with heroes, villains, and moments of astonishing derring-do and terrifying disaster. Written and presented as an “actual history of a fictional company,” this surrealist, experimental novel is a tour de force of politicized fantastic fiction, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into a truly original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations, community interventions, and staged performances, ELADATL is a furiously hilarious send-up of academic histories, mainstream narratives, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum. "Poet Foster (Atomik Aztex) and artist Romo deliver a maddeningly accomplished inquiry into the secret history of East Los Angeles. . . . This is as much fun to read as it must have been to make."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "One of the wildest, most creative and deeply-cutting novels I’ve read in years, a genuine piece of newness in both content and form. To wade through this surreal narrative archeology is to experience, in the finest sense, literature as fever dream."—Omar El Akkad, author of American War: A Novel "Visionary, hilarious, anarchic, this assemblage of breakneck dialog, blisteringly brilliant film criticism, bureaucratic documents, revolutionary chatter, mass transit, and fake dreams of the secret police, is the counterfactual novel to beat all counterfactual novels."—Mark Doten, author of Trump Sky Alpha "Hilarious and prophetic and profound, truer than truth, and realer than all realities currently available for purchase, ELADATL is strong medicine against the erasures of history, a mega-vitamin for struggles yet to come. This book combats despair."—Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

American Studies as Transnational Practice

American Studies as Transnational Practice PDF Author: Yuan Shu
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN: 1611688485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
This wide-ranging collection brings together an eclectic group of scholars to reflect upon the transnational configurations of the field of American studies and how these have affected its localizations, epistemological perspectives, ecological imaginaries, and politics of translation. The volume elaborates on the causes of the transnational paradigm shift in American studies and describes the material changes that this new paradigm has effected during the past two decades. The contributors hail from a variety of postcolonial, transoceanic, hemispheric, and post-national positions and sensibilities, enabling them to theorize a "crossroads of cultures" explanation of transnational American studies that moves beyond the multicultural studies model. Offering a rich and rewarding mix of essays and case studies, this collection will satisfy a broad range of students and scholars.

City Terrace

City Terrace PDF Author: Sesshu Foster
Publisher: Kaya/Muae
ISBN:
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Brawling, street-wise prose poems push the boundaries of narrative form, taking the reader through the physical and psychological landscapes of East Los Angeles.

Racial Asymmetries

Racial Asymmetries PDF Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479800554
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts.a Racial Asymmetries aspecifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the authorOCOs ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective. a Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu FosterOCOsa Atomik Aztex, Sabina MurrayOCOsa A CarnivoreOCOs Inquiry aand Sigrid NunezOCOsa The Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, a Racial Asymmetries aemploys an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds. a Stephen Hong Sohn ais Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the co-editor ofa Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits."

Eat the Mouth That Feeds You

Eat the Mouth That Feeds You PDF Author: Carribean Fragoza
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868354
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE WHITING AWARD PEN AMERICA LITERARY FINALIST Recommended by Héctor Tobar as an essential Los Angeles book in the New York Times. Carribean Fragoza's debut collection of stories reside in the domestic surreal, featuring an unusual gathering of Latinx and Chicanx voices from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, and universes beyond. "Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is an accomplished debut with language that has the potential to affect the reader on a visceral level, a rare and significant achievement from a forceful new voice in American literature."—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, New York Times Book Review, and author of Sabrina and Corina Carribean Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma's letters has extended to taking bites of her actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family’s beloved lime tree. Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women's wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border. "Eat the Mouth that Feeds You renders the feminine grotesque at its finest."—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean "Eat the Mouth that Feeds You will establish Fragoza as an essential and important new voice in American fiction."—Héctor Tobar, author of The Barbarian Nurseries "Fierce and feminist, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is a soul-quaking literary force."—Dontaná McPherson-Joseph, The Foreword, *Starred Review ". . . a work of power and a darkly brilliant talisman that enlarges in necessary ways the feminist, Latinx, and Chicanx canons."—Wendy Ortiz, Alta Magazine "Fragoza's surreal and gothic stories, focused on Latinx, Chicanx, and immigrant women's voices, are sure to surprise and move readers."—Zoe Ruiz, The Millions "This collection of visceral, often bone-chilling stories centers the liminal world of Latinos in Southern California while fraying reality at its edges. Full of horror and wonder."—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review "Fragoza's debut collection delivers expertly crafted tales of Latinx people trying to make sense of violent, dark realities. Magical realism and gothic horror make for effective stylistic entryways, as Fragoza seamlessly blurs the lines between the corporeal and the abstract."—Publishers Weekly "The magic realism of Eat the Mouth that Feeds You is thoroughly worked into the fabric of the stories themselves . . . a wonderful debut."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

I'jaam

I'jaam PDF Author: Sinan Antoon
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872864573
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
A risky and risqué prison memoir depicts the collective nightmare of life under Saddam.

Ether

Ether PDF Author: Ben Ehrenreich
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
ISBN: 087286524X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
A bearded man in a badly soiled suit known only as The Stranger wanders an apocalyptic landscape on the fringes of a dying metropolis, looking for a way to "get back on top." Thwarted and rejected at every turn by old friends and strangers alike—even by the author of this novel, whom he visits repeatedly in unsuccessful attempts to determine his own narrative—his impotence and rage are expressed in acts of seemingly senseless violence. The various characters he encounters on his journey—a pack of sadistic boys, skinheads who beat him senseless, a deaf-mute woman who tries to heal him, a sidewalk preacher, and a deranged man who identifies him as The One—avoid or abuse him, or attempt to follow him. Entertaining, disturbing, and wildly intelligent, written with sinister humor and great compassion, Ether reflects on the possibilities and consequences of forgiveness, the problems of faith, and the trials of creation. "Like a David Lynch movie transcribed by Pierre Reverdy, it's a brilliant and unforgettable book, written somewhere between sleeping and waking."—Chris Kraus, author of Torpor "This is an intense, intelligent novel that paints a vivid picture of an America that most of us refuse to see, are afraid to see. This is real art."—Percival Everett, author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier "A book that's both pure as snow and filthy as dirty, with the lovely detachment of ice. Like Beckett, Ehrenreich has the talent of being particular and general at once, and thus steps outisde of time"—Lydia Millet, Pulizer Prize finalist for Love in Infant Monkeys "Ether is a dark and powerful work, with disturbing metaphysical overtones. Ben Ehrenreich is a gathering power in the literary land."—John Banville, author of The Infinities "Ben Ehenreich transforms the brutal human and urban blight into a landscape of cosmic battle. Ether is a dark, complex, richly written, beautiful novel. It is a rarity in American fiction today."—Frederic Tuten, author of Self Portraits: Fictions "Ether, perhaps even more than his previous novel, The Suitors, shows Ben Ehrenreich unafraid of storytelling that is terrifically bold and sly."—Sesshu Foster, author of World Ball Notebook Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. Ether is his second novel.

A Good Day for Seppuku

A Good Day for Seppuku PDF Author: Kate Braverman
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872867226
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Haunting new stories about girls on the brink of adulthood, women on the verge of breakdowns, and families undone by past deceptions. "Kate Braverman is a writer of astonishing versatility and lyricism. Her stories are brilliantly rendered, painfully intimate portraits of individuals who come alive on the page as if illuminated by strobe lighting. With remarkable precision she tracks the restless motions of a mind searching for its reflection in the world—a continuous interrogation of the self that sweeps us along with it, as in a mysterious adventure."—Joyce Carol Oates "If fame did not find Braverman when the moment was right, perhaps it will make amends now that the moment is wrong. . . . Braverman excels at flooding readers in images that throb with menace or pleasure, as if descriptive language were a vein into which our most primal fears and desires could be injected."—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker "The book feels timeless, think Transparent, sans the trans . . . Kate Braverman, an underground literary icon through decades of razor-sharp writing, returns with a gorgeously observed collection of stories about contemporary Jewish identity. It's profound, realistic, and funny in equal measure."—David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly "Braverman daringly, ravishingly, and resoundingly dramatizes the profound consequences of delusions, lies, ignorance, anger, cruelty, poverty, disappointment, conformity, inebriation, and violence with high imagination, sensual precision, cutting humor, and bracing insight."—Donna Seaman, Booklist *Starred review "Braverman writes forthright but beautiful sentences. Her details are so vivid that they feel like memories . . . "—Publishers Weekly, *Starred/Boxed review "Kate Braverman is an original. Reading her is like hitching a ride on a runaway train, always dangerous, always thrilling, always a knockout. Seppuku is all that and more."—Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake "Braverman is the godmother of literary bad girls and a connoisseur of the shattered beauty glittering in the wreckage of her characters' lives. A Good Day for Seppuku celebrates the Braverman vision, and frames her legacy."—Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M. A thirteen-year-old girl must choose between her mother in Beverly Hills or her pot-growing father in the Allegheny Mountains. Dr. Bernie Roth and his wife Chloe reside in a grand hacienda in La Jolla. Their children are in college, and their disappointments are profound. But Bernie has his doctor's bag of elixirs for the regrets of late middle age. Mrs. Barbara Stein, a high school teacher, looks like she'd sacrifice her life for Emily Dickinson's honor. That's camouflage. Mrs. Stein actually spends summers in the Sisyphean search for her prostitute daughter in Los Angeles. These are some of the tales told in Kate Braverman's audacious new story collection. These furious and often hilarious tableaus of American family life remind us of why she has been seducing readers ever since her debut novel Lithium for Medea shook the literary world nearly forty years ago.