Believeniks!

Believeniks! PDF Author: Ivan Felt
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0307423522
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
Critic Ivan Felt and poet Harris Conklin are the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of baseball fandom. Or, perhaps, the Felix and Oscar of baseball fandom. Or the Pollock and de Kooning. Or the Bugs and Daffy. The New York Mets are, of course, the New York Mets of baseball. In 2005, Felt and Conklin, lifelong friends and lifelong fans, determined to change the course of their own careers and of baseball history by doing what had never been done: writing their beloved team to a World Championship. The 2005 Mets, with a new manager and some of the spiffiest free agents on the market, seemed ready to take the world by storm. Felt and Conklin believed themselves up to the task. It is, after all, Belief (and free agents) that makes such dreams come true. Believeniks! is the record of a journey. Felt and Conklin would, alas, fail to see their team attain that golden pinnacle in the clouds of baseball glory. As Believeniks! reveals, however, the season’s unfolding drama would leave two of baseball’s most erudite and excitable fans forever changed.

Believeniks!

Believeniks! PDF Author: Ivan Felt
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0307423522
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
Critic Ivan Felt and poet Harris Conklin are the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of baseball fandom. Or, perhaps, the Felix and Oscar of baseball fandom. Or the Pollock and de Kooning. Or the Bugs and Daffy. The New York Mets are, of course, the New York Mets of baseball. In 2005, Felt and Conklin, lifelong friends and lifelong fans, determined to change the course of their own careers and of baseball history by doing what had never been done: writing their beloved team to a World Championship. The 2005 Mets, with a new manager and some of the spiffiest free agents on the market, seemed ready to take the world by storm. Felt and Conklin believed themselves up to the task. It is, after all, Belief (and free agents) that makes such dreams come true. Believeniks! is the record of a journey. Felt and Conklin would, alas, fail to see their team attain that golden pinnacle in the clouds of baseball glory. As Believeniks! reveals, however, the season’s unfolding drama would leave two of baseball’s most erudite and excitable fans forever changed.

The Ecstasy of Influence

The Ecstasy of Influence PDF Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385534965
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Get Book Here

Book Description
What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture sup­posed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers. A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf’s worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and oth­ers. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.

Believeniks!

Believeniks! PDF Author: Ivan Felt
Publisher: Random House LLC
ISBN: 0385517165
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Two ardent fans offer a tongue-in-cheek chronicle of the New York Mets' 2005 season as they follow the team and its players on the path to a Mets World Series as they endeavor to unseat the hated Yankees. 25,000 first printing.

The New York Mets

The New York Mets PDF Author: Richard Grossinger
Publisher: Frog Books
ISBN: 9781583942055
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
No baseball team has captured America's imagination like the Mets. Alternately the "Lovable Losers" and the "Miracle Mets," New York's other team offers fascinating fodder for writer Richard Grossinger in this thoughtful collection. The New York Mets is a series of probing essays on the best and most interesting years of the team, particularly 1969, 1973, 1986, and last year's abbreviated run. A pivotal essay chronicles the lives of a professional athlete and a die-hard fan to create a well-argued, deeply felt meditation on the ways in which franchise baseball has come to fail not only the fans but the players. This centerpiece presents a poignant narrative of Mets pitcher Terry Leach and author Grossinger's own experiences playing and tracking the sport. Taken together, these powerful essays alternately take the poet's, the alchemist's, and the player's perspective to paint a composite portrait that brings all the stunning highs and dispiriting lows together to show the ways in which America's favorite pastime has changed. Grossinger reflects on the salad days when teams were happily homegrown and laments the current money-ball scenario some call baseball today.

Dissident Gardens

Dissident Gardens PDF Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307744493
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, The Globe and Mail Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the MacArthur Fellowship whose writing has been called “as ambitious as [Norman] Mailer, as funny as Philip Roth, and as stinging as Bob Dylan” (Los Angeles Times), returns with an epic yet intimate family saga. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her equally passionate and willful daughter, Miriam, flees Rose’s influence for the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. Despite their differences, they share a power to enchant the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her feckless chess hustler cousin, Lenny; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinger husband, Tommy Gogan; and their bewildered son, Sergius. Through Lethem’s vivid storytelling we come to understand that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.

Understanding Jonathan Lethem

Understanding Jonathan Lethem PDF Author: Matthew Luter
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611175135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book Here

Book Description
Understanding Jonathan Lethem is a study of the novels, short fiction, and nonfiction on a wide range of subjects in the arts by American novelist Jonathan Lethem, who is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Motherless Brooklyn, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Gun, with Occasional Music. Matthew Luter explores the key contemporaries of and influences on Lethem, who is the Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. Luter begins this volume by explaining how Lethem's innovative and provocative essay on creative appropriation, "The Ecstasy of Influence," differs from other writing about influence, suggesting an artistic mode that celebrates thoughtful borrowing. Readings of Lethem's three major novels follow: taken together, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City present a novelist coming to terms with the joys and downsides of artistic influence. Luter concludes the edition with an examination of Lethem's third collection, Lucky Alan: And Other Stories. Borrowing openly and promiscuously from earlier traditions both high and low (experimental fiction, comic books, art film, detective novels), Lethem displays a career-long interest in questioning what literary originality might mean in a postmodern age. Some suggest that such borrowings indicate a literary well that has run dry, making writers such as Lethem mere patchwork artists. Luter argues instead that Lethem's propensity for wearing his influences and obsessions on his sleeve encourages new thought about originality itself. Out with "it's all been done" and in with "look at all that's been done, and all that we can still do with it!"

Bunk

Bunk PDF Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575

Get Book Here

Book Description
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction “There Kevin Young goes again, giving us books we greatly need, cleverly disguised as books we merely want. Unexpectedly essential.”—Marlon James Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue’s gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers—from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What Is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. In this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of “truthiness” where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.

The Collapsing Frontier

The Collapsing Frontier PDF Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629636541
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
Having stormed mainstream literature from the outskirts, Lethem has won a readership both wide and deep, all of whom appreciate his literary excellence, his mordant but compassionate humor, and the cultish attentiveness of his SF origins. He has earned the right to tread anywhere, and his many admirers are ready to follow. This collection compiles his intensely personal thoughts on the most interesting and deplorable topics in post-postmodern America. It moves from original new fiction to insights on popular culture, cult and canonical authors, and problematic people. Plus… “David Bowman and the Furry-Girl School of American Fiction” is a personal true adventure, as Lethem tries (with the help of a seeming expert) to elbow his way into literary respectability. “The Collapsing Frontier” and “In Mugwump Four” are fictions mapping ominous new realms. “Calvino’s 'Lightness' and the Feral Child of History” is an intimate encounter with a legendary author. In “My Year of Reading Lemmishly” and “Snowden in the Labyrinth” he explores courage, art, and the search for truth, with wildly different results. And Featuring: Our usual Outspoken Interview, in which Lethem reveals the secret subtext of his books, how he spent his MacArthur award money, and how a Toyota he owned was used in the robbery of a fast-food restaurant.

More Alive and Less Lonely

More Alive and Less Lonely PDF Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612197388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Ecstasy of Influence comes a new collection of essays that celebrates a life spent in books More Alive and Less Lonely collects over a decade of Jonathan Lethem’s finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appreciations of forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp critical essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries. Only Lethem, with his love of cult favorites and the canon alike, can write with equal insight into classic writers like Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, modern masters like Lorrie Moore and Thomas Pynchon, graphic novelist Chester Brown, and science fiction outlier Philip K. Dick. Sharing his infectious love for books of all kinds, More Alive and Less Lonely is a bracing voyage of literary discovery and an essential addition to every booklover’s shelf.

A Gambler's Anatomy

A Gambler's Anatomy PDF Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101873671
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a devilishly entertaining novel about an international backgammon hustler who thinks he's psychic. Too bad about the tumor in his face. Alexander Bruno travels the world playing high stakes backgammon and hunting for amateur “whales” who think they can challenge him. Lately he’s had a run of bad luck, not helped by the blot that has emerged in his field of vision, which forces him to look at the board sideways. As the blot grows larger, his game gets worse, until, at an opulent mansion in Berlin, he passes out in the middle of a match and receives an alarming diagnosis. Out of money and out of friends, he turns to the only person who can help (and the last person he wants to see): a high-rolling former childhood acquaintance who agrees to pay for Bruno’s experimental surgery in Berkeley. But Berkeley is the place where Bruno discovered his psychic gift and where he vowed never to return. There, forced to confront patchouli flashbacks and his uncertain future, he must ask himself: Is he playing the game, or is the game playing him?