Da Vinci's Bicycle (New Directions Classic)

Da Vinci's Bicycle (New Directions Classic) PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811227448
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Guy Davenport’s second collection of stories, was first published in 1979, and contains some of his most important fiction. Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time. They are all people who see the world differently from their contemporaries and therefore seem absurd, like Pablo Picasso in "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," Leonardo Da Vinci in "The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag," James Joyce and Guillaume Apollinaire in the marvelous "The Haile Selassie Funeral Train." Hilton Kramer of The New York Times has said, "Davenport’s conception of the short story form is remarkable. He has given it some of the intellectual density of the learned essay, some of the lyrical concision of the modern poem––some of its difficulty too––and a structure that often resembles a film documentary. The result is a tour de force that adds something new to the art of fiction." Esteemed writer and translator Guy Davenport's brilliant story collection, first published in 1979, is recognized today as a classic of American fiction. Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time.

Da Vinci's Bicycle (New Directions Classic)

Da Vinci's Bicycle (New Directions Classic) PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811227448
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Guy Davenport’s second collection of stories, was first published in 1979, and contains some of his most important fiction. Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time. They are all people who see the world differently from their contemporaries and therefore seem absurd, like Pablo Picasso in "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," Leonardo Da Vinci in "The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag," James Joyce and Guillaume Apollinaire in the marvelous "The Haile Selassie Funeral Train." Hilton Kramer of The New York Times has said, "Davenport’s conception of the short story form is remarkable. He has given it some of the intellectual density of the learned essay, some of the lyrical concision of the modern poem––some of its difficulty too––and a structure that often resembles a film documentary. The result is a tour de force that adds something new to the art of fiction." Esteemed writer and translator Guy Davenport's brilliant story collection, first published in 1979, is recognized today as a classic of American fiction. Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time.

A Table of Green Fields

A Table of Green Fields PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811217712
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description


7 Greeks

7 Greeks PDF Author:
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811212885
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"Overall, this volume will afford great pleasure to scholars, teachers, and also those who simply love to watch delightful souls disport themselves in language."--Anne Carson

Fortress Besieged (New Directions Classic)

Fortress Besieged (New Directions Classic) PDF Author: Qian Zhongshu
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 081122354X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century, Fortress Besieged is a classic of world literature, a masterpiece of parodic fiction that plays with Western literary traditions, philosophy, and middle-class Chinese society in the Republican era. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien (á la Emma Bovary), with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake American university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.

Aller Retour New York: Essay (New Directions Revived Modern Classics)

Aller Retour New York: Essay (New Directions Revived Modern Classics) PDF Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811223140
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this unbuttoned missive to his friend Alfred Perles is not only his longest (nearly 80 pages!) but his best—an exuberant, rambling, episodic, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour New York has never been easy to find. It was first brought out in Paris in 1935 in a limited edition, and a second edition, “Printed for Private Circulation Only,” was issued in the United States ten years later. It is now available in paperback as a Revived Modern Classic, with an introduction by George Wickes that illuminates the people and personal circumstances which inform Aller Retour New York.

Twelve Stories

Twelve Stories PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: Counterpoint
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Stories with references to art, philosophy and literature. In Robot, a dog falls into a hole in a forest, leading a group of French boys to discover the cave of Lascaux, while The Chair is about the writer, Franz Kafka and a garden bathhouse at Marienbad.

The Cardiff Team

The Cardiff Team PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811217705
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description


A Balance of Quinces

A Balance of Quinces PDF Author: Erik Reece
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811213363
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
As Erik Anderson Reece says in A Balance of Quinces, "Many know Guy Davenport the creator of fiction, the critic, the illustrator, the poet, the translator.... But Guy Davenport the monastic painter is still unknown." Here gathered for the first time is a generous collection of Davenport's paintings and drawings, interwoven with commentary by poet and critic Erik Anderson Reece. The broad scope of Davenport's artistic output is included here: the pen-and-ink portraits, the abstract still lifes, and the collage compositions. Erik Anderson Reece's essay provides cultural background for the work and examines it as am extension of Davenport's writings. Besides the plentiful black-and-white reproductions throughout the text, this edition of A Balance of Quinces also includes twenty-four pages of color plates.

Objects on a Table

Objects on a Table PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1582430357
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This collection of four essays on the art of the still life begins with a look back to pictures of meals painted on the walls of Egyptian tombs--as the author points out, the soul could eat. Davenport’s meditations on the still life dip into the full history of this art form, touching on neolithic cave paintings, the Dutch masters, Cezanne, Van Gogh, even photography and the collage.

The Guy Davenport Reader

The Guy Davenport Reader PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 161902103X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination. The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes."—Guy Davenport Modernism spawned the greatest explosion of art, architecture, literature, painting, music, and dance of any era since the Renaissance. In its long unfolding, from Yeats, Pound and Eliot to Picasso and Matisse, from Diaghilev and Balanchine to Cunningham and Stravinsky and Cage, the work of Modernism has provided the cultural vocabulary of our time. One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called "assemblages"—lush experiments that often defy classification. Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport's fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Eight years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers the first true introduction to the far–ranging work of this neglected genius.