Author: David Means
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571330142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded"-wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy-while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians. This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the twenty-two-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. In Hystopia, Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.
Hystopia
Author: David Means
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571330142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded"-wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy-while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians. This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the twenty-two-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. In Hystopia, Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571330142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded"-wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy-while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians. This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the twenty-two-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. In Hystopia, Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.
Hystopia
Author: David Means
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865479135
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
"A visionary first novel taking place in an alternate version of Vietnam-War-era America"--
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865479135
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
"A visionary first novel taking place in an alternate version of Vietnam-War-era America"--
The Spot
Author: David Means
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932791
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which three men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery. The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair is about to come to an end. The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in the currents of her own tragic story. The Spot is in the ear of a Manhattan madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbor . The Spot is a suburban hospital room in which a young father confronts his son's potentially devastating diagnosis. The Spot is a dusty encampment in Nebraska where a gang of inept radicals plot a revolution. The Spot draws thirteen new stories together into a masterful collection that shows David Means at his finest: at once comically detached and wrenchingly affecting, expansive and concise, wildly inventive and firmly rooted in tradition. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor (London Review of Books), Alice Munro, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac (Newsday), Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson (Chicago Tribune/NPR), Denis Johnson (Entertainment Weekly), Poe, Chekhov, and Carver (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), but the spot he has staked out in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932791
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which three men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery. The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair is about to come to an end. The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in the currents of her own tragic story. The Spot is in the ear of a Manhattan madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbor . The Spot is a suburban hospital room in which a young father confronts his son's potentially devastating diagnosis. The Spot is a dusty encampment in Nebraska where a gang of inept radicals plot a revolution. The Spot draws thirteen new stories together into a masterful collection that shows David Means at his finest: at once comically detached and wrenchingly affecting, expansive and concise, wildly inventive and firmly rooted in tradition. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor (London Review of Books), Alice Munro, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac (Newsday), Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson (Chicago Tribune/NPR), Denis Johnson (Entertainment Weekly), Poe, Chekhov, and Carver (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), but the spot he has staked out in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.
Greetings from Below
Author: David Philip Mullins
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1932511881
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Book Description
Set in Vegas, these Mary McCarthy Prize-winning stories chronicle what becomes of a man contorted by grief and sexual regret.
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1932511881
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Book Description
Set in Vegas, these Mary McCarthy Prize-winning stories chronicle what becomes of a man contorted by grief and sexual regret.
What to Do About the Solomons
Author: Bethany Ball
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190723
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
A “funny, sexy, and smart” multigenerational saga following the secret lives of an (over) extended Jewish family—from Israel to America (Judy Blume). More than oceans divide the Solomons. And now, it’s a scandal. Prodigal son Marc Solomon, an Israeli ex-Navy commando living in Los Angeles, is falsely accused of money laundering through his California investment firm. As his home is raided, Marc’s wife, Carolyn ―concealing her own dicey past―makes hopeless attempts to hold their family of five together. Not surprisingly, news of Marc’s disgrace makes its way from Santa Monica to a kibbutz on the Jordan River Valley, and the rest of the mortified Solomon clan: Marc’s self-absorbed wannabe movie star sister, Shira; his rich, powerful and fed-up construction magnet father, Yakov; his childhood sweetheart, Maya; and his brother-in-law Guy, a local ranger turned “mad artist.” As the secrets of the community are revealed through various memories and tales, we witness the tenuous bonds that can keep the Solomons together, and the truths and rumors that could ultimately tear them apart. Elegant, witty, and provocative, What to Do About the Solomons weaves contemporary Jewish history through a distinctly modern and very savvy tale of family life. “I ended [it] absolutely swimming with affection, not just for the characters but for the multiple worlds that created them . . . there’s something profoundly lovely―and loving―about the Solomons” (New York Times Book Review).
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190723
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
A “funny, sexy, and smart” multigenerational saga following the secret lives of an (over) extended Jewish family—from Israel to America (Judy Blume). More than oceans divide the Solomons. And now, it’s a scandal. Prodigal son Marc Solomon, an Israeli ex-Navy commando living in Los Angeles, is falsely accused of money laundering through his California investment firm. As his home is raided, Marc’s wife, Carolyn ―concealing her own dicey past―makes hopeless attempts to hold their family of five together. Not surprisingly, news of Marc’s disgrace makes its way from Santa Monica to a kibbutz on the Jordan River Valley, and the rest of the mortified Solomon clan: Marc’s self-absorbed wannabe movie star sister, Shira; his rich, powerful and fed-up construction magnet father, Yakov; his childhood sweetheart, Maya; and his brother-in-law Guy, a local ranger turned “mad artist.” As the secrets of the community are revealed through various memories and tales, we witness the tenuous bonds that can keep the Solomons together, and the truths and rumors that could ultimately tear them apart. Elegant, witty, and provocative, What to Do About the Solomons weaves contemporary Jewish history through a distinctly modern and very savvy tale of family life. “I ended [it] absolutely swimming with affection, not just for the characters but for the multiple worlds that created them . . . there’s something profoundly lovely―and loving―about the Solomons” (New York Times Book Review).
Homesick for Another World
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399562893
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time "I can’t recall the last time I laughed this hard at a book. Simultaneously, I’m shocked and scandalized. She’s brilliant, this young woman."—David Sedaris Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel. And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399562893
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time "I can’t recall the last time I laughed this hard at a book. Simultaneously, I’m shocked and scandalized. She’s brilliant, this young woman."—David Sedaris Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel. And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.
American War
Author: Omar El Akkad
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0451493591
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle—this gripping debut novel asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself. From the author of What Strange Paradise "Powerful ... as haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in The Road." —The New York Times Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0451493591
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle—this gripping debut novel asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself. From the author of What Strange Paradise "Powerful ... as haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in The Road." —The New York Times Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.
This Is Memorial Device
Author: David Keenan
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571330843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTHLRB BOOK OF THE WEEKCAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTHSHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends. Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571330843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTHLRB BOOK OF THE WEEKCAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTHSHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends. Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.
21st Century US Historical Fiction
Author: Ruth Maxey
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030418979
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
This new collection examines important US historical fiction published since 2000. Exploring historical novels by established American writers such as Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Susan Choi, and George Saunders, the book also includes chapters on first-time novelists. Individual essays in 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past tackle prominent and provocative new novels, for example, recent Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction by Anthony Doerr, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colson Whitehead. Interrogating such key themes as war, race, sexuality, trauma and childhood; notions of genre and periodization; and recent theorizations of historical fiction, scholars from the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland analyze an emerging canon of contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse range of major American writers.
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030418979
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
This new collection examines important US historical fiction published since 2000. Exploring historical novels by established American writers such as Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Susan Choi, and George Saunders, the book also includes chapters on first-time novelists. Individual essays in 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past tackle prominent and provocative new novels, for example, recent Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction by Anthony Doerr, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colson Whitehead. Interrogating such key themes as war, race, sexuality, trauma and childhood; notions of genre and periodization; and recent theorizations of historical fiction, scholars from the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland analyze an emerging canon of contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse range of major American writers.
Object Lessons
Author:
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448149959
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Book Description
Edited by Lorin and Sadie Stein What does it take to write a great short story? In Object Lessons, twenty-one contemporary masters of the genre answer that question, sharing favourite stories from the pages of The Paris Review. A laboratory for new fiction since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has launched hundreds of careers while publishing some of the most inventive and best-loved stories of the last half century. This anthology – the first of its kind – is more than a treasury: it is an indispensable resource for writers, students and anyone else who wants to understand fiction from a writer's point of view. A repository of incredible fiction, Object Lessons includes contributions from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Alarcon, Donald Antrim, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, Mary Gaitskill, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Colum McCann, Lorrie Moore, Norman Rush, Mona Simpson and Ali Smith, among others.
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448149959
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Book Description
Edited by Lorin and Sadie Stein What does it take to write a great short story? In Object Lessons, twenty-one contemporary masters of the genre answer that question, sharing favourite stories from the pages of The Paris Review. A laboratory for new fiction since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has launched hundreds of careers while publishing some of the most inventive and best-loved stories of the last half century. This anthology – the first of its kind – is more than a treasury: it is an indispensable resource for writers, students and anyone else who wants to understand fiction from a writer's point of view. A repository of incredible fiction, Object Lessons includes contributions from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Alarcon, Donald Antrim, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, Mary Gaitskill, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Colum McCann, Lorrie Moore, Norman Rush, Mona Simpson and Ali Smith, among others.