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Author: Edward Carey
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030755872X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
"Easily the most brilliant fiction I've seen this year -- it proves the potential brilliance of the novel form." -- John Fowles, author of The Magus Observatory Mansions, once the Orme family's magnificent ancestral home set on beautiful grounds, is now a crumbling apartment block stranded on a traffic island, peopled with eccentrics. Thirty-seven-year-old Francis Orme lives in Observatory Mansions with his peculiar parents and a collection of misfits. By day he is a street performer, earning money as "a statue of whiteness" in the park, wearing white gloves to ensure that his skin never touches anything. He steals items for his museum of significant objects (996 in all), not for their monetary value but because they have been loved, often bringing grief to their erstwhile owners. His bedridden mother, Alice, who has created for herself an alternative time frame called "fiction," and his father, Francis, are among the occupants set apart from the rest of the busy city by their histories, their memories, and their relationships with the other seven inhabitants of the flats. Each of the house dwellers has his or her own story, as seen through Francis's eyes, and the careful routine and harmony of the house are shaken when along comes a new resident, the half-blind, vulnerable Anna Tap. She is sympathetic and resourceful, and slowly the desperately lonely residents begin to open up their long-closed hearts. As the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions begins to shift, Francis finds himself having to protect the secrets of his past and the sanctity of his collection, while growing emotionally closer to Anna. Hailed as no less than a tour de force, Observatory Mansions is a debut novel of immense originality--a strangely haunting landscape occupied by compelling and unforgettable characters.
Author: Edward Carey
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030755872X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Easily the most brilliant fiction I've seen this year -- it proves the potential brilliance of the novel form." -- John Fowles, author of The Magus Observatory Mansions, once the Orme family's magnificent ancestral home set on beautiful grounds, is now a crumbling apartment block stranded on a traffic island, peopled with eccentrics. Thirty-seven-year-old Francis Orme lives in Observatory Mansions with his peculiar parents and a collection of misfits. By day he is a street performer, earning money as "a statue of whiteness" in the park, wearing white gloves to ensure that his skin never touches anything. He steals items for his museum of significant objects (996 in all), not for their monetary value but because they have been loved, often bringing grief to their erstwhile owners. His bedridden mother, Alice, who has created for herself an alternative time frame called "fiction," and his father, Francis, are among the occupants set apart from the rest of the busy city by their histories, their memories, and their relationships with the other seven inhabitants of the flats. Each of the house dwellers has his or her own story, as seen through Francis's eyes, and the careful routine and harmony of the house are shaken when along comes a new resident, the half-blind, vulnerable Anna Tap. She is sympathetic and resourceful, and slowly the desperately lonely residents begin to open up their long-closed hearts. As the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions begins to shift, Francis finds himself having to protect the secrets of his past and the sanctity of his collection, while growing emotionally closer to Anna. Hailed as no less than a tour de force, Observatory Mansions is a debut novel of immense originality--a strangely haunting landscape occupied by compelling and unforgettable characters.
Author: Peter Schwenger
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816646319
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.
Author: Edward Carey
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1443424242
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Part one of an unusual and astonishing new fantasy trilogy that blends fine literary fare with a terrific romp through the reimagined outskirts of Victorian-era London In the imaginary borough of Filching, the extensive Iremonger family (“kings of mildew, moguls of mould”) have made a fortune from junk, building a dark and sprawling mansion from salvage scrap. Heap House is surrounded by the dangerous, noxious, shifting Heaps that stretch beyond its bounds. And within its walls, certain objects begin to display strange signs of life. Young Clod Iremonger is about to be "trousered" and betrothed (unwillingly) to his cousin Pinalippy when he meets the plucky orphan servant Lucy Pennant, with whose help he begins to uncover the dark secrets of his family’s empire. Mystery, romance and the perils of the Heaps await! Gorgeously (and ghoulishly) illustrated by the author, Heap House is peopled with unforgettable characters with delightfully skewed names--anxious, animal-loving Tummis with his pet seagull; menacing cousin Moorcus; dreadful Aunt Rosamud and more. As Carey writes, “Every life is thick with rubbish, but the Iremongers did it with a difference.”
Author: Edward Carey
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593188896
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE “A strange and tender parable . . . All of Edward Carey's work is profound and delightful.” —Max Porter, author of Lanny The ingenious storyteller Edward Carey returns to reimagine a time-honored fable: the story of an impatient father, a rebellious son, and a watery path to forgiveness for the young man known as Pinocchio In the small Tuscan town of Collodi, a lonely woodcarver longs for the companionship of a son. One day, “as if the wood commanded me,” Giuseppe—better known as Geppetto—carves for himself a pinewood boy, a marionette he hopes to take on tour worldwide. But when his handsome new creation comes magically to life, Geppetto screams . . . and the boy, Pinocchio, leaps from his arms and escapes into the night. Though he returns the next day, the wily boy torments his father, challenging his authority and making up stories—whereupon his nose, the very nose his father carved, grows before his eyes like an antler. When the boy disappears after one last fight, the father follows a rumor to the coast and out into the sea, where he is swallowed by a great fish—and consumed by guilt. He hunkers in the creature’s belly awaiting the day when he will reconcile with the son he drove away. With all the charm, atmosphere, and emotional depth for which Edward Carey is known—and featuring his trademark fantastical illustrations—The Swallowed Man is a parable of parenthood, loss, and letting go, from a creative mind on a par with Gregory Maguire, Neil Gaiman, and Tim Burton.
Author: Christian Morgenstern
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789383145249
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
First published in 1905, German poet Christian Morgenstern's piece is a darkly comic linguistic caprice. Illustrated with punctuation marks, the text is a romp, and yet the political undertones are unmistakable, suggesting systems of menacing control.
Author: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1617759384
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Palm Springs now joins Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California’s Noir Series arena. “Contrary to popular belief, noir doesn’t require a bleak city street for its setting. Nor water, for that matter. Noir thrives on secrets, lies and lust, all flowing plentifully through the jewel in the Coachella Valley’s fragile crown . . . For all the playfulness of the genre and the location, the wisecracks and the kidney-shaped pools, there is an unmanageable darkness waiting to seep in, like so much blood in the pool water.” —Los Angeles Times Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: T. Jefferson Parker, Janet Fitch, Eric Beetner, Kelly Shire, Tod Goldberg, Michael Craft, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Rob Roberge, J.D. Horn, Eduardo Santiago, Rob Bowman, Chris J. Bahnsen, Ken Layne, and Alex Espinoza.
Author: Marc Valli
Publisher: Laurence King
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Presents a survey of key contemporary artists who have each embraced painting and are working within a realist tradition. Through individual interviews, discusses their methods, motives and sources, from art history to the Internet and the language of film.
Author: Edward Barnaby
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319773232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
Have industrial-age technologies and visual discourses transformed us into spectators of the real, and can realist fiction make that transformation visible to us? This book brings Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and an array of cultural criticism into dialogue with novels by Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Rushdie, Carey and Barnes to foreground literary realism’s critique of visual culture, including Gothic architectural revival, neoclassicism, tourism, historical pageantry, postcolonial cinema and photography, museums, preservationism, urbanism and artisanal neo-folk movements. Barnaby advances the concept of meta-spectacle to distinguish realist fiction that engages ethically with visual discourses from realist-ic fiction that reproduces the visible veneer of reality for aesthetic consumption. He highlights the limitations of artistic critiques of spectacle, considers their resilience toward a culture industry that continuously repackages iconoclasm as iconicity, and reflects upon the process of reorienting the reader to comprehend realist gestures. By heightening the capacity to recognize our own immersion within objectified representations of the real, Realist Critiques of Visual Culture demonstrates how literary realism remains vital within a society that is so deeply invested in visually replicating and archiving lived experience.
Author: Meryl Gordon
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1455512648
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
From New York Times bestselling author Meryl Gordon, the definitive biography of Huguette Clark, who went from being one of the wealthiest and most famous Jazz Age socialites to spending the last twenty years of her life hiding out in hospitals. Born in 1906, Huguette Clark grew up in her family's 121-room Beaux Arts mansion in New York and was one of the leading celebrities of her day. Her father William Andrews Clark, was a copper magnate, the second richest man in America, and not above bribing his way into the Senate. Huguette attended the coronation of King George V. And at twenty-two with a personal fortune of $50 million to her name, she married a Princeton man and childhood friend William MacDonald Gower. Two-years later the couple divorced. After a series of failed romances, Huguette began to withdraw from society--first living with her mother in a kind of Grey Gardens isolation then as a modern-day Miss Havisham, spending her days in a vast apartment overlooking Central Park, eating crackers and watching The Flintstones with only servants for company. All her money and all her real estate could not protect her in her later life from being manipulated by shady hangers-on and hospitals that were only too happy to admit (and bill) a healthy woman. But what happened to Huguette that turned a vivacious, young socialite into a recluse? And what was her life like inside that gilded, copper cage?
Author: Liz Jensen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596919981
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
Charlotte Schleswig, the delightful narrator of Liz Jensen's latest novel, supports herself and the lumpen Fru Schleswig (who may or may not be her mother) as a prostitute in 1890s Copenhagen. While she is no small success at the trade, she leaps at a new job opportunity for herself and Fru Schleswig, as cleaning ladies for the wealthy widow Krak. But mysteries abound at Fru Krak's dark old mansion. The basement appears to be haunted, townspeople claim to have seen the dead Professor Krak walking the streets as a ghost, and there are stories of desperate souls who paid the professor a visit and never emerged. In fact, as Charlotte will discover, there is a simple explanation for all this: the basement is home to a time machine. When their cunning investigations land them in trouble, Charlotte and Fru Schleswig find themselves catapulted through time and space to modern-day London, and there their adventures truly begin. With the minxy, intrepid Charlotte, Liz Jensen introduces a heroine every bit as memorable as Louis Drax. And with My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, she delivers yet another outlandishly entertaining novel, in which the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of spacetime proves no match for human ingenuity and earthly passion.
