Pieces of Soap: Essays

Pieces of Soap: Essays PDF Author: Stanley Elkin
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1941040381
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
With a wickedly witty touch, Elkin’s essays takes readers on a tour of American life in the 20th century. Stanley Elkin was one of our great American writers. “A divine exploiter of the idiocies and intricacies of our language,” as John Irving put it, and nowhere is that more clear than this collection of essays, which find Elkin wresting hilarity and heartbreak from the most unlikely of sources.

Pieces of Soap: Essays

Pieces of Soap: Essays PDF Author: Stanley Elkin
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1941040381
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
With a wickedly witty touch, Elkin’s essays takes readers on a tour of American life in the 20th century. Stanley Elkin was one of our great American writers. “A divine exploiter of the idiocies and intricacies of our language,” as John Irving put it, and nowhere is that more clear than this collection of essays, which find Elkin wresting hilarity and heartbreak from the most unlikely of sources.

Shouting Down the Silence

Shouting Down the Silence PDF Author: David C Dougherty
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252091019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Shouting Down the Silence presents the first complete biography of Stanley Elkin, a preeminent novelist who consistently won high marks from critics but whose complexities of style seemed destined to elude the popular acclaim he hoped to attain. From the publication of his second novel, A Bad Man, in 1967 to his death in 1995, Elkin was tormented by the desire for both material and artistic success. Elkin's novels were taught in colleges and universities, his fiction received high praise from critics and reviewers (two of his novels won National Book Critics Circle Awards), and his short stories were widely anthologized--and yet he was unable to achieve renown beyond the avant-garde, or to escape the stigma of being an "academic writer." He wanted to be Faulkner, but he had trouble being Elkin. Drawing on personal interviews and an intimate knowledge of Elkins's life and works, David C. Dougherty captures Elkin's early life as the son of a charismatic, intimidating, and remarkably successful Jewish immigrant from Russia, as well as his later career at Washington University in St. Louis. A frequent participant at the annual Bread Loaf Writers' conference, he was the friend--and sometime antagonist--of other important writers, particularly Saul Bellow, William Gass, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Coover. Despite failed attempts to bridge the gap from his academic post to wide popular success, Elkin continued to write essays, stories, and novels that garnered unerring praise. His was a classic dilemma of an intellectual aesthete loath to make use of the common devices of popular appeal. The book details the ambition, the success, the friction, and the foibles of a writer who won fame, but not the fame he wanted.

The Franchiser

The Franchiser PDF Author: Stanley Elkin
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781564783059
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
"Sentence for sentence, nobody in America writes better than Stanley Elkin." The New Republic

The Muse Upon My Shoulder

The Muse Upon My Shoulder PDF Author: Sylvia Skaggs McTague
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838639962
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In The Muse upon My Shoulder an exceptionally diverse group of writers (including Evan S. Connell, Anthony Piccione, David Trinidad, William Stafford, Jean Thompson, Vance Bourjaily, E. L. Doctorow, Stanley Elkin, Jay McInerney, Beth Henley, David Hwang, Bud Schulberg, and Mary Gordon) discuss the creative process. They entertain self-revealing questions about their status as writers, their inspiration to write, and their relationship to an audience. The conversational form of the interview allows for candid answers that readers rarely hear to questions that seldom are answered. The final chapter lets readers participate in the conflicts that surround the production of a good interview. Sylvia Skaggs McTague is a lecturer at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

George Mills

George Mills PDF Author: Stanley Elkin
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781564782922
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
Considered by many to be Elkin's magnum opus, George Mills is, an ambitious, digressive and endlessly entertaining account of the 1,000 year history of the George Millses. From toiling as a stable boy during the crusades to working as a furniture mover, there has always been a George Mills whose lot in life is to serve important personages. But the latest in the line of true blue-collar workers may also be the last, as he obsesses about his family's history and decides to break the cycle of doomed George Millses. An inventive, unique family saga, George Mills is Elkin at his most manic, most comic and most poignant.

An Essay Towards the History of Leverpool,

An Essay Towards the History of Leverpool, PDF Author: William Enfield
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Liverpool (England)
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description


The Dick Gibson Show

The Dick Gibson Show PDF Author: Stanley Elkin
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781564781987
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
National Book Award finalist: Look who's on the "Dick Gibson Radio Show" Arnold the Memory Expert ("I've memorized the entire West Coast shoreline - except for cloud cover and fog banks"). Bernie Perk, the burning pharmacist. Henry Harper, the nine-year old orphan millionaire, terrified of being adopted. The woman whose life revolves around pierced lobes. An evil hypnotist. Swindlers. Con-men. And Dick Gibson himself. Anticipating talk radio and its crazed hosts, Stanley Elkin creates a brilliant comic world held together by American manias and maniacs in all their forms, and a character who perfectly understands what Americans want and gives it to them.

Track Changes

Track Changes PDF Author: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417070
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Writing in the digital age has been as messy as the inky rags in Gutenberg’s shop or the molten lead of a Linotype machine. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the early adopters, and what made others anxious? Was word processing just a better typewriter, or something more?

Boswell

Boswell PDF Author: Stanley Elkin
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781564781741
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Boswell is Stanley Elkin's first and funniest novel: the comic odyssey of a twentieth-century groupie who collects celebrities as his insurance policy against death. James Boswell - strong man, professional wrestler (his most heroic match is with the Angel of Death) - is a con man, gate crasher, and moocher of epic talent. He is also a man on the make for all the great men of his time - his logic being that if you can't be a lion, know a pride of them. Can he cheat his way out of morality?

An Essay on the Virtues of Lime-water in the Cure of the Stone

An Essay on the Virtues of Lime-water in the Cure of the Stone PDF Author: Robert Whytt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description