The Cheerful Scapegoat

The Cheerful Scapegoat PDF Author: Wayne Koestenbaum
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1635901456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Wayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables. In his first book of short fiction--a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables--Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in The Cheerful Scapegoat are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue--but in the fable-world of The Cheerful Scapegoat, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture--codes and signifiers--get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable soufflé. Koestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables--emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes--alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.

The Cheerful Scapegoat

The Cheerful Scapegoat PDF Author: Wayne Koestenbaum
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1635901456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Wayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables. In his first book of short fiction--a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables--Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in The Cheerful Scapegoat are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue--but in the fable-world of The Cheerful Scapegoat, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture--codes and signifiers--get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable soufflé. Koestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables--emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes--alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.

Escape Goat

Escape Goat PDF Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063084813
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
From the international bestselling author of Bel Canto and The Dutch House, Ann Patchett, and the bestselling illustrator of the Fancy Nancy series, Robin Preiss Glasser, comes a hilarious and heartwarming story about a goat who keeps getting all the blame, but ultimately teaches one family about the importance of honesty and owning up to your mistakes. The Farmer family has a big problem! Every day their goat escapes, and every day, Mr. Farmer brings him back. So when things start to go awry on the farm, it must be the goat’s fault. Who’s to blame when Mrs. Farmer’s petunias are trampled? Or when all the cupcakes for Archie’s party disappear? And when the whole bucket of paint is spilled? Of course, everyone blames the goat! But is it really his fault? Find out in this epic collaboration between Ann Patchett and Robin Preiss Glasser, who create this perfect picture book about telling the truth.

Of Kings and Things

Of Kings and Things PDF Author: Eric Stanislaus Stenbock
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913689077
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
An introduction to the Decadent writer Stanislaus Eric Stenbock for the general reader, offering morbid stories, suicidal poems, and an autobiographical essay. Described by W. B. Yeats as a “scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men,” Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock (1860–1895) is surely the greatest exemplar of the Decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. A friend of Aubrey Beardsley, patron of the extraordinary pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon, and contemporary of Oscar Wilde, Stenbock died at the age of thirty-six as a result of his addiction to opium and his alcoholism, having published just three slim volumes of suicidal poetry and one collection of morbid short stories. Stenbock was a homosexual convert to Roman Catholicism and owner of a serpent, a toad, and a dachshund called Trixie. It was said that toward the end of his life he was accompanied everywhere by a life-size wooden doll that he believed to be his son. His poems and stories are replete with queer, supernatural, mystical, and Satanic themes; original editions of his books are highly sought by collectors of recherché literature. Of Kings and Things is the first introduction to Stenbock's writing for the general reader, offering fifteen stories, eight poems and one autobiographical essay by this complex figure.

Inside & Out of Byzantium

Inside & Out of Byzantium PDF Author: Nina Živančević
Publisher: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
In this, her first book of fiction written in English, Zivancevic's distant outsider stance as a cosmopolitan New York intellectual is shaken and inexorably transformed with the onset of the war in Sarajevo in 1992. Nina Zivancevic, a prominent Serbian poet, scholar, and translator, lived in lower Manhattan prior to the outbreak of the war in Sarajevo in 1992. Zivancevic introduced the work of Allan Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, and Charles Bernstein to East European readers, and her polyglot sensibility is highly informed by her immersion in the downtown New York art and literary world of the 1980s. In this, her first book of fiction written in English, Zivancevic's distant outsider stance as a cosmopolitan New York intellectual is shaken and inexorably transformed with the onset of the war. Faced with the complete blockade of information in the West about the situation in her country, she has no choice but to become actively involved in its comprehension, but without promoting the cause of a particular party or faction. Inside and Out of Byzantium is a remarkably visceral and powerful literary response to a state of permanent war.

The Best American Poetry 2023

The Best American Poetry 2023 PDF Author: David Lehman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982186771
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Award-winning poet Elaine Equi selects the poems for the 2023 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year’s most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work. For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is “deft, delicate [and] subversive” (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today. Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.

The Cheerful Subversive's Guide to Independent Filmmaking

The Cheerful Subversive's Guide to Independent Filmmaking PDF Author: Dan Mirvish
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000403084
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
In this fully updated second edition, award-winning film director and Slamdance Film Festival co-founder Dan Mirvish gives you soup-to-nuts, cradle-to-grave advice on every aspect of the filmmaking lifestyle and craft. He drops advice on playing the Hollywood game, and shows you how to finance, cast, shoot and show your indie feature, documentary, episodic series, short film, student film, web video or big-budget blockbuster. Once labeled a "cheerful subversive" by The New York Times, Mirvish shares lessons he's learned personally from film luminaries Robert Altman, Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas, Steven Soderbergh, Rian Johnson, Whit Stillman, Harold Ramis, Lynn Shelton, John Carpenter, Ava DuVernay, the Russo Brothers, Bong Joon-ho, Sean Baker and more. This revised edition includes brand new chapters on filming during a global pandemic finding investors and crowdfunding backers whether and where to go to film school how to get a big Hollywood agent self-distributing your film, even to airlines casting an Oscar®-winner as your lead actor and turning your garage into a 1980s New York subway Visit the extensive companion website at www.DanMirvish.com for in-depth supplemental videos, behind-the-scenes footage from Dan's films and bonus materials.

Little Joy

Little Joy PDF Author: Cecilia Pavon
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1635901405
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The best of contemporary Argentine author Cecilia Pavón's short stories. Poet, writer and translator Cecilia Pavón emerged in the late 1990s as one of the most prolific and central figures of the young Argentine literary scene--the so-called "Generation of the 90s": artists and writers whose aesthetics and politics were an earnest response to the disastrous impact of American-exported neoliberal policies and the resulting economic crisis of 2001. Their publications were fragile--xeroxed, painted on cardboard--but their cultural impact, indelible. A cofounder of Buenos Aires's independent art space and publishing press Belleza y Felicidad--where a whole generation of soon-to-be-famous Argentine artists showed for the first time--Pavón pioneered the use of "unpoetic" and intimate content, her verses often lifted from text messages or chatrooms, her tone often impish, yet brutally sincere. Fellow Argentine poet Marina Yuszczuk once wrote, "Pavón's writing is filled with minor illuminations and conjectures; her syntax is the syntax of commas, 'buts,' and disjunctives, thoughts and impressions organized into a current that flows, branches off, and stands still." In 2015, Pavón's first volume of collected poems, A Hotel With My Name, was published in English. Contemporary writers in the US, Australasia and Europe discovered a deep affinity with her work. Pavón's protagonists, Ariana Reines noted, "are absolute women, guileless dreamers, saints in sneakers, on sidewalks, in jail, in Zara, on buses, in nightclubs, in bed." Translated by Pavón's own poetic protégé Jacob Steinberg, Little Joy collects the best of Pavón's short stories written between 1999-2020, originally published in three volumes in Spanish.

Now the Night Begins

Now the Night Begins PDF Author: Alain Guiraudie
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 163590062X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
A novel that is a meditation on friendship, love, obsession, power, and abuse, by turns hyperrealist and phantasmagoric, recalling the work of Sade and Bataille. And he leaves. I'm not happy, I'm pretty upset at myself, I wasn't satisfied with him but I wouldn't have been any better without him. I sit on the couch and think. I'm not actually thinking, it's already been thought, I have to call Grampa... I need to hear his voice. I miss him. —from Now the Night Begins At the tail end of summer vacation, Gilles Heurtebise drifts between lazy afternoons, swimming, cruising the shores of a nearby lake, and absentmindedly hooking up with old lovers. He has yet to achieve material or romantic stability. He is forty, facing a precarious future with unformed fears and regrets. The one thing that seems solid is Grampa, the ninety-year-old patriarch of a family Gilles has befriended. Gilles grows obsessed by the old man, and a strange sexual bond grows between the two. When the police get involved, and Gilles is witness to a murder, the banality of interhuman violence is brought to a paroxysmal climax. The winner of France's prestigious Prix Sade, Now the Night Begins is a meditation on friendship, love, power, and abuse in a world where social relations have radically disintegrated. Interwoven with swaths of Occitan, the language of troubadours and love, and by turns hyperrealist and phantasmagoric, the novel recalls Georges Bataille's dark surrealism and the unvarnished violence of Bret Easton Ellis. It proves Alain Guiraudie's status as the preeminent writer of the vulnerability underlying our contemporary malaise. “The genial perversity of Alain Guiraudie's Now the Night Begins is something rare and fascinatingly energized, a metaphysical and moral slapstick that points to the arbitrariness of all authority and the fluidity of all desires. In its way, the most elegant, certainly the most hilarious brief for anarchy that anyone has written in a long time.” —Gary Indiana “Raw, sexual, and scatological, Alain Guiraudie's novel evokes Sade and Bataille.” —Elisabeth Philippe

Written in Invisible Ink

Written in Invisible Ink PDF Author: Herve Guibert
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1635901197
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Stories that map the writer's artistic development, written with candor, detachment, and passion. Hervé Guibert published twenty-five books before dying of AIDS in 1991 at age 36. An originator of French "autofiction" of the 1990s, Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Best known for the series of books he wrote during the last years of his life, chronicling his coexistence with illness, he has been a powerful influence on many contemporary writers. Written in Invisible Ink maps the writer's artistic development, from his earliest texts—fragmented stories of queer desire—to the unnervingly photorealistic descriptions in Vice and the autobiographical sojourns of Singular Adventures. Propaganda Death, his harsh, visceral debut, is included in its entirety. The volume concludes with a series of short, jewel-like stories composed at the end of his life. These anarchic and lyrical pieces are translated into English for the first time by Jeffrey Zuckerman. From midnight encounters with strangers to tormented relationships with friends, from a blistering sequence written for Roland Barthes to a tender summoning of Michel Foucault upon his death, these texts lay bare Guibert's relentless obsessions in miniature.

Ultramarine

Ultramarine PDF Author: Wayne Koestenbaum
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781643621159
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description