Author: Dave Cowen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781660970643
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
What makes a good writer? Publishing in The New Yorker? Selling a screenplay? Writing something that will be acknowledged for all time? In April of 2019, Dave Cowen wanted to prove he wasn't a failed writer. Even though he published humor in The New Yorker, they weren't buying any more of his work. Even though he wrote a screenplay that sought to help heal the country's divide on guns, Hollywood didn't want it. So he set out to write something that would be a success no matter what anyone thought of it. The ensuing quest to write the longest sentence ever published in the English language becomes a strange, all-consuming, life-changing odyssey. The stream-of-consciousness draws in James Joyce, Numerology, Copyright Law, Jeff Bezos, Instagram, The Enneagram, Kanye West, and portions written by an AI.But what begins as a comedic conceptual performance soon transforms into a poignant grappling with the suicide earlier that same spring of the writer's beloved father with whom he shared a bipolar disorder diagnosis. As the author pours out words through his year of mourning - without stopping to edit - right up until the anniversary of his father's death, he's unsure if he's losing his sanity or if he's awakening his consciousness, seeing mystical synchronicities in the texts he reads, the music he hears, and the external/internal interplay of life itself. Finding inspiration in his father's hero, Abraham Lincoln, and other father figures such as Lewis Hyde and David Shields, Carl Jung and James Hollis, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, and Philip K. Dick and Jack Kerouac, the writer integrates personal memoir with literary criticism, original thought with collage remixing, depth psychology with freethinking spirituality. He comes out on the other side a wounded healer with much to offer his readers: comedy, candor, and catharsis. And the opportunity to add 250 words of their own to the sentence-book, whatever it inspires them to express, via a verified Amazon purchase review, so that all of us can be part of the longest sentence ever written and published!
Author: Lucy Ellmann
Publisher: Biblioasis
ISBN: 1771963085
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 934
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Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2019 • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 • A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2019 "This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry."—Parul Sehgal, New York Times Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America's ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing? With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America's barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.
Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Absalom, Absalom!" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Author: Wally Lamb
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780060391621
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 884
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Book Description
With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Lewis Hyde
Publisher: Union Books
ISBN: 190852605X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous ‘ I Have a Dream’ speech. Thirty years later his son registered the words ‘ I Have a Dream’ as a trademark and successfully blocked attempts to reproduce these four words. Unlike the Gettysburg Address and other famous speeches, ‘ I Have a Dream’ is now private property, even though some the speech is comprised of words written by Thomas Jefferson, a man who very much believed that the corporate land grab of knowledge was at odds with the development of civil society. Exploring the complex intersection between creativity and commerce, Hyde raises the question of how our shared store of art and knowledge might be made compatible with our desire to copyright everything, and questions whether the fruits of creative labour can – or should – be privately owned, especially in the digital age. ‘ In what sense,’ he writes, ‘ can someone own, and therefore control other people’ s access to, a work of fiction or a public speech or the ideas behind a drug?’ Moving deftly between literary analysis, history and biography (from Benjamin Franklin’ s reluctance to patent his inventions to Bob Dylan’ s admission that his early method of songwriting was largely comprised of ‘ rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there… slapping a title on it’ ), Common As Air is a stirring call-to-arms about how we might concretely legislate for a cultural commons that would simultaneously allow for financial reward and protection from monopoly. Rigorous, informative and riveting, this is a book for anyone who is interested in the creative process.
Author: Mark Leach
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481885188
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 630
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Book Description
Exiled on a deserted island, a Christ-haunted journalist-turned-filmmaker attempts to persuade a married women from his past to help him produce a science-fiction-themed pastiche to the 1960s French New Wave classic, "Last Year at Marienbad." Through this act of artistic creation, he expects to carry out the will of God by prophesizing the death of time and the birth of a new religion. If only he can make the woman remember him... "Marienbad My Love" is the world's longest novel, a multi-million-word, multiple-volume work meticulously assembled through calculation and chance from fragments of pre-existing texts both written and appropriated by Mark Leach over the course of 30 years - "the movie," as Leach calls it, "of all my labors and all my inspirations."
Author: James Joyce
Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
ISBN: 9781843796251
Category : FICTION
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses is a languorous internal monologue, in which the passionate wife of Leopold Bloom meditates on love and life. While Bloom sleeps beside her (head to toe), Molly recalls her many infidelities, including the energetic sexual encounter enjoyed that very afternoon. Though difficult to read straight from the page, Marcella Riordan's beautiful reading of this passage brings out all the wit and passion of one of the finest passages of writing in modern literature.
Author: Dave Cowen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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Book Description
Humorist Dave Cowen had a spiritual awakening in 2019, which was furthered along and sustained by finding a network of spiritual social media users' memes. Coining it "Spiritual Instagram" to his unbelieving friends and in his memoir, This Book Is The Longest Sentence Ever Written And Then Published, he says it's for unreligious but enlightened weirdos like he is now. Every meme he screenshot and saved to his phone since he found the community in January 2020 is interspersed with commentary reflecting upon the experience until the end of July 2020. SPIRITUAL INSTAGRAM is interested in the interplay between social media and literature, the personal and the universal, the fleeting and the eternal, and the human and the divine. Enjoy! Dave Cowen is a DIY author whose books have been featured in The New York Times. He has also written for The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Points In Case. His books have been Best Sellers in the Amazon categories of Political Humor, Parody, History Humor, Bipolar Disorder, Grief and Loss, Screenplays, and Jewish Holidays.
Author: Dave Cowen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781793219107
Category : Haggadah
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
