Author: Peter Dimock
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564788016
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
For over twenty-five years, ghost-writer Theo Fales has been helping retired generals and CIA directors justify their decisions in the first-person. One day, however, hearing a song at a colleague’s memorial service, Theo has a vision, sensing in the music a completely different way to live. How can he reconcile this revelation with his professional allegiance to power? Is he mad, or has history itself lost its way? Theo Fales is a one-time historian turned book editor who specializes in ghostwriting the memoirs of leading American policy-makers. For over twenty-five years, Theo has been helping retired generals and CIA directors justify their decisions in the first-person. One day, however, hearing a song at a colleague’s memorial service, Theo has a vision: he senses, in the music, a completely different way to live. He becomes obsessed by a need to align musical time with the metre of his own life and prose. Theo’s method opens onto two seemingly contradictory interior landscapes: one, a rage of identification with a college classmate who has written and signed the legal document justifying the use of torture by the US; the other, a love for the singer best known for her interpretations of the composer who wrote that vital song. Theo commits himself to the idea that only through his method will he be able to save himself. Is he mad, or has history itself lost its way?
Author: Peter Dimock
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1564788342
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
Theo Fales is a one-time historian turned book editor who specializes in ghostwriting the memoirs of leading American policy-makers. For over twenty-five years, Theo has been helping retired generals and CIA directors justify their decisions in the first-person. One day, however, hearing a song at a colleague's memorial service, Theo has a vision: he senses, in the music, a completely different way to live. He becomes obsessed by a need to align musical time with the metre of his own life and prose. Theo's method opens onto two seemingly contradictory interior landscapes: one, a rage of identification with a college classmate who has written and signed the legal document justifying the use of torture by the US; the other, a love for the singer best known for her interpretations of the composer who wrote that vital song. Theo commits himself to the idea that only through his method will he be able to save himself. Is he mad, or has history itself lost its way?
Author: Lee Zimmerman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000049604
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
The more the global north has learned about the existential threat of climate change, the faster it has emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change, Lee Zimmerman thinks about why this is by examining how "climate change" has been discursively constructed, tracing how the ways we talk and write about climate change have worked to normalize a generalized, bipartisan denialism more profound than that of the overt "denialists." Suggesting that we understand that normalized denial as a form of cultural trauma, the book explores how the dominant ways of figuring knowledge about global warming disarticulate that knowledge from the trauma those figurations both represent and reproduce, and by which they remain inhabited and haunted. Its early chapters consider that process in representations of climate change across a range of disciplines and throughout the public sphere, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Barack Obama’s speeches and climate plans, and the 2015 Paris Agreement. Later chapters focus on how literary representations especially, for the most part, participate in such disarticulations, and on how, in grappling with the representational difficulties at the climate crisis’s heart, some works of fiction—among them Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker—work against that normalized rhetorical violence. The book closes with a meditation centered on the dream of the burning child Freud sketches in The Interpretation of Dreams. Highlighting the existential stakes of the ways we think and write about the climate, Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change aims to offer an unfamiliar place from which to engage the astonishing quiescence of our ecocidal present. This book will be essential reading for academics and students of psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, trauma studies, literature, and environmental studies, as well as activists and others drawn to thinking about the climate crisis.
Author: Peter Dimock
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1646050606
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 90
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Book Description
Daybook from Sheep Meadow finds Peter Dimock returning to the breakdown of America’s imperialist history that he started exploring in his groundbreaking previous novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. In Daybook, Dimock expands on what it means to refute the narrative of American greatness – and what happens once one starts on that path. Historian Tallis Martinson has grappled for years with the atrocities of the American condition through meditative notebook entries, wherein he has attempted to create a “historical method” that guide’s an individual ‘s personal thought outside the language of empire. However, when words fail him completely, he commits himself to a psychiatric facility, mute and unable to write. Daybook presents Tallis’ notebook entries, annotated by his brother and editor Christopher Rentho Martinson. Christopher initially follows the entries’ complex guided meditations in hopes of being able to reach Tallis during his visits to the psychiatric facility. Instead, he finds himself immersed in his own family’s implication in the normalized atrocities of his country’s past and present. An experiment in the capacity of literature to re-lay the trajectory of America’s future, Daybook stages a space wherein the reader can register – and, potentially, remedy – the criminal catastrophe of the American political arena.
Author: John Ernest
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0199731489
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
This volume approaches the history of slave testimony in three ways: by prioritising the broad tradition over individual authors; by representing inter-disciplinary approaches to slave narratives; and by highlighting emerging scholarship on slave narratives, concerning both established debates over concerns of authorship and agency, for example, and developing concerns like eco-critical readings of slave narratives.
Author: Chantele Sedgwick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1634500032
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
A 2015 Whitney Award Nominee! A powerful story of loss, second chances, and first love, reminiscent of Sarah Dessen and John Green. When Oakley Nelson loses her older brother, Lucas, to cancer, she thinks she’ll never recover. Between her parents’ arguing and the battle she’s fighting with depression, she feels nothing inside but a hollow emptiness. When Mom suggests they spend a few months in California with Aunt Jo, Oakley isn’t sure a change of scenery will alter anything, but she’s willing to give it a try. In California, Oakley discovers a sort of safety and freedom in Aunt Jo’s beach house. Once they’re settled, Mom hands her a notebook full of letters addressed to her—from Lucas. As Oakley reads one each day, she realizes how much he loved her, and each letter challenges her to be better and to continue to enjoy her life. He wants her to move on. If only it were that easy. But then a surfer named Carson comes into her life, and Oakley is blindsided. He makes her feel again. As she lets him in, she is surprised by how much she cares for him, and that’s when things get complicated. How can she fall in love and be happy when Lucas never got the chance to do those very same things? With her brother’s dying words as guidance, Oakley knows she must learn to listen and trust again. But will she have to leave the past behind to find happiness in the future? Sky Pony Press, with our Good Books, Racehorse and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of books for young readers—picture books for small children, chapter books, books for middle grade readers, and novels for young adults. Our list includes bestsellers for children who love to play Minecraft; stories told with LEGO bricks; books that teach lessons about tolerance, patience, and the environment, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Author: Mathias Nilges
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810143445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
In How to Read a Moment, Mathias Nilges shows that time is inseparable from the stories we tell about it, demonstrating that the contemporary American novel offers new ways to make sense of the temporality that governs our present. “Time is a thing that grows scarcer every day,” observes one of Don DeLillo’s characters. “The future is gone,” The Baffler argues. “Where’s my hoverboard!?” a meme demands. Contemporary capitalism, a system that insists that everything happen at once, creates problems for social thought and narrative alike. After all, how does one tell the time of instantaneity? In this moment of on-demand service and instant trading, it has become difficult to imagine the future. The novel emerged as the art form of a rapidly changing modern world, a way of telling time in its progress. Nilges argues that this historical mission is renewed today through works that understand contemporaneity as a form of time shaping that props up our material world and cultural imagination. But the contemporary American novel does not simply associate our present with a crisis of futurity. Through analyses of works by authors such as DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead, Nilges illustrates that the novel presents ways to make sense of the temporality that controls our purportedly fully contemporary world. In so doing, the novel recovers a sense of possibility and hope, forwarding a dazzling argument for its own importance today.
Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421427141
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
A collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature. It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. "Early American," "antebellum," "modern," "post-1945"—such designations organize our knowledge of the past and shape the ways we discuss that past today. These periods tend to align with the watershed moments in American history, even as the field has shifted its perspective away from the nation-state. It is high time we rethink these defining periods of American literary history, as the drawing of literary timelines is a necessary—even illuminating—practice. In these short, spirited, and imaginative essays, 23 leading Americanists gamely fashion new, unorthodox literary periods—from 600 B.C.E. to the present, from the Age of Van Buren to the Age of Microeconomics. They bring to light literary and cultural histories that have been obscured by traditional timelines and raise provocative questions. What is our definition of "modernism" if we imagine it stretching from 1865 to 1965 instead of 1890 to 1945? How does the captivity narrative change when we consider it as a contemporary, not just a "colonial," genre? What does the course of American literature look like set against the backdrop of federal denials of Native sovereignty or housing policies that exacerbated segregation? Filled with challenges to scholars, inspirations for teachers (anchored by an appendix of syllabi), and entry points for students, Timelines of American Literature gathers some of the most exciting new work in the field to showcase the revelatory potential of fresh thinking about how we organize the literary past.
Author: Mitchum Huehls
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421423103
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture is essential reading for anyone invested in the ever-changing state of literary culture.
Author: J.D. Engle
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
ISBN: 1662926642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 133
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Book Description
A moving tribute to Virginia Woolf's classic novel To the Lighthouse, J.D. Engle’s Two Seasons continues the story of the intriguing artist Lily Briscoe, while standing on its own as a warmly involving work of fiction. In the autumn five years after the 1927 novel's triumphant end, the now married Lily Ramsay brings family and friends together at what is essentially a farewell dinner for her terminally ill husband. Five years later, spring finds us at the Ramsay Hebrides house of the earlier novel for the wedding of daughter Rose. Celebrated as a successful artist, yet reserved and only comfortable on the margins of social settings, Lily deals with the tensions ignited by her calmer but still difficult husband and the lingering resentments of his children. True to Woolf's theme of a senseless world temporarily leant meaningful order by artistic creation and warm human relations, J.D. Engle’s Two Seasons is the quietly riveting story of a remarkable family and of a strong female character struggling against her nature to ally these essential forces. Book Review 1: “Compelling and quite moving . . . a work of virtuosity and originality” -- Peter Dimock, novelist (George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time, Daybook from Sheep Meadow: The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson, etc.) Book Review 2: ‘’A beautifully written book . . . . At a time when failing to register how so much of what we do in the present will produce dire consequences in the future, Two Seasons calls us, finally and simply, to pay closer attention—to how we talk and write and tell stories, to the dense meanings of every moment, to the mystery and vastness of other people’s inner lives, to the ways that worlds end, and to the ways they nonetheless still live on.” -- Lee Zimmerman, Editor, Twentieth Century Literature; Professor, Hofstra University
