The idol and the octopus : political writings

The idol and the octopus : political writings PDF Author: Norman Mailer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description

The idol and the octopus : political writings

The idol and the octopus : political writings PDF Author: Norman Mailer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Idol and the Octopus

The Idol and the Octopus PDF Author: Norman Mailer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description


The Idol and the Octopus

The Idol and the Octopus PDF Author: Norman Mailer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Idol and the Octopus

The Idol and the Octopus PDF Author: Norman Mailer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description


The Quixote Cult

The Quixote Cult PDF Author: Genaro Gonzàlez
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
ISBN: 9781611922554
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The late 1960s was a heady time to come to adulthood, even in deep South Texas. When the narrator of The Quixote Cult„known simply as De la O„begins college, he discovers a world of political activists, Vietnam veterans, small-time drug dealers, and academic opportunists unlike anything he and his friend Lucio ever experienced in the barrio. And the more he sees of the fighting between La Raza revolutionaries, union members, political bosses, and paramilitary protesters, the more De la O wonders if the preaching of Chicano brotherhood isnÍt simply the flowering of another crackpot cult. But as he encounters day-care radicals, tilts at institutional windmills, and learns about St. Che and other icons, De la O also meets such living wonders as the Jewish Aztec Princess and The Brown Barbie. The Quixote Cult confirms Genaro GonzàlezÍs reputation as a rambunctious, quirky writer whose characters, as The Nation wrote, ñcombust into their own living, full-colored realityî„even as they take on such important hippie-era questions as ñYou guys do bathe, donÍt you?î

The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People

The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People PDF Author: Robert Inchausti
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791406779
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book examines how the spiritual longings of ordinary people have shaped the most progressive political and cultural movements of the twentieth century and given birth to a new postmodern perspective on existence that recoups the traditional religious verities on the far side of both literary modernism and neo-Marxism. Inchausti focuses on figures who have been instrumental in defending the sacred traditions of indigenous cultures and oppressed minorities. He demonstrates that Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Elie Wiesel, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Lech Walesa share an ethic that is, at once, plebeian in origin and yet sublime in aspiration.

Selected Letters of Norman Mailer

Selected Letters of Norman Mailer PDF Author: Norman Mailer
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812986091
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1032

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Book Description
A genuine literary event—an illuminating collection of correspondence from one of the most acclaimed American writers of all time Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific—or more exposed—than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published—most for the first time—in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Compiled by Mailer’s authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer’s missives from 1940 to 2007—letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky. Here is Mailer the precocious Harvard undergraduate, writing home to his parents for the first time and worrying that his acceptances by literary magazines were “all happening too easy.” Here, too, is Mailer the soldier, confronting the violence of war in the Pacific, which would become the subject of his masterly debut novel, The Naked and the Dead: “[I’m] amazed how casually it fits into . . . daily life, how very unhorrible it all is.” Mailer the international celebrity pledges to William Styron, “I’m going to write every day, and like Lot’s Wife I’m consigning myself to a pillar of salt if I dare to look back,” while the 1980s Mailer agonizes over the fallout from his ill-fated friendship with Jack Henry Abbott, the murderer who became his literary protégé. (“The continuation of our relationship was depressing for both of us,” he confesses to Joyce Carol Oates.) At last, he finds domestic—and erotic—bliss in the arms of his sixth wife, Norris Church (“We bounce into each other like sunlight”). Whether he is reflecting on the Kennedy assassination, assessing the merits of authors from Fitzgerald to Proust, or threatening to pummel William Styron, the brilliant, pugnacious Norman Mailer comes alive again in these letters. The myriad faces of this artist and activist, lover and fighter, public figure and private man, are laid bare in this collection as never before. Praise for Selected Letters of Norman Mailer “Extraordinary.”—Vanity Fair “As massive as the life they document . . . the autobiography [Mailer] never wrote . . . a kind of map, from the hills and rice paddies of the Philippines through every victory and defeat for the rest of the century and beyond.”—Esquire “The shards and winks at Mailer’s own past that are scattered throughout the letters . . . are so tantalizing. They glitter throughout like unrefined jewels that Mailer took to the grave.”—The New Yorker “Indispensable . . . a subtle document of an unsubtle man’s wit and erudition, even (or especially) when it’s wielded as a weapon.”—New York “Umpteen pleasures to pluck out and roll between your teeth, like seeds from a pomegranate.”—The New York Times

A Chance Meeting

A Chance Meeting PDF Author: Rachel Cohen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588363708
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
“They met in ordinary ways,” writes Rachel Cohen in her introduction, “a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend’s casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. . . . They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other.” Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady and is captured in a moment of self-consciousness about being American. Brady returns to photograph Walt Whitman and, later, at City Point in the midst of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather. Mark Twain publishes Grant’s memoirs; W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit the young Helen Keller; and Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography. Later, Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein, who was also a student of William James’s, attend a performance of The Rite of Spring; Hart Crane goes out on the town with Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together; Elizabeth Bishop takes Marianne Moore, who was photographed by both Van Vechten and Richard Avedon, to the circus; Avedon and James Baldwin collaborate on a book; John Cage and Marcel Duchamp play chess; and Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell march on the Pentagon in the anti–Vietnam War demonstration of 1967. The accumulation of these pairings draws the reader into the mysterious process through which creativity has been sparked and passed on among iconoclastic American writers and artists. Ultimately, Rachel Cohen reveals a long chain of friendship, rebellion, and influence stretching from the moment just before the Civil War through a century that had a profound effect on our own time. Drawing on a decade of research, A Chance Meeting makes its own illuminating contribution to the tradition of which Cohen writes.

Romantic Postmodernism in American Fiction

Romantic Postmodernism in American Fiction PDF Author: Alsen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900465898X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Intended for teachers and students of American Literature, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of romantic tendencies in postmodernist American fiction. The book challenges the opinion expressed in the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) and propagated by many influential scholars that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction is represented by the disjunctive and nihilistic work of such writers as Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Professor Alsen disagrees. He contends that this kind of fiction is not read and taught much outside an isolated but powerful circle in the academic community. It is the two-part thesis of Professor Alsen's book that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction consists of the widely read work of the Nobel Prize laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison and other similar writers and that this mainstream fiction is essentially romantic. To support his argument, Professor Alsen analyzes representative novels by Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, the later John Barth, Alice Walker, William Kennedy, and Paul Auster. Professor Alsen demonstrates that the traits which distinguish the fiction of the romantic postmodernists from the fiction of their disunctive and nihilist colleagues include a vision of life that is a form of philosophical idealism, an organic view of art, modes of storytelling that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century romance, and such themes as the nature of sin or evil, the negative effects of technology on the soul, and the quest for transcendence.

Memories of a Lost War

Memories of a Lost War PDF Author: Subarno Chattarji
Publisher:
ISBN: 019818767X
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In this unique and significant addition to Vietnam studies, Memories of a Lost War analyzes the poems written by American veterans, protest poets, and Vietnamese, within political, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. Drawing on a wealth of material often published in small presses and journals, the book highlights the horrors of war and the continuing traumas of veterans in post-Vietnam America. In its inclusion of Vietnamese perspectives, the book marks a departure from earlier works that have largely concentrated on Vietnam as a war rather than a country.