The Life and Times of Major Fiction

The Life and Times of Major Fiction PDF Author: Jonathan Baumbach
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 9780932511089
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The fourteen stories that make up Jonathan Baumbach's eighth book of fiction deals with parents, children, love, basketball, billiards, reading, marriage, divorce--the essentials of everyday life which, through the author's unique strategy of narrative, come to the reader in unexpected ways. Combining comedy and nightmare, these stories distinguish themselves by the charge of their imaginative life, their concern with language, and the play and replay of their form. "Familiar Games" describes a one-on-one basketball game between a 12-year-old boy and his mother, a match that evokes a childhood memory of sexual mystery; "Passion?" concerns the disrepair of a marriage that has presented itself to friends and the world as ideal; "Children of Divorced Parents" centers on the problematic career of a filmmaker who, after several failed marriages, continues to pursue the illusion of first love; and the title story, "The Life and Times of Major Fiction," investigates the mysterious career of a literary confidence man, an impassioned lover of good books, whose life is itself a pastiche of the plots of major fictions.

The Life and Times of Major Fiction

The Life and Times of Major Fiction PDF Author: Jonathan Baumbach
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 9780932511089
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
The fourteen stories that make up Jonathan Baumbach's eighth book of fiction deals with parents, children, love, basketball, billiards, reading, marriage, divorce--the essentials of everyday life which, through the author's unique strategy of narrative, come to the reader in unexpected ways. Combining comedy and nightmare, these stories distinguish themselves by the charge of their imaginative life, their concern with language, and the play and replay of their form. "Familiar Games" describes a one-on-one basketball game between a 12-year-old boy and his mother, a match that evokes a childhood memory of sexual mystery; "Passion?" concerns the disrepair of a marriage that has presented itself to friends and the world as ideal; "Children of Divorced Parents" centers on the problematic career of a filmmaker who, after several failed marriages, continues to pursue the illusion of first love; and the title story, "The Life and Times of Major Fiction," investigates the mysterious career of a literary confidence man, an impassioned lover of good books, whose life is itself a pastiche of the plots of major fictions.

Tolstoy's Major Fiction

Tolstoy's Major Fiction PDF Author: Edward Wasiolek
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226873986
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"Edward Wasiolek, after much valuable work on Dostoevsky, has now written one of the best books on Tolstoy in recent decades. This may be in part because of his preoccupation with Tolstoy's most challenging contemporary, and the resulting sense of their unlikeness in a common pursuit. But there are other, unspeculative reasons. Few studies of Tolstoy have been so carefully pondered and so firmly organized to convince; and not so many show the flexibility and variety of its approach. Wasiolek proposes an essentially simple and consistent reading, but he advances it with subtlety and discretion."—Henry Gifford, Times Literary Supplement

Across the Universe

Across the Universe PDF Author: Beth Revis
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101486082
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Book 1 in the New York Times bestselling trilogy, perfect for fans of Battlestar Gallactica and Passengers! WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO SURVIVE ABOARD A SPACESHIP FUELED BY LIES? Amy is a cryogenically frozen passenger aboard the spaceship Godspeed. She has left her boyfriend, friends--and planet--behind to join her parents as a member of Project Ark Ship. Amy and her parents believe they will wake on a new planet, Centauri-Earth, three hundred years in the future. But fifty years before Godspeed's scheduled landing, cryo chamber 42 is mysteriously unplugged, and Amy is violently woken from her frozen slumber. Someone tried to murder her. Now, Amy is caught inside an enclosed world where nothing makes sense. Godspeed's 2,312 passengers have forfeited all control to Eldest, a tyrannical and frightening leader. And Elder, Eldest's rebellious teenage heir, is both fascinated with Amy and eager to discover whether he has what it takes to lead. Amy desperately wants to trust Elder. But should she put her faith in a boy who has never seen life outside the ship's cold metal walls? All Amy knows is that she and Elder must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets before whoever woke her tries to kill again.

Life and Times of Michael K

Life and Times of Michael K PDF Author: J. M. Coetzee
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524705489
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

This Is Pleasure

This Is Pleasure PDF Author: Mary Gaitskill
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1524749141
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being PDF Author: Ruth Ozeki
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101606258
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 621

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Book Description
A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness Finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award “A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.” In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

The Mote in God's Eye

The Mote in God's Eye PDF Author: Larry Niven
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671741926
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 596

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Book Description
Science fiction-roman.

J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing

J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing PDF Author: David Attwell
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198746334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
J.M. Coetzee is one of the world's most intriguing authors. Compelling, razor-sharp, erudite: the adjectives pile up but the heart of the fiction remains elusive. Now, in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell explores the extraordinary creative processes behind Coetzee's novels from Dusklands to The Childhood of Jesus. Using Coetzee's manuscripts, notebooks, and research papers--recently deposited at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin--Attwell produces a fascinating story. He shows convincingly that Coetzee's work is strongly autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with never-ending self-reflection. Having worked closely with him on Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews and given early access to Coetzee's archive, David Attwell is an engaging, authoritative source. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing is a fresh, fascinating take on one of the most important and opaque literary figures of our time. This moving account will change the way Coetzee is read, by teachers, critics, and general readers.

The Queen Of The Night

The Queen Of The Night PDF Author: Alexander Chee
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544106601
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER, New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year from NPR, Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, and others. The mesmerizing story of one woman's rise from circus rider to courtesan to world-renowned diva—"a brilliant performance" (Washington Post). The Queen of the Night tells the captivating story of Lilliet Berne, an orphan who left the American frontier for Europe and was swept into the glamour and terror of Second Empire France. She became a sensation of the Paris Opera, with every accolade but an original role—her chance at immortality. When one is offered to her, she finds the libretto is based on her deepest secret, something only four people have ever known. But who betrayed her? With epic sweep, gorgeous language, and haunting details, Alexander Chee shares Lilliet’s cunning transformation from circus rider to courtesan to legendary soprano, retracing the path that led to the role that could secure her reputation—or destroy her with the secrets it reveals. “It just sounds terrific. It sounds like opera.”—The New Yorker “Sprawling, soaring, bawdy, and plotted like a fine embroidery.”—NPR

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel PDF Author: Alexander Chee
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1328764419
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form identities in life and in art. As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incendiary” by the New York Times, and "brilliant" by the Washington Post. With his first collection of nonfiction, he’s sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing ​— ​Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley ​— ​the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump. By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack. Named a Best Book by: Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, Paris Review, Mother Jones,The A.V. Club, Out Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, PopSugar, The Rumpus, My Republica, Paste, Bitch, Library Journal, Flavorwire, Bustle, Christian Science Monitor, Shelf Awareness, Tor.com, Entertainment Cheat Sheet, Roads and Kingdoms, Chicago Public Library, Hyphen Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, The Coil, iBooks, and Washington Independent Review of Books Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction * Recipient of the Lambda Literary Trustees' Award * Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay * Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography