Work Shirts for Madmen

Work Shirts for Madmen PDF Author: George Singleton
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547798024
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A quirky tale of a hard-drinking artist by an author who “writes about the rural South without sentimentality . . . but with plenty of sharp-witted humor” (NPR Morning Edition). Renegade artist Harp Spillman is lower than a bow-legged fire ant. Because of an unhealthy relationship with the bottle, he’s ruined his reputation as one of the South’s preeminent commissioned metal sculptors. And his desperate turn to ice sculpting might’ve led to a posse of angry politicians on his trail. With the help of his sane and practical wife, Raylou, Harp understands that it’s time to get his act together and prove that he can complete a series of twelve-foot-high metal angels—welded completely out of hex nuts—for the city of Birmingham. Is it pure chance that the Elbow Boys, with arms voluntarily fused together so they can’t drink, show up in order to help Harp? And why did his neighbor smuggle anteaters into the desolate little South Carolina town of Ember Glow? Harp is drying out, but somehow being sober isn’t making the world seem any less confusing . . . “Engagingly comic . . . Singleton has a flair for capturing Southern eccentricity, and Raylou’s imperturbable patience is just as funny in its way as Harp’s self-loathing.” —Publishers Weekly “If there is a fiction genre blending the riotous, bleary-eyed excess and absurdity of gonzo journalism with the rather earnest sensitivity of a John Irving hero—who always does right by his wife in the end—Work Shirts belongs to it. . . . It’s a fun read . . . An adventure to be undertaken.” —Newsweek

Work Shirts for Madmen

Work Shirts for Madmen PDF Author: George Singleton
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547798024
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
A quirky tale of a hard-drinking artist by an author who “writes about the rural South without sentimentality . . . but with plenty of sharp-witted humor” (NPR Morning Edition). Renegade artist Harp Spillman is lower than a bow-legged fire ant. Because of an unhealthy relationship with the bottle, he’s ruined his reputation as one of the South’s preeminent commissioned metal sculptors. And his desperate turn to ice sculpting might’ve led to a posse of angry politicians on his trail. With the help of his sane and practical wife, Raylou, Harp understands that it’s time to get his act together and prove that he can complete a series of twelve-foot-high metal angels—welded completely out of hex nuts—for the city of Birmingham. Is it pure chance that the Elbow Boys, with arms voluntarily fused together so they can’t drink, show up in order to help Harp? And why did his neighbor smuggle anteaters into the desolate little South Carolina town of Ember Glow? Harp is drying out, but somehow being sober isn’t making the world seem any less confusing . . . “Engagingly comic . . . Singleton has a flair for capturing Southern eccentricity, and Raylou’s imperturbable patience is just as funny in its way as Harp’s self-loathing.” —Publishers Weekly “If there is a fiction genre blending the riotous, bleary-eyed excess and absurdity of gonzo journalism with the rather earnest sensitivity of a John Irving hero—who always does right by his wife in the end—Work Shirts belongs to it. . . . It’s a fun read . . . An adventure to be undertaken.” —Newsweek

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine PDF Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429961228
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
"When are the 1970s going to begin?" ran the joke during the Presidential campaign of 1976. With his own patented combination of serious journalism and dazzling comedy, Tom Wolfe met the question head-on in these rollicking essays in Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine -- and even provided the 1970s with its name: "The Me Decade."

Difficult Men

Difficult Men PDF Author: Brett Martin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125699
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The 10th anniversary edition, now with a new preface by the author "A wonderfully smart, lively, and culturally astute survey." - The New York Times Book Review "Grand entertainment...fascinating for anyone curious about the perplexing miracles of how great television comes to be." - The Wall Street Journal "I love this book...It's the kind of thing I wish I'd been able to read in film school, back before such books existed." - Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Saul In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows on cable channels dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and creative ambition. Combining deep reportage with critical analysis and historical context, Brett Martin recounts the rise and inner workings of this artistic watershed - a golden age of TV that continues to transform America's cultural landscape. Difficult Men features extensive interviews with all the major players - including David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire), David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) - and reveals how television became a truly significant and influential part of our culture.

Missionaries, Mercenaries and Madmen

Missionaries, Mercenaries and Madmen PDF Author: J. Worth
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
ISBN: 1398458937
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
“We’ll have to leave. This country has had it.” My husband made the decision and I followed along feeling like my heart was being ripped from my chest. Robert Mugabe switched the trigger that changed our lives. He announced that University in Zimbabwe would be for black people only. We were white Africans and so needed to find a place where our children would have educational options. Australia was the obvious choice. This memoir takes the reader on a journey to places most Australians have no idea exists in their own country. The isolated, remote locations where Aboriginal people live, not as their ancestors had done but propped up by government welfare. Wild places where hunting and gathering had become recreational rather than a way of life and where western culture, knowledge and values were imposed on ancient knowledge and ways of being. The confused, bastardised culture emerging felt like stepping into hell. The dregs of white society had gravitated north; economic refugees, criminals, drunks and druggies and God botherers all trying to survive in a melee of heat, dust, flies, mosquitoes, and topical downpours. We were not welcomed. This is where my story began.

One for the Books

One for the Books PDF Author: Joe Queenan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101601191
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
One of America’s leading humorists and author of the bestseller Closing Time examines his own obsession with books Joe Queenan became a voracious reader as a means of escape from a joyless childhood in a Philadelphia housing project. In the years since then he has dedicated himself to an assortment of idiosyncratic reading challenges: spending a year reading only short books, spending a year reading books he always suspected he would hate, spending a year reading books he picked with his eyes closed. In One for the Books, Queenan tries to come to terms with his own eccentric reading style—how many more books will he have time to read in his lifetime? Why does he refuse to read books hailed by reviewers as “astonishing”? Why does he refuse to lend out books? Will he ever buy an e-book? Why does he habitually read thirty to forty books simultaneously? Why are there so many people to whom the above questions do not even matter—and what do they read? Acerbically funny yet passionate and oddly affectionate, One for the Books is a reading experience that true book lovers will find unforgettable.

Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine

Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine PDF Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374204241
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
"When are the 1970s going to begin?" ran the joke during the Presidential campaign of 1976. With his own patented combination of serious journalism and dazzling comedy, Tom Wolfe met the question head-on in these rollicking essays -- and even provided the 1970s with its name: "The Me Decade."

What You Have Left

What You Have Left PDF Author: Will Allison
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416546677
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
What You Have Left is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and, most of all, longing. In 1976, on the day of his wife's funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again -- "time I spent wondering what I'd done to make him leave," she says, "and what I could do to make him come back." What You Have Left is about a father and daughter trying to make their way back to one another across decades of uncertainty and ambivalence -- all the while hoping to discover that what they have left is worth salvaging. It's also the story of a grandfather bent on suicide, a pioneering female NASCAR driver, a heartbroken amnesiac, a video poker junkie, and assorted other liars, cheaters, and lovers who, despite their best intentions, never quite live up to their own expectations. Are we doomed to repeat our parents' mistakes? Can lies save love instead of destroying it? Is letting go the same as giving up? Shot through with sly humor and a knowing sympathy for human weakness, What You Have Left takes up these and other questions as it examines the weight of history, the nature of loss, and the possibility of forgiveness. Making use of bold shifts in viewpoint and time, Allison proves a brilliant observer of the emotional legacies handed down from parent to child and the ways loss defines us. This stunning debut brims with an affection for humanity exactly as it is -- in all its ignorance and awareness, its swagger and humility, its despair and hope.

Still in Print

Still in Print PDF Author: Jan Nordby Gretlund
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611172640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
An insightful guidebook to some of the best examples of modern Southern fiction, as selected by an international group of critics In Still in Print, eighteen southern novels published since 1997 fall under the careful scrutiny of an international cast of accomplished literary critics to identify the very best of recent writings in the genre. These essays highlight the praiseworthy efforts of a pantheon of novelists celebrating and challenging regionality, unearthing manifestations of the past in the present, and looking to the future with wit and healthy skepticism. Organized around shared themes of history, place, humor, and malaise, the novels discussed here interrogate southern culture and explore the region's promise for the future. Four novels reconsider the Civil War and its aftermath as Charles Frazier, Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Pam Durban revisit the past and add fresh insights to contemporary discussions of race and gender through their excursions into history. The novels by Steve Yarbrough, Larry Brown, Chris Offutt, Barry Hannah, and James Lee Burke demonstrate a keen sense of place, rooted in a South marked by fundamentalism, poverty, violence, and rampant prejudice but still capable of promise for some unseen future. The comic fiction of George Singleton, Clyde Edgerton, James Wilcox, Donald Harington, and Lewis Nordan shows how southern humor still encompasses customs and speech reflected in concrete places. Ron Rash, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy probe the depths of human existence, often with disturbing results, as they write about protagonists cut off from their own humanity and desperate to reconnect with the human race. Diverse in content but unified in genre, these particular novels have been nominated by the contributors to Still in Print for long-term survival as among the best modern representations of the southern novel. Featuring: M. Thomas Inge on Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain Clara Juncker on Josephine Humphreys's Nowhere Else on Earth Kathryn McKee on Kaye Gibbons's On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon Jan Nordby Gretlund on Pam Durban's So Far Back Tara Powell on Percival Everett's Erasure Tom Dasher on Steve Yarbrough's The Oxygen Man Jean Cash on Larry Brown's Fay Carl Wieck on Chris Offutt's The Good Brother Owen W. Gilman Jr. on Barry Hannah's Yonder Stands Your Orphan Hans H. Skei on James Lee Burke's Crusader's Cross Charles Israel on George Singleton's Work Shirts for Madmen John Grammer on Clyde Edgerton's The Bible Salesman Scott Romine on James Wilcox's Heavenly Days Edwin T. Arnold on Donald Harington's Enduring Marcel Arbeit on Lewis Nordan's Lightning Song Thomas Ærvold Bjerre on Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. on Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land Richard Gray on Cormac McCarthy's The Road

The Real Mad Men

The Real Mad Men PDF Author: Andrew Cracknell
Publisher: Running Press Adult
ISBN: 0762442433
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Advertising is a business rooted in art, an art rooted in business, and it reached its peak in a specific place at a specific time: New York City at the end of the 1950s and through the '60s. AMC's award-winning drama Mad Men has garnered awards for its portrayal of advertising executives. This engaging, insightful narrative reveals, for the first time, the lives and work of the real advertising men and women of that era. Just as portrayed in the series, these creative people were the stars of the real Madison Avenue. Their innate eccentricity, vanity, and imagination meant their behavior and lifestyle was as candid and original as their advertising. They had it and they flaunted it. People like Bill Bernbach, George Lois, Ed McCabe, Mary Wells, Marion Harper, Julian Koenig, Steve Frankfurt, and Amil Gargano, and others, who in that small space, in that short time, created some of the most radical and influential advertising ever and sparked a revolution in the methods, practice, and execution of the business. Including over 100 full-color illustrations, the book details iconic campaigns such as VW, Avis, Alka Seltzer, Benson & Hedges, Polaroid, and Braniff Airways.

Why Dogs Chase Cars

Why Dogs Chase Cars PDF Author: George Singleton
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565129113
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
These fourteen funny stories tell the tale of a beleaguered boyhood down home where the dogs still run loose. As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina (where everybody is pretty much one beer short of a six-pack), all Mendal Dawes wants is out. It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. Embarrassing his son to death nearly every day, Mr. Dawes is a parenting guide's bad example. He buries stuff in the backyard—fake toxic barrels, imitation Burma Shave signs (BIRD ON A WIRE, BIRD ON A PERCH, FLY TOWARD HEAVEN, FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH), yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts" and makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and befriend a classmate rumored to have head lice. Mendal Dawes is a boy itching to get out of town, to take the high road and leave the South and his dingbat dad far behind—just like those car-chasing dogs. But bottom line, this funky, sometimes outrageous, and always very human tale is really about how Mendal discovers that neither he nor the dogs actually want to catch a ride, that the hand that has fed them has a lot more to offer. On the way to watching that light dawn, we also get to watch the Dawes's precarious relationship with a place whose "gene pool [is] so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's soles dry." To be consistently funny is a great gift. To be funny and cynical and empathetic all at the same time is George Singleton's special gift, put brilliantly into play in this new collection.