American Loser

American Loser

Author: Phillip Roberts

Publisher: America Star Books

Published: 2011-06-29

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1681227916

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A story about the will? Doesn't sound particularly exciting or extraordinary. Maybe not. Depends on what a person goes through to discover their will. I see. You mean a will to live? Yes. And that's what American Loser is about? Primarily, yes. About discovering how powerful a person's will can be. That's certainly more interesting. Who might read such a story? Someone who's been in pain; who's questioned their own existence and considered maybe not being around tomorrow. Anyone else who might like this story? People amused by extreme behavior: sexual oddity and odysseys, drug use, and other absurdities that arise from passionate living.


Born Losers

Born Losers

Author: Scott A. Sandage

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2006-04-30

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780674015104

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What makes somebody a Loser, a person doomed to unfulfilled dreams and humiliation? Nobody is born to lose, and yet failure embodies our worst fears. The Loser is our national bogeyman, and his history over the past two hundred years reveals the dark side of success, how economic striving reshaped the self and soul of America. From colonial days to the Columbine tragedy, Scott Sandage explores how failure evolved from a business loss into a personality deficit, from a career setback to a gauge of our self-worth. From hundreds of private diaries, family letters, business records, and even early credit reports, Sandage reconstructs the dramas of real-life Willy Lomans. He unearths their confessions and denials, foolish hopes and lost faith, sticking places and changing times. Dreamers, suckers, and nobodies come to life in the major scenes of American history, like the Civil War and the approach of big business, showing how the national quest for success remade the individual ordeal of failure. Born Losers is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.


Beautiful Losers

Beautiful Losers

Author: Samuel Francis

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 1994-08-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0826260551

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The 1992 presidential election campaign showed just how deep were the divisions within the Republican party. In Beautiful Losers, Samuel Francis argues that the victory of the Democratic party marks not only the end of the Reagan-Bush era, but the failure of the American conservatism.


Trainwreck

Trainwreck

Author: Jeff Nichols

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2009-07-21

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 143911286X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Hilarious and oddly inspiring, Trainwreck is proof that a life disastrously lived can still turn out beyond anybody's wildest imaginings. Growing up a privileged Manhattan kid, Jeff Nichols should have had it all. Instead, he got a plethora of impairments: learning disabilities, a speech impediment, dyslexia, ADD, and a mild case of Tourette's syndrome. In Trainwreck, his weird and witty memoir of utter dysfunction, Nichols gives an irreverent look at how one "idoit" made good.


The American Mystery

The American Mystery

Author: Tony Tanner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-03-16

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780521783743

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A collection of essays by the late Tony Tanner on a wide range of key American authors.


Billion Dollar Loser

Billion Dollar Loser

Author: Reeves Wiedeman

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0316461342

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller: This "vivid" inside story of WeWork and its CEO tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history (Ken Auletta). Christened a potential savior of Silicon Valley's startup culture, Adam Neumann was set to take WeWork, his office share company disrupting the commercial real estate market, public, cash out on the company's forty-seven billion dollar valuation, and break the string of major startups unable to deliver to shareholders. But as employees knew, and investors soon found out, WeWork's capital was built on promises that the company was more than a real estate purveyor, that in fact it was a transformational technology company. Veteran journalist Reeves Weideman dives deep into WeWork and it CEO's astronomical rise, from the marijuana and tequila-filled board rooms to cult-like company summer camps and consciousness-raising with Anthony Kiedis. Billion Dollar Loser is a character-driven business narrative that captures, through the fascinating psyche of a billionaire founder and his wife and co-founder, the slippery state of global capitalism. A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller “Vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel” (Ken Auletta)


The Loser

The Loser

Author: Thomas Bernhard

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-11-10

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0307773469

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.One of Bernhard's most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other-- the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator-- has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.


Encounters with American Culture

Encounters with American Culture

Author: Peter Prescott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1351311905

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Peter S. Prescott was one of the most informed and incisive American literary critics to write for the general public. Never content merely to summarize or to pronounce quick judgments, Prescott's reviews are witty and delightful essays to be enjoyed for their own sake as examples of civilized discourse. Whether he is exploring a well-known novelist's outlook and methods, or the peculiar deficiencies of a work of nonfiction, Prescott's grace, elegance, and insights make each piece proof that real criticism need not be pedantic, obscure, or interminably long. The focus in this second volume of Prescott's writings published by Transaction is on both fiction by American authors and on nonfiction reflecting our American unease. He casts an ironic eye on how we in this country think we live now; on what we are saying about ourselves in our fiction, our history, and our biography. Prescott considers some of our century's classic writers: Hemingway and Henry Miller; John Cheever and Thornton Wilder. He offers new insights regarding those who are still at work: Mailer, John Irving, Oates, Updike, Ozick, and Alice Walker. Some authors do not fare well. With his customary flair; Prescott explains why the reputations of Kurt Vonnegut and Barbara Tuchman, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and John Gardner, urgently need deflation. He includes essays on writers and books not generally noticed in collections of criticism: Stephen King, The Joy of Sex, fairy tales, science fiction, thrillers, books on survival and etiquette. Here is a critic with a personal voice and a sense of style. For essays published in this collection, Prescott received the most highly regarded prize in journalism: the rarely presented George Polk Award for Criticism. This is a chronicle of our contemporary American culture as revealed by its books, written with verve, intelligence, wisdom, and wit by a critic who's cruel only when appropriate. Encounters with American Culture is, quite simply, literary journalism at its urbane best.


American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam

American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam

Author: Philip D. Beidler

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0820330248

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A discussion of the literature of the war and a study of literary consciousness relative to the larger process of cultural myth-making.