Cool for America
Cool for America

Author: Andrew Martin

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0374718237

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A hilarious collection of overlapping stories that explores the dark zone between artistic ambition and its achievement by the author of Early Work. Bookended by the misadventures of Leslie, an aspiring writer who moves form New York to Missoula, Montana, hoping to shake off lingering depression, this story collection follows young people pushed hard against—and often crashing into—their limits as not only would-be Tolstoys but also functioning, feeling human beings. As Martin’s characters age out of punk shows and all-night benders and into book clubs and elaborate weddings, they find that neither family life nor community ties can quite shore up the dam against despair. Has redemption through art ever been more than a pipe dream? Could writing the perfect sentence ever make such broken lives turn out right? Or is it time to sell the books and head for the barricades? Whatever the case, Andrew Martin’s winsome malcontents can be counted on to make agonized indecision cool again for the twenty-first century. Praise for Cool for America Long-listed for the Story Prize “Fun, irresistible, smart and wise . . . Shot through with flashes of crackling lucidity.” —Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times “Simultaneously sharp and self-lacerating and generous and agreeable.” —Matthew Schneier, The New York Times Book Review

Early Work
Early Work

Author: Andrew Martin

Publisher:

Published: 2018-07-10

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0374146128

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When Peter meets Leslie, a sexual adventurer, he gets a glimpse of what he imagines himself to be: a writer of talent and nerve. Over the course of a Virginia summer, their charged, increasingly intimate friendship opens the door to difficult questions about love and literary ambition

Cool for You
Cool for You

Author: Eileen Myles

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1619029170

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Grainy and stripped down, this gritty novel traces the downbeat progress of a tough, queer girl growing up in working-class Boston by "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde” (The New York Times). Why can’t I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work. The first published novel of legendary poet and performer Eileen Myles follows a queer female growing up in working-class Boston, straining against the institutions that hold her: family, Catholic school, jobs at a camp, at a nursing home, at a school for developmentally disabled adult males. She wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and journeys through a series of low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. Schooled by mean and memorable Catholic nuns, this tomboy heroine stumbles and dreams her way through the painful corridors of family, early sexual encounters, and an eye-opening series of jobs caring for the sick and insane--the abandoned wards of the state. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, and how they do (and do not) get out of the hands of their families and the state. Without artifice or pseudonym, protagonist Eileen Myles boldly sets down a rich and graphic account of female experience in this world. Free-ranging and deadpan, tragic and joyful, this is a book about women, gender, class, bodies, escape, and what it means to be “inside.” Never more relevant, and now with an introduction by Chris Kraus. "Eileen Myles is a genius!"--Dorothy Allison

The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

Author: Joel Dinerstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-05-17

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 0226152650

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Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool. This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.

The Lost Continent
The Lost Continent

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Anchor Canada

Published: 2012-09-25

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0385674562

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"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

Crooked Hallelujah
Crooked Hallelujah

Author: Kelli Jo Ford

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0802149146

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“A masterful debut” that follows four generations of Cherokee women across four decades—from the Plimpton Prize–winning author (Sarah Jessica Parker). It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church—a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever. Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine—a mixed-blood Cherokee woman—and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world—of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados—intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home. In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent. “A compelling journey through the evolving terrain of multiple generations of women.” —The Washington Post

Cool Town
Cool Town

Author: Grace Elizabeth Hale

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-02-13

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1469654881

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In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.

America Alone
America Alone

Author: Mark Steyn

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2008-04-07

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1596980761

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"Mark Steyn is a human sandblaster. This book provides a powerful, abrasive, high-velocity assault on encrusted layers of sugarcoating and whitewash over the threat of Islamic imperialism. Do we in the West have the will to prevail?" - MICHELLE MALKIN, New York Times bestselling author of Unhinged "Mark Steyn is the funniest writer now living. But don't be distracted by the brilliance of his jokes. They are the neon lights advertising a profound and sad insight: America is almost alone in resisting both the suicide of the West and the suicide bombing of radical Islamism." - JOHN O'SULLIVAN, editor at large, National Review IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT..... Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are. And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"--while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy. If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steyn--the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world--shows to devastating effect. The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the West is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization. But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world's last best hope. Mark Steyn's America Alone is laugh-out-loud funny--but it will also change the way you look at the world.

Cool Comfort
Cool Comfort

Author: Marsha Ackermann

Publisher: Smithsonian Institution

Published: 2013-08-06

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1588344010

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The year 2002 marked the 100th anniversary of the first installation of air-conditioning. During the past century, it has become a staple of American life; 83% of US homes are now air-conditioned. In this engaging social history, Marsha Ackermann explores how the idea of “cooling” became firmly embedded in the social perceptions and expectations of Americans, transforming our definition of comfort and the way we live, work, and play.