Stalking academia, re-ordering double printsand rewriting the autobiography of Buster Keaton, Clinton's hapless and sophomoric intellectual narrator offers his poignant and funny insights on modern-day culture in a series of slapstick misadventures.
Shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize, Necropsy in E Minor is the tale of a young college professor who sits down to write what he calls a “memoir,†but which really only records the past six months of his life (with numerous digressions), and ends, with the last line, after a richly devastating encounter, at the moment of writing.Who is this person? That is kept a secret, despite the fact that he is writing for no audience other than himself. His name does not appear, but those of others do, necessary to ensure the accuracy of the anagrams and puns that have helped map his universe since he found “The Note.†Given his disposal to interpret this anonymous confessional/fantasy story, an endeavor undertaken with the firm belief that it was written for him, by someone he knows, and purposefully left for him to find.Having abandoned the scholarly methodologies and subjects that would actually allow him to attain tenure, our professor on the lam performs all manner of linguistic analyses of the note, drives around the rim of Florida (the pilgrimage method, fittingly circular), desperately uses inkblots, the I Ching, and tarot cards for practical advice, adopts a cat named Sanity, becomes an amateur ornithologist, develops a theory of “instantaneous architecture,†endures a shamanic experience, and eggs himself on with the hope that, no matter what happens, his “memoir†might one day be found by archaeologists and thereby provide a key to human life at the close of the twentieth century.
Susie Duncan Sexton has lived her entire life in a small town, indeed, in the same house where she grew up. As an adult, she taught at the same grammar school that she attended as a child, and many of the relationships she cultivated while growing up, including her marriage, have endured over the years. Always one to document the present and offer her sometimes unorthodox ideas and opinions, Susie Duncan Sexton has tickled the keys of her trusty old typewriter for nearly five decades, and now that venerable machine is ready to reveal its secrets.
Fast, furious, unforgettable and set against the backdrop of a crumbling civilization, NIGHT TRAIN follows arch-outsider Jerzy Mulvaney in an audacious account of what it means to be homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.
From the best-selling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, a rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running, and the integral impact both have made on his life. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Haruki Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and includes settings ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs and the experience, after the age of fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.
Using the idea of 'parability,'or the ability for writers to tell improper stories, as a foundation, Alan Ramón Clinton synthesizes a new model for a creative, more daring literary criticism. Sharp and surprising, this wide-ranging project engages with the work of Pynchon, Eco, Forché, Merrill, Weiner, Plath, Ashbery, and Eigner.
Featuring more than one thousand new, rewritten, and updated entries, this reference on American politics explains current terms in politics, economics, and diplomacy.
The first full length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is mainly driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. As Pohl's primary aim is to demonstrate how women writers explore the complex (gender) politics of space, specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house. The early modern writers Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish seek to recreate Paradise in their versions of Eden and Jerusalem; the one yearns for Arcadia, the other for Solomon's Temple. Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell redefine the convent as an emancipatory space, dismissing its symbolic meaning as a confining and surveilled architecture. The utopia of the country house in the work of Delarivier Manley, Sarah Scott and Mary Hamilton will reveal how women writers resignify the traditional metonym of the country estate. The study will finish with an investigation of Oriental tales and travel writing by Ellis Cornelia Knight, Lady Mary Montagu, Elizabeth Craven and Lady Hester Stanhope who unveil the seraglio as a location for a Western, specifically masculine discourse on Orientalism, despotism and female sexuality and offers their own utopian judgment.
Fiction. Film Studies. A somewhat deranged cultural studies professor, having been informed by a reliable source (his "girlfriend of the time") that he reminds her of the legendary silent film star Buster Keaton, inexplicably dumps her and strikes out on his own to seek out the nature of this resemblance. A truly slapstick adventure ensues in which our good professor travels from the Boston area back home to Tennessee, flees the police to parts unknown, encounters psychopathic roommates, heroin punks, the sadomasochistic underground, hermaphrodite butlers, curmudgeonly cave dwellers, tarot card casino dealers, vaudeville cults, guru junkies, and more, all of whom, in the spirit of Keaton's films, he falls in love with one by one. When our hero steals a hot air balloon in order to make it to California, will he finally discover the secret of Keaton's apocryphal machine, the "love catapult"?