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Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine

Author: Thom Jones

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Published: 2009-11-29

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 031609305X

The author's world encompasses dilapidated fight arenas, state mental hospitals & chaotic emergency rooms. The inhabitants are his brilliantly etched characters, who battle desperately against fate in a game of life they cannot win but dare not lose. As we approach the end of the century & the millennium, no one writes better or more vividly than Jones does about the personal, private apocalypses we all face in our darkest moments. In one story, a Vietnam vet, a Recon Marine, swims alone across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, & the Bosporus to maintain "the edge" that kept him alive in wartime - & that is all he now has left. In another, a brilliant doctor verges on a breakdown. In the title story, a young amateur fighter stoically endures repetitive beatings because he knows the world of boxing shields & protects him from the even crueler world outside of the ring. A number of these stories have appeared in different forms in the New Yorker, Playboy, & Esquire.

Night Train

Author: Thom Jones

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2018-09-18

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0316449350

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A posthumous and definitive collection of new and selected stories by "virtuoso of the short story" (Esquire) and National Book Award finalist Thom Jones. This scorching collection from award-winning author Thom Jones features his best new short fiction alongside a selection of outstanding stories from three previous books. Jones's stories are full of high-octane, prose-drunk entertainment. His characters are grifters and drifters, rogues and ne'er-do-wells, would-be do-gooders whose human frailties usually get the better of them. Some are lovable, others are not, but each has an indelible and irresistible voice. They include Vietnam soldiers, amateur boxers, devoted doctors, strung-out advertising writers, pill poppers and veterans of the psych ward, and an unforgettable adolescent DJ radio host, among others. The stories here are excursions into a unique world that veers between abject desperation and fleeting transcendence. Perhaps no other writer in recent memory could encapsulate in such short spaces the profound and the devastating, the poignant and the hallucinatory, with such an exquisite balance of darkness and light. Jones's fiction reveals again and again the resilience and grace of characters who refuse to succumb. In stories that can at once delight us with their wicked humor and sting us with their affecting pathos, Night Train perfectly captures the essence of this iconic American master, showcasing in a single collection the breadth of power of his inimitable fiction.

Cold Snap

Author: Thom Jones

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2016-11-08

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0316438642

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Following his celebrated debut collection, The Pugilist at Rest, National Book Award nominee Thom Jones delivers a lacerating collection of stories that plunges us once again into an edgy, adrenalized world of desire, mania, and rage. In ten new stories, Jones introduces us to hard-luck fighters steeling themselves for battles they've already lost, doctors who fall in love with their illnesses, and a strung-out advertising writer who uses the hand of the devil to do the work of God. At the end of the day, the only ones still standing have gone head-to-head with the world's brutality--and remain ready, hopelessly potent yet irreversibly doomed, to battle all over again. Thom Jones has a wicked appetite for existential calamity and unflagging humor in its presence; his writing is mesmerizing, sometimes fevered, and impossible to put down. Cold Snap resoundingly confirms what thousands already know: Thom Jones is here to stay.

Swimming Sweet Arrow

Author: Maureen Gibbon

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Published: 2009-12-19

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 0316093106

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Evangeline Starr Raybuck -- plain-spoken, lusty, and hardworking -- and June Keel are high school seniors, best friends going out with best friends, working together at Noecker's chicken farm after school. Vangie and June make out with their boyfriends together in the same car; they pass dirty notes to each other during the day at school. They tell each other everything: "That was the kind of friends we were". After they graduate, things begin to shift. Vangie gets a job waitressing and moves in with Del; June, unable to get a job anywhere but the local factory, moves in with Ray and his older brother Luke. As they become more involved in their lives with their men, they see each other infrequently, but not so seldom that it doesn't become clear to Vangie that there's something dangerous going on, that June has crossed a line with the men in her life that even Vangie would not.

Chaos is a Friend of Mine

Author: Ewan MacKenna

Publisher: deCoubertin Books

Published: 2019-11-19

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1909245909

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… People say to me be careful of the money, don’t blow it. If the money becomes a problem, I’ll get rid of it. I’ve been planning to get to this stage for a long, long time and I won’t let anything stop me. Honestly.’ The year is 2013, and Ewan MacKenna is sitting in McDonald’s with Conor McGregor as he enjoys his weekly coffee, a treat in the eyes of a dedicated fighter. The Crumlin born mixed martial arts fighter has not yet cashed his €60,000 prize money after his maiden UFC victory over Marcus Brimage, a first-round stoppage, but he knows the importance of it – only recently has he found himself in the social welfare queue. Five years on and McGregor is late for his press conference with Khabib Nurmagomedov ahead of their showdown at UFC 229. By the time he arrives his opponent has gone, but it doesn’t stop him from launching into a diatribe against him before reverting to a sales pitch for his own whiskey, ‘Proper No. 12.’ Somewhere along the line, the fighter became a stranger to his art, increasingly drawn to the circus that surrounds him. But what is McGregor? A wonderful rags-to-riches tale? Dedicated athlete? Cultural phenomenon? Troubled soul? Out-of-control kid? Confused young man? Narcissist? Arrogant thug? Sporting icon? McGregor is any and all but, crucially, more than most sporting stars, he is also a mirror of society. In Chaos is a Friend of Mine, MacKenna takes in both Las Vegas in 2018 and Dublin in 2019 in order to examine McGregor’s journey, from his upbringing in the Irish capital, to his early days as a wide-eyed, prodigiously talented martial arts obsessive, to his recent antics outside the ring which have seem him grow bigger than the sport itself but spiral out of control.

Epilepsy Metaphors

Author: Eleana Vaja

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2017-10-31

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 3839441188

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Between 1990 and 2015, American literature saw the emergence of a new corpus of epilepsy metaphors which tackle the stigma of epilepsy within three areas: society, body, and language. Eleana Vaja introduces concepts such as protometaphors, relational metaphors, epileptic texts, and metastability to categorize and examine these foci further. Applying philosophy as well as "hard sciences" (i.e. mathematics, medicine, physics) to disability studies, her study of selected works by Siri Hustvedt, Thom Jones, Reif Larsen, Dennis Mahagin, Audrey Niffenegger, Rodman Philbrick, and Lauren Slater shows how epilepsy metaphors redefine the notion of the "liminal" and the "normal".