The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America
The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America

Author: Mark Beyer

Publisher: Siren & Muse Publishing

Published: 2020-08-15

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13:

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Have you ever heard the story of the Hero turned Goat? At sixteen, Ernest Waine is trapped in a world of hate. He cycles between knowing his friends and seeing enemies watching from the shadows. What has made me this way? he asks. An answer eludes him by day; at night he reads fantastic books in which he can only hope to learn some right path along the potholed roads leading to the end of the twentieth century.The day Ernest opens Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s voice shouts at him over the noise made constant by his daytime life. What he hears from the Russian master-storyteller makes the case for his next move. Murder, on a notorious scale. Twenty-five years later, Ernest is asked to recall the day in his life when he had planned to kill his classmates. This time he does not hear Dostoevsky speaking, but his own voice coming from behind the horror of what he had done, and what he hadn’t. The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America carries with it the passions of the frightened, the angry: those children compelled to react in the name of self-defined safety, and lone survival. Sometimes, the sum of all actions does not define a life. “Let me tell you the one about the Goat turned Hero...” Read and excerpt, and then BUY THE BOOK :-)

Quest!
Quest!

Author: Mark Beyer

Publisher: Siren & Muse Publishing

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

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A band of lusty archaeologists get onto the trail of ancient treasure from the year-410 sacking of Rome. Using ancient maps, fast ships, slow donkeys, and cryptic flags, their bracing adventure brings "The Faculty" to the brink of success and disaster. Along with an albino magician and a side-show lycanthrope straight out of a traveling circus, their story comes from the annals of history lived large. Follow Dr. Felix Flahaven, Hazel "Purple" O'Haze, Priya Sata, Caligula Clauswicz, and the other Faculty on the first of many exploits to come.

Max, the blind guy
Max, the blind guy

Author: Mark Beyer

Publisher: Siren & Muse Publishing

Published: 2023-01-28

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

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Maximilian Ruth daydreams in colors which his eyes can no longer see. His wife is leading them on a European tour: Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, and Venice. Greta Ruth calls this trip their “last hurrah.” She hasn't had the best from 40 years with Max. But Max takes their life differently: marriage is an affair of more than the heart’s journey. This pair of American originals have known passion, riches, and sorrow. Today, these roads lead them through Europe’s famed cities, but Greta wonders if the plan will see her through to the promised “champagne on the Grand Canal.” Their Elite Travel tour-mates are getting on each other’s nerves. They are characters found next door, on everyday streets, under black-eye days, and across lost-memory nights. The highlights and sights, the posh lunches, the gamy conversation over drinks in the bar – and of course the "tour friendships" – all make their faux-camaraderie sometimes combative but never boring. A story rife with modern perils – too much time, too much money, just enough libido, secrets revealed – Max and Greta Ruth don’t wait for what the future may bring. "Max, the blind guy" is a complex, emotional story of art, ego, love, and marriage. Beyer’s nuanced story brings to life fictional characters from America and Europe as this group of recalcitrant travelers make their way travel through lovely cities and desperate thoughts. "Precocious. Provocative. Poignant. MAX, THE BLIND GUY is built like an intricate mansion of dozens of opulently adorned rooms, secret passageways and windows that open up to the bright and vibrant world beyond. The story explores the delights, disappointments, disturbances, and distractions of love, lust, and the desire to get to the next place. Language play, humor, despair, and the engagement of a complicated community of characters, 'Max' brings to mind the work of his literary predecessors such as Nabokov, Marquez, Dickens, and Dostoevsky." - Patricia Ann McNair, author, THE TEMPLE OF AIR

Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story
Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story

Author: Jeff Birkenstein

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-03-10

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1793629897

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In Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story, editors Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein have assembled a collection of eighteen original essays written by literary critics from around the globe. Collectively, these critics argue that the reciprocal influence between Russian and American writers is integral to the development of the short story in each country as well as vital to the global status the contemporary short story has attained. This collection provides original analyses of both well-known Russian and American stories as well as some that might be more unfamiliar. Each essay is purposely crafted to display an appreciation of the techniques, subject matter, themes, and approaches that both Russian and American short story writers explored across borders and time. Stories by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Krzhizhanovsky as well as short stories by Washington Irving, Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ursula Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates populate this essential, multivalent collection. Perhaps more important now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, these essays will remind readers how much Russian and American culture share, as well as the extent to which their respective literatures are deeply intertwined.

Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky

Author: Erik Krag

Publisher: Oslo : Universitetsforl. ; New York : Humanities Press

Published: 1976

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13:

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The End of American Innocence
The End of American Innocence

Author: Henry Farnham May

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780231096539

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An historical account of the political and intellectual atmosphere of the USA in the early 20th century, which contends that the old order was being challenged and altered long before World War I. The study examines the ideas and literature of the periods before and after the War.

AN AMERICAN PROCESSION
AN AMERICAN PROCESSION

Author: Alfred Kazin

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2013-10-02

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 080415127X

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An American Procession is a study, on the largest scale, of the major American writers at work during the historically and literarily crucial century that began in the early 1830s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a metaphysical revolution, and ended on the eve of the 1930s with the triumph of modernism and the critical recognition of the “postponed power” of those who had been modern before their time. These one hundred years encompassed a period of unprecedented expansion and promise in the United States, and the work of our novelists, essayists, poets, and historians was the mirror of the nation’s spirit. The thirty years preceding the Civil War produced the transcendental idealism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and the dark romanticism of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. In the years just after World War I, modernism reached its exemplary form in the work of Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald, and between the two wars emerged the great realists: Mark Twain, Henry James, Crane, and Dreiser. It is through an exploration of the lives and works of these writers—together with Emily Dickinson, William James, Henry Adams, and Faulkner—that Kazin maps out a great literary procession shaped by individual genius, by history, and by the implacable American sense of self. With each writer, Alfred Kazin illuminates for us the work, the influences that informed it, and its influence on the work of others. Each figure seems revitalized for us by Kazin’s acuity and powerful sympathy for his subject. An American Procession, with its intellectual energy, its clarity and breadth, is the brilliantly executed capstone of Kazin’s already illustrious career and will stand as the most important study of American literature in our time.

Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use
Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use

Author: Keith Allan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 914

ISBN-13: 3319434918

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This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her societal environment.This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The editors and contributors share a perspective that essentially considers language as a system for communication and wants to look at language from a societal perspective, and accept the view that acts of interpretation are essentially embedded in culture. In an interdisciplinary approach, some authors explore connections with social theory, in particular sociology or socio-linguistics, some offer a political stance (critical discourse analysis), others explore connections with philosophy and philosophy of language, and several papers address problems in theoretical pragmatics.