Böcker i American Literature Series-serien

"True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by acclaimed playwright and poet Dan O'Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph--of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu--altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O'Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to an investigation of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living."--

Radical and racy, Robert Coover's Coover Stories is a new collection of incisive, inventive works from the postmodern master.When Robert Coover's first collection Pricksongs & Descants came out in 1969, his shortstory "The Babysitter," took the literary world by storm. Described as "metafiction at its best,"his work is taught in classrooms more than half a century later, no less relevant-andirreverent-than at its debut. Provocative, experimental, and biting, Coover's darkly satiricwriting has pushed the avant-garde to its limits and sired a generation of postmodernists. Coover Stories is the fourth short story collection from Robert Coover. Drawing on decades of experience, the William FaulknerFoundation Award-winning writer continues to shock and engage his readers with his wit, style,and keen critical eye for the paradoxes of modernity.

"You'll Like it Here is a haunting bricolage, divided into three parts, that excavates the forgotten history of Redondo Beach in the early 1900's through old news clippings, advertisements, recipes and other ephemera that speak to the ills of male stoicism, industrialization and capitalism, and environmental displacement. Ashton used digital archives from the Redondo Reflex and other city adjacent newspapers as the basis for his surrealist account, masterfully tracing this larger shift away from coastal maritime repose in the wake of the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II through momentary fragments that feel as real and palpable as they do transient, mythological, and strangely reminiscent of our current times."--Provided by publisher.

The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits-what appears-to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence.

An Evening of Romantic Lovemaking is the tale of a would-be standup comedian/terrorist as he hilariously and heart-wrenchingly performs his last act in front of an audience who may or may not be there. Curtis White calls it "both the funniest and one of the saddest novels I've ever read" and "a work of comic genius. While comparisons to Gilbert Sorrentino, Mark Leyner, and Flann O'Brien will be made, Slotky's voice is entirely his own and one you'll not soon forget."

From Museum of Modern Art editor Emily Hall, a debut novel in the first person about the place of art and the artist in the world.

Best known for his complex and beautiful novels-regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo-Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story, having written numerous pieces over the course of his career that now, collected at last, serve as an ideal introduction to one of the most important contemporary American authors. Combining elements of classic McElroy with tantalizing stories pointing the way ahead (the spare and dangerous "e;No Man's Land,"e; the lush and mischievous "e;The Campaign Trail"e;), Night Soul and Other Stories presents a wide range of work from a monumental artist.

Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.

Considered by many to be Elkin's magnum opus, George Mills is, an ambitious, digressive and endlessly entertaining account of the 1,000 year history of the George Millses. From toiling as a stable boy during the crusades to working as a furniture mover, there has always been a George Mills whose lot in life is to serve important personages. But the latest in the line of true blue-collar workers may also be the last, as he obsesses about his family's history and decides to break the cycle of doomed George Millses. An inventive, unique family saga, George Mills is Elkin at his most manic, most comic and most poignant. First published by Random House (1982), most recent paperback by Avon (1996).

In The Circus of Trust, Mark Tardi implicates us all in a pastoral of detritus where "the same indifferent sun" unflinchingly tracks devastation as part of the most routine actions.

Lines from a Canvas offers the public one of the best kept secrets in the world of poetry for years, the work of Jacob Miller. His poems uniquely traverse the cultural territory from Homer to the Grateful Dead, taking the reader from ancient Greece and Rome to the Holocaust to the Cold War to Vietnam to 9/11.

Collecting twenty essays written by distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany, The Holodeck in the Garden offers an informative tour of the complex interrelations between science, technology, and contemporary American literature.

"In "The Confidence-Man," writes John Bryant in his Introduction, "Melville found a way to render our tragic sense of self and society through the comic strategies of the confidence game. He puts the reader in the game to play its parts and to contemplate the inconsistencies of its knaves and fools." Set on a Mississippi steamer on April Fool's Day and populated by a series of shape-shifting con men, "The Confidence-Man is a challenging metaphysical and ethical exploration of antebellum American society. Set from the first American edition of 1857, this Modern Library paperback includes an Appendix with Bryant's innovative "fluid text" analysis of early manuscript fragments from Melville's novel.

The denizens of Kelton, New York - a bedroom community some fifty miles from Manhattan - are a well-heeled bunch who spend an awful lot of time playing rummy. There is Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, and her complacent brother Marshall, who doesn't like his friends to confide in him. There are the bumbling and overindulged Fabia and Victor, another sibling duo, and their friend Irving, a meek mama's boy. Into their cloistered lives come Claire and Nadia Tosti, two sisters from Paris, whose take-charge tactics stir the winds of enterprise, romance, and change. Through them, Alice is led to a swarthy Italian who helps her orchestrate a successful restaurant business. Irving pairs up with Claire, finally winning freedom from his eccentric, cat-loving mother. Victor embraces Nadia and the antiques trade, while Fabia discovers a potential romance with Victor's French pen pal. Only Marshall finds himself eluded by love, a predicament that will lead him from the snug environs of Kelton to the crude energies of the Midwest. In bistros, galleries, bars, and theaters, the protagonists eat, drink, criticize each other, and debate the worlds of art, music, literature, life, and love.

In 2010, the Newseum in Washington D.C. finally obtained the suit O. J. Simpson wore in court the day he was acquitted, and it now stands as both an artifact in their "e;Trial of the Century"e; exhibit and a symbol of the American media's endless hunger for the criminal and the celebrity. This event serves as a launching point for Ishmael Reed's Juice!, a novelistic commentary on the post-Simpson American media frenzy from one of the most controversial figures in American literature today. Through Paul Blessings-a censored cartoonist suffering from diabetes-and his cohorts-serving as stand-ins for the various mediums of art-Ishmael Reed argues that since 1994, "e;O. J. has become a metaphor for things wrong with culture and politics."e; A lament for the death of print media, the growth of the corporation, and the process of growing old, Juice! serves as a comi-tragedy, chronicling the increased anxieties of "e;post-race"e; America.

Famous for her works of "flash fiction" which capture life, love, and contradiction in a single page, Diane Williams continues to forge her own innovative tradition in this new collection. Including over three dozen short stories along with three novellas, Romancer Erector is her boldest collection to date. Here she once again astonishes us with her distinctive voice, detached yet fiercely intimate. As one critic writes: "the effect is original, as if a strange little memory has insinuated itself into the reader's own memory, to remain there...incapable of assimilation." Like intricately wrapped gifts, these tales deliver the hidden, the haunted, the charms, the bell, the mansions inside of the human heart.

"No one is better than William H. Gass at communicating the sublime and rapturous excitement of reading." Washington Post

"It's outrageous that an educated man and a gifted writer like Mr. Mathews could make such a public confession of such shameful activities." Q. Kuhlmann, author of The Eye of Anguish: Subversive Activity in the German Democratic Republic

Ishmael Reed's career as one of our great playwrights has long been eclipsed by his other work. Here published for the first time, Reed's plays follow the ancient tradition of using the theater as a forum in which the official versions of our history can be critiqued. Dealing with subjects that mainstream theatergoers might find disturbing-homelessness, the arbitrary entrapment of a black politician, the excesses of the radical feminist movement, the use of black conservatives to promote right-wing agendas, the exploitation of blacks and Africans as unsuspecting guinea pigs by the pharmaceutical industry, and the hypocrisy of the Christian church-Reed's plays are a pungent antidote to the watered-down world of contemporary pop culture, where, Reed argues, minority voices remain as marginalized and stigmatized as they were a hundred years ago.

Now finally collected into a single volume, the Sherbrookes trilogy-Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness-is Nicholas Delbanco's most celebrated achievement. Centering upon one New England clan and their estate in southwestern Vermont-a full thousand acres, including the bleak and chilly Big House, from which the volatile Sherbrookes have such trouble escaping-these books form a virtuoso portrait of the love, pride, resentment, and even madness we inherit from our families. Written in his characteristically opulent, bravura prose, Delbanco is here revealed as a Henry James for our time: a passionate cataloger of human strength and frailty. Edited and revised by the author some thirty years after its first publication, the trilogy-"e;made new"e; as the single-volume Sherbrookes-can now be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.

The Barnum Museum is a combination waxworks, masked ball, and circus sideshow masquerading as a collection of short stories. Within its pages, note such sights as: a study of the motives and strategies used by the participants in the game of Clue, including the seduction of Miss Scarlet by Colonel Mustard; the Barnum Museum, a fantastic, monstrous landmark so compelling that an entire town finds its citizens gradually and inexorably disappearing into it; a bored dilettante who constructs an imaginary woman-and loses her to an imaginary man!-and a legendary magician so skilled at sleight-of-hand that he is pursued by police for the crime of erasing the line between the real and the conjured. Ingeniously written and orchestrated, each exhibit in The Barnum Museum will compel you to continue, each story becoming a lure to the next.

On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt . . . Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, "e;real"e; world, another last Jew-the last living Holocaust survivor-sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.

After the success of his first novels (Edwin Mullhouse and Portrait of a Romantic), Steven Millhauser went on to enchant critics and readers with two short story collections that captured the magic and beauty of his longer works in vivid miniature. The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of the author's gifts, from the story of "e;August Eschenburg,"e; the clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supersedes that of the refined and beautiful, to "e;Cathay,"e; a kingdom whose wonders include elaborate landscape paintings executed on the eyelids and nipples of court ladies.

"Perfect Lives is a seemingly endless and seamless dreamscape of the musicality of the spoken word....It floats in my head like a memorable, ever-changing dream." Spalding Grey