Bøger i American Literature (Dalkey Archive) serien

Mr. West is a writer for whom words are a projectile (if you remember Alley Jaggers) - freewheeling, hectic, rumbustious, percussive and imaginatively prolix. Mandy, his daughter, here glimpsed in a few of her early years, is deaf - also "exceptional" which might mean autistic - and also a hooligan who might be eating nail varnish or drinking from a potty or staring unblinking at 150 watt bulbs or running, everywhere, "heedless of gesticulating and half-felled adults and the sanity of drivers." She has only three words to begin with, baba, more and ish-ish, and Mr. West's "space probe" in the form of an epistle shows her here and there - taking care of a bird, or immersed in a bath, or developing a lexicon of sounds and meanings which will salvage her from the "long emergency" of those who live without words and with a special dependence which is also a special innocence. Some of the earlier parts appeared in the New American Review; a closing chapter relates more directly to those who deal with any disadvantaged child and his naked affection for this helterskelter, demonic creature is everywhere apparent. The book of course is for Mandy who is "as incoherent as daily light, as vulnerable as uranium 235, and (has) an atom where an atom shouldn't be" - it's for others too. (Kirkus Reviews)

In normal, everyday tones, a story is told by the perpetrator of triple incest: first with his mother as a child and a young man, then with his daughter as he grows into mature manhood, and finally with his sister in middle age. This primeval fairytale burns with an icy passion as the narrator switches roles along with familial relationships. The quasi-metaphysical lucidity with which he pursues his odd fate is eerie, particularly in light of his apparent innocence as to the perverse nature of his taboo attachments, and the theatrical artifice with which he pursues them. In the end, his passionate desire is so earnest that the reader is left to wonder if he is truly a monster or an innocent: who is directing whom?

Memories of My Father Watching TV has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat", "Highway Patrol", "Bonanza", and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, Memories is finally a sad lament of a father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

Paying homage to the Italian-American experience, Italian Stories celebrates an Italian neighbourhood in the Bronx during the 1930s and '40s, and mourns the loss of this ethnic identity with the migration of subsequent generations to the suburbs. With stories that are both melancholy and comic, Papaleo here explores the contradictory desires of assimilation: his characters want to live the life of the average American while maintaining a strong link to their rich heritage. In addition, Papaleo rails against the damaging stereotypes of Italian-Americans propagated by the media in movies and television.

In God Head, Scott Zwiren boldly and courageously records the terrifying, destructive experience of manic depression. From a promising young college student to mental hospitals to a confined, out-of-control, roller-coaster life on New York City's Upper West Side, Zwiren's narrator traces from the inside the horrors of an existence that swings between numbing depression and exalting highs.

This bitterly funny memoir reads like an expose of the power structures in America s higher education system: who s got it, how they re abusing it, what everyone else is willing to do to get it, and the social cost of doing educational business this way.

In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.