Bøger i American Literature (Dalkey Archive) serien

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.

Be it known that The Tar Baby, while just as jovial but much randier, has nothing to do with Uncle Remus. It's the quarterly of a little, very literary magazine of Galapagos Junior College (California) and this book will appear with some eye-catching visual effects beginning with the little black bare-assed boy with cheeks who is just as well off without a diaper considering the number of referrals to what it might have been loaded with. This particular issue is a memorial to Anatole Waxman-Weissman, 1931-1972, a lexicographer and logomachist who devoted his life to variant versions of a work (full of "cloacal musings") on Wittgenstein before he ended it by walking into a bus (deliberately?). The issue contains comments on both the contribution of this "booby hatch philosopher" as well as his early on rite de passage in the hands of the ladies in a nearby motel bordello - he marries the daughter of its housemother who runs off with a plumber. Along with a good deal of infighting among departmental thick heads as well as the brawling of the natives, this is tilled in via bits and pieces - pieces which might include anything from a recipe for turtle pie to an account of the Tong War of 1858. Will there be any exegetes? It's hard to say since the level is quite high and quite low at the same time - think of it as both scatologica slapstick and an academic sendup which is funny, in spots. (Kirkus Reviews)

June Akers Seese's second novel is about books and the people who read them: it's about a rare-book dealer and his mistress, set in that era when words like "mistress" were still used, and recalling the years when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud might share the same paragraph in an after-hours night spot. Seese writes movingly, tightly, without recourse to adjectives, from the gut and to the gut.

Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a "perverse tale" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with unnaturally large genitals, she spins a tawdry tale of his frustrated relationship with his petite wife. Expressing all the bitterness of "an old woman's revenge," Miss Ethel's tale is nonetheless a sensitive depiction of rural life in the early years of World War II.Dowell's masterful use of the tale-within-a-tale to explore psychological states makes "Too Much Flesh and Jabez" a memorable achievement.

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.

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)

"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

In his debut collection, Damion Searls gives us five extraordinary tales of the life of the mind in America today. ¿56 Water Street¿ and ¿Goldenchain¿ follow writers whose projects only lead them deeper into the labyrinth of modern relationships and friendships. The nasty office satire ¿The Cubicles¿ and the atmospheric ¿A Guide to San Franciscö take place in the sun and fog of West Coast dreams. In the final story, ¿Dialogue Between the Two Chief World Systems,¿ a Hungarian beauty creates a scholarly conundrum with surprising parallels to the book as a whole.Set amidst Ethiopian healing scrolls and sponges of the Adriatic and the guy who invented flashing the temperature on bank clocks, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going plays in the intersection of knowledge and life in contemporary America. Searls¿s flights of fancy and painterly eye for detail introduce a range of intelligent characters feeling their way toward complex moral and personal truths.

This year Rikki Ducornet is being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her beloved work as a novelist and essayist, but perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modernday fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction. This landmark collection of new stories is generously illustrated by T. Motley, whose gritty, fantastical cartooning explores the same post-magical realism that has been the subject of Ducornet's distinguished career.

"A captivating short work almost beyond description." The New Yorker

"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.

Sixty-one vignettes on the sole subject of masturbation record the imaginative varieties of this activity in prose that is playful, intimate, quirky and humane. Illustrated throughout with watercolors by Francesco Clemente that offer an intriguing counterpoint to Mathews's fictions.

For a period of just over a year, Harry Mathews set about following Stendhal¿s dictum for writers of ¿twenty lines a day, genius or not.¿ What resulted is a book that is part journal, parts writer¿s manual, and part genius. First undertaken as a kind of discipline, the work molds itself into a penetrating reflection on daily events in Mathews¿s life, his friends, himself, and the act of writing.

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.

Carole Maso's stunning, erotic fourth novel chronicles the dark, irresistible adventures of an American writer named Catherine who has come to France to live. Set into motion by a single act of abandonment-Catherine's lover of ten years has left her-she falls deeper and deeper into an irretrievable madness. With passionate abandon and detachment Catherine pursues her own destruction. Forcing the boundaries of identity and the limits of her eroticism, she enters a series of blinding sexual encounters with a poet, a fascist, a young Arlesian woman, a fireman, and three thieves. Eerily she splits herself in two so that she is both the one who watches and the one who is watched, creator and creation, author and character, as she observes herself from afar "And I would like to help her", the one who watches says, "but I can't". Finally she meets Lucien, the solitary, cynical, beautiful man with long hair who looks as though he has "stepped out of an unmade film by the dead Truffaut", and through this mysterious, doomed, bittersweet liaison Catherine makes one last attempt to halt her decline through the redemptive act of story-telling. She begins to invent the story of their lives, telling it to him half in English, half in French, joining their solitudes for a moment before losing forever her belief that the shapely, hopeful prospects of narrative make sense of expenence. "She notices how everything is given up or taken away" as she loses the power of the imagination or memory or the body to console, and finally of language to convey meaning. This mesmerizing drama of sex, betrayal, and dissolution with its shattering inevitable conclusion is played out against the dazzling backdrop of thebeautiful, indifferent Cote d'Azur in summer. Written in a dwindling lexicon with a simple, warped musicality, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is a dark, uncompromising, seductive work of art.

Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments, and rare pleasures of family, romance, and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. As the novel's perspective shifts to each of the four primary characters, four discrete stories take form, stories that Sorrentino further enriches by using a variety of literary methods--fantasies, letters, a narrative question-and-answer, fragments of dialogue and memory. Combining humor and feeling, balancing the details and the rhythms of experience, Aberration of Starlight re-creates a time and a place as it captures the sadness and value of four lives.

Fire the Bastards! is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions as a case study.

Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is Gilbert Sorrentino's ruthless, and timeless, attack on the New York art world of the 1950s and '60s. Guaranteed permanent relevance by the never-ending presence of the marginally talented--and populated by artists who sold out, would-be artists with little ability, and hopeless hangers-on--this brilliant novel masterfully dissects the art world's culture of corruption and compromise, and in so doing examines the social and political malaise that continues to have a grip on modern America. One of Gilbert Sorrentino's most engaging novels, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is often named among the most important novels of the last several decades.

A classic of dark eroticism from one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.

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.

What Waiting Really Means is about emergencies that never reach the emergency room. It's about a woman named Mary with no last name who rides buses and smokes cigars and watches the wind blow her bedroom curtains into a frenzy. It's about cities, Detroit, New York, and Atlanta, About older men. The kind who will hold you. And killers, And the boundaries they look for. The narrator is sure of one thing; "Men who wear Brooks Brothers suits and pretend to read books are a step backward, and not far enough back, at that, "She's better off with her cigars at the Majestic Grill waiting while the rain beats on the windows.

In Curtis White's first novel, The Idea Of Home, he attempts to imagine "a place in which humans can live." This utopia is definitely not San Lorenzo - a post-war, prefabricated suburb in California - where White grew up and which is the basis for this novel. From the vantage point of anoff-kilter adulthood, White spins recent American history together with personal observations and investigations into the dark heart of American suburbia. Shocking, yet very funny and always learned, The Idea Of Home is a mix of the personal and the philosophical in an energetic collage that would resemble the biographies of Nietzsche and Mark Twain if they had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and '60s.

This is the first paperback edition of one of Stein's most revealing novels. Written in 1925-26 (but not published until 1958), it is Stein's midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated. In place of a traditional narrative, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel-writing, and the novelist's relation to her materials. In a sense, the novel is about "preparing a novel" (the subject of chap. 50), about everything that goes through a writer's head as she begins to write. Mixed in with her meditations on writing are daily events in her marriage to Alice B. Toklas, visits from friends - including such notable figures of the period as Josephine Baker, Virgil Thomson, Rene Crevel, and a number of expatriate American writers and artists - travels in and around France, memories of the past, inquiries into names and the nature of identity, and virtually anything else that occurs to her. As she writes at one point, "It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything, " so everything of interest to Stein goes into her preparations for the novel that is A Novel of Thank You.

Jarleth Pendergast in an ex-pat Irishman, an aging punk rocker, a film snob, a copy-shop employee, and a desperate man whose career as an avant-garde claymation artist is going nowhere. Notified about a possible inheritance at the beginning of the book, Jarleth enters on a course of rampant self-destruction, narrating all his adventures to a deceased Irish lawyer. "One of the funniest books I've read in the past several years," according to Harvey Pekar, this first novel is a mad, sad, and profoundly funny book.