Bøger i American Literature serien

And so begins the HooDoo Western by Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life.In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.

A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.

When John Barth¿s Lost in the Funhouse appeared in 1968, American fiction was turned on its head. Barth¿s writing was not a response to the realistic fiction that characterized American literature at the time; it beckoned back to the founders of the novel: Cervantes, Rabelais, and Sterne, echoing their playfulness and reflecting the freedom inherent in the writing of fiction. This collection of Barth¿s short fiction is a landmark event, bringing all of his previous collections together in one volume for the first time. Its occasion helps readers assess a remarkable lifetime¿s work and represents an important chapter in the history of American literature. Dalkey Archive will reissue a number of Barth¿s novels over the next few years, preserving his work for generations to come.

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.

True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by award-winning 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 investigating the source 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,â€? took the literary world by storm. Described as “metafiction at its best,â€?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.

Reprint of the 1st ed. Published in 1971.

Written when John Barth was 24 years old, The Floating Opera is his first novel, published in 1957. It is a first-person reminiscence of the day Todd Andrews decided to commit suicide. Having picked up some sense of the French Existentialist writers from the postwar Zeitgeist, this novel questions life's value through the eyes of a 37-year-old man.

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.

"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.

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 yoüll not soon forget.¿

In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth. Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinating materials - including innumerable details about the madness and calamity in many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides - David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoring up Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. Where Reader ultimately leads us is shattering.

Similarly four complete poetry books and a selection of new poems and sequences—samples the ongoing project of C. S. Giscombe’s long, long song of location and range.  In all the work collected here, location is a practice; range is the fact of the serial, the figuring of continuous arrival. The writing speaks to rivers, the souls of city life, animals, the counted and uncounted, the many instances that might indicate “a shape to all that sound,” monstrosity and argument (the latter defined, with a hat-tip to Frankenstein, as “a thing that becomes terrifying to its maker”), and the colors of human migration, these things among others.  In the “Cry Me a River” poem, Giscombe writes, "for the sake of argument, say that the shape of a region or of some distinct areas of a city could stand in for memory and that it—the shape is a specific value because it’s apparent and public, and that way achieves an almost nameless contour."

First published in 1996 to international acclaim, Eric Darton's Free City is the fictional journal of L., a seventeenth-century inventor caught in a precarious love triangle, even as his beloved northern European port town teeters on the brink of catastrophe.In a tale laced with bawdy humor and elements of the fantastical, L. must balance the demands of his patron-a rapacious entrepreneur-against those of his sorceress lover. As L. attempts to avert calamity, he finds himself joined by the most unlikely of allies.Weaving together historical, political and absurdist elements, Free City resonates more profoundly today than ever.

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.

The poems in this collection were written between 2007 and 2020. When asked to describe the poems here, Ishmael Reed wrote: ' The poems are based on events that occurred around the house to cataclysmic space events.'

A new collection of poems from the AmericanpoetTennesseeReed.From "California Burning 2017-2018"Will smoke days become the West's new snow days?When an early morning dagger of red lightcuts through my curtainsI think of what I want to save in case I have to evacuate

The Revisionist is a novel of many voices, brilliantly arranged. Its themes are mysterious, its tone compassionate, its conclusions beguiling.

In Ishmael Reed's Conjugating Hindi, stories, histories and myths of different cultures are mixed and sampled. Modern issues like gentrification addressed. It is the closest that a fiction writer has gotten to the hip-hop form on the page.Once again, Ishmael Reed has pioneered a new form. One that crosses all borders.

Tell me a story! Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore orders her husband Peter Sagamore -- and so lets loose a flood of tales that floats them both past encounteres with their own lives and loves, entanglements with the CIA and toxic waste, and fantastically inventive brushes with some of the greatest characters of all time, including updated versions of Don Quixote, Odysseus, and Scheherazade.

REYoung`s latest features a nation buried in snow and ice in an obligatory 365 days a year Christmas celebration, a tribe of Mayan warriors in comedy troupe disguise, an existentially challenged hero and more. Told in a shoot from the hip Texas style, Margarito and the Snowman is loose, rangy, battered with attitude and bound to offend all.

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.