Bøger af Alexander Theroux

A unique work in Theroux's canon, Truisms distills a lifetime of observation and reading into thousands of rhyming quatrains, a Rubaiyat for our times. It is a compendium of universal truths, witty aphorisms, personal opinions, wise maxims, sardonic insults, cranky complaints, abrupt advice, and believe-it-or-not factoids that only he could assemble. Beginning with a well-informed history of apothegms and epigrams, Theroux states, "A truism provides a way of seeing by way of the compendious and concise, the summary and the succinct, a thought closed like a door with a bang." Truisms is "the way I see the world," he concludes, and it should appeal to both Theroux's fans and to anyone who appreciates pithy proverbs.- Steven Moore, author (The Novel: An Alternative History, My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays, Alexander Theroux: A Fan's Notes, etc.)

Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville's Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. Both Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat were nominated for the National Book Award.Early Stories, the first book of Theroux's fiction to be published in fourteen years, constitutes an addition to one of modern American literature's most lauded and entertaining bodies of work. It is also the first volume in his story triad (Fables and Later Stories soon to follow).Nobody writing today has a keener instinct for obsession, hypocrisy, sexual jealousy, envy, human folly, the lineaments of vanity, greed, and romantic disappointment, and, yes, grace. A feast of comic joy awaits you in this long-awaited collection. Here, the sword arm of satire is swung high! We encounter an intractable woman who refuses to divulge the secret to her spaghetti sauce. A tourist discovers a modern Nestor in an English pub. An idealistic teacher who is also a broken-hearted lover leaves us speechless over his overwhelming fixation. A hide-bound feminist goes to Italy to learn pasta making. A beautiful Bostonian, becoming a fashion model, achieves a much different goal. What is the effect of summer camp on a sensitive youngster? How does a hunt in Cracow for the alpenstock of great Copernicus end up a comic farce? Does a young boy with a genius IQ fulfill his promise? What happens when a collector discovers the rarest autograph in American letters? Nothing prepares the reader for the twists and turns of these unsparing but brilliantly plotted stories. Language is, however, the subject, the splendid gift of one of the nation's word-masters, a magician who fashions words out of his fingertips. Satire, it is said, swipes off the noggin but leaves the head in place. Here, the head still manages to find its voice-to our great and continuing pleasure.

Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville's Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. Both Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat were nominated for the National Book Award.Early Stories, the first book of Theroux's fiction to be published in fourteen years, constitutes an addition to one of modern American literature's most lauded and entertaining bodies of work. It is also the first volume in his story triad (Fables and Later Stories soon to follow).Nobody writing today has a keener instinct for obsession, hypocrisy, sexual jealousy, envy, human folly, the lineaments of vanity, greed, and romantic disappointment, and, yes, grace. A feast of comic joy awaits you in this long-awaited collection. Here, the sword arm of satire is swung high! We encounter an intractable woman who refuses to divulge the secret to her spaghetti sauce. A tourist discovers a modern Nestor in an English pub. An idealistic teacher who is also a broken-hearted lover leaves us speechless over his overwhelming fixation. A hide-bound feminist goes to Italy to learn pasta making. A beautiful Bostonian, becoming a fashion model, achieves a much different goal. What is the effect of summer camp on a sensitive youngster? How does a hunt in Cracow for the alpenstock of great Copernicus end up a comic farce? Does a young boy with a genius IQ fulfill his promise? What happens when a collector discovers the rarest autograph in American letters? Nothing prepares the reader for the twists and turns of these unsparing but brilliantly plotted stories. Language is, however, the subject, the splendid gift of one of the nation's word-masters, a magician who fashions words out of his fingertips. Satire, it is said, swipes off the noggin but leaves the head in place. Here, the head still manages to find its voice- to our great and continuing pleasure.

The Lollipop Trollops gathers the poems-written over several decades-of Alexander Theroux, one of the most brilliant novelists of our age. It is an uncompromising and explosive volume, a work of astonishing force and variety.Although written in a genre by which he has been known thus far only to a few, this book but continues what, taken altogether, including his essays, plays, stories, and fables, he understands to be a part of a single vision, the unfolding drama of a mind in action. "Ideas of a certain kind," writes the author, "thoughts of a certain nap, can properly be expressed in no other way, not merely one-take ideas, rather substances requiring a specific form, the way brandy suitably calls for a snifter, absinthe a drip glass, and champagne an eight-ounce 'tulip.'"A variety of voices and visions reflect the alternations of mood, degrees of power, and a broad array of themes, a major one of which remains Theroux's insistent exploration of the mystery at the heart of the creative process itself. The complex styles, his versatility, incorporates a vast knowledge.Here are occasional poems that explore secret moments of passion as well as sonnets, simple unadorned lyrics, blank verse, jingles, and, along with some masterful Therouvian "triplets," much scarifying satire, forms in their plenitude including everything from closed couplets to bold free verse, from the dissonant to the deeply meditative to the elegantly lyrical. There is mad exactness here, great insight, rapier wit.Theroux has a commanding genius, whether writing of love or sketching a profile or fitting out thoughts like weapons with tips barbed with ferocious signifiers. With his love of words and penetrating way of seeing things like no one else, whether pastoral or political or polemical, he conjures poems out of his fingers like miraculous birds with an instant singing life.