Bøger af Marc Estrin

"On Wednesday, Apr 13, 1968, at 7:30 PM, William Eugene Vanderbilt-Davidoff rose from the dead. Upon discovering Mr. Vanderbilt-Davidoff's open, empty casket, and after a short staff meeting, Randy, Jim, and Lamont decided to replace Will with four bags of roadway salt laid end to end, and close the coffin. Screw it down. It was a closed-casket contract. Who would know? And Dignity Funeral Home & Services could hardly afford the scandal of having lost a client. Et Resurrexit explores Will's further adventures"--

The Good Doctor Guillotin follows five characters to a common destination--the scaffold at the first guillotining of the French Revolution: Dr. Guillotin, of course, a physician and member of the National Assembly, involved in many important events, including the Tennis Court Oath. Nicolas Pelletier, the first victim--or "patient," as they were sometimes called, since the new beheading machine was seen as a humanitarian medical intervention in the state's technique of dealing death. Father Pierre, the cure who accompanies Pelletier in his last days, a man torn between his religious commitment, and an equally strong commitment to the poor and their revolution. Sanson, the famous executioner of Paris who, 9 months later would execute the king and retire from remorse. Tobias Schmidt, builder of the new machine, a German piano maker working in Paris, a freethinker predicting the Terror that will follow, but allowing himself to initiate it. The revolution, after all, had reduced the sale of pianos. Various other interesting figures briefly appear: Damiens, Mozart, Mesmer, Louis XVI, the Marquis de Sade, Marat, Robespierre, Demoulins among them. The eighteenth century narrative is divided into several sections, each introduced by an essay in the author's voice, the first on five-ness and Pentagons; a second on hope and Utopia; a third on revolutionary violence; and a fourth on capital punishment. This is no "historical novel." It is, rather, a fictive meditation on a contemporary conundrum using an eighteenth century drum.

The most unlikely life of a most unsightly man. Marc Estrin discovers that another writer's novel-THE NOSE- not only has spawned a bizarre cult among the nation's youth but also is based on the extraordinary life of a real person-an outcast named Alexei Pigov. Estrin searches Alexei out and ask him to provide annotations to THE NOSE. Alexei says that-although the events of the novel might, for the most part, be real-the purported reasons for them are all damnable lies. On the left-hand page of The Annotated Nose we read THE NOSE itself, and take in its beautifully unsettling illustrations by Delia Robinson. On the right-hand page we follow Alexei's complaints-always surprising and often farreaching. The layers in Estrin's remarkable comic book are as multiple, eclectric, and outrageous as the sequence of mask Alexei wears to hide his face from the world over the caroming trajectory of hie most unlikely life. The Annotated Nose is at once Marc Estrin's most playful and most ambitious work to date.

Who would benefit if they really did bring The Rapture on? Marc Estrin follows another of his strange protagonists through a world troubled by what it knows and by how it applies that knowledge. From the first page, we are plunged into a global riot of paranoia, joy, and fear. But something is sadly familiar here, perhaps because we have been taught to anticipate a world in which people suddenly fly off the planet. It might be The Rapture. Or it might be some violation of the force of gravity. Whatever it is, it's spreading madness, religious hysteria, and some truly formidable government powers. The voice of these Lamentations is a sixty-something, club-footed scientist named Julius Marantz, an obsessive researcher who suffers both from forbidden knowledge and an insistent conscience. As his spirit and his heart begin to fail, Julius realizes what is lost to him: a childhood of possibility, the consolation of belief, and the undying optimism of a father who taught him the principles of physics on the roller-coaster and the parachute jump. Partly a portrait of cynical politics and religious fervor, part scientific speculation and even a meditation on the glories of Coney Island, The Lamentations of Julius Marantz traces the rise and fall of science in a truly personal story that finally fairly ascends.

A most unlikely life."Marc Estrin” discovers that another writer's novel - The Nose - not only has spawned a bizarre cult among the nation's youth, but is based on the extraordinary life of a real person-an outcast named Alexei Pigov."Estrin” searches Alexei out and asks him to provide annotations to The Nose.Alexei says that-although the events of the novel might, for the most part, be real-the purported reasons for them are all damnable lies.On the left-hand page of The Annotated Nose we read The Nose itself, and take in its beautifully unsettling illustrations.On the right-hand page we follow Alexei's complaints - always surprising and often far-reaching.The layers in Estrin's remarkable comic book are as multiple, eclectic, and outrageous as the sequence of masks Alexei wears to hide his face from the world over the caroming trajectory of his most unlikely life.The Annotated Nose is at once Marc Estrin's most playful and his most ambitious work to date. A signed and numbered limited edition of 75 copies is also available.

An astounding debut in which Kafka's Gregor Samsa undergoes yet another metamorphosis--one that propels him across the rocky and often ridiculous landscape of the early 20th century.

At once a chess master, a linguist, an athlete and an innocent in love, Arnold passes through the racial tensions of Mansfield, Texas (home of the author of Black Like Me) in the 1950s, the anti-war movement at Harvard, and both the Upper East Side and the Bowery, meeting Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, and Leonard Bernstein in the process, and finally learning the meaning of meaning.