Bøger af Michael Coffey

An instruction manual on Eternal Youth. Includes discussion on a method of implementing Eternal Youth and the implications of Eternal Youth.

Beckett’s Children is a lyrical blend of personal memoir, father–son dialogue, and literary investigation that probes the works of Irish writer Samuel Beckett and American poet Susan Howe in search of traces of their long-rumored status as father and daughter. Although Howe has denied the rumor, the possibility that it might be true leads Coffey to a highly original appreciation of her work and a fascinating focus on the dozens of unattended children who wander through Beckett’s oeuvre.The saga of Coffey’s adult son, at various moments on the run in the Indiana woods or incarcerated, shines light on life without parental connection in a cold America. As an adoptee himself, Coffey looks to literature for traces of his own origin story and lineage, a heritage held in secret by a closed adoption system but which, through books and cultural signs, he has been able to decipher in his own way. Provocative and beautifully expressed, Beckett’s Children suggests a new approach to the textual worlds of two highly respected artists, providing a revelatory perspective on both American poetics and the vibrant world of Beckett studies.

- First book by master sculptor and craftsman Michael Coffey- Memoir that spans from the Great Depression, to the tumult of New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, to a long, dedicated career making some of the most high sought after pieces of wood furniture- A highly sophisticated reflection on the relationship between art and lifeMichael Coffey: Sculptor and Furniture Maker in Wood unsettles the conventional distinction between craftsman and artist, which is often assumed to be the difference between creating something new, as opposed to reproducing old forms. Inspired by but not beholden to artist-craftsmen such as George Nakashima, Wendell Castle, and Jack Rogers Hopkins, Coffey's handmade, one-of-a-kind works seamlessly combine the irregular forms of nature, an aesthetic built on the variable and unexpected, with a deep sense for the haptic and functional qualities of wood. This book includes not only a generous reproduction of Coffey's body of work, but also an in-depth autobiographical reflection on how his formative experience, from his rural and bohemian childhood to community organizing, and to the discovery of his passion for woodworking, molded him into the sculptor and artisan he is today. Coffey makes all his work in his western Massachusetts studio, deeply integrating his life and practice. This reflects the work itself, as this book makes clear, Coffey's pieces that are both uniquely sculptural but also highly functional, recognizing the complex relationship people have with the objects they choose for their space. His pieces are meant to be lived in.

Michael Coffey examines how the timing of baseball's perfect games have reflected American history and addresses how these rare incidents of ultimate performance exhibit how the game and the country have simultaneously evolved.

Riveting . . . vibrant and unsparing. Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)Superb. . . . Startlingly original. Library Journal (starred review)Once I started reading these stories, I couldnt stop. They absorbed me thoroughly, with their taut narratives and evocative languagethe language of a poet. JAY PARINI, author of Jesus: The Human Face of God and The Last StationSherwood Anderson would recognize this world of lonely, longing characters, whose surface lives Coffey tenderly plumbs. These beautiful storiesspare, rich, wise and compellinggo to the heart. FREDERIC TUTEN, author of Self Portraits: Fictions and Tintin in the New WorldWhether [Coffey is] writing about a sinning priest or a man whos made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffeys protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits? EDMUND WHITE, author of Inside a Pearl and A Boys Own StoryAmong these eight stories, a fan of writer (and fellow adoptee) Harold Brodkey gains an audience with him at his lifes end, two pals take a Joycean sojourn, a man whose business is naming things meets a woman who may not be what she seems, and a father discovers his son is a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president. In each tale, Michael Coffeys exquisite attention to character underlies the brutally honest perspectives of his disenchanted fathers, damaged sons, and orphans left feeling perpetually disconnected.Michael Coffey is the author of three books of poems and 27 Men Out, a book about baseballs perfect games. He also co-edited The Irish in America, a book about Irish immigration to America, which was a companion volume to a PBS documentary series. He divides his time between Manhattan and Bolton Landing, New York. The Business of Naming Things is his first work of fiction.

From the assassination of the Archduke, through Hitler's rise and demise, to Saddam Hussein's doomed invasion of Kuwait -- Military Blunders is a blow-by-blow account of this century's most ill-fated military events. What were they and why did they happen?

This study appraises the work of all the Roman satirists, from the 2nd century BC, to the end of the reign of Hadrian in AD 138. The satirists' work is shown to reflect the constantly changing society in which they lived, and its topics range from the morally earnest to the bawdy.