Bøger udgivet af Red Lemonade

Here is an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Tillman upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Like other unique thinkers, Tillman sees the world differently—she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social and political questions change the reader''s mind, startling it with new angles. Which is why so many of us who know her work often wonder: what would Lynne Tillman do? A long-time resident of New York, Tillman''s sharp humor is like her city''s, tough and hilarious. There are distinct streams of concern coursing through the seeming eclecticism of topics—Hillary Clinton, Jane Bowles, O.J. Simpson, art and artists, Harry Mathews, the state of fiction, film, the state of her mind, the State of the Nation. There is a great variety, but what remains consistent is how differently she writes about them, how well she understands, how passionate and bold her writing is.What does Lynne Tillman do? Everything. Anything. You name it. She has a conversation with you, and you''re a better, smarter person for it.

When there is nothing left to burn, Della sets herself on fire. At twenty-seven, she is stuck in the far corner of a parallel America on the verge of collapse, splitting time slinging tofu scramble at the local vegan-friendly diner and counting down the days until the impending birth of her brother Credence's twins forces her out of his house's leaky attic apartment. She collects pictures of historic self-immolators and stares out the skylight of her room while TVs from across the sprawl spew war reports and Presidential battle plans. A breakdown a few years back has sent splinters through her buzzing mind, though something in her still hums with a mercurial urgency, flittering back and forth between fight and flight. Many of those close to her shuffle through the shallow rebellions - hair dye, sex parties, gluttonous self-absorption - of an ineffective counterculture, and while others join the growing people leaving their country behind for a life of escape and "eco-tourism," something quiet in her whispers the need to stay. But those bombs keep inching closer, thudding deep and real between the sounds of katydids fluttering in the still of the city night, and the destruction begins to excite her. What begins as terror threats called in to greasy bro-bars across the block boils over into a desperate plot, intoxicating and captivating Della and leaving her little chance for escape. Zazen unfolds as a search for clarity soured by irresolution and catastrophe, yet made vital by the thin, wild veins of imagination run through each escalating moment, tensing and relaxing, unfurling and ensnaring. Vanessa Vaselka renders Della and her world with beautiful, freighting, and phantasmagorically intelligent accuracy, crafting from their shattered constitutions a perversely perfect mirror for our own selves and state.

When war breaks out in Europe — modern, aerial war whose tactics include displacing entire populations — British civilization collapses overnight. The ironically named Theodore Savage, an educated and idle civil servant, must learn to survive by his wits in a new Britain… one where science and technology swiftly come to be regarded with superstitious awe and terror.The book — by a women’s rights activist often remembered today for her polemical plays, tracts and treatises — was first published in 1922.

Several thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these devices will permit us to move unhindered through time and space, and to live complacent, well-regulated lives. However, when one of these devices goes awry, a "clockwork man" appears accidentally in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village. Comical yet mind-blowing hijinks ensue.Considered the first cyborg novel, The Clockwork Man was first published in 1923 — the same year as Karel Capek's pioneering android play, R.U.R.

What would you do if you alone had discovered that the entire planet was about to be engulfed in a belt of poisonous "ether" from outer space - and that all humanity would die?Arthur Conan Doyle's intrepid Professor Challenger invites a hand-picked crew of adventurers and scientists - the very same comrades with whom he had romped through a South American jungle crawling with prehistoric monsters and beast-men in The Lost World, science fiction's first popular dinoasaurs-still-live tale. This adventure, however, takes place entirely in Challenger's home (in his wife's boudoir, in fact) outside London, which has been fortified with several hours' worth of oxygen. Challenger tells his friends: "We are assisting at a tremendous and awful function.”Like astronauts strapping themselves into a rocket, Challenger & Co. assemble in front of a picture window to witness the end of all life on the planet. As birds plummet from the sky, trains crash, and men and women topple over before their horrified gaze, they debate everything from the possibilities of the universe to the "abysses that lie upon either side of our material existence,” to the "ideal scientific mind." If the point of other apocalyptic tales is to model proper action in the face of certain disaster, Doyle's offbeat adventure models a proper attitude: scholarly sprezzatura, nerves of steel, stoic calm.Professor Challenger himself is a larger than life character - strong as a bull, the smartest man alive, and an enormous egotist who nevertheless is good company whether he's hunting dinosaurs or waiting for the end of the world.

A satire driven by dialogue, Happy Talk takes place among Americans sent to Haiti in the mid-1950s for a myriad of misdirected purposes, then follows their lives through the 1970s. Front and center are two star-crossed lovers: the errant filmmaker Culprit Clutch and his ghostly paramour, a nursing student named Josie.A band of New York City playwrights-turned-educational filmmakers, the Useless Bums, are sent to northern Haiti to create a tourist film promoting the new sport of surfing on Haitian beaches. It’s part of a U.S. State Department/United Nations plan to turn Haiti into the new Hawaii. Joining the Bums are the Nightingales, American nursing students placed at a school in Haiti that’s been forgotten by their contacts in Washington. The students have found a cache of rifle and are living in anarchic conditions, while teaching themselves the art and science of nursing.The surfing film does not turn out as planned, as there are no waves in northern Haiti. The question becomes, what length will the U.S. government go to establish surfing as a tourist attraction on the magic island? The film set creates a curious spectacle witnessed by Haitians, who provide spectacles of their own involving voodoo possession.A power-mad doctor has taken over as State Department provost and imprisons Culprit Clutch on the grounds of impregnating a student nurse. The Nightingales and Useless Bums concoct a wild plan involving theatrics and a commando-style raid to set the world right. Meanwhile, a small expedition heads toward a town built by zombies with the goal of finding one.It turns out Josie is not having a baby after all; it was a hysterical pregnancy. After years of crippling headaches, Josie then suffers from a hysterical death. Unable to locate her family, the Americans drop her coffin into the sea. She returns, walking from the water on the waveless beach. Together again with Culprit in his pension room, she sleeps all the time and never speaks.The Nightingales and Useless Bums receive orders to return to the states. Culprit and another student nurse, Belinda, arrive too late for the voyage home. Josie, meanwhile, walks back into the sea, for good this time. The ocean turns orange, a mushroom cloud appears on the horizon, and waves begin to roll onto the beach.The novel has cascading epilogues that follow the characters before and after their Haiti misadventures. A young Culprit Clutch films a tragic-comic car race across Mexico in 1950. Abbot Jaffe is jailed briefly on drug charges in 1967, then decides to write a musical revue based on Jesus’ teachings and in seeking advice from Leonard Bernstein, encounters members of the Nation of Islam who are building a UFO. Belinda Ballard finds herself adrift in hippie-era San Francisco and is recruited into Jim Jones’ church. Keith Clone is helping build a commuter rail tube beneath the San Francisco Bay and is recruited to work on Skylab. Once aboard the space station, Keith Clone desires to kiss one of his fellow astronauts and during a space walk witnesses the Mother Plane, a humongous interstellar craft piloted by black musicians.Driven by its ensemble cast and Catch-22-style dialogue, Happy Talk is an absurdist take on history in the style of a 60s-era postmodern, black humor novel. A work that walks along the edge of contradiction, it's satiric yet sentimental, avant-garde yet accessible, offensive yet agreeable, a serious look into the American soul.

Jack London's plague novel, in which the world's population has been reduced to a few scattered bands of primitive scavengers, has influenced subsequent science-fiction apocalypses and dystopias - from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four to the movies Road Warrior and Idiocracy.Outside the ruins of San Francisco, a former UC Berkeley professor of literature recounts the chilling sequence of events which led to his current lowly state - a gruesome pandemic which killed nearly every living soul on the planet, in a matter of days. Modern civilization tottered and fell, and a new race of barbarians - the western world's brutalized workers - assumed power everywhere.Over the space of a few decades, all learning has been lost. Unlike the professor on Gilligan's Island, the narrator is the least useful member of a thriving tribe, whose younger generation (who boast names like Hoo-Hoo and Har-Lip) are mostly descended from a the tribe's brutish founder. He was known only by the title of his former occupation, so the tribe's name is: Chauffeur.A bleak, at times darkly humorous glimpse into the future by an author best known for red-blooded adventure yarns set in the Klondike Gold Rush.

Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later — in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Not only have his fellow Londoners forgotten most of what humankind used to know, before civilization collapsed, but they don’t particularly care to re-learn any of it. Though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his own era’s smug doctrine of Progress, Tuft eventually decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful. That is, until northern English and Welsh tribes threaten London — at which point he sets about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.Shanks''s post-apocalyptic novel, a pessimistic satire on Wellsian techno-utopian novels, was first published in 1920.

Matthew Battles does not write stories that move, develop or unfold. He creates worlds that hiss, snap, and rattle, and decorates them with objects that brood in black, glassine silence, or crumble into dusty revelation. Characters are left to grab at scraps of reality sent whipping about them at hurricane force. Ideas "run faster than memory can sieve them from the flow," leaving vaporous reverie to fill the vacuum - dogs populate trees, demolition men bear holy forgeries, and a slick dark box siphons off synaptic vibrations.The thrill and anxiety of the Uncanny is the engine of this debut collection by rare book librarian and cultural critic Matthew Battles. He invents a new Creole, one that combines the baroque grandiosity of 19th century industrialist with the sleek grandiosity of the 21st technologist. Traversing musty libraries and austere technology conferences, Battles quietly but ruthlessly discloses the beauty and grotesquerie of our present times, our infatuation with the New and our nostalgia for the Old both lovingly depicted and then slowly roasted on the spit.In "The Dogs in the Trees," man's best friends deliver an enigmatic rebuke. The protagonist of "The Sovereignties of Invention" is enthralled by a gadget that plumbs the depths of the stream of consciousness. In "The Manuscript of Belz," a librarian ponders the glamor of the book and the bloody limits of cultural experience. And "the Gnomon" seeks in Internet culture the same dark energies limned by Poe. Each story within "The Sovereignties of Invention" waits, still, dark and deep, to yield its unique shock of uncanny truth - the only choice is to dive in.

It begins with an envelope. Twenty years old, maybe more, with the dust of the dead-letter office still clinging to the stained, fraying paper. It arrives in the mailbox of Lucy — a proofreader and sometimes-photographer haunted by the face of a brother she left behind — with the address of a vacant neighborhood lot barely legible on the front. Inside she finds only a photograph of a man she does not recognize, but whose face captivates her instantly. She hunts for him, feeling for blind answers in the boroughs of her soul and city. The details of her world — of a neighborhood decaying and maimed in daylight, yet pulsing with some hidden life in dark; the shaded, shifting menace of shadow on the night sidewalk — blur together through the fogged lens of her plastic camera, and the casual banter of summer afternoons evaporates into the hiss of something missing, something lost and formless that she must return.The picture ultimately leads Lucy across the darkened city, from the canal slicing through her neighborhood over the rivers at the city limits, its mystery resolving into vivid, caustic focus in the book’s concluding scenes. Follow Me Down owns moments both wondrous in their sympathy and wild in their desolation, as Stark culls from the crumbling city setting characters mercurial and impassable, joyous and redemptive.

Praise for Lynne Tillman"One of America's most challenging and adventurous writers." — Guardian"Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine—not because I 'admire' her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That's how I feel..." — Jonathan Safran Foer"Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman." — Edmund White“Anything I’ve read by Tillman I’ve devoured.” — Anne K. Yoder, The Millions"If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the 00s, but in the last 50 years, [American Genius, A Comedy] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years." — Blake Butler, HTML Giant

While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little

If representatives of an advanced civilization were to visit our planet today, would they be impressed or dismayed by the way we live?When three adventurers, Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot, are marooned on a South Sea island, they discover an ancient crystal sepulchre. Inside are two Atlanteans who have been in a state of suspended animation for 250,000 years!One of the awakened sleepers, the haughty Lord Oro, is the last of the Sons of Wisdom, a superior race who'd relied on their advanced technology to subjugate the planet's lesser peoples. The other Atlantean is Oro's daughter, Yva, heiress to the title of Queen of the Earth... who falls in love with Arbuthnot.Using astral projection, Lord Oro visits London and the battlefields of the Western Front. Unimpressed with the state of the world in the early 20th century, he sets out to do what he's apparently done once before - use a colossal gyroscope to drown the planet, and restart the course of human history.A darkly humorous look at the politics and conflicts of his own era by an author best known for swashbuckling adventure novels (including the hugely popular King Solomon's Mines) set in the context of the Scramble for Africa.

"SHE: Do you like Kipling? HE: I don't know, I've never Kippled!" If you've never read Rudyard Kipling's science fiction, then you've never Kippled.Having achieved international fame with The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, Kim, and his Just So Stories, in 1905 Kipling serialized a thrilling science fiction novella, With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D, in which the reader learns — while following the exploits of an intercontinental mail dirigible battling foul weather — about a planet-wide Aerial Board of Control, which enforces a rigid system of command and control not only in the skies (which are increasingly crowded with every manner of zeppelin) but in world affairs too.Kipling got so excited by his own utopian vision that when the story first appeared in McClure's Magazine, it was accompanied by phony advertisements for dirigible and aeronautical products that he'd written, plus other ersatz magazine clippings. In one of these latter, we read that the Aerial Board of Control had effectively outlawed war in 1967 — by "reserving to every nation the right of waging war so long as it does not interfere with traffic and all that that implies."This turns out to imply a great deal! In Kipling's 1912 followup story, "As Easy As A.B.C.," which is set 65 years after With the Night Mail, we learn just how complete the Aerial Board's control is over the social and economic affairs of every nation. When a mob of disgruntled "Serviles" in the District of Northern Illinois demands the return of democracy, the A.B.C. sends a team of troubleshooters (from England, Russia, Japan, and Italy) and a fleet of 200 zeppelins to "take such steps as might be necessary for the resumption of traffic and all that that implies." Democracy, it seems, is an impediment to the smooth flow of international commerce — so it was abolished during the 20th century, along with newspapers.What happens when the A.B.C. troubleshooters confront the democrats? Trouble!