Kafka Was the Rage

Author: Anatole Broyard
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679781269
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance. Stylish written, mercurially witty, imbued with insights that are both affectionate and astringent, this memoir offers an indelible portrait of a lost bohemia. We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Street—indulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as “living off the land or sailing around the world” while exercizing his libido with a protegee of Anais Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on “the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis.” Along the way he encounters Delmore Schwartz, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, William Gaddis, and other writers at the start of their careers. Written with insight and mercurial wit, Kafka Was the Rage elegantly captures a moment and place and pays homage to a lost bohemia as it was experienced by a young writer eager to find not only his voice but also his place in a very special part of the world.

Intoxicated by My Illness

Author: Anatole Broyard
Publisher: Fawcett
ISBN: 0449908348
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
Anatole Broyard, long-time book critic, book review editor, and essayist for the New York Times, wants to be remembered. He will be, with this collection of irreverent, humorous essays he wrote concerning the ordeals of life and death—many of which were written during the battle with cancer that led to his death in 1990. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year “A heartbreakingly eloquent and unsentimental meditation on mortality . . . Some writing is so rich and well-spoken that commentary is superfluous, even presumptuous. . . . Read this book, and celebrate a cultured spirit made fine, it seems, by the coldest of touches.”—Los Angeles Times “Succeeds brilliantly . . . Anatole Broyard has joined his father but not before leaving behind a legacy rich in wisdom about the written word and the human condition. He has died. But he lives as a writer and we are the wealthier for it.”—The Washington Post Book World “A virtuoso performance . . . The central essays of Intoxicated By My Illness were written during the last fourteen months of Broyard’s life. They are held in a gracious setting of his previous writings on death in life and literature, including a fictionalized account of his own father’s dying of cancer. The title refers to his reaction to the knowledge that he had a life-threatening illness. His literary sensibility was ignited, his mind flooded with image and metaphor, and he decided to employ these intuitive gifts to light his way into the darkness of his disease and its treatment. . . . Many other people have chronicled their last months . . . Few are as vivid as Broyard, who brilliantly surveys a variety of books on illness and death along the way as he draws us into his writer’s imagination, set free now by what he describes as the deadline of life. . . . [A] remarkable book, a lively man of dense intelligence and flashing wit who lets go and yet at the same time comtains himself in the style through which he remains alive.”—The New York Times Book Review “Despite much pain, Anatole Broyard continued to write until the final days of his life. He used his writing to rage, in the words of Dylan Thomas, against the dying of the light. . . . Shocking, no-holds-barred and utterly exquisite.”—The Baltimore Sun

Kafka's Curse

Author: Achmat Dangor
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
His unforgiving brother, a post-apartheid politician, tries to come to terms with Oscar's apostasy but will himself betray both his principles and his family when he falls in love with Amina, a beautiful and spirited psychotherapist.

A Hunger Artist

Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 1222378256
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Book Description
In the days when hunger could be cultivated and practiced as an art form, the individuals who practiced it were often put on show for all to see. One man who was so devout in his pursuit of hunger pushed against the boundaries set by the circus that housed him and strived to go longer than forty days without food. As interest in his art began to fade, he pushed the boundaries even further. In this short story about one man's plight to prove his worth, Franz Kafka illustrates the themes of self-hatred, dedication, and spiritual yearning. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary fiction and nonfiction, Sheba Blake Publishing Corp. is extremely dedicated to bringing to the forefront the amazing works of long dead and truly talented authors.

Out of Sheer Rage

Author: Geoff Dyer
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 1466869860
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD "In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times Geoff Dyer was a talented young writer, full of energy and reverence for the craft, and determined to write a study of D. H. Lawrence. But he was also thinking about a novel, and about leaving Paris, and maybe moving in with his girlfriend in Rome, or perhaps traveling around for a while. Out of Sheer Rage is Dyer's account of his struggle to write the Lawrence book--a portrait of a man tormented, exhilarated, and exhausted. Dyer travels all over the world, grappling not only with his fascinating subject but with all the glorious distractions and needling anxieties that define the life of a writer.

Kafka, Angry Poet

Author: Pascale Casanova
Publisher: French List
ISBN: 9780857421623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term "Kafkaesque" is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex and the illogical. His works sustained themes of violence, family conflict, bizarre and all-powerful bureaucracies, and fantastical transformations. However, in Kafka, Angry Poet, Pascale Casanova looks past the customary analyses of Kafka's work and dives deep into his mind, examining his motives rather than the results. She bravely asks the question, "What if Kafka were the most radical of social critics? What if he had actually attempted to pull the wool over our eyes with narratives that are, in fact, subtly deceptive?" The hypothesis she develops is that Kafka began with an awareness of the tragic fate of the German-speaking Jews of early twentieth-century Prague and was subsequently led to reflect on other forms of power, such as male dominance and colonial oppression. The stories produced as a result were traps for the unwary, throwing the reader off the scent with the use of unreliable and even deceitful narrators. Curiously, says Casanova, it is not in literature that one finds the answers to these questions but in German ethnology, a field which, as an intellectual of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka knew well. Through her detailed research, Casanova shows us a combative Kafka who is at once ethnologist and investigator, unstintingly denouncing all forms of domination with the kind of tireless rage that was his hallmark. In so doing, she sheds light on the deep-seated reasons for Kafka's anger.

Metamorphosis

Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd
ISBN: 939096024X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 71

Book Description
Franz Kafka, the author has very nicely narrated the story of Gregou Samsa who wakes up one day to discover that he has metamorphosed into a bug. The book concerns itself with the themes of alienation and existentialism. The author has written many important stories, including The Judgement, and much of his novels Amerika, The Castle, The Hunger Artist. Many of his stories were published during his lifetime but many were not. Over the course of the 1920s and 30s Kafkas works were published and translated instantly becoming landmarks of twentieth-century literature. Ironically, the story ends on an optimistic note, as the family puts itself back together. The style of the book epitomizes Kafkas writing. Kafka very interestingly, used to present an impossible situation, such as a mans transformation into an insect, and develop the story from there with perfect realism and intense attention to detail. The Metamorphosis is an autobiographical piece of writing, and we find that parts of the story reflect Kafkas own life.

Stitches

Author: David Small
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771081154
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Best Book of the Year An Amazon.com Top Ten Best Book of 2009 A Washington Post Book World’s Ten Best Book of the Year A California Literary Review Best Book of 2009 An L.A. Times Top 25 Non-Fiction Book of 2009 An NPR Best Book of the Year, Best Memoir With this stunning graphic memoir, David Small takes readers on an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of his tumultuous childhood in 1950s Detroit, in a coming-of-age tale like no other. At the age of fourteen, David awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover his throat had been slashed and one of his vocal chords removed, leaving him a virtual mute. No one had told him that he had cancer and was expected to die. The resulting silence was in keeping with the atmosphere of secrecy and repressed frustration that pervaded the Small household and revealed itself in the slamming of cupboard doors, the thumping of a punching bag, the beating of a drum. Believing that they were doing their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. David’s mother held the family emotionally hostage with her furious withdrawals, even as she kept her emotions hidden — including from herself. His father, rarely present, was a radiologist, and although David grew up looking at X-rays and drawing on X-ray paper, it would be years before he discovered the shocking consequences of his father’s faith in science. A work of great bravery and humanity, Stitches is a gripping and ultimately redemptive story of a man’s struggle to understand the past and reclaim his voice.

In My Place

Author: Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679748180
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The award-winning correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour gives a moment-by-moment account of her walk into history when, as a 19-year-old, she challenged Southern law--and Southern violence--to become the first black woman to attend the University of Georgia. A powerful act of witness to the brutal realities of segregation.

Franz Kafka in Context

Author: Carolin Duttlinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107085497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Book Description
Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.