Autoportrait

Author: Edouard Levé
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1564788458
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 85

Book Description
In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond "sincerity," Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé's prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine—until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author's dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction . . . made entirely of facts.

Ishmael Reed

Author: Ishmael Reed
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564785513
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Book Description
The award-winning plays of one of the most celebrated and innovative American writers of our time. Ishmael Reed’s career as one of our great playwrights has long been eclipsed by his other work. Here published for the first time, Reed’s plays follow the ancient tradition of using the theater as a forum in which the official versions of our history can be critiqued. Dealing with subjects that mainstream theatergoers might find disturbing—homelessness, the arbitrary entrapment of a black politician, the excesses of the radical feminist movement, the use of black conservatives to promote right-wing agendas, the exploitation of blacks and Africans as unsuspecting guinea pigs by the pharmaceutical industry, and the hypocrisy of the Christian church—Reed’s plays are a pungent antidote to the watered-down world of contemporary pop culture, where, Reed argues, minority voices remain as marginalized and stigmatized as they were a hundred years ago.

The Recognitions

Author: William Gaddis
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 156478696X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1285

Book Description
The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.

Alix's Journal

Author: Alix Cléo Roubaud
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564785548
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Moving, fragile, and intimate, Alix s Journal is a unique testament to a great artist, lost before her time.

The Book of Jokes

Author: Momus
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564785610
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Imagine a universe where every joke you've ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous--and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single family, saddled with a super-eccentric, sexually rapacious father, "The Book of Jokes" tells the story of the youth and education of a bland young boy doomed to record--in an incongruously serious, autobiographical mode--all the ridiculous incidents befalling his household. With their lives dictated by set ups and punchlines, the boy's family quickly becomes luridly dysfunctional, and he realizes that the only way to escape his tragicomic fate is by trying to take control of the joke-telling himself. Channeling the spirits of Chaucer, Rabelais, Flann O'Brien, and Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, the Vatican secretary who compiled the first known book of jokes in 1451, "The Book of Jokes" is a happy raspberry in the face of life as we know and tell it.

This is Not a Tragedy

Author: Françoise Palleau-Papin
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564786072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
"How much of myself is in there? It's all me. Especially in Reader's Block, all that personal stuff re: Reader and/or Protagonist, ex-wife, ex-galfriends, children, lack of money, isolation, messed-up life, and/or some items dictated by novelistic necessity---and of course there is necessary invention there also, e.g., a house at a cemetery---but even little items like a couple of yellow stones from Masada or a reproduction of Giotto's Dante---I plucked up whatever was ready at hand. Is that laziness, or is it what they speak of as using what one knows? Take your pick."---David Markson To Francoise Palleau-Papin --Book Jacket.

Maps and Territories

Author: Joshua Armstrong
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786942763
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life has meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel.

The Truth about Marie

Author: Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564783677
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint’s acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie—the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint’s novels, The Truth about Marie’s plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments of intense action to perfectly paced lulls, The Truth about Marie relies on a series of contrasts to tell a beguiling, and finally touching, story of intimacy forever being regained and lost.

Allowed to Grow Old

Author: Isa Leshko
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639137X
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 141

Book Description
There’s nothing quite like a relationship with an aged pet—a dog or cat who has been at our side for years, forming an ineffable bond. Pampered pets, however, are a rarity among animals who have been domesticated. Farm animals, for example, are usually slaughtered before their first birthday. We never stop to think about it, but the typical images we see of cows, chickens, pigs, and the like are of young animals. What would we see if they were allowed to grow old? Isa Leshko shows us, brilliantly, with this collection of portraits. To create these portraits, she spent hours with her subjects, gaining their trust and putting them at ease. The resulting images reveal the unique personality of each animal. It’s impossible to look away from the animals in these images as they unforgettably meet our gaze, simultaneously calm and challenging. In these photographs we see the cumulative effects of the hardships of industrialized farm life, but also the healing that time can bring, and the dignity that can emerge when farm animals are allowed to age on their own terms. Each portrait is accompanied by a brief biographical note about its subject, and the book is rounded out with essays that explore the history of animal photography, the place of beauty in activist art, and much more. Open this book to any page. Meet Teresa, a thirteen-year-old Yorkshire Pig, or Melvin, an eleven-year-old Angora Goat, or Tom, a seven-year-old Broad Breasted White Turkey. You’ll never forget them.

Isle of Dreams

Author: Keizō Hino
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 156478603X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
Sakai works for a construction company that builds high rise buildings in Tokyo, but gets introduced to parts of the city he's never seen after meeting a mysterious young woman.