The Hall of Uselessness

The Hall of Uselessness PDF Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176383
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Book Description
An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.

Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie PDF Author: Jeff Berglund
Publisher: University of Utah Press
ISBN: 1607819740
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
A collection of critical essays on the writing and films of American Indian author Sherman Alexie.

Shifting Interludes: Selected Essays

Shifting Interludes: Selected Essays PDF Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604736687
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
A collection of eloquent, sometimes hard-hitting essays by one of the South's most beloved writers covers forty years in Morris's career as a journalist and columnist. (Literature)

Simon Leys

Simon Leys PDF Author: Philippe Paquet
Publisher: La Trobe University Press
ISBN: 1925435563
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Book Description
An award-winning biography of one of the greats. Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in 2014. Writing in three languages – French, Chinese and English – he played an important political role in revealing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution. His writing on China and on varied literary and cultural topics appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and the Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People’s Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction. This substantial biography – recently published by Gallimard in France to wide acclaim and winning an award from the Académie Francaise – draws on extensive correspondence with Ryckmans, as well as his unpublished writings. It has been translated by an internationally renowned French translator Julie Rose (based in Sydney).

The Death of Napoleon

The Death of Napoleon PDF Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312421779
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
History tells us that Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the desolate island of St. Helena in 1821. Or did he? This film supposes a more fanciful tale. A secret network of loyalists hatch an ingenious plot: the Emporer (Ian Holm in a double role) will return to Paris, while a double takes his place in exile. Trading identities with a dissolute sailor (Holm), Napoleon is spirited back to France to reclaim his throne. Yet, early on in the scheme, the plan goes awry. The double refuses to give up playing Napoleon thereby stranding the former Emperor in Paris.

Chinese Shadows

Chinese Shadows PDF Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140047875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description

Writing Was Everything

Writing Was Everything PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674962389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
Blending autobiography, history, and criticism, this book is a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma and stands as testimony to Kazin’s belief that “literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind.”

Mind of an Outlaw

Mind of an Outlaw PDF Author: Norman Mailer
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645659
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 636

Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE GLOBE AND MAIL Norman Mailer was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American letters and an acknowledged master of the essay. Mind of an Outlaw, the first posthumous publication from this outsize literary icon, collects Mailer’s most important and representative work in the form that many rank as his most electrifying. As America’s foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life—on the airwaves and in print—for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics. Here is Mailer on boxing, Mailer on Hemingway, Mailer on Marilyn Monroe, and, of course, Mailer on Mailer—the one subject that served as the beating heart of all of his nonfiction. From his early essay “A Credo for the Living,” published in 1948, when the author was twenty-five, to his final writings in the year before his death, Mailer wrestled with the big themes of his times. He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. Mind of an Outlaw spans the full arc of Mailer’s evolution as a writer, including such essential pieces as his acclaimed 1957 meditation on hipsters, “The White Negro”; multiple selections from his seminal collection Advertisements for Myself; and a never-before-published essay on Sigmund Freud. Incendiary, erudite, and unrepentantly outrageous, Norman Mailer was a dominating force on the battlefield of ideas. Featuring an incisive Introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Mind of an Outlaw forms a fascinating portrait of Mailer’s intellectual development across the span of his career as well as the preoccupations of a nation in the last half of the American century. Praise for Mind of an Outlaw “[Mailer’s] best and brightest.”—Esquire “The fifty essays collected in this retrospective volume span sixty-four years and show [Norman] Mailer (1923–2007) at his brawny, pugnacious, and egotistical best. . . . This provocative collection brims with insights and reflections that show why Mailer is regarded as a great literary mind of his generation.”—Publishers Weekly “The selections open a window onto the capacious mind and process of one of the most volatile intellects of the twentieth century.”—Library Journal “Vintage Mailer: brilliant, infuriating, witty and never, ever boring.”—Tampa Bay Times “As good an introduction to Mailer’s habits of mind as there’s ever been.”—Kirkus Reviews “There’s no arguing about Mailer the essayist—he was outstanding. . . . These insightful essays educate, argue and persuade on everything from politics and literature to film, philosophy and the human condition.”—Shelf Awareness

Public Access

Public Access PDF Author: Michael Berube
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860916789
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
In the years of the Reagan–Bush era, the controversy over ‘political correctness’ erupted on American campuses, spreading to the mainstream media as right-wing pundits like Dinesh D’Souza and Roger Kimball prosecuted their publicity campaign against progressive academics. Michael Bérubé’s brilliant new book explains how and why the political correctness furore emerged, and how the right’s apparent stranglehold on popular opinion about the academy can be loosened. Traversing the terrain of contemporary cultural criticism, Bérubé examines the state of cultural studies, the significance of postmodernism, the continuing debate over multicultural curricula, and the recent revisions of literary history in American studies. Also included is Bérubé’s witty and self-deprecating autobiographical reflection on why interpretive theory has emerged as an indispensable part of education in the humanities over the past decade Public Access insists that academics must exercise more responsibility towards the publics who underwrite but often misunderstand their work and its significance. Taken seriously as a potential audience, Bérubé argues, such publics can be weaned from their present inclination to believe the distortions and half-truths peddled by the right’s ideologues. The goal of such ‘public access’ criticism is not just a better environment for teachers and scholars, but a world in which education itself achieves its proper place in a society committed to equality of opportunity and true critical thinking.

Masscult and Midcult

Masscult and Midcult PDF Author: Dwight Macdonald
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174682
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.
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