Moravagine

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590170636
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine." This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."

Complete Poems

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520065808
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Book Description
"At last! A superb translation of one of the great and greatly neglected Modernist poets! The map of Modernist poetry will never be quite the same."—Marjorie Perloff "Padgett's sparkling translations do marvelous justice to the eccentric and exciting poetry of Blaise Cendrars."—John Ashbery

SynergiCity

Author: Paul Hardin Kapp
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093933
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City proposes a new and invigorating vision of urbanism, architectural design, and urban revitalization in twenty-first-century America. Culling transformative ideas from the realms of historic preservation, sustainability, ecological urbanism, and the innovation economy, Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong present a holistic vision for restoring industrial cities suffering from population decline back into stimulating and productive places to live and work. With a particular emphasis on the Rust Belt of the American Midwest, SynergiCity argues that cities such as Detroit, St. Louis, and Peoria must redefine themselves to be globally competitive. This revitalization is possible through environmentally and economically sustainable restoration of industrial areas and warehouse districts for commercial, research, light industrial, and residential uses. The volume's expert researchers, urban planners, and architects draw on the redevelopment successes of other major cities--such as the American Tobacco District in Durham, North Carolina, and the Milwaukee River Greenway--to set guidelines and goals for reinventing and revitalizing the postindustrial landscape. Contributors are Paul J. Armstrong, Donald K. Carter, Lynne M. Dearborn, Norman W. Garrick, Mark Gillem, Robert Greenstreet, Craig Harlan Hullinger, Paul Hardin Kapp, Ray Lees, Emil Malizia, John O. Norquist, Christine Scott Thomson, and James Wasley.

Blood on the Forge

Author: William Attaway
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178084
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Praised by both Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, this classic of Black literature is a brutal depiction of the Great Migration from the Jim Crow South This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who flee the rural South to work in industries up North. Delivered by day into the searing inferno of the steel mills, by night they encounter a world of surreal devastation, crowded with dogfighters, whores, cripples, strikers, and scabs. Keenly sensitive to character, prophetic in its depiction of environmental degradation and globalized labor, Attaway's novel is an unprecedented confrontation with the realities of American life, offering an apocalyptic vision of the melting pot not as an icon of hope but as an instrument of destruction. Blood on the Forge was first published in 1941, when it attracted the admiring attention of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. It is an indispensable account of a major turning point in black history, as well as a triumph of individual style, charged with the concentrated power and poignance of the blues.

The Ten Thousand Things

Author: Maria Dermout
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Set between Holland and a remote Indonesian island, this intimate magical realism novel offers “an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of a legend” (Time). “Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild The Ten Thousand Things is at once novel of shimmering strangeness—and familiarity. It is the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

Inventing America

Author: José Rabasa
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806125398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
In Inventing America, José Rabasa presents the view that Columbus's historic act was not a discovery, and still less an encounter. Rather, he considers it the beginning of a process of inventing a New World in the sixteenth century European consciousness. The notion of America as a European invention challenges the popular conception of the New World as a natural entity to be discovered or understood, however imperfectly. This book aims to debunk complacency with the historic, geographic, and cartographic rudiments underlying our present picture of the world.

Seduction and Betrayal

Author: Elizabeth Hardwick
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174372
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
A vivid and provocative literary criticism of famous women writers from Virginia Woolf to Zelda Fitzgerald by a “gifted miniaturist biographer” (Joyce Carol Oates) The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America’s most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits—of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle—as well as a provocative reading of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer’s reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

Selected Stories

Author: Robert Walser
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466834951
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories, Susan Sontag describes Walser as "a good-humored, sweet Beckett." The more common comparison is to "a comic Kafka." Both formulations effectively describe the reading experience in these stories: the reader is obviously in the presence of a mind-bending genius, but one characterized by a wry, buoyant voice, as apparently cheerful as it is disturbing. Walser is one of the twentieth century's great modern masters—revered by everyone from Walter Benjamin to Hermann Hesse to W. G. Sebald—and Selected Stories gives the fullest display of his talent. "He is most at home in the mode of short fiction," according to J. M. Coetzee in The New York Review of Books. The stories "show him at his dazzling best."

The Astonished Man

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
The extraordinary and much-requested first volume of Cendrars' autobiography, this account chronicles the author's exploits in the Foreign Legion--including the loss of his arm--before the narrative sets off across continents. From Africa to South America, Cendrars encounters everyone from Gallic gipsies to Piquita, the Mexican millionairess. And to all his encounters he brings the vitality, savage humor, and vivid observation that characterize his dazzling writing.

Bricks and Brownstone

Author: Charles Lockwood
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Book Description
Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Rowhouse 1783?1929 was first published in 1972, and remains the only book ever written on the New York row house. It has been met with impressive critical praise ever since and Rizzoli is proud to publish this revised and updated edition as the introductory volume in the new Rizzoli Classics program, dedicated to keeping in print important architecture titles. Charles Lockwood looks at different architecture styles of the New York row house. The book is comprehensive, examining the history of New York's changing neighborhoods and the history of the various row house architectural styles--the Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, and Second Empire, as well as the eclectic but picturesque styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The text and illustrations also delve into the architectural details, paying meticulous attention to all features, including doorways, glass, mantels, staircases, ceiling ornaments, and ironwork. Twenty years later, this edition is updated to include specially commissioned new color photographs of interiors and exteriors of some of New York's most impressive homes. Also included is Best of the Brownstones Walking Tours, carefully detailed and illustrated with color photographs.