Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal

Author: Lydie Salvayre
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564785572
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, the narrator accepts a job writing a laudatory authorized biography of a fast-food magnate, whose egotism borders on megalomania. She thus enters a world of call girls, celebrities, investment portfolios, and bitter rivalries, where the desire to dominate others motivates every decision. Quickly seduced, she takes to all the silver platters and evenings spent chatting with Robert De Niro--until her cold-hearted, brutish boss receives an unexpected visit from his mother, who upends his faith in the corporate world, threatening to destroy both his opulent lifestyle and his sanity. A trenchant satire of greed and self-interest--in idealists and tycoons both--Lydie Salvayre's latest novel proves her once again to be France's funniest and most insightful critic of modern life. Portrait was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary award.

When I Hit You

Author: Meena Kandasamy
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609456009
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
The widely acclaimed novel of an abused woman in India and her fight for freedom: “A triumph.” —The Guardian Named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and the Observer Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize Based on the author’s own experience, When I Hit You follows the narrator as she falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife. Soon, the newlywed experiences extreme violence at her husband’s hands and finds herself socially isolated. Yet hope keeps her alive. Writing becomes her salvation, a supreme act of defiance, in a harrowing yet fierce and funny novel that not only examines one woman’s battle against terror and loneliness but reminds us how fiction and stories can help us escape.

Elephant Company

Author: Vicki Croke
Publisher:
ISBN: 1400069335
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
"At the onset of World War II, [Billy] Williams formed Elephant Company and was instrumental in defeating the Japanese in Burma and saving refugees, including on his own 'Hannibal Trek, ' [becoming] a media sensation during the war, telling reporters that the elephants did more for him than he was ever able to do for them"--

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.

Joseph Walser's Machine

Author: Gonçalo M. Tavares
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1564788466
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
Continuing Tavares's award-winning "Kingdom" series (begun in Jerusalem, winner of the Saramago Prize), Joseph Walser's Machine recounts a life of bizarre routines and patterns. Routine humiliation at a factory; routine maintenance of the world's most esoteric collection; and the most important routine of all: the operation of a mysterious machine on a factory floor. Yet all of Joseph Walser's routines are violently disrupted when his city is occupied by an invading army, leaving him faced with political intrigues, marital discord, and finally, one last, catastrophic confrontation with his beloved machine.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.