Brock Clarke – författare
Visar alla böcker från författaren Brock Clarke. Handla med fri frakt och snabb leverans.
6 produkter
6 produkter
108 kr
Tillfälligt slut
Sam Pulsifer has come to the end of a very long and unusual journey. He spent ten years in prison for accidentally burning down poet Emily Dickinson's house - and unwittingly killing two people in the process. He emerged aged twenty-eight and set about creating a new life for himself. He went to college, found love, got married, fathered two children, and made a new start - and then watched in almost-silent awe as the vengeful past caught up with him, right at his own front door.As, one by one, the homes of other famous New England writers are torched, Sam knows that this time he is most certainly not guilty. To prove his innocence, he sets out to uncover the identity of this literary-minded arsonist. What he discovers, and how he deals with the reality of his discoveries, is both hilariously funny and heartbreakingly sad. An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is a novel disguised as a memoir; a deeply affecting story about truth and honesty and the damage they do.
329 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
248 kr
Tillfälligt slut
139 kr
Tillfälligt slut
Winner of the 2000 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short FictionWelcome to the strange, wonderful world of Brock Clarke. Here you will meet florists, dental hygienists, high school teachers, and peddlers of porno novelty items, all trying to be normal, good people and failing miserably. Reaffirming that "life, at its core, is embarrassing," What We Won't Do is a collection of tales about the miseries of the average, blue-collar worker who is anything but average. Here is a portrait of the Homer Simpsons and Archie Bunkers of the world, Knut Hamson style. These stories are more than insightful; they're downright funny."The honesty herein is not the sugarcoated sort, it's the sort that exacts revenge by goading others into doing what we can't or won't do ourselves. . . . You haven't read these stories before, and that's the highest compliment that I can pay them. That and the fact that they made me laugh, out loud, and frightened me a little, and still do."—from the Foreword by Mark RichardMarketing plans for What We Won't Do:• Author tour in South Carolina (Clemson, Greenville), and upstate New York (Syracuse, Rochester).• Will coordinate additional tour with Harcourt upon release of his novel, The Ordinary White Boy, in September 2001.• Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.• Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.Brock Clarke is from upstate New York. He received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester, and is currently an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Clemson University. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the New York State Writers' Institute. He lives with his wife, Lane, and their son Quinn in Clemson, South Carolina.
163 kr
Skickas inom 11-20 vardagar
In fifteen sharply engaging essays, acclaimed novelist and short story writer Brock Clarke examines the art (and artifice) of fiction from unpredictable, entertaining, and often personal angles, positing through a slant scrutiny of place, voice, and syntax what fiction can—and can’t—do. (“Very: is there a weaker, sadder, more futile word in the English language?”)Clarke supports his case with passages by and about writers who have both influenced and irritated him. Pieces such as “What the Cold Can Teach Us,” “The Case for Meanness,” “Why Good Literature Makes Us Bad People,” and “The Novel is Dead; Long Live the Novel” celebrate the achievements of master practitioners such as Muriel Spark, Joy Williams, Donald Barthelme, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Beatty, George Saunders, John Cheever, and Colson Whitehead. Of particular interest to Clarke is the contentious divide between fiction and memoir, which he investigates using recent and relevant critical arguments, also tackling ancillary forms such as “fictional memoir” and the autobiographical novel.Anecdotal and unabashed, rigorous and piercingly perceptive—not to mention flat-out funny—I, Grape; or The Case for Fiction is a love letter to and a passionate defense of the discipline to which its author has devoted his life and mind. It is also an attempt to eff the ineffable: “That is one of the basic tenets of this book: when we write fiction, surprising things sometimes happen, especially when fiction writers take advantage of their chosen form’s contrarian ability to surprise.”
181 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
With his tenth book, celebrated author Brock Clarke once again demonstrates his mastery of the story form.In Special Election, ingenious fictions target our all-too-familiar preoccupations and vulnerabilities—belonging, (dis)engagement, the struggle for self-worth, the difficulty of loving and being loved, the banality and absurdity of existence. Brock Clarke’s rapier wit, inexhaustible imagination, and brilliant leaps of illogic transform his characters’ desperation and distress into tragicomic delight. In the title story, Lawrence Welk is ousted from heaven to run for governor in present-day North Dakota. In “One Goes Where One Is Needed,” we follow the former Provisional Coalition Administrator of post-liberation Iraq, now a youth ski instructor at Okemo Mountain in Vermont. In “The Slim Jim,” the protagonist finds himself (literally and figuratively) very slowly choking to death on a frozen microwavable burrito.“There is something wrong with me,” states the narrator of “The Big Book of Useless Saturdays.” This could be said of all the characters in Special Election, and through loopy misdirection and mordant observation, Clarke devotes himself to showing his characters and his readers exactly what is wrong. Yet the sharpness of his attention and lavish ludicrousness of his storylines belie a sneaking affection for this imperfect, disappointing world filled with imperfect, disappointing humans. Though Clarke has been compared to such greats as Barthelme, Bellow, and Saunders, the nine stories in Special Election vibrate at a frequency all his own, showcasing the strengths of one of our most gifted comic writers.