Joe Amato - Böcker

Enacts and evokes the changes and creative possibilities emerging from contemporary literary technologies (electronic media).Bookend challenges distinctions between prose and poetry as well as between popular and academic culture, embodying a wide array of poetic techniques to argue that form and structure are themselves essential to artistic and cultural meaning. It critiques the current media environs, a hybrid reality in which the individual encounters his or her public and private selves in the midst of a crisis of values. Each of the five anatomies represents both a personal and a local account of where the author finds himself in social and educational terms, and an attempt is made throughout to situate this individual experience against a global imperative.

A funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Central New York.Finalist for the 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Autobiography/Memoir Category Once an Engineer is a funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of a dozen years spent growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. The tail end of the sixties finds Joe and his younger brother, Mike, living with their divorced and unemployed father in a low-income neighborhood on the edge of Syracuse, New York, a once prosperous city now down on its luck. Mike and Joe mature under their father's distinctively masculine tutelage, but their dreams of a better life are tempered by the harsh realities of public assistance.When the brothers are offered the chance to attend college, they are drawn to the engineering profession, with its seductive promise of middle-class wages and social status. At the same time, their father's trade, furniture finishing, succumbs to a new era of industrial and economic change, and as the gap between father and sons widens, they come to learn the true costs of upward mobility.Once an Engineer tells the story of three lives rooted in the moods and lore of Central New York, and the difficulty of finding meaningful work in a world gone inexorably, technologically global.

A failed professor, Samuel Taylor is haunted by the premonition that in attempting to write out of his system the circumstances surrounding his failure, he'll only find himself at the mercy of another system, language itself. Each iteration of his creative effort, whether centered around seemingly mundane activities such as driving or manual labor, or scrutinizing the current cachet of rock climbing, illustrates that while experience might preempt artistic aspiration, those who are wedded to the demands of literary art are at its beck and call. By turns comic and tragic, Samuel Taylor's Last Night asks us to consider what it means to be a writer first and last.