Kirk Curnutt – författare

'Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.'F. Scott Fitzgerald's first story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, appeared in 1920 on the heels of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and immediately established him as a master of popular fiction. Love stories such as 'The Offshore Pirate' and 'Head and Shoulders' capture the spectacle and fantasy of the Jazz Age, celebrating that modern icon of feminine self-possession, the flapper, while comedies of manner like 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' and 'The Ice Palace' showcase Fitzgerald's eye for humour. In addition to these four classic tales, which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post , this edition highlights the author's proficiency with other crowd-pleasing story types: from Gothic fiction ('The Cut-Glass Bowl') to didactic moral stories ('The Four Fists'), from satire ('Dalyrimple Goes Wrong') to spiritual quests ('Benediction'), Fitzgerald tried his hand at many genres---and succeeded at all.

In the summer of 1962, the peripatetic and irrepressible Pete Gill was hired on a whim to coach basketball at tiny Ireland High School. There he would accomplish, against enormous odds, one of the great small-town feats in Indiana basketball history. With no starters taller than 5'10", few wins were predicted for the Spuds. Yet, after inflicting brutal preseason conditioning, employing a variety of unconventional motivational tactics, and overcoming fierce opposition, Gill molded the Spuds into a winning team that brought home the town's first and only sectional and regional titles. Relying on narrative strategies of creative nonfiction rather than strict historical rendering, Mike Roos brings to life a colorful and varied cast of characters and provides a compelling account of their struggles, wide-ranging emotions, and triumphs throughout the season.

From her early classic Three Lives to her best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to Brewsie and Willie, a loving tribute to the G.I.s who adored her, Gertrude Stein's work was among the most controversial of the modernist movement. Alternately praised and derided, emulated and ridiculed, Stein was as unique a celebrity as the mass media of the early 20th century ever produced. As her influence spread through the lost generation she nurtured, critics from Edmund Wilson to confidant Carl Van Vechten defended her experimentation against the slings and arrows of the literary establishment. At the same time, Stein found herself parodied and caricatured from the pages of the New York Sun to the New Yorker. Her reputation solidified only after her 1946 death from cancer prompted a series of reminiscences and reestimations from the Chicago Tribune to the Saturday Review.While previous collections of Stein criticism typically reprint commentary by her most ardent supporters, this study reconstructs her precarious position in the eyes of American newspaper and magazine columnists and is thus a guide to her critical reception. While including quintessential pieces on Stein by Carl Van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter, this collection also includes previously obscure estimations from contemporaries such as H. L. Mencken, Mina Loy, and Conrad Aiken. The book borrows from a range of sources—from leading literary outlets such as the New Yorker to a number of regional newspapers. Some 75% of the material in the volume has never before been reprinted.

Although F. Scott Fitzgerald remains one of the most recognizable literary figures of the twentieth century, his legendary life - including his tempestuous romance with his wife and muse Zelda - continues to overshadow his art. However glamorous his image as the poet laureate of the 1920s, he was first and foremost a great writer with a gift for fluid, elegant prose. This introduction reminds readers why Fitzgerald deserves his preeminent place in literary history. It discusses not only his best-known works, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), but the full scope of his output, including his other novels and his short stories. This book introduces new readers and students of Fitzgerald to his trademark themes, his memorable characters, his significant plots, the literary modes and genres from which he borrowed, and his inimitable style.

Although F. Scott Fitzgerald remains one of the most recognizable literary figures of the twentieth century, his legendary life - including his tempestuous romance with his wife and muse Zelda - continues to overshadow his art. However glamorous his image as the poet laureate of the 1920s, he was first and foremost a great writer with a gift for fluid, elegant prose. This introduction reminds readers why Fitzgerald deserves his preeminent place in literary history. It discusses not only his best-known works, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), but the full scope of his output, including his other novels and his short stories. This book introduces new readers and students of Fitzgerald to his trademark themes, his memorable characters, his significant plots, the literary modes and genres from which he borrowed, and his inimitable style.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby.The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging.Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great GatsbyThe Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging.Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

Conventional wisdom holds that Hemingway's Key West years were among his least productive, and many are dismissive of the works he produced during that time. In this collection, several leading Hemingway scholars focus on his overlooked short stories and essays, especially those written for Esquire from 1933 to 1936. They demonstrate how the island inspired some of his most vivid work and discuss how the ""Hemingway industry"" continues to endure.

American Literature in Transition, 1970-1980 examines the literary developments of the twentieth-century's gaudiest decade. For a quarter century, filmmakers, musicians, and historians have returned to the era to explore the legacy of Watergate, stagflation, and Saturday Night Fever, uncovering the unique confluence of political and economic phenomena that make the period such a baffling time. Literary historians have never shown much interest in the era, however - a remarkable omission considering writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Marilyn French, Adrienne Rich, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Alice Walker, and Octavia E. Butler were active. Over the course of twenty-one essays, contributors explore a range of controversial themes these writers tackled, from 1960s' nostalgia to feminism and the redefinition of masculinity to sexual liberation and rock 'n' roll. Other essays address New Journalism, the rise of blockbuster culture, memoir and self-help, and crime fiction - all demonstrating that the Me Decade was nothing short of mesmerizing.

The subject of endless biographies, fictional depictions, and critical debate, Ernest Hemingway continues to command attention in popular culture and in literary studies. He remains both a definitive stylist of twentieth-century literature and a case study in what happens to an artist consumed by the spectacle of celebrity. The New Hemingway Studies examines how two decades of new-millennium scholarship confirm his continued relevance to an era that, on the surface, appears so distinct from his-one defined by digital realms, ecological anxiety, and globalization. It explores the various sources (print, archival, digital, and other) through which critics access Hemingway. Highlighting the latest critical trends, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how Hemingway's remarkably durable stories, novels, and essays have served as a lens for understanding preeminent concerns in our own time, including paranoia, trauma, iconicity, and racial, sexual, and national identities.

Explores how American Literature has represented the sound and spirit of popular music From the birth of rhythm and blues to the rise of hip-hop, American writers have long grappled with how to capture in words the energy, rebellion, and cultural power of popular music. Popular Music and American Literary Culture traces this complex relationship, offering the most comprehensive exploration yet of how novelists, poets, and playwrights have responded to the sounds that have defined the last eight decades of American life. Kirk Curnutt examines how writers have celebrated, critiqued, and been inspired by the sonic revolutions of their time—from Elvis and Motown to punk and rap—while questioning literature’s ability to match music’s visceral immediacy. Moving from 1950s pulp paperbacks to twenty-first-century drama, Curnutt uncovers how depictions of performers, fans, and media reflect broader debates about art, authenticity, and cultural authority. His wide-ranging readings recover overlooked works and authors who confronted rock and soul with as much seriousness as the revered voices of American fiction, poetry, and theater. Illuminating how writers have tried, and often struggled, to translate rhythm, emotion, and the pulse of a generation into prose and verse, Popular Music and American Literary Culture: Addresses scholarship on rock, soul, funk, and hip-hop within a single, cohesive frameworkReveals how literary portrayals of music reflect shifting cultural attitudes toward race, class, gender, and generational identityExamines canonical authors including Thomas Pynchon and James Baldwin, as well as overlooked writers such as Kristin Hunter and Greg RandolphReclaims forgotten or neglected texts that expand the boundaries of American musical and literary studyIntegrates historical, cultural, and formal perspectives to show the evolution of music in American artistic consciousnessPopular Music and American Literary Culture: Reading the Beat is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, popular culture, and music history. It is especially relevant for English, American Studies, and Cultural Studies programs seeking to blend literary analysis with media and performance studies. Written in an engaging and accessible style, it is also well-suited for general readers interested in the interplay between sound and story in American artistic life.

From Captain Ahab to Yuri Zhivago, discover the most remarkable characters in fiction. Huckleberry Finn, Anna Karenina, Harry Potter, Hester Prynne . . . these are just a handful of remarkable characters found in literature, but of course the list is virtually endless! But why ponder which of these creations are the greatest? More than just a topic to debate with friends, the greatest characters from fiction help readers comprehend history, culture, politics, and even their own place in today’s world. Despite our reliance on television, film, and technology, it is literature’s great characters that create and reinforce popular culture, informing us again and again about society and ourselves. In The 100 Greatest Literary Characters, James Plath, Gail Sinclair, and Kirk Curnutt identify the most significant figures in fiction published over the past several centuries. The characters profiled here represent a wide array of storytelling, and the authors explore the significance of the figures at the time they were created as well as their relevance today. Included in this volume are characters from literature produced around the world, such as Aladdin, James Bond, Holden Caulfield, Jay Gatsby, Hercule Poirot, Don Quixote, Lisbeth Salander, Ebenezer Scrooge, Jean Valjean, and John Yossarian.Readerswill find their beloved literary figures, learn about forgotten gems, or discover deserving choices pulled from history’s dustbin. Providing insights into how literature shapes and molds culture via these fabricated figures, The 100 Greatest Literary Characters will appeal to literature lovers around the globe.

Published in 1937, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not is that rare example of a novel whose cultural impact far outweighs its critical reputation. Long criticized for its fragmented form, its ham-fisted approach to politics, and its hard-boiled obsession with cojones, this blistering tale of a Florida Straits boat captain named Harry Morgan desperately trying to survive the economic ravages of the Great Depression by running rum and revolutionaries to Havana has fueled tourist industries in Key West and Cuba and has inspired at least three movie adaptations (including a classic cowritten by William Faulkner and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall).In Reading Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, Kirk Curnutt explicates dozens of topics that arise from this controversial novel's dense, tropical swelter of references and allusions. From Cuban politics to multifarious New Deal "alphabet agencies," from rum running to human smuggling to byways, bars, and brothels, Curnutt delves deeply into the plot's rich textural back- drop. Most important, he reminds us what a very different novel To Have and Have Not would have been had Hemingway not undergone a political change of heart while covering the Spanish Civil War and revised a narrative originally feral in its suspicion of partisans and ideologues at odds with the newfound ideals of activism and intervention that Hemingway felt essential to halting the global rise of fascism.More than any study of the only novel Ernest Hemingway set on American soil, this book reads To Have and Have Not in the peculiar juxtaposition of literary innovation and popular appeal that made Hemingway the world's most famous writer. While valorizing Hemingway's artistry, Curnutt never lets readers forget the visceral thrills of what one movie adaptation called "Hemingway-Hot Adventure."

The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise explores resonances of "Southernness" in works by American culture’s leading literary couple. At the height of their fame, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald dramatized their relationship as a romance of regionalism, as the charming tale of a Northern man wooing a Southern belle. Their writing exposes deeper sectional conflicts, however: from the seemingly unexorcisable fixation with the Civil War and the historical revisionism of the Lost Cause to popular culture’s depiction of the South as an artistically deprived, economically broken backwater, the couple challenged early twentieth-century stereotypes of life below the Mason-Dixon line. From their most famous efforts (The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz) to their more overlooked and obscure (Scott’s 1932 story “Family in the Wind,” Zelda’s “The Iceberg,” published in 1918 before she even met her husband), Scott and Zelda returned obsessively to the challenges of defining Southern identity in a country in which “going south” meant decay and dissolution. Contributors to this volume tackle a range of Southern topics, including belle culture, the picturesque and the Gothic, Confederate commemoration and race relations, and regional reconciliation. As the collection demonstrates, the Fitzgeralds’ fortuitous meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918 sparked a Southern renascence in miniature.

Brian Wilson is a musical genius. Ever since British press agent Derek Taylor launched a publicity campaign with that theme to promote the landmark LP Pet Sounds in 1966, some variation of that claim has been obligatory when discussing the significance of the Beach Boys' founder and chief composer. Originally designed to liberate Wilson from his outmoded image as a purveyor of sun-and-surf teen pop so the symphonic sophistication of his music might be properly appreciated, the assertion has been repeated so often in the forty-plus years since as to render it virtually meaningless. Indeed, if anything, the label today seems an albatross around the man's neck, inasmuch as Wilson's slow-but-steady reemergence as a working musician since 1998 after three decades of mental illness and drug abuse, has been freighted with expectations that he again produce something as epochal as Good VibrationsA" to justify the adoration he inspires in impassioned defenders. Brian Wilson interrogates this and other paradigms that stymie critical appreciation of Wilson's work both with the Beach Boys and as a solo artist.This is the first study of Wilson to eschew chronology in favor of a topical organization that allows discussion of lyrical themes and musical motifs outside of any prejudicial presumptions about their place in the trajectory of his career.The meanings of Brian Wilson's work have tended to be determined by the well-known storyline of his rise, fall, and redemption.A" From abused child to seemingly unstoppable hit-maker to eccentric with a living-room sandbox to the 300-pound Orson Wells of rockA" to the heavily medicated Icarus figure with the full-time Svengali psychiatrist to his current incarnation as a fragile, elder-statesman survivor, Brian Wilson has, quite simply, lived the most celebrated bizarre life in pop music. Its sheer Shakespearean proportions have overshadowed a beauty and gentleness of spirit that is as vibrant in Farmer's DaughterA" (1963) as it is in recent efforts such as Live Let LiveA" (2008).While no one would disagree that Wilson peakedA" in 1966 with Pet Sounds his current CD, That Old Lucky Sun (2008), finds him creating beautiful music steeped in Americana that deserves discussion on its own terms rather than as a coda to the accomplishments of his gold-record youth.