Margaret Luongo – författare
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2 produkter
2 produkter
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
309 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective. In ""Chestnut Season,"" a young woman stalled in traffic sees her future self parked beside her; in ""Boyfriends,"" the recently deceased protagonist endures eulogies by her ex-beaus and husbands; in ""Mrs. Fargo,"" a young man faces a reckoning with his first-grade teacher, a suicide, for whom he's harbored a crush and whom he hopes to impress with his worldly successes. The short-short ""Buoyant"" introduces Elise, nine months pregnant, as she drifts down the Santa Fe River, trying to jettison her suddenly circumscribed existence. Desperate to impress upon his students the seriousness of life, the professor in ""Pedagogy'"" boils his head, discovering in the end a lesson learned too late.Other stories touch upon issues of identity, following characters who find themselves in the wrong places, or who find themselves too late. At the advice of their marriage counselor, the couple in ""What Nina Wants"" take on the personas of Charles Mingus and Nina Simone, speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway in a rented MG, with a loaded gun and an electric bass. In a small town in 1970s New Jersey, the protagonist of ""Embankment"" can't decide if she's on a date or has been abducted. ""Do That Everywhere"" finds the teen-aged Cami on the verge of becoming her mother - promiscuous and bitter. In ""Glen Echo,"" a badass womanizer wonders who he is now that he's married an Italian-American Bridezilla. Through compact, tightly woven prose, vivid imagery, and a variety of arresting narrative techniques, If the Heart Is Lean zeroes in on the humorous and painful lives of people who are mysteries to themselves.
Häftad, Engelska, 2016
372 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The stories in History of Art examine the definitive, yet paradoxical, preoccupations of humankind - namely art-making and war - and the emotions that underpin both: passion and sentimentality, obsession and delusion, ambition and insecurity, fear and envy. Luongo casts the infamous, famous, and unknown in these sublime vignettes, from Marie Antoinette and John Lennon to the designers of fictional typefaces and the painted soldiers in Stanley Spencer's Great War Memorial. Drawing each work together through the dichotomy of art and war, Luongo also presents a mother who leaves her family so that she can illustrate the war for civilians who have no understanding of it; a Canadian artist who sketches the beach at Normandy while a German sniper observes him; and the daughter of a World War II veteran who struggles with his troubling legacy.In addition to the collection's subjective focus, the structure of History of Art works to build creative tension. Luongo's use of nontraditional forms - flash-fiction sequences, a bird-watching guide, a word problem - are expertly deployed to heighten the sense of trauma and inventiveness found in these stories. In both content and construction, Luongo approaches the ageless themes of creation and destruction with striking novelty, humor, and mastery.