Randy Malamud – författare

Though better known for his poetry, T. S. Eliot wrote seven important plays between 1926 and 1958, of which Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949) may be most produced. Posthumously, he won Tony Awards in 1983 for the musical adaptation of his poetry in the Broadway production of Cats. He was at the forefront of a mid-twentieth-century revival of the genre of verse drama and also wrote a considerable body of dramatic criticism. Notwithstanding the hundreds of critical sources annotated in this bibliography, the Eliot industry has neglected the plays in recent years, producing few important studies on par with those on the poetry.This new sourcebook surveys the entire dramaturgical and critical discourse surrounding Eliot's plays. A separate chapter for each play provides characters, synopsis, detailed production history, critical overview of both performance reviews and scholarly response, textual notes and influences, and publishing history. The comprehensive bibliography is divided into sections for primary works, including Eliot's plays and essays on drama plus interviews and archival materials, and secondary sources, including scholarly and review criticism in general and of single plays. Also featured are a chronology of major career events, an introductory analysis, and an appendix of additional performance adaptations. Two other appendixes offer chronological access to all secondary sources and succinct data on major productions and their credits. Fully cross-referenced and indexed, this exhaustive compendium makes information and resources immediately accessible to anyone doing research on Eliot or modern British and American drama.

To understand Eliot's weighty contribution to the pantheon of modernism, one must take account of his dramatic career. Where the Words Are Valid brings to modernist scholars' serious attention a large body of work that has often been glibly patronized and relegated to near-obscurity. Eliot's plays embody more significant connections than disruptions with the rest of his work, and are integrally related to the other elements of his oeuvre. Further, they contain a richly suggestive autobiographical vein that illuminates the persona and psyche of Eliot the playwright and, as well, throwbacks to Eliot as a younger poet and critic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Sometime in the mid-1990s we began, often with some trepidation, to enroll for a service that promised to connect us--electronically and efficiently--to our friends and lovers, our bosses and clients. If it seemed at first like simply a change in scale (our mail would be faster, cheaper, more easily distributed to large groups), we now realize that email entails a more fundamental alteration in our communicative consciousness. Randy Malamud's Email is written for anyone who feels their attention and their intelligence--not to mention their eyesight--being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather and meaningless internet flotsam.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

CRASH! explores the fascinating, revealing, and surprising cultural impact of plane crashes across art, literature, music, media, and creative nonfiction. Plane crashes are covered extensively but they are not analyzed very deeply, beyond rote media reports and forensic accident investigations. This is despite the voluminous, diverse, and fascinating cultural materials — poems and novels, songs, films, art, TV series, and on and on — that emerge in the wake of aviation disasters. Randy Malamud reanimates these tragic events and identifies how they persist and resonate through our culture—more than we might have imagined, and in intricately far-reaching ways. A unique and extraordinarily wide-ranging cultural examination, CRASH! takes the reader on a journey that includes reflections on flight phobia, themes of crash survival (with asides on Lord of the Flies, The Little Prince, and Ernest Hemingway’s two-day two-crash adventure), the existentialism of pilots’ last words, the day the music died, deep dives into modernist plane wreck paintings, kamikaze pilots and their Zen death poems, plane crashes before planes, ‘race, crash, and gender,’ and the cultural aftermath of 9/11. Ultimately, Malamud shows that crashes do not bring about complete and total destruction: we accomplish some degree of restoration by shoring fragments against the ruins. The plane is dead; long live the plane.

CRASH! explores the fascinating, revealing, and surprising cultural impact of plane crashes across art, literature, music, media, and creative nonfiction. Plane crashes are covered extensively but they are not analyzed very deeply, beyond rote media reports and forensic accident investigations. This is despite the voluminous, diverse, and fascinating cultural materials — poems and novels, songs, films, art, TV series, and on and on — that emerge in the wake of aviation disasters. Randy Malamud reanimates these tragic events and identifies how they persist and resonate through our culture—more than we might have imagined, and in intricately far-reaching ways. A unique and extraordinarily wide-ranging cultural examination, CRASH! takes the reader on a journey that includes reflections on flight phobia, themes of crash survival (with asides on Lord of the Flies, The Little Prince, and Ernest Hemingway’s two-day two-crash adventure), the existentialism of pilots’ last words, the day the music died, deep dives into modernist plane wreck paintings, kamikaze pilots and their Zen death poems, plane crashes before planes, ‘race, crash, and gender,’ and the cultural aftermath of 9/11. Ultimately, Malamud shows that crashes do not bring about complete and total destruction: we accomplish some degree of restoration by shoring fragments against the ruins. The plane is dead; long live the plane.

Why do we travel? What are we doing – and what do we imagine we are doing – when we leave the house, get on a plane and thereby step into globalism? The Importance of Elsewhere is a collection of essays, rooted in Randy Malamud’s own lifetime of travel, that addresses those questions and more. Setting today’s tourism in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiences of travel and travel writing, he uncovers motives and appreciations of movement, difference and novelty that are deeply woven into the imperial enterprise – and that remain key drivers of our interest in and enjoyment of travel today. Marrying concrete case studies and lively personal anecdotes, The Importance of Elsewhere will be of interest to any global traveler who has ever stopped to wonder what it is that draws her to faraway places.

Virginia Woolf’s novel famously begins – ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ Of course she would: why would anyone surrender the best part of the day to someone else? Flowers grace our lives at moments of celebration and despair. ‘We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them’, writes Kakuzo Okakura. Flowers brighten our homes, our parties, and our rituals with incomparable notes of natural beauty, but the ‘nature’ in these displays is tamed and conscribed. This book analyzes the transplanted nature of cut flowers – of our relationship with them and the careful curation of their very existence.It is a picaresque, unpredictable ramble through the world of flowers, encompassing paintings, murals, fashion, and public art, glass flowers, pressed flowers, flowery church hats, weaponized flowers, deconstructed flowers, flower power. . . and much more.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 Human culture is now more dangerous to nonhuman animals than ever before. The destruction of natural habitats and the killing of animals for food, science, medicine or trophy - sometimes to the point of extinction - is the stuff of newspaper headlines. We live in a time when the idea of an animal's habitat has almost become irrelevant, except as a historical curiosity, yet also in a time when the public and philosophical acknowledgement of animal rights and environmental ethics is on the rise. Animals are enmeshed in human culture simply because people are so interested in them. Animals remain central to our sense of the natural world. Our pets are often seen as our closest companions through life. At the same time, the last century has seen the use of animals in scientific experimentation and the major changes in industrial-scale animal farming. Never has the relationship between human and non-human animals been more hotly contested.As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Animals, this volume presents an overview of the period and continues with essays on the position of animals in contemporary Symbolism, Hunting, Domestication, Sports and Entertainment, Science, Philosophy, and Art. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Animals edited by Linda Kalof and Brigitte Resl

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 Human culture is now more dangerous to non-human animals than ever before. The destruction of natural habitats and the killing of animals for food, science, medicine or trophy - sometimes to the point of extinction - is the stuff of newspaper headlines. We live in a time when the idea of an animal's habitat has almost become irrelevant, except as a historical curiosity, yet also in a time when the public and philosophical acknowledgement of animal rights and environmental ethics is on the rise. Animals are enmeshed in human culture simply because people are so interested in them. Animals remain central to our sense of the natural world. Our pets are often seen as our closest companions through life. At the same time, the last century has seen the use of animals in scientific experimentation and major changes in industrial-scale animal farming. Never has the relationship between human and non-human animals been more hotly contested. A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern Age presents an overview of the period and continues with essays on the position of animals in contemporary symbolism, hunting, domestication, sports and entertainment, science, philosophy, and art.