American Literature – serie

National Book Award finalist: Look who's on the "Dick Gibson Radio Show": Arnold the Memory Expert ("I've memorized the entire West Coast shoreline - except for cloud cover and fog banks"). Bernie Perk, the burning pharmacist. Henry Harper, the nine-year old orphan millionaire, terrified of being adopted. The woman whose life revolves around pierced lobes. An evil hypnotist. Swindlers. Con-men. And Dick Gibson himself. Anticipating talk radio and its crazed hosts, Stanley Elkin creates a brilliant comic world held together by American manias and maniacs in all their forms, and a character who perfectly understands what Americans want and gives it to them.

California is still the world's biggest hideout. The only thing more western is the Pacific Ocean, where, if the Big One happens, California might find a home at the bottom.One of those hiding out is Peter Bowman, a former army brat, and lecturer at Woodrow Wilson Community College, who is being hunted for a quality most men would crave. But for Bowman, nicknamed Boa, it has become burdensome. When an opportunity comes, he has to choose between becoming financially solvent or exposing himself to his pursuers. Along the way, he runs into some memorable characters both in reality and in his dreams, including Ishmael Reed. In Ishmael Reed's Conjugating Hindi, stories, histories and myths of different cultures are mixed and sampled. Modern issues like gentrification addressed. It is the closest that a fiction writer has gotten to the hip-hop form on the page.Once again, Ishmael Reed has pioneered a new form. If his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, was an early Afro-Futurist novel, Mumbo Jumbo recognized as “a graphic novel before we used the term” (according to Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson), Yellow Back Radio Broke Down Blazing Saddles's “important precursor,” Flight To Canada his "Neo Slave Narrative," a concept that he coined–Conjugating Hindi is his global novel. One that crosses all borders.

An inventor living at the beginning of the Enlightenment keeps journals reflecting on everything from his inventive lovemaking to his discovery of the first binary code, caffeine stimulation, the insanity defense, and the memory of birds.First published in 1996 to international acclaim, Eric Darton’s Free City is the fictional journal of L., a seventeenth-century inventor caught in a precarious love triangle, even as his beloved northern European port town teeters on the brink of catastrophe.In a tale laced with bawdy humor and elements of the fantastical, L. must balance the demands of his patron—a rapacious entrepreneur—against those of his sorceress lover. As L. attempts to avert calamity, he finds himself joined by the most unlikely of allies.Weaving together historical, political and absurdist elements, Free City resonates more profoundly today than ever.

From the celebrated author of Little Lazarus, Michael Bible’s The Terrible moves between one man’s imagined memories of a past life as Ivan the Terrible’s brother, and his more recent recollections as a father careening through modern American society.The Terrible unfolds in the space between confession and delusion as our narrator, the self-proclaimed brother of Ivan the Terrible, Yuri Vasilievich, is arrested and questioned for an unnamed “incident” in the parking lot of Twisted Oak Steakhouse in Harmony, North Carolina. Rather than explain what happened, he offers a meandering, occasionally mythic, and often hilarious account of his life. He claims to have been born in 1532 in Russia and is the younger brother of the Russian Tzar. He recounts frozen bear attacks, boyars ripped apart by dogs, a lifelong obsession with dandies and silks, and then pivots to modern day to his assault of a Captain America impersonator in Times Square.Throughout the novel, the Russian past and the American present blur. Our narrator’s mental health deteriorates, or perhaps sharpens. But the emotional truth of his stories—his longing for love, his guilt as a parent, his isolation inside his own mind—cuts through even his most absurd digressions.

At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the cost of an uncharted French island. A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.