American Literature (Dalkey Archive) – serie

Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, ?"Wall to Wall"?traces a modern?Ulysses?in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from its weak side--the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio Grande, Nogales, The Border--before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a "female beast," which his father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a "she," a domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque "flight of passage." In "Wall to Wall" Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, "Wall to Wall" has been an underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric masterpiece.

Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, ?"Wall to Wall"?traces a modern?Ulysses?in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from its weak side--the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio Grande, Nogales, The Border--before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a "female beast," which his father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a "she," a domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque "flight of passage." In "Wall to Wall" Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, "Wall to Wall" has been an underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric masterpiece.

From "Putting Things Away" to "The Marriage Almanac" (not to mention the pedantic "Index," in itself a comic wonder), Stanley Crawford gives the married, the unmarried, and the formerly married a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage manuals ever produced. Starting with the complete title, "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood," a boorish narrator sets down some seventy-three pieces of advice to his wife, young son, and two-year-old daughter, intended to foster and maintain domestic tranquility in an age of anxiety. Taken literally, our neo-Victorian head of the house is a male chauvinist pig of sorts, but what reader would deny that the sources of Crawford's satire run deep in the American grain?

Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a "perverse tale" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with unnaturally large genitals, she spins a tawdry tale of his frustrated relationship with his petite wife. Expressing all the bitterness of "an old woman's revenge," Miss Ethel's tale is nonetheless a sensitive depiction of rural life in the early years of World War II.Dowell's masterful use of the tale-within-a-tale to explore psychological states makes "Too Much Flesh and Jabez" a memorable achievement.

June Akers Seese's second novel is about books and the people who read them: it's about a rare-book dealer and his mistress, set in that era when words like "mistress" were still used, and recalling the years when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud might share the same paragraph in an after-hours night spot. Seese writes movingly, tightly, without recourse to adjectives, from the gut and to the gut.

"Under the Shadow"?takes the form of fifty-nine brief sketches with simple nouns as titles. These exquisite vignettes take place on a plane at once surreal, abstract, and ominous, describing a set of people and incidents derived largely from fragments of conversation and gossip gathered here and there. They are reminiscent of Raymond Roussel's characters amid his inimitable ersatz pastorals, with tableaux both innocent and grotesque. There is something ambiguous about these passages, something deliberately closed and dreamlike. Many of them read like primal scenes of private pathologies; others are memories that, many years later, retain their power to haunt.

"Century 21," a time machine in literary form, ignores the unity of time, space, and character. This tragicomical idyll of the future past mixes ancient and modern genres: Platonic dialogue and nineteenth-century romance, reportage and science fiction. At the book's core are two sisters, Ann Kar, a writer and survivor, and Carol, a suicidal artist. Considering herself a lunatic, Carol dreams about escaping from the earth to the moon (luna) and about the moon scholar, a lunar archeologist, who a thousand years after her death, while reconstructing terrestrial life, discovers the traces of her existence, falls in love with her, and begins to write about her - and his - erotic adventure. The result is a novel where Anna Karenina writes about Simone Weil, where Joseph Conrad meets Malcolm Lowry in Mexico, where Goethe presides over a literary institute made up of such members as Italo Svevo and Sextus Propertius, and where Djuna Barnes, dying from AIDS, visits Moses Maimonides in Japan. Ewa Kuryluk is fascinated by the repetition of the same situations and types, yet she's after her contemporaries who are starved for affection, lost in transit, ready to slip into somebody else's skin, and speaking in English, their second language, with a heavy accent. "Century 21" is a profoundly moving and original work.

This volume brings together two of Paul West's best books: his critically acclaimed "Words for a Deaf Daughter" (1970), a nonfiction account of West's deaf and brain-damaged daughter Mandy at age eight, and "Gala" (1976), a novel about a writer named Wight Deulius who brings his handicapped teenage daughter Michaela from England to America for a visit. While Words is an account of Mandy's diagnosis and treatment, Gala is "the scenario of a wish-fulfillment" (as West writes in the preface), a continuation of the father and daughter's joyful investigation of the richness of life and its amazing possibilities. Ranging across natural history and astronomy in his effort to understand his daughter's handicap, West finds in Mandy/Michaela an irrepressible and unpredictable guide to the mysteries of the universe. Brought together in the same volume, the books also allow a unique look at how nonfiction and fiction techniques can be used to the same ends in the hands of a master of prose.

Carole Maso's stunning, erotic fourth novel chronicles the dark, irresistible adventures of an American writer named Catherine who has come to France to live. Set into motion by a single act of abandonment-Catherine's lover of ten years has left her-she falls deeper and deeper into an irretrievable madness. With passionate abandon and detachment Catherine pursues her own destruction. Forcing the boundaries of identity and the limits of her eroticism, she enters a series of blinding sexual encounters with a poet, a fascist, a young Arlesian woman, a fireman, and three thieves. Eerily she splits herself in two so that she is both the one who watches and the one who is watched, creator and creation, author and character, as she observes herself from afar "And I would like to help her, " the one who watches says, "but I can't." Finally she meets Lucien, the solitary, cynical, beautiful man with long hair who looks as though he has "stepped out of an unmade film by the dead Truffaut, " and through this mysterious, doomed, bittersweet liaison Catherine makes one last attempt to halt her decline through the redemptive act of story-telling. She begins to invent the story of their lives, telling it to him half in English, half in French, joining their solitudes for a moment before losing forever her belief that the shapely, hopeful prospects of narrative make sense of expenence. "She notices how everything is given up or taken away" as she loses the power of the imagination or memory or the body to console, and finally of language to convey meaning. This mesmerizing drama of sex, betrayal, and dissolution with its shattering inevitable conclusion is played out against the dazzling backdrop of the beautiful, indifferent Cote d'Azur in summer. Written in a dwindling lexicon with a simple, warped musicality, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is a dark, uncompromising, seductive work of art.

Sister Carrie is a first novel by a woman writer possessing such an original voice and slashing, surrealistic wit that she is sure to take her place at the forefront of cutting-edge fiction writers. Carrie Meeber leaves her stifling Florida home for Chicago, where she enters the related fields of advertising and prostitution. As an unflappable narrator makes inquiries into her bizarre life, a cartoonish, hyperkinetic, blaring street world envelops the reader. Depraved characters parade themselves and their crass literary leanings; many keep journals, out of which Carrie is revealed with stylistic pyrotechnics. Fairbanks's scrappy, fantastic, debauched characters reveal themselves as well in hot rapid monologue and dialogue. There is something of Kathy Acker in Sister Carrie, something of Ronald Firbank, William Burroughs, Mark Leyner perhaps, even the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. (And Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie? revamped, accessorized, given riot grrrl attitude). But it is finally a tour de force from a young woman writer with a voice all her own and a sardonic world-view perfect for the irony-clad nineties.

Cast in the form of a hilariously ribald parody of a literary quarterly, ?"The Tar Baby"?is a brilliant, audacious, story-filled novel populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies. A commemorative issue honoring the late Anatole Waxman-Weissman, the book/journal parodies a number of academic fads and concerns as the various contributors expose their and their subject's many idiosyncrasies while pursuing their own private agendas.

Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet’s dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity.Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island’s 17th-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island’s exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza.The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet’s previous novel (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), was described by one reviewer as “Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll.” Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.

In?"The Stain"?Rikki Ducornet tells the story of a young girl named Charlotte, branded with a furry birthmark in the shape of a dancing hare, regarded as the mark of Satan. "Sadistic nuns, scatology, butchered animals, monkish rapists, and Satan" (Kirkus), as well as the village exorcist, inhabit this bawdy tale of perversion, power, possession, and the rape of innocence. Ducornet weaves an intricate design of fantasy and reality, at once surreal, hilarious, and terrifying.

In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house in the 19th century; ultimately these hauntings are manifestations of his own psychic disintegration. Considered by many to be Dowell’s finest achievement, Island People conveys the fragmentation that results from prolonged isolation.

The distinctions between art and life are blurred in this unsettling and tantalizing first collection of short fiction by novelist Susan Daitch ("The Colorist," ?"L.C."). In fifteen stories, all concerning "strange displacements of the ordinary," Daitch examines the fringes of the art world in the 20th century. Characters restore or duplicate art objects (legally and otherwise), dub dialogue for foreign films, and look to old movies for guidance. In the title story (based upon a legendary amusement park in upstate New York), a woman works at a children's theme park, where Alice in Wonderland mourns for the Sheriff of Nottingham, who has joined the marines. Combining "downtown aesthetics" with a vivid historical imagination, Susan Daitch's stories have the same qualities that have earned her novels wide praise.

In?"God Head," Scott Zwiren boldly and courageously records the terrifying, destructive experience of manic depression. From a promising young college student to mental hospitals to a confined, out-of-control, roller-coaster life on New York City's Upper West Side, Zwiren's narrator traces from the inside the horrors of an existence that swings between numbing depression and exalting highs.

In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth. Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinating materials - including innumerable details about the madness and calamity in many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides - David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoring up Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. Where Reader ultimately leads us is shattering.

These novels face head-on the reality of the American Indian, perhaps the last great taboo in American culture. After all of the flag-waving, the wars to protect the Land of the Free, and interventions around the world in the name of democracy, how do Americans admit, even today, that America was not discovered by Columbus and not courageously cultivated by white Anglo-Saxons? The land was invaded and a people destroyed, all in the name of religion, political freedom, and money.Long before Cormac McCarthy and even long before Tom Robbins, William Eastlake invented an American Southwest whose comic and tragic dimensions, as well as its hard beauty, encapsulates American myths and nightmares in much the way that Faulkner did with his invented Yoknapatawpha County. Against a background of New Mexico that transcends regional space, Eastlake explores race, greed, and tradition, evoking stereotypes for the sake of exploding them and laying bare an American reality that is a strange mix of pop culture, zany humor, biting satire, and a deep-seated respect for and love of the land.

Proving that the spirits of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett still flow in the veins of at least one Irish writer, Roger Boylan has composed a novel filled with hilarity and doom about the inhabitants of the Irish town of Killoyle: Milo Rogers, a headwaiter and would-be poet with a bit of a drinking problem and a bit of a sexual one; Kathy Hickman, a writer for the woman's fashion magazine Glam, as well as a former pin-up girl; Wolfetone Grey, who reads books only by or about God, and who also makes anonymous phone calls through-out the town in order to make people believe, among other things, that they have just won the lottery; and a host of other peculiar folks, all suffering from and tortured by problems with God, sex, the drink, and of course Ireland. Accompanying all of this is a nameless figure who bursts on the scene in the form of acerbic, opinionated, hilarious footnotes that rudely comment upon the characters and numerous other subjects.

In a prose form as startling as its content, ?"The Shutter of Snow"?portrays the post-partum psychosis of Marthe Gail, who after giving birth to her son, is committed to an insane asylum. Believing herself to be God, she maneuvers through an institutional world that is both sad and terrifying, echoing the worlds of?"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?and?"The Snake Pit."Based upon the author's own experience after the birth of her son in 1924, "The Shutter of Snow" retains all the energy it had when first published in 1930.

Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innovators in twentieth-century fiction, a position that is everywhere confirmed in this trilogy of novels, Odd Number, Rose Theatre, and Misterioso. Beginning with a series of interrogations (we never do find out why they are being conducted) about characters drawn from other Sorrentino novels and concluding with the reappearance of the same characters, Pack of Lies is Gilbert Sorrentino's testament to the supremacy of the imagination, a critique of the state of art and society, and a vicious comedy portraying a world of fraud and mayhem.

"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind."Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas who, as a result of witnessing his mother's murder, falls into a decades-long coma. Awakened in a seaport town in France, he reconstructs his past through storytelling and myth, resulting in an astonishing exploration of memory and imagination.

Best known as one of the most significant poets of the 20th century, Louis Zukofsky was also an accomplished writer of fiction, all of which is collected here for the first time. Included is his only novel, "Little" (1970), which John Leonard in the "New York Times" called "an odd, playful, thoroughly charming novel about a child prodigy." (The novel is very autobiographical and Zukofsky's son, violin virtuoso, Paul Zukofsky, has written an afterword for this edition.) Also included are the four stories comprising "It Was," published in 1961 in a limited edition and virtually unobtainable for years. The stories range from the brief title story in which a writer struggles with the composition of the perfect sentence to the novella length "Ferdinand," which Guy Davenport praised in the "New York Times Book Review" as "a finely tuned story from a sensibility of extraordinary range and skill."

Both comic and haunting, ?"Crystal Vision"?invokes the world of magic and the arcane as filtered through a group of characters gathered on the streets and in the stores of their Brooklyn neighborhood to gossip, insult, lust, brag, and argue. In a series of seventy-eight short narratives, Gilbert Sorrentino perfectly captures the speech, illusions, and confusion of The Magician, Ritchie, The Arab, Irish Billy, Big Duck, Doc Friday, Fat Frankie, and many others. Through formal inventiveness, Sorrentino liberates these characters from the confines of realism and gives us their world--zany, vulgar, hilarious, and exuberant.

From Hollywood B-movies to Hollywood classics, ?"A Night at the Movies"?invents what "might have happened" in these Saturday afternoon matinees. Mad scientists, vampires, cowboys, dance-men, Chaplin, and Bogart, all flit across Robert Coover's riotously funny screen, doing things and uttering lines that are as shocking to them as they are funny to the reader. As Coover's Program announces, you will get Coming Attractions, The Weekly Serial, Adventure, Comedy, Romance, and more, but turned upside-down and inside-out.

A novel. In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.

A blend of postmodern metafiction and old-style bedroom farce, The Journalist explores the elusive, sometimes illusive, boundaries between facts and the fictions we weave around them. The novel's protagonist, living at a time that might be the present in a city that might be anywhere, has decided for reasons of mental hygiene to keep a detailed record of his thoughts, words, and deeds. Very quickly, however, the project begins to absorb his entire life, as the increasingly meticulous recording of experience threatens to supplant experience itself. To make matters worse, what he records offers its own grist for worry: his devoted wife suddenly grows secretive, his equally devoted mistress turns evasive, his frustratingly independent son might or might not be visiting that same mistress behind his back, and his closest friend begins acting in mysterious ways (and is it just his imagination, or is this friend having clandestine meetings with his wife?). His ever more convoluted perceptions breed a dark muddle of suspicion, leading to a climax that is at once intensely funny and excruciatingly poignant.

Described as "wonderfully funny" by Annie Dillard, "Heartbreak Hotel" reveals the collective memories, sorrows, and triumphs embodied in all women as the museum becomes the metaphor for the body of the narrator.

For a period of just over a year, Harry Mathews set about following Stendhal’s dictum for writers of “twenty lines a day, genius or not.” What resulted is a book that is part journal, parts writer’s manual, and part genius. First undertaken as a kind of discipline, the work molds itself into a penetrating reflection on daily events in Mathews’s life, his friends, himself, and the act of writing.