American Literature Series – serie

The Barnum Museum is a combination waxworks, masked ball, and circus sideshow masquerading as a collection of short stories. Within its pages, note such sights as: a study of the motives and strategies used by the participants in the game of Clue, including the seduction of Miss Scarlet by Colonel Mustard; the Barnum Museum, a fantastic, monstrous landmark so compelling that an entire town finds its citizens gradually and inexorably disappearing into it; a bored dilettante who constructs an imaginary woman - and loses her to an imaginary man! - and a legendary magician so skilled at sleight-of-hand that he is pursued by police for the crime of erasing the line between the real and the conjured.

The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend both the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of Steven Millhauser's gifts, from "August Eschenburg, " the story of the clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supercedes that of the refined and beautiful, to "Cathay, " a kingdom whose wonders include elaborate landscape paintings executed on the eyelids and nipples of court ladies.

As he's chauffeured about in his official limousine, aging City Commissioner of Streets Bobbo Druff comes to a frightening realization: he's lost force, the world has started to condescend to him. His once fear-inspiring figure has become everyone's "little old lady." In retaliation, Druff constructs a paranoid plot--his "MacGuffin"--within which (he believes) everyone is out to get him. With unabashed enthusiasm Druff starts an illicit affair (in order to incriminate himself), instigates fights with his employees, invents lies for his family--in short, does everything in his power to create a world in which he is placed safely and firmly at the scandalous center. One of Elkin's greatest comic figures, Druff's self-conscious madness is surprisingly smart and hilariously inventive. Few characters in modern literatureshow such immense creativity and courage in the face of such a hopeless dilemma--the very slipperiness of existence itself.

Considered by many to be Elkin's magnum opus, George Mills is, an ambitious, digressive and endlessly entertaining account of the 1,000 year history of the George Millses. From toiling as a stable boy during the crusades to working as a furniture mover, there has always been a George Mills whose lot in life is to serve important personages. But the latest in the line of true blue-collar workers may also be the last, as he obsesses about his family's history and decides to break the cycle of doomed George Millses. An inventive, unique family saga, George Mills is Elkin at his most manic, most comic and most poignant.

In The King, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur, Donald Barthelme moves the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table to the cruelty of the Second World War. Dunkirk has fallen, Europe is at the breaking point, Ezra Pound and Lord Haw-Haw are poisoning the radio waves, Mordred has fled to Nazi Germany, and King Arthur and his worshipful Knights are deep in the fighting. When the Holy Grail presents itself--which is, in this version, the atomic bomb, "a superweapon if you will, with which we can chastise and thwart the enemy"--they must decide whether to hew to their knightly ways or adopt a modern ruthlessness. Barthelme makes brilliant comic use of anachronism to show that war is center stage in the theater of human absurdity and cruelty. But Arthur, in deciding to decline the power of the Grail, announces his unwillingness to go along: "It's not the way we wage war. The essence of our calling is right behavior, and this false Grail is not a knightly weapon."

The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts its shadow, and Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature represents, in its author’s words, a report on ten years watching of shadows. Collecting the earliest short essays and reviews by a man who was arguably the greatest English-language critic-scholar of the twentieth century, Gnomon not only provides valuable, entertaining, and often scabrous insights into the workings of literature, as well as the books of such modern giants as William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, but is itself a cross-section of the the development of Kenner’s own body of work, which inits beauty, irreverence, and disregard for convention proves him as much an artist as the men and women he spent his life championing.

The award-winning plays of one of the most celebrated and innovative American writers of our time.

The collected early novels of an American master.

One of the great comic epics of our time: the Last Jewish Novel about the Last Jew in the World.

Best known for his complex and beautiful novels--regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo--Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story, having written numerous pieces over the course of his career that now, collected at last, serve as an ideal introduction to one of the most important contemporary American authors. Combining elements of classic McElroy with tantalizing stories pointing the way ahead (the spare and dangerous "No Man's Land," the lush and mischievous "The Campaign Trail"), "Night Soul and Other Stories" presents a wide range of work from a monumental artist.

In 2010, the Newseum in Washington D.C. finally obtained the suit O. J. Simpson wore in court the day he was acquitted, and it now stands as both an artifact in their "Trial of the Century" exhibit and a symbol of the American media's endless hunger for the criminal and the celebrity. This event serves as a launching point for Ishmael Reed's "Juice!," a novelistic commentary on the post-Simpson American media frenzy from one of the most controversial figures in American literature today. Through Paul Blessings--a censored cartoonist suffering from diabetes--and his cohorts--serving as stand-ins for the various mediums of art--Ishmael Reed argues that since 1994, "O. J. has become a metaphor for things wrong with culture and politics." A lament for the death of print media, the growth of the corporation, and the process of growing old, "Juice!" serves as a comi-tragedy, chronicling the increased anxieties of "post-race" America.

Between World Wars I and II, three expatriate Americans attempt to reconstruct a vision of the fractured Europe they’ve been forced to occupy; meanwhile, in the near future, a nameless narrator wanders the desolation of the United States, looking for (and dreading to find) any sign of life. But where the normal historical novel treats the past like the present, The Scenarists of Europe deals in the actual form of the past— corrupted files and incomplete documents, static tableaux and broken images, between which we must imagine the connections—and, in the process, constructs a dreamlike critique of the transmission of history, the empire-building ambitions of modernism, and the ahistorical wilderness of the world’s last superpower.

John Barth, a moderately successful novelist just turned sixty, decides to take a sail on Chesapeake Bay with his wife, but a tropical storm forces them deep into the Maryland tidal marshes. Lost, Barth takes out his dinghy to search for a way home, but becomes embarked instead on a quest through the murkier regions of his own memory—a semi-memoir, staged as an operatic cruise through desire, vocation, despair, love, marriage, selves, and counterselves.

In The Black Mountain Letters, poet and scholar Jonathan C. Creasy breathes new life into one of the most important experiments in arts and education ever established in the United States. Through years of research into the life and legacy of Black Mountain College, Creasy has produced a unique book that brings together poems, prose, visual art, and archive material, illuminating the college’s fascinating history while engaging with the work of its most important faculty and alumni, including Josef and Anni Albers, Charles Olson, John Cage, and Robert Creeley.

This magnificent and witty study by an unrecognized innovator seeks to define and explore the nature of “nonsense” in literature. Relying mainly on readings of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Elizabeth Sewell not only sets out plausible boundaries for what or does not constitutes gibberish, but elucidates just how much of what is considered “sensible” writing must rely on nonsense for its power. Comparable only to the greatest works of Viktor Shklovsky, The Field of Nonsense is a masterpiece of American literary criticism.

Lines from a Canvas offers the public one of the best kept secrets in the world of poetry for years, the work of Jacob Miller. His poems uniquely traverse the cultural territory from Homer to the Grateful Dead, taking the reader from ancient Greece and Rome to the Holocaust to the Cold War to Vietnam to 9/11. In short, the expansive canvas of his content presents a compelling spectrum mixing classical and modern brush strokes, all while exploring experiences of love and loss, isolation and separation, as well as mortality. Consistent with his content, though perhaps of even greater importance, the crowning achievement shown in this collection is Jacob Miller’s new poetic technique, which delivers the reader to an expertly constructed and long-needed bridge between classical traditions (such as rhyme and meter, or even hidden slant rhymes or assonance connections), and imagistic free-verse. Additionally, this collection contains the poet’s free-verse libretto to the modern opera Manhattan in Charcoal, (recently released on CD). The title poem, Lines from a Canvas, offers the point of view of a canvas, not the painter, and this launches the operative conceit in this collection: each poem explores the perspective of the canvas of life and death, more than the poet himself. Each poem truly brings something new to the page.

REYoung`s latest features a nation buried in snow and ice in an obligatory 365 days a year Christmas celebration, a tribe of Mayan warriors in comedy troupe disguise, an existentially challenged hero known as the Snowman on a quest that takes him south of the border down ol’ Mexico way, and a B-grade movie director named Boone Weller with his own agenda. Is it a book? A movie? Told in a shoot from the hip Texas style, Margarito and the Snowman is loose, rangy, battered with an attitude and bound to offend everybody.

The gunning down of her mother in a Richmond street sets young Helen Stockton Defoe on a journey of self-discovery. A physical feature she had first noticed when she was nine years old has made her feel apart and she has quietly capitalized on the privilege, never mind the aura, which surrounds her. She lives in her head and fills her thoughts – and days – with science, horses and art. The more intently she begins to observe her remote, detached father, the more she learns about her place within the rarefied world she inhabits. Just when it appears she is at last becoming closer to him, it all falls apart as he coldly undermines her abiding passions, which causes her to question the identity she has created. Her rebellion leads her to Europe on a disturbing path dominated by chance and an evolving self-realization. As a result of these experiences she gains an ability to feel deeply, something from which she had always felt somehow excluded.This most unusual coming-of-age novel with its impressive characterization, humor and vivid sense of place takes its clever, if barely street-wise and increasingly obsessive, teenaged narrator on a physical as well as psychological journey towards an astute, hard fought, and deserved, maturity.

The Bern Book is a travelogue, a memoir, a “diary of an isolated soul” (Darryl Pinckney), and a meditation on the myth and reality of race in midcentury Europe and America.In 1953, having left the US and settled in Bern, Switzerland, Vincent O. Carter, a struggling writer, set about composing a “record of a voyage of the mind.” The voyage begins with Carter’s furiously good-humored description of how, every time he leaves the house, he must face the possibility of being asked “the hated question” (namely, Why did you, a black man born in America, come to Bern?). It continues with stories of travel, war, financial struggle, the pleasure of walking, the pain of self-loathing, and, through it all, various experiments in what Carter calls “lacerating subjective sociology.” Now this long-neglected volume is back in print for the first time since 1973.

The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn’t know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she’ll know it when she sees it. Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a “completed” column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions—what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue—that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters. An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.

An Evening of Romantic Lovemaking is the tale of a would-be standup comedian/terrorist as he hilariously and heart-wrenchingly performs his last act in front of an audience who may or may not be there. Curtis White calls it “both the funniest and one of the saddest novels I’ve ever read” and “a work of comic genius. While comparisons to Gilbert Sorrentino, Mark Leyner, and Flann O’Brien will be made, Slotky’s voice is entirely his own and one you’ll not soon forget.”

The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits—what appears—to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence.

You'll Like it Here is a haunting bricolage, divided into three parts, that excavates the forgotten history of Redondo Beach in the early 1900’s through old news clippings, advertisements, recipes and other ephemera that speak to the ills of male stoicism, industrialization and capitalism, and environmental displacement. Ashton used digital archives from the Redondo Reflex and other city adjacent newspapers as the basis for his surrealist account, masterfully tracing this larger shift away from coastal maritime repose in the wake of the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II through momentary fragments that feel as real and palpable as they do transient, mythological, and strangely reminiscent of our current times.Formally, You'll Like it Here works in conversation with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, and Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 Fog. The novel also embraces a multi-register, journalistic storytelling that questions the tenuous line between objectivity and subjectivity in documenting the unreliability of history—both personal and collective—brilliantly balancing voids of loss, absence, and disappearance with moments of natural transcendence and miraculous phenomena.

A Gogolian nightmare from the point of view of a small-town English professor.The Mad Diary of Malcolm Malarkey is a kind of post-modern May-December black comedy about the 60ish, cancer-stricken Oxford educated, Irish English literature professor, Malcolm Malarkey who falls in love with the beautiful, 30ish Italian returning graduate student, Liliana Liliano, who, by then, has tragically lost her husband in an auto accident. Malarkey has no respect for things that are politically correct and often runs into problems with the administration if not the local police, while Liliana. after years of trying to crack the glass ceiling, quits the corporate world and returns to university to pursue her passion: literature. After a relatively quick relationship they fall in love. Though they have much in common and they truly love each other, the potential stumbling block for them is her desperation to get pregnant, especially since she has already had a miscarriage not long before her husband died.  Malarkey has already raised a family, and is still ceaselessly harassed by his Brazilian ex and her bevy of blood-sucking barristers, and the thought of starting a family again and potentially leaving Liliana a widow for a second time with a young child, is a major dilemma for him. Try as he might to salvage the relationship, Malarkey eventually loses Liliana because of his multiple impotencies. Though Malarkey loves Liliana deeply, madly, she eventually breaks it off. True love may last forever, but eggs do not. Months after her separation, Liliana meets and marries a Florentine who, in rapid succession, impregnates her with the children she most desires. Though Malarkey realizes the break was the best for her, it wasn’t for him and he tries in earnest to move on with his feckless existence, but not before telling her he’ll love her forever.

Proving himself yet again a master of every form, Barth conquers in his latest the ruminative short essay—“​​jeux d’esprits,” as Barth describes them. These mostly one-page tidbits pay homage to Barth’s literary influences while retaining his trademark self-consciousness and willingness to play.

Small Pieces is a collaboration between novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom and writer and visual artist Fowzia Karimi, pairing Marcom’s short stories—miniatures as Marcom calls them—with Karimi's watercolors. The work is a conversation between two artists in text and image, side by side.

Radical and racy, Robert Coover’s Coover Stories is a new collection of incisive, inventive works from the postmodern master.When Robert Coover’s first collection Pricksongs & Descants came out in 1969, his shortstory “The Babysitter,” took the literary world by storm. Described as “metafiction at its best,”his work is taught in classrooms more than half a century later, no less relevant—andirreverent—than at its debut. Provocative, experimental, and biting, Coover’s darkly satiricwriting has pushed the avant-garde to its limits and sired a generation of postmodernists.Coover Stories is the fourth short story collection from Robert Coover. Drawing on decades of experience, the William FaulknerFoundation Award–winning writer continues to shock and engage his readers with his wit, style,and keen critical eye for the paradoxes of modernity.

True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by award-winning playwright and poet Dan O’Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal.The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph—of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu—altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O’Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson.In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to investigating the source of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage.The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe.These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living.