Great Picks from 80S, 90 S, and Beyond

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CRITICS LOVED THESE, AND WE THINK YOU WILL, TOO. GREAT PICKS FROM 80S, 90S, AND BEYOND Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin Jhumpa Lahiri: Unaccustomed Earth J. G. Ballard: Empire of the Sun Elmore Leonard: Get Shorty Roberto Bolano: 2666 Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude Anita Brooker: Family and Friends Cormac McCarthy: The Road A.S. Byatt: Possession Ian McEwan: Atonement Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas Susan Choi: Person of Interest Toni Morrison: Beloved Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell Haruki Murakami: Kafka on the Shore Don Delillo: Underworld Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Ann Patchett: Bel Canto Sebastian Faulk: Birdsong Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses Jonathan Ferris: Then We Came to the End E. Annie Proulx: The Shipping News Richard Ford: The Sportswriter (also, Independence Day) Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections Philip Roth: The Plot Against America Charles Frazier: Cold Mountain Russo, Richard: Empire Falls Kaye Gibbons: Ellen Foster W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz Glen David Gold: Carter Beats the Devil Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Dan Simmons: The Terror Mark Helprin: A Winter’s Tale Jane Smiley: A Thousand Acres Oscar Hijuelos: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Zadie Smith: White Teeth Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner ` Zadie Smith: On Beauty Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go Donna Tartt: The Secret History Kazuo Ishiguro: Artist of the Floating World Colm Toibin: The Master Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke Colson Whitehead: John Henry Days Edward P. Jones: The Known World ` David Wroblewski: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle .

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Malamud Release 2013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PRESS CONTACT: Wednesday, April 3, 2013 Peter Eramo, (202) 675-0344, [email protected] Emma Snyder, (202) 898-9061, [email protected] George Saunders to receive 2013 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story Washington, D.C.—George Saunders has been selected to receive the 2013 PEN/Malamud Award. Given annually since 1988 in honor of the late Bernard Malamud, this award recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction. The announcement was made today by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Robert Stone and Susan Richards Shreve, Co-Chairs. George Saunders is an acclaimed essayist and author of novellas, but he is best known for his energetic, inventive, and deeply humane short stories. In the words of Alan Cheuse, a member of the Malamud Award Committee, “Saunders is one of the most gifted and seriously successful comic short story writers working in America today. And his comedy, like most great comedy, is dark. George Saunders is the real thing, the successor to such dark comedians of ordinary speech as Donald Barthelme and Grace Paley. He's a Vonnegutian in his soul and, paradoxically, a writer like no one but himself.” This singular writing voice is equal parts hilarious and compassionate, merging colloquial language with technocratic jargon, surreal futuristic landscapes with everyday homes and yards, foreboding undercurrents with sparks of enormous optimism. The first of Saunders’s four published story collections, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, arrived in 1996 and moved Thomas Pynchon to describe Saunders as, “An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.” His most recent collection, Tenth of December, was published to near universal acclaim in January of 2013 and inspired a New York Times Magazine cover story titled, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.” Charles Yu, reviewing it in the L.A.
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Daniel Green
DANIEL GREEN 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS RADICAL REALISTS “Like Life: Radical Realism and the Fiction of Sam Pink” (5) “Reinforcing Hard Reality: Stephen Dixon” (14) “Sincerity and the Surface: On Nicholson Baker” (19) “Not Somewhere or Anywhere” (Ottessa Moshfegh) (26) “Entering Cross River” (Rion Amilcar Scott) (30) “Contextualized Naturalism: The Artfulness of Russell Banks's Affliction” (36) “Sleights of Hand” (Philip Roth) (46) REGRESSIVE REALISTS “Richard Powers I: Forsaking Illusions” (50) “Lost in the Woods: Richard Powers, The Overstory” (58) “Safely Familiar” (Denis Johnson) (63) “Getting At The Thing Itself” (Kent Haruf” (66) “Endless Talk” (Richard Ford) (71) “Killing the Joke” (Lorrie Moore) (80) “Until the Movie Comes Out” (Richard Russo) (84) “Illusions of Substance” (Charles Baxter) (89) 3 PREFACE The underlying assumption of most of my critical writing has been that, far from representing a tangential, eccentric practice (as much of current literary culture would have it), “experimental” fiction in fact provides an indispensable service in helping to keep the literary resources of fiction refreshed. Often this entails contrasting such fiction with a conventionalized or exhausted realism, which despite the interventions of fabulists and postmodernists (not to mention the efforts of many genre writers) remains more or less the default preference in both American fiction and general-interest literary criticism. But the problem with a blanket critique of realism, especially from the years after World War II, and even more especially
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Verbal Pentimento in Donna Tartt’S the Goldfinch
Vilnius University Faculty of Philology Department of English Philology Marija Petravičiūtė The Art of Mourning: Verbal Pentimento in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of MA in English Studies Academic advisor: dr. Rūta Šlapkauskaitė 2017 Contents: Abstract ................................................................................................................. 3 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................... 4 2. The Matter of Matter: A Theoretical Frame ................................................. 11 3. The Denial of Death: Art and the Illusion of Presence ................................. 20 4. Conclusions ................................................................................................... 36 Summary in Lithuanian ....................................................................................... 37 References ........................................................................................................... 38 Appendix ............................................................................................................. 40 2 Abstract The present MA paper aims to examine Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), a novel which is primarily preoccupied with the themes of art and death. Seeing as one of the purposes of this thesis is to establish relevant connections between the logic of still life paintings, the protagonist’s life choices and, consequently, his
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K. Kusano 1 Kaede Kusano Mr. Ahumada ENG 4U1-09 28
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Let Me Be Frank with You Richard Ford
BIBLIOTECA TECLA SALA February 15, 2018 Let Me Be Frank With You Richard Ford Introduction A brilliant new work that returns Richard Ford to the hallowed territory that sealed his reputation as an American master: the world of Frank Bascombe, and the landscape of his celebrated novels The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. In his trio of world-acclaimed novels portraying the life of an entire American generation, Richard Ford has imagined one of the most indelible and widely discussed characters in modern literature, Frank Bascombe. Through Bascombe—protean, funny, profane, wise, often inappropriate—we’ve witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the twentieth century. Contents: Now, in Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford reinvents Introduction 1 Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) Biography: Richard 2 attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world Ford undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live Living with Frank 3-5 in at this moment. Ford is here again working with the Bascombe: an maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute interview with height of his powers. Richard Ford [https://www.harpercollins.com/9780061692062/let- Notes 6 me-be-frank-with-you] Page 2 Biography: Richard Ford Richard Ford, (born February 16, the novellas comprisedin Let Me 1944, Jackson, Mississippi, U.S.), Be Frank with You (2014). American writer of novels and short stories about lonely and In Wildlife (1990) Ford depicted a damaged people.
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Kindred Ambivalence
KINDRED AMBIVALENCE: ART AND THE ADULT-CHILD DYNAMIC IN AMERICA’S COLD WAR by MICHAEL MARBERRY A THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2010 Copyright Michael Marberry 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT The pervasive ideological dimension of the Cold War resulted in an extremely ambivalent period in U.S. history, marked by complex and conflicting feelings. Nowhere is this ambivalence more clearly seen than in the American home and in the relationship between adults and children. Though the adult-child dynamic has frequently harbored ambivalent feelings, the American Cold War era—with its increased emphasis on the family in the face of ideological struggle—served to highlight this ambivalence. Believing that art reveals historical and cultural concerns, this project explores the extent to which adult-child ambivalence is prominent within American art from the period—particularly, the coming-of-age story, as it is a genre intrinsically concerned with the interactions between adults and children. Chapter one features an analysis of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Order” coming-of-age sequence, specifically “The Source” and “The Circus.” Establishing Porter’s relevance to the Cold War period, this chapter illustrates how her young heroine (Miranda Gay) experiences ambivalence within her familial relationships—which, in turn, comes to foreshadow and represent the adult-child ambivalence within the Cold War period. Chapter two expands its scope to include a larger historical context and a different artistic mode. With the rise of cinema during the Cold War period, the horror film became a genre extremely interested in adult-child ambivalence, frequently depicting the child as a destructive force and the adult as a victim of parenthood.
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PDXScholar Portland State University PDXScholar Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and and Presentations Planning 2-2014 Jim Rockford or Tony Soprano: Coastal Contrasts in American Suburbia Carl Abbott Portland State University, [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/usp_fac Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, and the Urban Studies and Planning Commons Citation Details Abbott, C. (2014). Jim Rockford or Tony Soprano: Coastal Contrasts in American Suburbia. Pacific iH storical Review, Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 1-23. This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Jim Rockford or Tony Soprano: Coastal Contrasts in American Suburbia CARL ABBOTT The author taught urban history and planning in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. This was his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, in Denver, Colorado, on August 10, 2013. Both in television shows such as The Rockford Files and The Sopranos and in the fiction of writers such as John Updike, Richard Ford, and Douglas Coupland, popular culture draws a distinction between Atlantic Coast and Pacific Coast suburbs. The dif- ferences revolve around two themes.
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Addition to Summer Letter
May 2020 Dear Student, You are enrolled in Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition for the coming school year. Bowling Green High School has offered this course since 1983. I thought that I would tell you a little bit about the course and what will be expected of you. Please share this letter with your parents or guardians. A.P. Literature and Composition is a year-long class that is taught on a college freshman level. This means that we will read college level texts—often from college anthologies—and we will deal with other materials generally taught in college. You should be advised that some of these texts are sophisticated and contain mature themes and/or advanced levels of difficulty. In this class we will concentrate on refining reading, writing, and critical analysis skills, as well as personal reactions to literature. A.P. Literature is not a survey course or a history of literature course so instead of studying English and world literature chronologically, we will be studying a mix of classic and contemporary pieces of fiction from all eras and from diverse cultures. This gives us an opportunity to develop more than a superficial understanding of literary works and their ideas. Writing is at the heart of this A.P. course, so you will write often in journals, in both personal and researched essays, and in creative responses. You will need to revise your writing. I have found that even good students—like you—need to refine, mature, and improve their writing skills. You will have to work diligently at revising major essays.
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Suburbs in American Literature
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Historical Fiction
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