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Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Four is the magic number in Michael Martones Four for a Quarter.  In subjectfour fifth Beatles, four tie knots, four retellings of the first Xerox, even the sex lives of the Fantastic Fourand in structurethe book is separated into four sections, with each section further divided into four chapterettesFour for a Quarter returns again and again to its originating number, making chaos comprehensible and mystery out of the most ordinary.    Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4                

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Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

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A wild, sex-and-peyote-fueled road trip through heartbreak and the mythic American West, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours is a fever dream and cult classic of love, loss, and self-destruction. Goebels grief-stricken adrenalized alter ego goes on a cross-country search for his sanitycrashing through relationships, memories, and mania from New York to Texas, Puerto Rico to Los Angeles, spiraling through the wreckage of a love affair that wont stay put. Grieving the sudden death of his brother and a past that wont let go, the narrator must rewrite his own story before it devours him. At its heart, this is a raw reckoning with loss, abuse, and madness, told in lyrical prose that feels pulled from the heart of a bard on fire. With echoes of The Dharma Bums, The Chronology of Water, and The Catcher in the Rye, this is an untamed, confessional Kunstlerromana howl of desire, dislocation, and the burning need to belong to a world that doesnt even exist.

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Over the past thirty years, oral history has found increasing favor among social scientists and humanists, with scholars rediscovering the oral interview as a valuable method for obtaining information about the daily realities and historical consciousness of people, their histories, and their culture. One primary issue is the question of how the communicative performances of the interviewer and narrator jointly influence the interview. Using methods of conversation/discourse analysis, the author describes the collaborative processes that enable interviewers and narrators to interact successfully in the interview context.

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Father Flashes reimagines what the novel can be or do. Composed of stunning vignettes that capture the deterioration of a fathers mind and body, this novel provides poetic insight into the complex workings of a father-daughter relationship. As the father collapses, what appears is the daughters struggle to simply cope. In prose composed of intense and moving shards, Tricia Bauer delivers a revealing account of the gradual decomposition of all that is familiar and of a daughters gathering of memories to form the arresting collage that is Father Flashes.

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Not only the story of a colossus of a woman living in Kansas, Fat Girl, Terrestrial is also a meditation on God, treachery, and blind love.   In Kingdom Come, Kansas, a town from which children once mysteriously disappeared, there lives a giant woman. Wallis Armstrong is not a pituitary mutant or a person battling a rare medical condition; shes just an improbably large woman ill at ease in a world built for shrimps. Paradoxically, Wallis builds miniatures of crime scenes, and her specialty is staged suicides. She constructed her first diorama as a child when a boy in her fourth-grade class went suddenly missing. Walliss brother, Obie, believes the only explanation for his sisters amplitude is that she is the incarnation of God on Earth, and he is her one true ardent disciple. Until he too disappears.   Kellie Wellss story of Walliss odyssey through this tight-fitting world is a churlish meditation on the existence and nature of God as well as an exploration of the treachery of childhood and the destructive nature of the most blindly abiding kind of love: that of a love-struck brother for a big sister, a disciple for an unwilling prophet, and a bone-weary god for a savage and disappointing flock.

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The Letter in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Criticism

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Epistolary Responses explores the transformative nature of epistolary fiction and criticism in letter form from a largely feminist perspective. While most scholarly work to date has focused on 17th- and 18th-century manifestations of this genre, Bower's study concentrates on epistolary fiction by contemporary American writers published between 1912 and 1988. The novels discussed, all featuring women letter writers, include: Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, John Barth's LETTERS, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, John Updike's S., Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, Upton Sinclair's Another Pamela, and Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters.  Bower explores the influence letters have on the act of writing and writing as act, their encoded desire for reply, their incompleteness as units of narrative information, their play on ideas of absence and presence, their apparently personal and private nature, and their foregrounding of the writer's agency and authority, all of which make letters a most useful genre both for novelists and for scholars. Several of the book's "fiction" chapters include a letter from the author of the text (sometimes a critic) that complements and supplements Bower's analysis. The final part of the book explores how seven scholars--men and women--have applied letters to their own critical writing, finding that this formal move allows them to question issues of public and private discourse, the authority of signature, and the "feminine" location.

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On the surface a murder mysterya detectives search for the killer of five people in DenverExpectation is also, among other things, a meditation on the relationship between language and music.  In his newest novel, Jeffrey DeShell draws on the musical innovations of Arnold Schoenbergby turns traditional, serial, and atonalto inform his grammar and language. Moving progressively through specific Schoenberg compositions, DeShell complicates the surface of his text into lyrical derivatives, all the while drawing us into a murder mystery like no other as Detective Francisca Fruscella pursues both the killer and her own complicated personal history.  By turns rapturous, rigorous, and gripping, Expectation is a thriller of another kindand a bold venture to the limits of the mystery genre and language itself.

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A wildly inventive and visually rich collage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel--through time, space, narrative, and death   The poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; anchorman Dan Rathers mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolls home alone one October evening; a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers; the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnons daughters point of viewthese and other stories form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. It is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.

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Explores the lives behind the headlines of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, evoking anew the scope of tragedy through the vision of literary fiction.   It was called the crime of the century, and it was front-page news: the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories imagines the private lives behind the headlines of the case, and examines the enduranceand demiseof those consumed by the tragedy.  Every character brings a different past life to the event, be it a life of celebrity, or of misfortune and obscurity. There is Anne Morrow Lindberghdaughter of a millionaire, the shy poet who married a national hero; Charles Lindberghthe rough-and-tumble Minnesota barnstormer, who at age twenty-five made the first transatlantic flight, bringing him world-wide prestige; Violetthe skittish family maid with a curious attachment to the boy and a secret life that lapses into hysteria and self-destruction; and the kidnappersan assembly of misfits with their own histories of misery. All are bound by the violence, turmoil, and mystery of the childs disappearance as it becomes evident that each life has been irrevocably changed. Patterns of bereavement and loss illuminate these stories: despair at the death of a child; the retreat into seclusion; the comfort and the desolation of a marriage. But the heart of this novel is the far-reaching nature of tragedy, and the ways the characters go on to liveor endtheir lives.

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Double or Nothing is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions.  Madly transfixing detailsnoodles, toilet paper, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollarsbecome milestones in a discovery of America. These details, combined with Federman's feel for the desperation of his characters, create a book that is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. The concrete play of its language, its use of found materials, give the viewer/reader a sense of constant and strange discovery. To turn these pages is to turn the corners of a world of words as full as any novel of literary discourse ever presented. Double or Nothing challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting. Picked for American Book Review's 100 Best First Lines from Novels

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Provides an important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism  Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, scholars have paid little attention to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? As a writer whose career was restricted by the dismal racial politics of his era, Chesnutt refused to conform to literary conventions for depicting race. Nor did he use his imaginative skills to evade the realities he and other African Americans faced. Rather, he experimented with ways of portraying reality that could elicit an appropriate, proportionate response to it, as Ryan Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chesnutts novels, including important unpublished works overlooked by previous critics.  In addition, Chesnutt and Realism addresses a curiously neglected subject in American literary studiesthe relationship between American literary realism and race. By taking Chesnutt seriously as a contributor to realism, this book articulates the strategies by which one African American intellectual helped to define the discourses that influenced his fate.  

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Imagine a bookish man named Francis D., swimming at a public beach in Cape Cod, who drifts out beyond his depth. Imagine that he doesn't drown, that the tide carries him to a private cove where he is rescued by two mysterious young women named Charlotte and Emily. Imagine then that Francis leaves behind his former humdrum life-his formidable wife and teenage daughter-and embarks on a series of violent and erotic adventures, as dream-like as reels of film. Imagine at the same time that a man named Joshua Quartz is telling his silent wife, Genevieve, the story of Francis's adventures, that they have little other communication, that the story is a way of keeping contact between husband and wife alive. Imagine that at some point Genevieve tells her own story, within and without Joshua's account. Baumbach's characters make occasional connections, make love and war, in the disguises of metaphor. If the main action is dream-like or fantastic, the real world is always at the window looking in.

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Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance

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Frames blood donation as a performance of civic identity closely linked to the meaning of citizenship  In Banning Queer Blood, Jeffrey Bennett frames blood donation as a performance of civic identity closely linked to the meaning of citizenship. However, with the advent of HIV came the notion of blood donation as a potentially dangerous process. Bennett argues that the Food and Drug Administration, by employing images that specifically depict gay men as contagious, has categorized gay men as a menace to the nation. The FDA's ban on blood donation by gay men served to propagate the social misconceptions about gay men that continue to circulate within both the straight and LGBT/Queer communities.  Bennett explores the role of scientific research cited by these banned-blood policies and its disquieting relationship to government agencies, including the FDA. Bennett draws parallels between the FDA's position on homosexuality and the historical precedents of discrimination by government agencies against racial minorities. The author concludes by describing the resistance posed by queer donors, who either lie in order to donate blood or protest discrimination at donation sites, and by calling for these prejudiced policies to be abolished.       

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Rice's parasitical language is akin to the acts of those naked 18th century pirates of desire. In Blood of Mugwump, Rice cannibalizes the likes of Joyce, Faulkner, Burroughs, Eliot, and a whole host of angelic others. Now trapped inside a kinetic body that is always changing from male to female, Doug Rice (the youngest Mugwump) sets out to discover himself in his sister's body. All the while the familial matriarch, Grandma Mugwump, feeds on the flesh of young Doug. Once through the looking glass, Doug realizes that Caddie (his polysexual Faulknerian nightmare of a sister) is more terrifying and holy than the average saint. A frenzied sexual virus, genetically conveyed, mutates and possesses the meat of Doug's and Caddie's bodies forcing them to love each other in unspeakable, yet classical, ways. 

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Winner of FC2's American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize   Margo Berdeshevskys Beautiful Soon Enough is a collection of hypnotic stories that capture the livesworldly, sexual, obsessiveof twentythree arresting women.These are snapshots and collages: stories of women on the outside, looking in; of women content to end their affairs; of young women learning the power of seduction; and of older women reminiscing about past loves. They are women who cannot live without loves embrace, and women who have found it and feel that it is never enough. They are women d'un certain age and women with naked hearts, of any age.Berdeshevskys tales cross the planet: from beds in Paris to the roofs of Havana, from Venice Beach to the hills of Dubrovnik. With settings as varied as the characters they depict, these tales illuminate the lives of women desperate for a balance between love, comfort, and freedom. Personal, driven, and lyrical, together they are Beautiful Soon Enough.

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An ersatz travel book for the Hoosier State  The master of the nearly true is back with The Blue Guide to Indiana, an ersatz travel book for the Hoosier State. Michael Martone, whose trademark is the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, has created an Indiana that almost is, a landscape marked by Lover's Lane franchises and pharmaceutical drug theme parks. Visit the Trans-Indiana Mayonnaise Pipeline and the Field of Lightbulbs. Learn about Our Lady of the Big Hair and Feet or the history of the License Plate Insurrection of 1979. Let Martone guide you through every inch of the amazing state that is home to the Hoosier Infidelity Resort Area, the National Monument for Those Killed by Tornadoes in Trailer Parks and Mobile Home Courts, and the Annual Eyeless Fish Fry. All your questions will be answered, including many you never thought to ask (like: "What's a good recipe for Pork Cake?").

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A fascinating memoir by Egypt-born American literary theorist and writer Ihab Hassan about his life in Japan. Part recollection, part cultural perception, Between the Eagle and the Sun records his journey, living and seeing himself sometimes as another, assaying always to read the hieroglyphs of his past in the scripts of Japan. As lucid as it is intensely felt, at once lyrical and critical, the work offers a beguiling vision of Japan and, by tacit contrast, of America. For writing, the author says, is more than praise or blame, it is also knowledge, empathy, and delight. These attributes are evident in Hassan's treatment of Japanese culture, its people and scenes. Indeed, the people, rendered in vibrant portraits throughout the book, abide when all the shadows of romance and exasperation have fled.  True to its moment, the work also reinvests the forms of memoir, travel, and quest. Cultural essays, travel anecdotes, autobiographical meditations, portraits of Japanese friends, a section titled "Entries, A to Z," fit into a tight frame, with clear transitions from one section to another. The style, however, alters subtly to suit topic, occasion, and mood.  Japan may not hold the key to this planet's future; no single nation does. Yet the continuing interest in its history, society, and people and the incresed awareness of its recent trends and growing global impact engage an expanding audience. Avoiding cliches, sympathetic to its subject yet analytical, unflinching in judgment, and withal highly personal, Between the Eagle and the Sun offers a unique image of its subject by a distinguished and well-traveled critic, at home in several cultures.

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The Just War of the Women's Social and Political Union

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Provides a new understanding of the recurrent rhetorical need to employ conservative rhetoric in support of a radical cause The Womens Social and Political Union, the militant branch of the English womens suffrage movement, turned to arson, bombing, and widespread property destruction as a strategy to achieve suffrage for women. Because of its comparative rarity, terrorist violence by reform (as opposed to revolutionary) movements is underexplored, as is the discursive rhetoric that accompanies this violence. Largely because of the moral stance that drives such movements, the need to justify violence is greater for the reformist than for the revolutionary terrorist. The burden of rhetorical justification falls even more heavily on women utilizing violence, an option generally perceived as open only to men.  The militant suffragettes justified their turn to limited terrorism by arguing that their violence was part of a just war. Appropriating the rhetoric of a just war in defense of reformist violence allowed the suffragettes to exercise a traditional rhetorical vision for the sake of radical action. The concept of a just war allowed a spinning out of a fantasy of heroes, of a gallant band fighting against the odds. It challenged the imagination of the public to extend to women a heroic vision usually reserved for men and to accept the new expectations inherent in that vision. By incorporating the concept of a just war into their rhetoric, the WSPU leaders took the most conventional justification that Western tradition provides for the use of violence and adapted it to meet their unique circumstance as women using violence for political reform.  This study challenges the common view that the suffragettes use of military metaphors, their vilification of the government, and their violent attacks on property were signs of hysteria and self-destruction. Instead, what emerges is a picture of a deliberate, if controversial, strategy of violence supported by a rhetorical defense of unusual power and consistency.  

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An audacious transformation in prose of fourteen Modernist films  From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academicThe Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter (or film), what remains is DeShells inventive deconstruction and representation of modern cinema. At times borrowing imagery, plot, or character elements, and at times rendering lighting, rhythm, costuming, or shot sequences into fictional language, The Professors journey sends him from the Southwestern town of Pueblo, Colorado, into the role of rescuer as he aids an attempted-rape victim, and finally to Italy. Ultimately though, The Professor is left alone, struggling to reconcile the real world with his life in cinema.  

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Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present

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Seeks to bring present-day philosophy principles into the history of aesthetics  Before the publication of Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present there were three histories of aesthetics in EnglishBosanquet's pioneering work, the second part of Croce's Aesthetic in the Ainsle translation, and the comprehensive volume by Gilbert and Kuhn. While each of these is interesting in its own ways, and together they cover a good deal of ground, none of them is very new. Thus none could take advantage of recent work on many important philosophers and periods and bring into a consideration of the past the best concepts and principles that have been developed by present-day philosophy.