Bøker i American Literature (Dalkey Archive)-serien

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. 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.

Taken from throughout Mills's career, the essays collected in this volume delve into the work of such influential writers as Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov, Samuel Beckett, Galway Kinnell, Edith Sitwell, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, Isabella Gardener, James Wright, David Ignatow, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, and Stanley Kunitz. Mills examines how the personal element informs the works of these writers and enables them "to speak to us, without impediment, from the deep center of a personal engagement with existence."

What Waiting Really Means is about emergencies that never reach the emergency room. It's about a woman named Mary with no last name who rides buses and smokes cigars and watches the wind blow her bedroom curtains into a frenzy. It's about cities, Detroit, New York, and Atlanta, About older men. The kind who will hold you. And killers, And the boundaries they look for. The narrator is sure of one thing; "Men who wear Brooks Brothers suits and pretend to read books are a step backward, and not far enough back, at that, "She's better off with her cigars at the Majestic Grill waiting while the rain beats on the windows.

In Curtis White's first novel, The Idea Of Home, he attempts to imagine "a place in which humans can live." This utopia is definitely not San Lorenzo - a post-war, prefabricated suburb in California - where White grew up and which is the basis for this novel. From the vantage point of anoff-kilter adulthood, White spins recent American history together with personal observations and investigations into the dark heart of American suburbia. Shocking, yet very funny and always learned, The Idea Of Home is a mix of the personal and the philosophical in an energetic collage that would resemble the biographies of Nietzsche and Mark Twain if they had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and '60s.

This is the first paperback edition of one of Stein's most revealing novels. Written in 1925-26 (but not published until 1958), it is Stein's midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated. In place of a traditional narrative, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel-writing, and the novelist's relation to her materials. In a sense, the novel is about "preparing a novel" (the subject of chap. 50), about everything that goes through a writer's head as she begins to write. Mixed in with her meditations on writing are daily events in her marriage to Alice B. Toklas, visits from friends - including such notable figures of the period as Josephine Baker, Virgil Thomson, Rene Crevel, and a number of expatriate American writers and artists - travels in and around France, memories of the past, inquiries into names and the nature of identity, and virtually anything else that occurs to her. As she writes at one point, "It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything, " so everything of interest to Stein goes into her preparations for the novel that is A Novel of Thank You.

Jarleth Pendergast in an ex-pat Irishman, an aging punk rocker, a film snob, a copy-shop employee, and a desperate man whose career as an avant-garde claymation artist is going nowhere. Notified about a possible inheritance at the beginning of the book, Jarleth enters on a course of rampant self-destruction, narrating all his adventures to a deceased Irish lawyer. "One of the funniest books I've read in the past several years," according to Harvey Pekar, this first novel is a mad, sad, and profoundly funny book.

Requiem is a darkly comic novel about what it means to be human in a culture obsessed with sex and death. With a structure loosely based on the Mass for the Dead, this ambitious novel includes letters-to-the-editor, an e-mail correspondence with a porn queen, scenes from the lives of classical musicians, and retellings of biblical stories. In the process, White charts the rise and fall of the Human from the Bible (pre-human), to the Enlightenment (the invention of the human), to the digital age (post-human). In an America where everyone keeps a secret website, and where a modern Prophet can only weep at the stories he hears, Requiem reveals our past, present and future with wit, sadness, and complete honesty.

It is December of 1944, and a detachment of American soldiers has been assigned to guard an ancient castle in Belgium inhabited by an elderly aristocrat, his young wife, and countless valuable artifacts. The soldiers virtually wait out the war--indulging in various hobbies, exploring the castle's excesses (including a replica of Venice, complete with canals and gondolas), in other words, trying to do something other than war--until a German counterattack puts them in the fray. Semi-autobiographical, ?"Castle Keep"?was the first major novel to use the real language of the soldier, uncensored and true-to-life. Inventive and brilliantly comic, this novel is the quintessential portrait of man at war.

Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that their marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the unimaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' failures and are dragged through the torment of this disintegrating marriage. No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up the devastating pain of a marriage falling apart and the doomed-to-fail efforts to make it work.

The Tarot deck as read from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, circa the late Forties and early Fifties. A candy-store (or bar or street corner) symposium on life, love, and storytelling. An eruption of local voices approaching Dantean - but hilarious - clamor. A display of inventiveness whose sneaky expanses depend on non sequiturs that Woody Allen would envy, on satires of flowery style. A companion-piece to Steelwork (1970). Yes, Sorrentino's new novel is all these things, and one thing more, which gives its title a justification beyond all the laughs: a closely woven examination of symbols - with the proposition that they are actually fateful choices; either that or judgments. Calvino's likewise Tarot-based The Castle of Crossed Destinies shares similar concerns, but Calvino is nowhere the irrepressible vaudevillian that Sorrentino is. Trotted out here, while drinking Mission cream sodas, eating Mrs. Wagner's pies and root beer barrels, waiting for the early Mirror, are such neighborhood luminaries as: aspiring litterateur Richie; acneous Big Duck; The Arab, master of baroque malapropisms; Professor Kooba; Santo Tuccio the movie buff; Fat Frankie; Little Mickey; Cheech; and The Drummer. Each has a story to tell (and overrule) each other, and all of them ere under the ultimate spell of an elusive symbolic character called "the Magician" - who, this being Sorrentino, is as hapless as the guys in the candy-store. (Magically arranging for an angel-with-trumpet to appear on a gas-station wall during a war-time night of free movies, the Magician can't, however, get the angel to make a sound, having neglected to make an angel that knows how to play a horn.) The comedy is marvelously broad throughout - especially when The Arab offers his just-slightly-off disquisitions: "I despise and abbhorate the baseball. . . . And akinly, all sporting ventures. Save the racing ovals and their equine contests which oft are of a spectaculous beauty"; or "It nudges and bunks into the tragic that you did not consider gleaning this information, Billy." And set-pieces (a Sorrentino specialty) are here in force and quality: a declasse gossip column, a list of old-time Brooklyn candies, a Hungarian folk tale. But under all the laughs and exuberant polyphony, Sorrentino does an extremely crafty thing: he makes these sweet slobs bear the task of explaining symbol and illusion. ("A wedge of pie then. Suppose you have it and that it stands for a triangle. Suddenly, Big Duck, let's say, comes along, his acne is goddamn growling. And he stuffs the pie into his mouth. What about that?") Never merely the maker of high-modernist yet rude entertainments, Sorrentino also always strives to produce literary correctives. And rarely has he done the job so well, so radically, so comically as in this fluorescent, subtly amalgamated book - one of his best. (Kirkus Reviews)

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.

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.

This bitterly funny memoir reads like an expose of the power structures in America s higher education system: who s got it, how they re abusing it, what everyone else is willing to do to get it, and the social cost of doing educational business this way.

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.

"(A) major figure in contemporary African American letters." Henry Louis Gates

A woman's sexual awakening is a tragedy when the woman is married to someone other than the man who awakens her. But until then, her marriage, now doomed, was a sleepwalker's tragedy. This novel will shock and offend some readers. Unapologetically explicit in its language, extreme in some of the acts it catalogues, it makes no pretense of submission to middle-class decency, let alone to expectations of happy endings. All three people in this love triangle are flawed, damaged, human. Things fall apart, and the resolution is unclear. Why does she do it? Why should we read it? The answer is one word: Ecstasy. Micheline Aharonian Marcom has a genius for language that is not only beautiful in and of itself, but also engages the heart. Lusher than Marguerite Duras, more tender and erotic than Cormac McCarthy, but nearly as dark, this is a narrative masterpiece.

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was--as Nicholas Delbanco writes--"world famous in his lifetime," yet now he has been "almost wholly forgotten." Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson--the narrator of this novel and the Count's fictional, last-surviving relative--is "haunted" by one of history's most fascinating and remarkable figures. On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself. The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.

The interconnected stories that form this novel take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 Arabian Nights and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young "author". First published in 1936 and long neglected, this elegantly inventive novel anticipates works like Pale Fire and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Locos, Felipe Alfau creates a mercurial dreamscape in which the characters - the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy - wrench free of authorial control, invade one another's stories, and even turn into one another.

Not since On the Road has a book been more thoroughly of the road. Unlike Kerouac's novel, however, this book was literally written on the road in Gudding's own car, on pad and paper while driving. Rhode Island Notebook is the handwritten account of one driver's journey to happiness in the face of grief. This book-length poem chronicles the break-up of a family and the separation of a father and daughter, while at the same time recording the rise of jingoism in the United States in the moments before and during the invasion of Iraq.

For over four decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has produced brilliant, penetrating essays and reviews, each one an uncompromising statement of what is good - and what is not - in literature and culture. Something Said collects in a single volume these definitive readings of such major twentieth-century innovators as William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Hubert Selby, John Hawkes, Flann O'Brien, William Gaddis, Italo Calvino, John Hawkes, and Robert Creeley, along with critical writings on film, pop culture, and visual art. Featuring seventy-two pieces in all, this new expanded edition includes twenty-five pieces written since the publication of the first edition in 1984, and demonstrates Sorrentino's concern for the craft of writing and the development of an American aesthetic.

While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. In his search, Michael uses photographs and paintings to visualize the past and thereby expose a family's decadent legacy of sex, lies, and betrayal.