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Intriguing, quirky, and deeply felt stories from Michigan fiction writer Andy Mozina, collected in his first full-length fiction release.
Ranking of people, schools, products, countries, and just about everything else is part of our daily lives. But we are in a paradoxical relationship with ranking: we believe that ranking is good because it is informative and objective; and we believe ranking is bad because it is biased and subjective, and occasionally, even manipulated. Ranking: The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play combines the application of scientific theories to everyday experience with entertaining personal stories.
In this coherent, intense study, Naomi Lebowitz defines and explores what she calls "the philosophy of literary amateurism." With expert readings of the works of major international writers of the Western tradition, Lebowitz passionately argues that all great writing is guided by a moral complexity and richness. Lebowitz defines literary amateurism as an attitude of anti-professionalism that allows a writer to explore and represent experience with complexity and moral fluidity. Citing Montaigne as the father of this philosophy, Lebowitz explores the work of such followers of Montaigne as Emerson, Balzac, Dickens, Henry James, Conrad, William James, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and Italo Svevo, comparing their work to that of more self-consciously professional writers like Flaubert, Taine, Rousseau, and Proust. In a hyper-professional age of criticism marked by formulaic and political dictition and syntax, Lebowitz tries to recover the amateur perspective naturally carried by great literature's form and play. The Philosophy of Literary Amateurism makes a lasting contribution to the recovery of more generous relations between life and literature.
This book focuses on the complex relationships between inheritance, work, and desert in literature. It shows how, from its manifestation in the trope of material inheritance and legacy in Victorian fiction, “inheritance” gradually took on additional, more modern meanings in Joseph Conrad’s fiction on work and self-making. In effect, the emphasis on inheritance as referring to social rank and wealth acquired through birth shifted to a focus on talent, ability, and merit, often expressed through work. The book explores how Conrad’s fiction engaged with these changing modes of inheritance and work, and the resulting claims of desert they led to. Uniquely, it argues that Conrad’s ficti...
An in-depth analysis of the composition of Invisible Man and Ralph Ellisons move away from the radical left during his writing of the novel between 1945 and 1952.
A comprehensive examination of the fiction and poetry of Raymond Carver.
"From the author of The River at Night and Into the Jungle comes a harrowing new thriller as a linguist, broken-hearted after the apparent suicide of her glaciologist brother, ventures hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle to try to communicate with a young girl who has thawed from the ice alive"--
British imperialism's favorite literary narrative might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests also generated a surprising cultural obsession with suffering, sacrifice, defeat, and melancholia. "There was," writes John Kucich, "seemingly a different crucifixion scene marking the historical gateway to each colonial theater." In Imperial Masochism, Kucich reveals the central role masochistic forms of voluntary suffering played in late-nineteenth-century British thinking about imperial politics and class identity. Placing the colonial writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad in their cultural context, Kucich shows how the ideological and psych...
Mike Kovacs is an economics professor who's trying to get over a bitter divorce. He’s barely on speaking terms with his only child. And he’s just killed two bicyclists in an inebriated hit-and-run at a deserted Michigan beach. (In his defense, he hadn’t meant to get that drunk. And what’s the use of getting caught and going to jail if it means you can no longer make positive contributions to society? Sunk costs, and all.) Claire Boland’s daughter is one of the victims. She’s racked with guilt over what she might have done differently as a parent. Her marriage is buckling under the weight of the tragedy. And yet there’s one person who seems to understand the magnitude of her gri...