Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Entrapment and Other Writings
Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places. In Entrapment and Other Writings—containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays—Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure. "You should not read [Algren] if you can’t take a punch," Ernest Hemingway declared. "Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful."
Understanding Nelson Algren
Brooke Horvath surveys the literary contributions of a writer known as the voice of America’s dispossessed. Horvath offers an introduction to the life and work of the Chicagoan who wrote about the underclass in the Windy City and beyond, bringing to the fore their humanity and aspirations. Examining Algren’s eleven major works, Horvath sets Algren’s evolution as a writer against the backdrop of the nation’s shifting social, political, and economic landscape.
At Times
Over thirty years of poems from an American poet in the spirit of Alan Dugan and Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make. "At times . . . I wanted to be a poet." A fittingly sly and humble epigraph for this half- a- lifetime's worth of sly and humble, and also lyrical and joyous, poems. From the first poem in the collection, "The Woman in the Peter Pan Collar," in which the poet examines an old photograph of his mother, searching for clues, to the last, "Rainouts," in which he beseeches the Lord to let his own death take place on the sort of day that strands baseball games mid-inning, leaving "all final decisions happily deferred," Brooke Horvath is always intimate, never rhetorical or bland. This is poetry not just for the sake of poetry, but poetry as a way of life, of engaging with the world. Like the works of Alan Dugan or Galway Kinnell, these are poems of the everyday and, when read slantwise, of what lies beyond. The whole collection, in fact, is imbued with the wily double meaning of the final couplet from "What in the World Were We Thinking Of?"--"It was a day when nothing happened / that we will find worth remembering."
Line Drives
"We wait for baseball all winter long," Bill Littlefield wrote in Boston Magazine a decade ago, "or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that's what poets do, too." Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after li...
Into The Tunnel
During its twenty-five years as a work-in-progress, William H. Gass's mammoth magnum opus became a legend of the literary world, the Sasquatch of contemporary American fiction. Along with an included interview with the author, the contributors to this study help situate Gass's challenging narrative within the remarkable career of a notable philosopher, essayist, and author of fiction. Contributors examine the book's quarrel with history, its engagement with issues of ethics and aesthetics, its representation of personality, its distinctive style and structure, its sophisticated metafictional texture, along with much else. What is going on in The Tunnel is not always immediately apparent, but the essays included in here tease out its secrets and concentrate our attention on details of an exasperating and exhilarating literary achievement.
The Short Writings of Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren was a renowned Chicago writer known for his social commentary and his novels like The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Although he continues to be remembered almost exclusively for his novels, this book aims to highlight the value and influence of his short form works. Before he died in 1981, Algren had amassed a genre-defying body of work, including short stories, articles, poems and book reviews. The present book features a comprehensive analysis and discussion of Algren's lost literature, including everything but his novels. One of the pieces covered is a masterpiece of race relations written in 1950, more than 60 years before the galvanization of the Black Lives Matter movement. Another is a scathing poem about Algren's transatlantic love affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Both items are reprinted in the book courtesy of the Algren estate. This book also includes references to Algren's works that have yet to be studied by Algren scholars.
The Illustration of the Master
"This very interesting monograph presents new information in a useful and helpfully readable way. James's collaboration with magazine illustrators has not been studied this comprehensively before."u ̀Michael Anesko, Pennsylvania State University --
New Essays on Rabbit Run
The essays in this collection examine the technical mastery and thematic range of John Updike's novel Rabbit Run.
Nelson Algren
This book addresses critical gaps in existing biographies of Nelson Algren, providing new perspectives on his writing style, literary contributions, professional colleagues, and personal life--especially his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Although Beauvoir maintained a simultaneous relationship with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the correspondence exchanged between Beauvoir, Algren, and Sartre, as this book discusses, sheds new light on her "transatlantic love affair" with Algren. Moreover, this work challenges the assertion that Algren's writing aligns seamlessly with the "New Journalism" style popularized by Tom Wolfe. It investigates how Algren's literary legacy might have diverged had he embraced more of the principles associated with New Journalism.
In the Process of Poetry
"This is the first major theoretical study of the four main figures of the New York School: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. Proposing a reinterpretation of the definition of the avant-garde, William Watkin describes it as a movement typified by its commitment to art in process, over the final art product. In a series of in-depth, and wide-reaching, readings, he then goes on to test this assertion in detailed relation to the poetry of the New York School, while also examining how the poets' own work further develops and analyses the concept of the avant-garde in contemporary culture."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
