Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism PDF Download

Author: Ian McGuire
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
"An original exploration of the work of writer Richard Ford in the context of its place within contemporary debates about the possible role, meaning of, and value of literary realism in a postmodern age"--

Author: Richard Ford
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408835118
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
Frank Bascombe has a younger girlfriend and a job as a sportswriter. To many men of his age, thirty-eight, this would be a cause for optimism, yet Frank feels the pull of his inner despair and especially of his recent losses - his preferred career has ended, his wife has divorced him, and a tragic accident took his elder son. In the course of this Easter weekend, Frank will lose all the remnants of his familiar life, though he will emerge heroic with spirits soaring. This is a magnificent novel that propelled Richard Ford into the first rank of American writers.

Author: Richard Ford
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062969811
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit and candor In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself,” a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them. Typically rich with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.

Author: Richard Ford
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408835096
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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In these ten stories, Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West - and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. A refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter; an unhappy girlfriend and a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck. Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiselled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

Author: Diarmuid Hester
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609386914
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade. In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American post–War avant-garde.

Author: Ian McGuire
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408882469
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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______________ 'Hugely entertaining' - The Times 'A wincingly entertaining portrayal of academe with its pants down. And a reminder that when things are at their worst they're also at their funniest' - Liz Jensen 'Covering familiar territory in this sardonic academic novel, McGuire wittily exposes his characters' pretensions and frustrations ... Outwitted and exploited at every step of the way, Gutman and his story are at once very funny and disconcertingly sad' - Sunday Times ______________ Thirty-something Morris Gutman is a chronically indecisive temporary lecturer at the University of Coketown. Life hasn't turned out as he planned: he has a demanding wife, an insomniac child and teaches demeaning courses to ungrateful English students. However, he is willing to do whatever it takes to negotiate a permanent departmental job, even if it means finding his way through the minefield that is academia and winning over the alluring and manipulative research fellow Zoe Cable.

Author: Richard Ford
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408835088
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an 'Existence Period' - selling real estate in New Jersey and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life. Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of extraordinary empathy and perception.

Author: Richard Ford
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307363724
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Great Falls, Montana, is where the Rockies end and where, in 1960, the Brinson family hopes to find a better life. Instead, sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson watches his parents discover the limits of their marriage and, at the same time, the unexpected depths of dignity and courage that remain even when love dies.

Author: Richard Ford
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408835142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The landscape of Women with Men ranges from the northern plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago. The tragedies that stalk the characters are unfolded with an indelible wit and clarity. So merciless is Ford's lingering gaze upon human, mostly male, weakness, so understanding his eye for the unravelling threads of human love, that this collection of novellas seems only to broaden the reputation and the following of one of the outstanding writers of our time.

Author: Cintia Santana
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611484618
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Forth and Back broadens the scope of Hispanic trans-Atlantic studies by shifting its focus to Spain’s trans-literary exchange with the United States at the end of the twentieth century. Santana analyzes the translation “boom” of U.S. literature that marked literary production in Spain after Franco’s death, and the central position that U.S. writing came to occupy within the Spanish literary system. Santana examines the economic and literary motives that underlay the phenomenon, as well as the particular socio-cultural appeal that U.S. “dirty realist” writers—which in Spain included authors as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, and Bret Easton Ellis—held for Spaniards in the 1980s. Santana also studies the subsequent appropriation of this writing by a polemic group of young Spanish writers in the 1990s whoself-consciously and insistently associated themselves with the U.S. Forth and Back illustrates that literary movements do not unilaterally spread; rather, those that flourish take root in fertile soil and are transformed in their travel by the desires, creative choices, and practical constraints of their differing producers and consumers. It is precisely in the crossing of these currents that plots thicken. The translation of dirty realism, its reception in Spain, and its cultural legacy as appropriated by the young Spanish writers, serve to interrogate a perceived U.S. hegemony. If Spanish realismo sucio has been said to be symptomatic of the globalization of literature, Forth and Back argues that the Spanish works in question posed a subtle reaffirmation of Spanish literature’s strong ties to realist fiction, a gesture of continuity in a decade that seemed to presence the undoing of much of Spain’s “Spanish-ness.” Ultimately, this project asks an ambitious pair of questions at the heart of human culture: how do we “read” each other, quite literally, across geography and language? How do we construct others and ourselves vis-à-vis those readings?