Tabloid Dreams

Tabloid Dreams PDF Author: Robert Olen Butler
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802120989
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
"An unrepeatable feat, a tour de force." --The Washington Post Book World In Tabloid Dreams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler dazzles with his mastery of the short story and his empathy for eccentric and ostracized characters. Using tabloid headlines as inspiration--"Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis," "Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac," and "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction"--Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, exploring enduring concepts of exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for self. Along the way, the cast includes a woman who can see through her glass eye when it's removed from the socket, a widow who sets herself on fire after losing a baking competition, a nine-year-old hit man, and a woman who dates an extraterrestrial she met in a Walmart parking lot. Tabloid Dreams weaves a seamless tapestry of high and low culture, of the surreal, sordid, and humorously sad.

The Pleasure of Influence

The Pleasure of Influence PDF Author: Rob Trucks
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557532534
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
In this collection, 11 important male fiction writers in America in 2001 discuss the origin, process and achievement of their own fiction. Interviewees include Robert Olen Butler, Charles Johnson, Thom Jones, Barry Hannah, Stephen Dixon, Russell Banks, Rick Moody and Chris Offutt.

Loud Speaker

Loud Speaker PDF Author: John Howard Lawson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political plays
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description


The Mini-Cycle

The Mini-Cycle PDF Author: Allan Weiss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000382028
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
While scholars have been studying the short story cycle for some time now, this book discusses a form that has never before been identified and named, let alone analyzed: the mini-cycle. A mini-cycle is a short story cycle made up, in most cases, of only two or three stories. This study looks at mini-cycles spanning the period from Anton Chekhov’s "little trilogy" (1898) to the "Alphinland" stories in Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress (2014), including texts by such authors as Stephen Leacock, Alice Munro, Robert Olen Butler, and Clark Blaise. Consideration is also given to marginal examples, like Sherwood Anderson’s "Godliness—A Tale in Four Parts" (1919), which can be seen as one story or four distinct texts unified under one title, and to what is called the "exploded" mini-cycle: one whose component stories are published with intervening stories between them rather than consecutively. For each mini-cycle, the analysis is based on close reading of both the linking elements—character, imagery, symbolism, and so forth—and the rhetorical and aesthetic effects of the mini-cycle’s being made up of distinct stories rather than constructed as one long narrative.

Southern Writers

Southern Writers PDF Author: Joseph M. Flora
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807131237
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

I Had the Strangest Dream...

I Had the Strangest Dream... PDF Author: Kelly Sullivan Walden
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 0446557102
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
In the mega-selling tradition of The Dreamer’s Dictionary comes a comprehensive, contemporary guide to understanding dreams and the unconscious mind. With over 3,500 symbols and a 7-step guide to applying their definitions to one’s life, this is the ultimate guide for today’s dreamer. It's a double-caf low-fat Frappuccino-kind of world, and all that bustle doesn't stop just because it's time for bed. While you sleep, your mind is busy going over everything you've experienced during the day. Now, with the only dream book that interprets both classic and new twenty-first century symbols - everything from speed dating and Botox to text messages and iPods - you can tap into your unconscious with the turn of a page. Discover the messages hidden in your dreams, your hopes, your fears, your unrealized strengths and potential. You'll learn how to recognize life-altering opportunities and become the person you've always dreamed of being.

Diana's Dogs

Diana's Dogs PDF Author: Ed Ifkovic
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595471048
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
The Guinness Book of World Records calls her the best-selling female singer in history. Billboard named her the Celebrity of the Century. Diana Ross, lead singer of the most popular girl group of the 1960s and later a consummate solo artist, has been in the public eye for over four decades. From 1964-when "Where Did Our Love Go?" rose to number one on the pop charts-to the present day, she has been the ultimate diva, an artist worshiped by fanatical fans, yet pilloried in the press for her temper tantrums and untoward demands. Ed Ifkovic delivers his own spin on this international celebrity, an idiosyncratic collection of short pieces that create a portrait of the mercurial star. From a Detroit housing project to a Connecticut mansion-who is this woman who exacts such loyalty from her fans and such vitriol from her detractors? There are pieces on Diana's tantrums, true, but also jottings on the homes she's lived in, the food she eats, the cars she drives, even her role as muse for writers. There is a collection of poetic similes commentators have employed to describe her, as well as a mind-boggling catalogue of garish tabloid headlines. This off-beat book, admittedly an obsessive fan's unembarrassed send-up-equal parts delight and censure-is a spirited yet sardonic tale that also explores the integration of black music into the white mainstream. Frankly, Diana led that noble charge. What the author delights in is the unorthodox observation and gossipy tidbit that accompanied that revolution.

Short Story Index

Short Story Index PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Short stories
Languages : en
Pages : 1080

Book Description


A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain PDF Author: Robert Olen Butler
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802193897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: “Uncannily perceptive stories written by an American from the viewpoint of Vietnamese citizens transplanted to Louisiana” (People). A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of lyrical and poignant stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its enduring impact on the Vietnamese. Written in a soaring prose, Butler’s haunting and powerful stories blend Vietnamese folklore and contemporary American realities, creating a vibrant panorama that is epic in its scope. This new edition includes two previously uncollected stories—“Missing” and “Salem”—that brilliantly complete the collection’s narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam to explore the experiences of a former Vietcong soldier and an American MIA. “Deeply affecting . . . A brilliant collection of stories about storytellers whose recited folklore radiates as implicit prayer . . . One of the strongest collections I’ve read in ages.” —Ann Beattie

Invaders

Invaders PDF Author: W. P. Kinsella
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
ISBN: 1616962275
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
The invasion of the future has begun. Literary legends including Steven Millhauser, Junot Diáz, Amiri Baraka, and Katharine Dunn have attacked the borders of the every day. Like time traveling mad-scientists, they have concocted outrageous creations from the future. They have seized upon tales of technology gone wrong and mandated that pulp fiction must finally grow up. In these wildly-speculative stories you will discover the company that controls the world from an alley in Greenwich Village. You’ll find nanotechnology that returns memories to the residents of a nursing home. You’ll rally an avian-like alien to become a mascot for a Major League Baseball team. The Invaders are here. But did science fiction colonize them first?