The Fun Stuff And Other Essays

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0374709068
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fun Stuff written by James Wood and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works—books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation—The Fun Stuff confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches—that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leon Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov—Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Aleksandar Hemon, and Michel Houellebecq. Included in The Fun Stuff are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming—which was a finalist for last year's National Magazine Awards—as well as Wood's essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for the Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.

Author : David Foster Wallace
Publisher : Back Bay Books
ISBN 13 : 0316090522
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again written by David Foster Wallace and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These widely acclaimed essays from the author of Infinite Jest -- on television, tennis, cruise ships, and more -- established David Foster Wallace as one of the preeminent essayists of his generation. In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner -- David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.

Author : Alison Bechdel
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780618871711
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fun Home written by Alison Bechdel and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374722048
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Serious Noticing written by James Wood and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive collection of literary essays by The New Yorker’s award-winning longtime book critic Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own. Together, Wood’s essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works, share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Brandeis University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611687438
Total Pages : 64 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Nearest Thing to Life written by James Wood and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works - among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to LifeÊis not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic - it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374159564
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fun Stuff written by James Wood and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects twenty-five essays critiquing the modern novel, analyzing the works of such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon.

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1628920467
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How to Write About Music written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, you'd do best to hone your chops and avoid clichés (like the one that begins this sentence) by learning from the prime movers. How to Write About Music offers a selection of the best writers on what is perhaps our most universally beloved art form. Selections from the critically-acclaimed 33 1/3 series appear alongside new interviews and insights from authors like Lester Bangs, Chuck Klosterman, Owen Pallet, Ann Powers and Alex Ross. How to Write About Music includes primary sources of inspiration from a variety of go-to genres such as the album review, the personal essay, the blog post and the interview along with tips, writing prompts and advice from the writers themselves. Music critics of the past and the present offer inspiration through their work on artists like Black Sabbath, Daft Punk, J Dilla, Joy Division, Kanye West, Neutral Milk Hotel, Radiohead, Pussy Riot and countless others. How to Write About Music is an invaluable text for all those who have ever dreamed of getting their music writing published and a pleasure for everyone who loves to read about music.

Author : Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1785335677
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Organic Cinema written by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “organic” is by now a venerable concept within aesthetics, architecture, and art history, but what might such a term mean within the spatialities and temporalities of film? By way of an answer, this concise and innovative study locates organicity in the work of Béla Tarr, the renowned Hungarian filmmaker and pioneer of the “slow cinema” movement. Through a wholly original analysis of the long take and other signature features of Tarr’s work, author Thorsten Botz-Bornstein establishes compelling links between the seemingly remote spheres of film and architecture, revealing shared organic principles that emphasize the transcendence of boundaries.

Author : Arlie Russell Hochschild
Publisher : University of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520272285
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book So How's the Family? written by Arlie Russell Hochschild and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new collection of thirteen essays, Arlie Russell Hochschild—author of the groundbreaking exploration of emotional labor, The Managed Heart and The Outsourced Self—focuses squarely on the impact of social forces on the emotional side of intimate life. From the “work” it takes to keep personal life personal, put feeling into work, and empathize with others; to the cultural “blur” between market and home; the effect of a social class gap on family wellbeing; and the movement of care workers around the globe, Hochschild raises deep questions about the modern age. In an eponymous essay, she even points towards a possible future in which a person asking “How’s the family?” hears the proud answer, “Couldn’t be better.”

Author : Ryan M. Blanck
Publisher : CreateSpace
ISBN 13 : 9781490935157
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Supposedly Fun Things... written by Ryan M. Blanck and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-07-06 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaperoning Grad Nite at Disneyland… Spending eight hours in the Prospective Juror holding room… Reading AP exam essays for fifty-six hours… Detoxing from an addiction to prescription narcotics… Travelling 7000 miles to present a paper at a literary conference in Antwerp, Belgium… In this collection of narrative and critical essays, Ryan M Blanck explores the “irony of the banal” in these situations and others. Influenced by the writing style of David Foster Wallace and heavily footnoted, Supposedly Fun Things… offers candid reflections on some of life's most ordinary – and extraordinary – events.