Understanding Contemporary American Literature
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Understanding John Rechy
by María DeGuzmán
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
In this first book-length monograph on the Mexican American novelist, essayist, and playwright John Rechy, best known for his debut novel City of Night, María DeGuzmán offers a conceptually clear yet aesthetically, philosophically, and socio-politically fine-grained analysis of the spectrum of his writing. Recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, ONE Magazine's National Gay and Lesbian Cultural Hero Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement, Rechy is the author of fifteen novels, at least three plays, and several volumes of nonfiction. He has written for the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and Saturday Review. In Understanding John Rechy, María DeGuzmán offers a brief biographical overview and then traces the development of Rechy's craft through his major works by calling attention to central issues, recurring situations and characters, styles, and special techniques. She examines the complexities of his representation of identity, the subjectivity in his male-homosexual odyssey and identity quest novels, and his experimentation with genre. She offers a concise yet intricate analysis of the major organizing paradigms and themes, genres, modes, styles, and handling of the gay Chicano's oeuvre. The book's guiding analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which Rechy's works function as cultural critique challenging mainstream values in a deep-structure way.
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Understanding Philip Roth
by Matthew A. Shipe
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
A panoramic and accessible guide to one of the most celebrated-and controversial-authors of the twentieth century
Philip Roth was one of the most prominent, controversial, and prolific American writers of his generation. By the time of his death in 2018,he had won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards. In Understanding Philip Roth, Matthew A. Shipe provides a brief biographical sketch followed by an illuminating and accessible reading of Roth's novels, illustrating how the writer constructed one of the richest bodies of work in American letters, capturing the absurdities, contradictions, and turmoil that shaped the United States in the six decades following the Second World War.
Questions of Jewish American identity, the irrationality of male sexual desire, the nature of the American experiment-these are a few of the central concerns that run throughout Roth's oeuvre, and across which his early and late novels speak to one another. Moreover, Shipe considers how Roth's fiction engaged with its historical moment, providing a broader context for understanding how his novels address the changes that transformed American culture during his lifetime.
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Understanding Truman Capote
by Thomas Fahy
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Truman Capote-and his most famous works, In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's-continue to have a powerful hold over the American popular imagination, along with his glamorous lifestyle, which included hobnobbing with the rich and famous and frequenting the most elite nightclubs in Manhattan. In Understanding Truman Capote, Thomas Fahy offers a way to reconsider the author's place in literary criticism, the canon, and the classroom.
By reading Capote's work in its historical context, Fahy reveals the politics shaping his writing and refutes any notion of Capote as disconnected from the political. Instead this study positions him as a writer deeply engaged with the social anxieties of the postwar years. It also applies a highly interdisciplinary framework to the author's writing that includes discussions of McCarthyism, the Lavender Scare, automobile culture, juvenile delinquency, suburbia, Beat culture, the early civil rights movement, female sexuality as embodied by celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, and atomic age anxieties. This new approach to studying Capote will be of interest in the fields of literature, history, film, suburban studies, sociology, gender/sexuality studies, African American literary studies, and American and cultural studies.
Capote's writing captures the isolation, marginalization, and persecution of those who deviated from or failed to achieve white middle-class ideals and highlights the artificiality of mainstream idealizations about American culture. His work reveals the deleterious consequences of nostalgia, the insidious impact of suppression, the dangers of Cold War propaganda, and the importance of equal rights. Ultimately, Capote's writing reflects a critical engagement with American culture that challenges us to rethink our understanding of the 1940s and 1950s.
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Understanding Jennifer Egan
by Alexander Moran
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding Jennifer Egan is the first book-length study of the novelist, short-story writer, and journalist best known for the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Alexander Moran examines each of Egan's varied published works, analyzes how her journalism informs her fiction, excavates her literary and intellectual influences, and considers her place in contemporary fiction.
Moran argues that because Egan's fiction is not easily categorized many of her novels have been underappreciated. He proposes a framework for understanding her writing centered on what it means to have, and to write, an "authentic" experience. In Emerald City, Egan explores the authenticity of touristic experience; in The Invisible Circus, her focus shifts to the authenticity of historical memory; in Look at Me, The Keep, and A Visit from the Goon Squad, she explores the effects of digital technology on how we understand authentic experience. In the concluding chapter, Moran discusses Egan's 2017 novel Manhattan Beach as a text that explores the authenticity of history and genre while resonating with the instability of the present.
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Understanding Barbara Kingsolver
by Ian Tan
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
A modern understanding of critically acclaimed and best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver's fiction.
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Understanding Margaret Atwood
by Donna M. Bickford
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
A timely, accessible introduction to Margaret Atwood's most recent novels and enduring themes
In 2017, the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale introduced the acclaimed and bestselling Canadian author to a new generation and reminded Atwood's long-established readers of her uncanny prescience.
Understanding Margaret Atwood provides an overview of the author's life, descriptions and analyses of the key themes present in her most recent novels, signposts to the connections and intertextual references between them, and attention to their critical reception. Following a biographical overview, author Donna M. Bickford studies The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and its sequel The Testaments (2019), retellings of The Odyssey in The Penelopiad (2005) and The Tempest in Hag Seed (2016), the MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), and The Heart Goes Last (2015). Written in clear language and a style appropriate both for scholars and for new students of Atwood, Bickford locates Atwood's recent works in the literary, political, and social context.
Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, essays, and poetry, which have collectively sold more than eight million copies worldwide; has received numerous awards and accolades, including multiple Booker Prizes and a PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award; and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Understanding Jim Grimsley
by David Deutsch
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Since the early 1980s, Jim Grimsley has received increasing acclaim for his achievements in a variety of dramatic and literary genres. Through his novels, plays, and short stories, Grimsley portrays an unrelenting search for happiness and interrogates themes of corruption, technology, poverty, domestic abuse, sexuality, and faith in the contemporary United States. Through unique characters and a multitude of forms, the award-winning author explores the complexities of southern culture, his own troubled childhood, and larger pieces of the human experience. In Understanding Jim Grimsley, David Deutsch offers the first book-length study of Grimsley's diverse work and argues for his vital role in shaping the contemporary queer American literary scene. Deutsch helps readers navigate the intricacies of Grimsley's influential drama, fiction, and fantasy science fiction-including his most popular novel, Dream Boy-by weaving together discussions of common themes. Placing Grimsley's plays, novels, and short stories in conversation with one another, Deutsch reveals Grimsley's development throughout a career in which he has investigated hope and hardship, youth and maturity, experimentation and convention. Deutsch also provides vital historical and cultural contexts for understanding how Grimsley engages, expands, and challenges literary and theatrical traditions. Deutsch demonstrates a deep, critical understanding of Grimsley's hard-earned, pragmatic optimism. Intertwining Grimsley's major fiction and plays and contextualizing these within a broader American landscape, this volume brings his work more completely into the conversation on southern queer literature.
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Understanding Michael Chabon
by Joseph Dewey
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Pulitzer Prizewinning author Michael Chabon has emerged as one of the most daring writers of American fiction in the post-Pynchon era. Joseph Dewey examines how Chabon's narratives have sought to bring together the defining elements of the two principal expressions of the American narrative that his generation inherited: the formal extravagances of postmodernism and the compelling storytelling of psychological realism. Like the audacious, self-conscious excesses of Pynchon and his postmodern disciples, Dewey argues, Chabon's fictions are extravagant, often ironic, experiments into form animated by dense verbal and linguistic energy. As with the probing texts of psychological realism by Updike and his faithful, Chabon's fictions center on keenly drawn, recognizable characters caught up in familiar, heartbreaking dilemmas; enthralling storylines compelled by suspense, enriched with suggestive symbols; and humane themes about love and death, work and family, and sexuality and religion. Evolving over three decades, this hybrid fiction has made Chabon not only one of the most widely read composers of serious fiction of his guild but one of the most critically respected writers as well, thus positioning Chabon as a representative voice of the generation. Dewey's study, the first to examine the full breadth of Chabon's fiction from his landmark debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, to his controversial 2012 best seller, Telegraph Avenue, places Chabon's fictional sensibility, for all its hipness, within what has been the defining theme of American literature since the provocative romances of Hawthorne and Melville: the anxious tension between escape and engagement; between the sweet, centripetal pull of the redemptive imagination as a splendid, if imperfect, engine of retreat and the harsh, centrifugal pull of real life itself, recklessly deformed by the crude handiwork of surprise and chance and unable to coax even the simplest appearance of logic.
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Understanding David Henry Hwang
by William C. Boles
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
David Henry Hwang is best known as the author of M. Butterfly, which won a 1988 Tony Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and he has written the Obie Award-winners Golden Child and FOB, as well as Family Devotions, Sound and Beauty, Rich Relations, and a revised version of Flower Drum Song. His Yellow Face won a 2008 Obie Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Understanding David Henry Hwang is a critical study of Hwang's playwriting process as well as the role of identity in each one of Hwang's major theatrical works. A first-generation Asian American, Hwang intrinsically understands the complications surrounding the competing attractiveness of an American identity with its freedoms in contrast to the importance of a cultural and ethnic identity connected to another country's culture. William C. Boles examines Hwang's plays by exploring the perplexing struggles surrounding Asian and Asian American stereotypes, values, and identity. Boles argues that Hwang deliberately uses stereotypes in order to subvert them, while at other times he embraces the dual complexity of ethnicity when it is tied to national identity and ethnic history. In addition to the individual questions of identity as they pertain to ethnicity, Boles discusses how Hwang's plays explore identity issues of gender, religion, profession, and sexuality. The volume concludes with a treatment of Chinglish, both in the context of rising Chinese economic prominence and in the context of Hwang's previous work. Hwang has written ten short plays including The Dance and the Railroad, five screenplays, and many librettos for musical theater. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, Hwang was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
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Understanding John Guare
by William W. Demastes
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
John Guare, one of the most innovative and influential contemporary American playwrights of the last sixty years, is best known for such works as House of Blue Leaves, winner of an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and four Tony Awards, and Six Degrees of Separation, recipient of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and the Olivier Best Play Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. In Understanding John Guare, William W. Demastes provides a concise biography and analyzes the playwright's career from his earliest works produced off-off Broadway in the 1960s to his most recent Broadway play, A Free Man of Color, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Often compared to his contemporaries Sam Shepard and David Mamet, who have distinctive voices tied to their mastery of realistic, idiomatic American English, Guare has a style that is perhaps more varied, Demastes speculates, the result of his formal training in theater. After earning a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, Guare earned an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. He then polished his theater craft in New York City during the exciting and turbulent 1960s, breaking from realist conventions and creating an unlikely blend of comedy, burlesque, stand-up comedy, and absurdly incongruous plotlines. The result has been a theater of surprise, rich in stage action, and experimentally invigorating. Demastes examines Guare's tools and techniques such as mixing serious with comic, creating characters who break into song and dance, inserting standup comedy routines, and drawing from the most absurd incongruities of everyday life. In doing so, Guare has created plays about the best and worst of humanity, about lost souls, and about delusional ideals.
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Understanding James Leo Herlihy
by Robert Ward
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding James Leo Herlihy is the first book-length study of one of America's most neglected post–war writers. Herlihy (1927–1993), an occasional actor, made his professional mark in life as a playwright and novelist. Herlihy produced a significant body of work, which includes numerous plays, two collections of short stories, and three novels. His best-known novel, Midnight Cowboy, was later adapted into a screenplay by John Schlesinger. It was the only X-rated movie to receive an Academy Award-three, in fact, in 1969: best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay. In Understanding James Leo Herlihy, Robert Ward examines Herlihy's writing with reference to its historical, cultural, and personal contexts. Ward portrays Herlihy as a product of his environment, influenced by the 1950s and 1960s culture, including the youth rebellion, the erosion of the traditional family, and the increasing sexual liberation. Herlihy's award-winning novels, plays, and short stories display persistent themes of displacement, alienation, and the loss of innocence-all themes that Ward views as parallel to Herlihy's personal life. Understanding James Leo Herlihy offers a detailed analysis of Herlihy's key works and their relation to his personal life. Through a biographical introduction, a detailed discussion of the major novels, plays, and short stories, and a substantial bibliography, Ward details the writer's critically and commercially successful works.
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Understanding Walter Mosley
by Jennifer Larson
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Walter Mosley is perhaps best known for his first published mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress, which became the basis for the 1995 movie of the same name featuring Denzel Washington. Mosley has since written more than forty books across an impressive expanse of genres including, but not limited to, nonfiction, science fiction, drama, and even young adult fiction, garnering him many honors including an O'Henry Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Grammy Award, a Pen Center Lifetime Achievement Award, and two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction. In Understanding Walter Mosley, Jennifer Larson considers Mosley's corpus as a whole to help readers more fully understand the evolution of his literary agenda. All Mosley's texts feature his trademark accessibility as well as his penchant for creating narratives that both entertain and instruct. Larson examines how Mosley's writing interrogates, complicates, and contextualizes recurring moral, social, and even personal questions. She also considers the possible roots of Mosley's enduring popularity with a diverse group of readers. Larson then traces key themes and claims throughout the Easy Rawlins series to show how Mosley's beloved hero offers unique perspectives on race, class, and masculinity in the mid– to late twentieth century; explores the ways in which Fearless Jones, Mosley's second detective, both builds on and diverges from his predecessor's character; and looks at how the works featuring Leonid McGill, Mosley's junior detective, center on understanding the complex relationship between present-day social dilemmas and the personal as well as the communal past. Regarding Mosley's other genres, Larson argues that the science fiction works together portray a future in which race, class, and gender are completely reimagined, yet still subject to an oppressive power dynamic, while his erotica asks readers to reconsider the dynamics of power and control but in a more personal, even intimate, context. Similarly, in Mosley's nongenre fiction, stories are revived through a reconnection with the past, a reclaiming of cultural heritage and lineage, and a rejection of classist visions of power. Finally, Mosley's nonfiction, which persuades his audience to act through writing, humanitarian efforts, or social uprising, offers a mix of lessons aimed at guiding readers through the same questions that inform his fiction writing.
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Understanding Gary Shteyngart
by Geoff Hamilton
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding Gary Shteyngart, the first comprehensive examination of Shteyngart's novels and memoir, introduces readers to one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful contemporary American authors. Born in Leningrad in 1972, Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979, attended Oberlin College and the City University of New York, and currently teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University. His novels include Super Sad True Love Story, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Absurdistan, chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and The Russian Debutante's Handbook, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Geoff Hamilton studies three broad, overlapping elements of Shteyngart's work: his construction of Russian-Jewish identity in the United States, his appraisal of communism's imaginative legacy for the wider East European diaspora and former Soviet republics, and his representation of the deadening effects of late capitalism. Focusing on Shteyngart's themes of the fracturing and decay of ethnic identities, the limits and pitfalls of multiculturalism, and the decline of privacy and civility against the creeping power of technological mediation, Hamilton also tracks the author's playful manipulation of literary traditions and his incisive revision of seminal mythologies of Russian, Jewish, and American selfhood. Although Shteyngart has sometimes been pigeon-holed as an immigrant author working a rather marginal ethnic shtick, Hamilton demonstrates that Shteyngart's work deserves attention for its remarkable centrality, that is, its relevance to core questions of identity formation and the conditions of belief common to globalized societies.
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Understanding Norman Mailer
by Maggie McKinley
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
As a renowned novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, speaker, aspiring politician, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Norman Mailer was one of the most prominent American literary and cultural figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Over the course of his expansive sixty-year career, Mailer published nearly forty original works of fiction and nonfiction, served as a counterculture activist, and was cofounder of the Village Voice. Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer also received the National Book Award and the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to Arts and Letters, a lifetime achievement award granted by the National Book Foundation. Understanding Norman Mailer is the first book of literary criticism to address Mailer's impressive body of work in its entirety, from his first publication to his last. Situating these volumes in their historical and cultural context, Maggie McKinley traces the major themes and philosophies that pervade Mailer's canon, analyzing his representations of gender, sexuality, violence, technology, politics, faith, celebrity, existentialism, and national identity. McKinley moves chronologically through Mailer's career, illuminating the many genres, styles, and perspectives with which Mailer experimented over time, demonstrating his remarkable artistic reach. McKinley also addresses Mailer's reputation as a combative public figure who, amid controversy surrounding his personal life and public persona, remained committed to lively intellectual debate. Through Understanding Norman Mailer, an accessible introduction to Mailer's life and work, McKinley offers a unique retrospective, articulating the development and changes within Mailer's ideas over time while highlighting concerns that remained at the center of his work for decades.
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Understanding Dave Eggers
by Timothy W. Galow
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding Dave Eggers is the first book-length study incorporating Egger's novels, short-story collections, and films by surveying thematic and stylistic developments in the work of one of the most celebrated American authors of the twenty-first century. Timothy W. Galow offers a textual analysis centered on major issues in academic scholarship, but explores them in an accessible way that gives Eggers's texts primary attention. Unlike other scholarship on Eggers, this work uniquely combines Egger's early autobiographical works and the subject of celebrity as well as his later texts that deal with humanitarian issues. Galow devotes a chapter to each of Eggers's major works, from his first book, the Pulitzer Prize–nominated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, though his most recent novel, A Hologram for the King, a National Book Award finalist about an aging American businessman chasing success in Saudi Arabia. Other chapters cover You Shall Know Our Velocity, What Is the What, and Zeitoun. Each chapter studies the major themes and styles of the featured work while also placing it in the context of Eggers's oeuvre. In this way Galow examines each text in its own right, but he also offers us a larger guide to all of Egger's work. Providing important historical background for understanding Eggers's literary work, Galow examines how Eggers's texts are deeply invested in both his own public persona and the changing cultural conditions in the United States over the past twenty years. Galow's careful analysis is conveyed in clear language that engages issues important to contemporary critics without being pedantic or jargon laden. As a result Understanding Dave Eggers can serve as a useful introduction to the author's work or a valuable resource for the devoted reader.
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Understanding Edward P. Jones
by James W. Coleman
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
In Understanding Edward P. Jones, James W. Coleman analyzes Jones's award-winning works as well as the significant influences that have shaped his craft. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Jones has made that city and its African American community the subject of or background for most of his fiction. Though Jones's first work was published in 1976, his career developed slowly. While he worked for two decades as a proofreader and abstractor, Jones published short fiction in such periodicals as Essence, the New Yorker, and Paris Review. His first collection, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and subsequent books, including The Known World and All Aunt Hagar's Children, received similar accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Following an overview of Jones's life, influences, and career, Coleman provides an introduction to the technique of Jones's fiction, which he likens to a tapestry, woven of intricate, varied, and sometimes disparate elements. He then analyzes the formal structure, themes, and characters of The Known World and devotes a chapter each to the short story collections Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar's Children. His discussion of these volumes focuses on Jones's narrative technique; the themes of family, community, and broader tradition; and the connections through which the stories in each volume collectively create a thematic whole. In his final chapter, Coleman assesses Jones's encompassing outlook that sees African American life in distinct periods but also as a historical whole, simultaneously in the future, the past, and the present.
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Understanding Ron Rash
by John Lang
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
In this first book-length analysis of Ron Rash's fiction and poetry, John Lang covers all of Rash's books published through 2013 and offers key insights about his aims, themes, literary techniques and allusions, and major literary influences. Understanding Ron Rash introduces readers to the major themes and literary techniques in Ron Rash's poetry and fiction in the fourteen books he has published through 2013. After a brief survey of Rash's life and career, five subsequent chapters examine his work by genre, following the chronology of his books' publication. Lang begins with Rash's first three collections of short fiction, examining their themes and style and interconnections. In an analysis of Rash's four volumes of poetry, Lang emphasizes both their grounding in Appalachia and their universal appeal. Then an examination of his first three novels considers Rash's historical and ecological and religious concerns as well as his desire to preserve what is rapidly vanishing, including the region's vernacular language. Rash's best-known and most accomplished novel, Serena, with its vivid characters, is examined for its striking use of dramatic techniques, and varied literary allusions. After a study of his most recent novel, The Cove, Lang's critical study's returns to Rash's recent work in short fiction: his Frank O'Connor Award-winning Burning Bright and Nothing Gold Can Stay, both of which demonstrate his wide-ranging subject matter and characters as well as his incisive portrait of contemporary life in Appalachia and beyond. An extensive bibliography of primary and secondary materials by and about Rash concludes the book, making it especially useful to students and teachers who want to learn more about Rash's work.
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Understanding John Updike
by Frederic Svoboda
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932–2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nation's life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author's deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended close readings of Updike's most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood. A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis's earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number-one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called "the adulterous society" in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation's fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike's professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation-not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.
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Understanding Marsha Norman
by Lisa Tyler
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning play 'night, Mother and her acclaimed adaptations of The Secret Garden and The Color Purple for musical theater, Marsha Norman has produced an impressive oeuvre that includes not only works for the stage but also a novel and several television screenplays. The first book on the Louisville-born writer in twenty years, Understanding Marsha Norman introduces readers to her life and work while making a persuasive case for her preeminence among America's leading dramatic artists. Following a biographical introduction, the book examines such early plays as Getting Out, Third and Oak, and Circus Valentine, which, according to the playwright herself, taught her the skills she needed to write her more successful works-most notably the much-lauded two-character drama 'night, Mother, which centers around an apparently rational young woman's choice to commit suicide. Subsequent chapters examine Norman's underrated novel The Fortune Teller and three mid-career plays that rewrite the traditions of the Western, the biblical story of Sarah and Abraham, and the legend of Daniel Boone. Her more recent plays, including Trudy Blue, 140, and Last Dance, acknowledge the limitations of romantic relationships, while her forays into musical theater and television, including scripts for such programs as Law and Order: Criminal Intent and the Peabody-winning HBO series In Treatment, signal a dramatist who is ever willing to take risks and venture into new genres. At her best when writing about interesting and troubled women and their relationships with each other, Norman has received much less critical attention than male contemporaries such as Sam Shepard and David Mamet. This engaging and edifying book helps rectify that disparity.
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Understanding James Baldwin
by Marc Dudley
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. What concerned him most-as a black man, as a gay man, as an American-were notions of isolation and disconnection at both the individual and communal level and a conviction that only in the transformative power of love could humanity find any hope of healing its spiritual and social wounds. In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc K. Dudley shows that a proper grasp of Baldwin's work begins with a grasp of the times in which he wrote. During a career spanning the civil rights movement and beyond, Baldwin stood at the heart of intellectual and political debate, writing about race, sexual identity, and gendered politics, while traveling the world to promote dialogue on those issues. In surveying the writer's life, Dudley traces the shift in Baldwin's aspirations from occupying the pulpit like his stepfather to becoming a writer amid the turmoil of sexual self-discovery and the harsh realities of American racism and homophobia. The book's analyses of key works in the Baldwin canon-among them, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, "Sonny's Blues," Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Devil Finds Work-demonstrate the consistency, contrary to some critics' claims, of Baldwin's vision and thematic concerns. As police violence against people of color, a resurgence in white supremacist rhetoric, and pushback against LGBTQ rights fill today's headlines, James Baldwin's powerful and often-angry words find a new resonance. From early on, Baldwin decried the damning potential of alienation and the persistent bigotry that feeds it. Yet, even as it sometimes wavered, his hope for both the individual and the nation remained intact. In the present historical moment, James Baldwin matters more than ever.
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Understanding John Edgar Wideman
by D. Quentin Miller
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Among the many gifted African American authors who emerged in the 1970s and 80s, John Edgar Wideman is one of the most challenging and innovative. His analytical mind can turn almost any topic into an intellectual adventure, whether it is playground basketball, the blues, the prison experience, father-son relationships, or the stories he lived or heard growing up in the impoverished section of Pittsburgh known as Homewood. In Understanding John Edgar Wideman, D. Quentin Miller offers a comprehensive overview of Wideman's writings, which range from the critically acclaimed books of the Homewood Trilogy to lesser known writings such as the early novels A Glance Away and The Lynchers. Notably Miller includes the first scholarly analysis of Writing to Save a Life, Wideman's recently published meditation on the military trial and execution of the father of civil rights martyr Emmett Till. In his fiction, nonfiction, and works that artfully combine both forms, Wideman has employed a multilayered and often difficult writing style in order to explore a wide range of topics. Miller tackles such topics as African American folk history, the intersection of personal and public history, the confluence of oral and written traditions, and the quest for meaning in nihilistic urban settings where black families struggle against crime, poverty, and despair. Miller also shows how Wideman's singular personal history is interwoven into his writings. His impressive accomplishments, including an Ivy League education and numerous literary honors, have come alongside family tragedies. By the time his sixth novel was published, both his brother and son were serving life sentences for murder, a source of anguish that he wrestled with in Brothers and Keepers and Fatheralong. Wideman writes with such authority on so many subjects that readers frequently have no idea what to expect with a new publication. Understanding John Edgar Wideman is thus a necessary guide to a prolific, varied, and essential oeuvre.
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Toni Morrison's Fiction
by Jan Furman
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity, and the self and other. As Furman demonstrates, Morrison more often than not renders meaning for characters and readers through an unflinching inquiry, if not resolution, of these enduring conflicts. She is not interested in tidy solutions. Enlightened self-love, knowledge, and struggle, even without the promise of salvation, are the moral measure of Morrison's characters, fiction, and literary imagination. Tracing Morrison's developing art and her career as a public intellectual, Furman examines the novels in order of publication. She also decodes their collective narrative chronology, which begins in the late seventeenth century and ends in the late twentieth century, as Morrison delineates three hundred years of African American experience. In Furman's view Morrison tells new and difficult stories of old, familiar histories such as the making of Colonial America and the racing of American society. In the final chapters Furman pays particular attention to form, noting Morrison's continuing practice of the kind of deep novelistic structure that transcends plot and imparts much of a novel's meaning. Furman demonstrates, through her helpful analyses, how engaging such innovations can be.
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Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston
by Julia H. Lee
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Maxine Hong Kingston is known for using a distinctive blend of autobiography, fantasy, and folklore to explore the history, experience, and identity of Chinese Americans. This is exemplified in her first book, The Woman Warrior, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, a bestseller, and a staple on college and university syllabi. Although The Woman Warrior is by far her most celebrated book, Kingston has penned a wide range of essays, fiction, and poetry, including China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Hawai'i One Summer, To Be a Poet, The Fifth Book of Peace, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and the edited volume Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston is the first book-length work to examine the entirety of Kingston's literary career, from The Woman Warrior to her most recent volume of poetry. Julia H. Lee weaves together scholarly assessments, interviews, biographical information, and her own critical analysis to provide a complete and complex picture of Kingston's works and its impact on memoir, feminist fiction, Asian American literature, and postmodern literature. Lee examines the influence that previous generations of Asian American authors, feminism, and antiwar activism have had on Kingston's work. Offering important contextual information about Kingston's life, Lee shows how it has so often served as a starting point for Kingston's writing. Also studied are her complex attitudes toward genre, and her ever-evolving identity as a novelist, essayist, memoirist, and poet. A comprehensive bibliography of critical secondary sources will be an invaluable resource for readers and critics of Kingston's works.
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Understanding Colum McCann
by John Cusatis
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding Colum McCann chronicles the Irish-born writer's journey to literary celebrity from his days as a teenage sportswriter for the Irish Press in the 1970s, through the publication of his award-winning first story, Tresses, in 1990, to his winning the 2009 National Book Award in fiction for the international bestseller Let the Great World Spin. In this first critical study of McCann's body of work, John Cusatis provides an introduction to McCann's life and career; an overview of his major themes, style, and influences; and close readings of his two short story collections and five novels. Cusatis traces McCann's redefinition of the Irish novel, exploring the author's propensity for transcending aesthetic, cultural, ethnic, geographical, and social boundaries in his ascent from the status of Irish novelist to international novelist. In the process, this study illuminates the various incarnations of McCann's perennial subject: exile, both geographical and emotional. Cusatis also delineates how the influences of McCann's Irish upbringing, penchant for international travel, and exhaustive and eclectic reading of literature manifest themselves in his fiction. Close attention is given to McCann's stylistic trademarks, such as his poetic voice, use of Christian symbolism, Irish and classical mythology, intertextuality, multiple viewpoints, nonlinear plot structure, and the merger of what McCann deems factual truth and textual truth. Understanding Colum McCann makes use of the existing body of published interviews, profiles, and critical articles, as well as a decade of correspondence between Cusatis and McCann. With international interest in McCann on the rise, this first full-length study of his career to date serves as an ideal point of entrance for students, scholars, and serious readers, and offers the biographical and critical foundation necessary for a deeper understanding of McCann's fiction.
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Understanding Jonathan Lethem
by Matthew Luter
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding Jonathan Lethem is a study of the novels, short fiction, and nonfiction on a wide range of subjects in the arts by American novelist Jonathan Lethem, who is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Motherless Brooklyn, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Gun, with Occasional Music. Matthew Luter explores the key contemporaries of and influences on Lethem, who is the Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. Luter begins this volume by explaining how Lethem's innovative and provocative essay on creative appropriation "The Ecstasy of Influence" differs from other writing about influence, suggesting an artistic mode that celebrates thoughtful borrowing. Readings of Lethem's three major novels follow: taken together, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City present a novelist coming to terms with the joys and downsides of artistic influence. Motherless Brooklyn pays tribute to and subverts traditional hardboiled detective novels as Lethem plays with the conventions of a favorite (and influential) genre. Fortress dwells obsessively on appreciation and criticism of influential art, as Lethem's main character spends a lifetime contemplating the complexities of the art he loves, interrogating his own reactions to it, and thinking through the political implications of the ways he has been influenced by that which he consumes. Chronic City depicts the cost of fandom and the dangers of giving over too much of oneself to the art that one loves, dramatized via a character brought nearly to ruin not by the demands of artistic creation, but by obsessive cultural consumption. Borrowing openly and promiscuously from earlier traditions both high and low (experimental fiction, comic books, art film, detective novels), Lethem displays a career-long interest in questioning what literary originality might mean in a postmodern age. Some suggest that such borrowings indicate a literary well that has run dry, making writers such as Lethem mere patchwork artists. Luter argues instead that Lethem's propensity for wearing his influences and obsessions on his sleeve encourages new thought about originality itself. Out with "it's all been done" and in with "look at all that's been done, and all that we can still do with it!"
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Understanding Alice Adams
by Bryant Mangum
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
In Understanding Alice Adams, Bryant Mangum examines the thematic intricacies and astute social commentary of Adams's eleven novels and five short story collections. Throughout her career Adams was known for creating and re-creating the "Alice Adams woman," who is bright, honest, attractive, thoughtful-and sometimes a bit offbeat. As Mangum notes, Adams's central characters-her heroes-are most often women struggling toward self-sufficiency and independence as they strive to fulfill their responsibilities, including child rearing and other societal commitments. After an overview of Adams's life (1926–1999), Mangum groups the novels and stories by the decades in which they were published, since shifts in the thematic arc of Adams's fiction break conveniently along those lines. He explains how Adams used the novel as an extended workshop for her short fiction. Her novels cover wide swaths of the American experience, and from these sweeping narratives she distilled her sharp, lyrical, vibrant short stories, which earned her twenty-three O. Henry Awards-including six first-place recognitions and a lifetime achievement award-an honor shared with only Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Alice Munro. In this study Mangum explores how Adams treats love, family, work, friendship, and nostalgia. He identifies hope as a thread that links all her main characters, despite how accurately she had anticipated the complexities and challenges that accompanied increased freedom for women in the later twentieth century.
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Understanding Bharati Mukherjee
by Ruth Maxey
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Bharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers-Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford-came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.
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Understanding William S. Burroughs
by Gerald Alva Miller
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Through critical readings, Gerald Alva Miller, Jr., examines the life of William S. Burroughs and the evolution of his various radical styles not just in writing but also in audio, film, and painting. Although Burroughs remains tied to the Beat Generation, his works prove more revolutionary. Miller argues that Burroughs, more than any other author, ushered in the era of both postmodern fiction and post structural philosophy. Through this study, Miller situates Burroughs within the larger countercultural movements that began in the 1950s, when his novels became influential because of their examination of various control systems (from sex and drugs to global or even intergalactic conspiracies).
Understanding William S. Burroughs begins by considering his early, straightforward narratives. Despite being more stylistically conventional, they broke new ground with their depictions of junkies, gay people, and others marginalized by society. The publication of Naked Lunch shattered all literary paradigms in terms of form and content. Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, recordings, films, and art that followed constitute one of the twentieth century's most sustained and methodical aesthetic experiments, placing Burroughs alongside Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon in terms of both innovation and influence. Burroughs eventually turned his attention toward imagining methods of using the control "machinery" against itself. Often considered his masterpiece, the Red Night Trilogy of the 1980s ranges across time and space, and life and death, in its quest to discover the ultimate form of freedom. His antiestablishment stance and virulent attacks on various types of oppression have caused Burroughs to remain a highly influential figure to each new generation of authors, artists, musicians, and philosophers. The hippies, punks, and cyberpunks were all heavily indebted to the man whom many people called el hombre invisible, and his works prove more relevant than ever in the twenty-first century.
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Understanding Karen Tei Yamashita
by Jolie A. Sheffer
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Among the most trenchant and provocative writers of globalization, Karen Tei Yamashita is one of the most significant, ambitious, and widely taught Asian American writers today. In four genre-bending novels, a short story collection/travel essay collage, a family memoir, and more than a dozen performance/theater works, Yamashita weaves together postmodernism, magical realism, history, social protest, and a wicked sense of humor. Her fictions challenge familiar literary tropes, especially those expected of "multicultural writers," such as the now-clichéd conflict between first-generation immigrants and their American-born children. Instead, her canvas is global, conjuring the unexpected intimacies and distances created by international capitalism, as people and goods traverse continents in asymmetrical circuits. Highlighting the connections between neoliberal economic policies, environmental devastation and climate change, anti-immigrant rhetoric, urban gentrification, and other issues that disproportionately affect historically underinvested and minority communities, Yamashita brings a uniquely transnational perspective to her portrayal of distinctly American preoccupations. Sheffer gives readers a concise introduction to Yamashita's life, provides lucid analysis of key motifs, and synthesizes major research on her work. Each chapter offers, in accessible prose, original interpretations of essential works and stages in her career: her Brazil-Japan migration trilogy comprising Brazil-Maru, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and Circle K Cycles; the magical realist revision of the Los Angeles riots in Tropic of Orange; her historical magnum opus about Asian American activism in the long 1960s, I Hotel; her understudied theatrical and performance works collected in Anime Wong; and her recent familial memoir about Japanese American internment during World War II, Letters to Memory. In short the volume serves as both a lucid introduction to a challenging author and a valuable resource for students and scholars.
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Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks
by Jennifer Larson
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks is a critical study of a playwright and screenwriter who was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Suzan-Lori Parks is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, a Whiting Writers Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, two Obie Awards, and a Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. In this book Jennifer Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of her extensive body of work, investigates and invigorates literary and cultural history. Larson discusses all of Parks's genres-play, screenplay, essay, and novel-closely reading key texts from Parks's more experimental earlier pieces as well as her more linear later narratives. Larson's study begins with a survey of Parks's earliest and most difficult texts including Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Larson then analyzes Venus, In the Blood, and the Lincoln Plays: The America Play and the Pulitzer Prize–winning TopDog/Underdog. Larson also discusses two of Parks's most important screenplays, Girl 6 and Their Eyes Were Watching God. In interpreting these screenplays, Larson examines film's role in the popularization and representation of African American culture and history. These essays suggest an approach to all genres of literature and blend creativity, form, culture, and history into a revisionary aesthetic that allows for no identity or history to remain fixed, with Parks arguing that in order to be relevant they must all be dynamic and democratic.
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Understanding David Mamet
by David Murphy
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding David Mamet analyzes the broad range of David Mamet's plays and places them in the context of his career as a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction prose as well as drama. Over the past three decades, Mamet has written more than thirty produced plays and garnered recognition as one of the most significant and influential American playwrights of the post-World War II generation. In addition to playwriting and directing for the theater, Mamet also writes, directs, and produces for film and television, and he writes essays, fiction, poetry, and even children's books. The author remains best known for depicting men in gritty, competitive work environments and for his vernacular dialogue (known in the theater as Mametspeak ), which has raised the expletive to an art form. In this insightful survey of Mamet's body of work, Brenda Murphy explores the broad range of his writing for the theater and introduces readers to Mamet's major writing in other literary genres as well as some of his neglected pieces. Murphy centers her discussion around Mamet's most significant plays-Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, The Cryptogram, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Edmond, The Woods, Lakeboat, Boston Marriage, and The Duck Variations-as well as his three novels-The Village, The Old Religion, and Wilson. Murphy also notes how Mamet's one-act and less known plays provide important context for the major plays and help to give a fuller sense of the scope of his art. A chapter on his numerous essays, including his most anthologized piece of writing, the autobiographical essay The Rake, reflects Mamet's controversial and evolving ideas about the theater, film, politics, religion, and masculinity. Throughout her study Murphy incorporates references to Mamet's popular films as useful waypoints for contextualizing his literary works and understanding his continuing evolution as a writer for multiple mediums.
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Understanding Richard Russo
by Kathleen Drowne
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding Richard Russo explores the significant themes and patterns in this contemporary American author's seven novels, a memoir, and two short story collections, including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Empire Falls. Known for assembling large casts of eccentric characters and sweeping multi-generational storylines, Russo brings to life hard-hit rural manufacturing towns and their inhabitants even as he explores the bewildering, painful complexities of family relationships. This critical study by Kathleen Drowne first recounts Russo's biography, then explores his novels chronologically, and ends with a chapter dedicated to his other works. Drowne invites readers to appreciate more fully Russo's evocative portrayals of hardscrabble working-class life in failing rural towns of the Northeast by identifying major themes and patterns present in Russo's work. In Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool, Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs, readers can see the primary recurring theme of Russo's work: the plight of deteriorating rural communities and the dramatic impact of that decline on their blue-collar inhabitants. A second important theme in Russo's fiction is the complicated relationship between emotionally scarred sons and their abusive, absent, or neglectful fathers; such relationships fuel the narratives of The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool, Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs, and That Old Cape Magic. Russo also utilizes large casts of realistic but highly eccentric characters-worn-out shopkeepers and odd-jobbers, alcoholics, invalids, and ne'er-do-wells-whose lives are emblematic of both the dignity and the desperation of crumbling Rust Belt towns. Russo possesses, as one New York Times reviewer commented, "that wonderfully unfashionable gift for effortless storytelling on a sweeping, multigenerational scale," which undoubtedly cements his place among his contemporaries in modern American literature. Drowne offers readers an insightful point of entrance into Russo's body of work to date.
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Understanding Francisco Goldman
by Ariana E. Vigil
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Award-winning writer and journalist Francisco Goldman is the author of novels and works of nonfiction and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine. His awards include the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the T. R. Fyvel Book Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish American father, Goldman's heritage has shaped his unique perspective and has had a significant influence on his literary themes. In Understanding Francisco Goldman, the first book-length study of Goldman's life and work, Ariana E. Vigil begins with a biographical chapter drawn largely from Goldman's essays and interviews. Her analytical chapters, one for each of Goldman's four novels and two works of nonfiction, offer biographical, historical, political, and literary context for each work while exploring major themes. Vigil examines the influence literary and political history have had in the development of Goldman's characters and themes, as well as his use of multiple literary genres and the role of humor in his work. She underscores how major themes in Goldman's work-migration, political violence, love, and loss-are explored across nations and time periods and how they remain significant today. In Understanding Francisco Goldman, Vigil draws connections between the writer's life and work and demonstrates the appreciation he deserves for his influence, diversity, and breadth. Through his thoughtful, intellectual, transnational writing, Goldman expands the definition of what it means to be American.
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Understanding William Gibson
by Gerald Alva Miller
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Gerald Alva Miller Jr.'s Understanding William Gibson is a thoughtful examination of the life and work of William Gibson, author of eleven novels and twenty short stories. Gibson is the recipient of many notable awards for science fiction writing including the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson's iconic novel, Neuromancer, popularized the concept of cyberspace. With his early stories and his first trilogy of novels,Gibson became the father figure for a new genre of science fiction called "cyberpunk" that brought a gritty realism to its cerebral plots involving hackers and artificial intelligences. This study situates Gibson as a major figure in both science fiction history and contemporary American fiction, and it traces how his aesthetic affected both areas of literature. Miller follows a brief biographical sketch and a survey of the works that influenced him with an examination that divides Gibson's body of work into early stories, his three major novel trilogies, and his standalone works. Miller does not confine his study to major works but instead also delves into Gibson's obscure stories, published and unpublished screenplays, major essays, and collaborations with other authors. Miller's exploration starts by connecting Gibson to the major countercultural movements that influenced him (the Beat Generation, the hippies, and the punk rock movement) while also placing him within the history of science fiction and examining how his early works reacted against contemporaneous trends in the genre. These early works also exhibit the development of his unique aesthetic that would influence science fiction and literature more generally. Next a lengthy chapter explicates his groundbreaking Sprawl Trilogy, which began with Neuromancer. Miller then traces Gibson's aesthetic transformations across his two subsequent novel trilogies that increasingly eschew distant futures either to focus on our contemporary historical moment as a kind of science fiction itself or to imagine technological singularities that might lie just around the corner. These chapters detail how Gibson's aesthetic has morphed along with social, cultural, and technological changes in the real world. The study also looks at such standalone works as his collaborative steampunk novel, his attempts at screenwriting, his major essays, and even his experimental hypertext poetry. The study concludes with a discussion of Gibson's lasting influence and a brief examination of his most recent novel, The Peripheral, which signals yet another radical change in Gibson's aesthetic.
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Understanding Chang-rae Lee
by Amanda M. Page
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
In Understanding Chang-rae Lee, Amanda M. Page provides the first critical survey of the work of one of America's most acclaimed contemporary novelists. Chang-rae Lee, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford University, has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, an American Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lee is the author of five novels, including The Surrendered, which was a named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011. In considering the novelist's oeuvre, Page examines Lee's evolving use of narrative perspective and how it attests to the power of voice by showing that storytelling can reveal hidden truths-whether intended or not. After a brief biography, an overview of Lee's critical reception, and a discussion of his nonfiction essays, Page traces the trajectory of Lee's career to illustrate the ways his work continues to push against formal and thematic boundaries with each new novel. In her exploration of Lee's first and best-known novel, Native Speaker, Page introduces many of Lee's recurring themes, including the pains of cultural assimilation, the significant role of language in identity, and emotional alienation as a result of constructs of masculinity. Page then argues that Lee's second novel, A Gesture Life, uses evasive narration and the guise of a suburban novel to conceal a meditation on war trauma and contemporary isolation. Aloft, the last of Lee's novels told in the first person, plays with expected conventions of American suburban fiction to critique the white privilege at the heart of this familiar form. Page also explores The Surrendered, Lee's ambitious historical epic that deploys third-person perspective to show the variety of ways historical trauma reverberates in the present. Page's final chapter focuses on Lee's dystopian novel On Such a Full Sea. In his most bold experiment with narrative voice to date, this novel is told from the collective perspective of an entire community, reflecting on the experiences of a lone girl as she navigates a highly stratified social hierarchy. Page argues that this work shows the culmination of Lee's interest in the relationship between the individual and the community and the power of a single voice to speak truth.
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Understanding Randall Kenan
by James A. Crank
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Randall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature. Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre-memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.
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Understanding Lee Smith
by Danielle N. Johnson
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Since the release of her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, in 1968, Lee Smith has published nearly twenty books, including novels, short stories, and memoirs. She has received an O. Henry Award, Sir Walter Raleigh Award, Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction, and a Reader's Digest Award; and her New York Times best-selling novel, The Last Girls, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. While Smith has garnered academic and critical respect for many of her novels, such as Black Mountain Breakdown, Oral History, and Fair and Tender Ladies, her writing has been viewed by some as lightweight fiction or even "chick lit." In Understanding Lee Smith Danielle N. Johnson offers a comprehensive analysis of Smith's work, including her memoir, Dimestore, treating her as a major Appalachian and feminist voice. Johnson begins with a biographical sketch of Smith's upbringing in Appalachia, her formal education, and her career. She explicates the themes and stylistic qualities that have come to characterize Smith's writing and outlines the criticism of Smith's work, particularly that which focuses on female subjectivity, artistry, religion, history, and place in her fiction. Too often, Johnson argues, Smith's consistent and powerful messages about artistry, gender roles, and historical discourse are missed or undervalued by readers and critics caught up in her quirky characters and dialogue. In Understanding Lee Smith, Johnson offers an analysis of Smith's oeuvre chronologically to study her growth as a writer and to highlight major events in her career and the influence they had on her work, including a major shift in the early 1990s to writing about families, communities, and women living in the mountains. Johnson reveals how Smith has refined her talent for creating nuanced voices and a narrative web of multiple perspectives and evolved into a writer of fine literary fiction worthy of critical study.
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Understanding Alice McDermott
by Margaret Hallissy
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
An Irish American Catholic born and raised in New York, McDermott uses multiple identities and a distinctive, nonchronological narrative style to create an unmistakable trademark. She currently serves as the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Understanding Alice McDermott begins with a brief biography and transitions into a linear inquiry of McDermott's published works. In addition to interrogating her recurring motifs of memory and heritage, Margaret Hallissy tracks various themes that appear throughout the novels-religion, generational trauma, geography, family, motherhood, and displacement-topics that intertwine and inform the mentality of McDermott's characters. This volume deftly leads the reader through each of McDermott's novels, seeking connections and facilitating conversations among her earliest and most recent works. Hallissy demonstrates a deep critical understanding of intersections in McDermott's canon. Her characters in some ways are beleaguered by society's perception of them-uneducated, lower-middle-class immigrants or children of immigrants-but are also positively defined by their collective dream of a lost homeland and the shared hardship of motherhood. By tracing the shifting themes and motifs through eight novels, uncollected short stories, and essays published during McDermott's fruitful career, Understanding Alice McDermott provides a window into the decades-long development of a contemporary master.
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Understanding Pat Conroy
by Catherine Seltzer
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
An insightful look at the life and work of the extraordinary popular Southern writer.
Pat Conroy's novels and memoirs have indelibly shaped the image of the South in the American imagination. His writing has rendered the physical landscape of the South Carolina lowcountry familiar to legions of readers and has staked out a more complex geography as well, one defined by domestic trauma, racial anxiety, religious uncertainty, and cultural ambivalence.
In “Understanding Pat Conroy”, Catherine Seltzer engages in a sustained consideration of Conroy and his work. The study begins with a sketch of Conroy's biography, which, while fascinating in its own right, is employed here to illuminate many of the motifs and characters that define his work and to locate him within southern literary tradition. Seltzer then explores each of Conroy's major works, tracing the evolution of the themes within and among each of his novels, including “The Great Santini”, “The Lords of Discipline”, “The Prince of Tides”, “Beach Music”, and “South of Broad”, and his memoirs, among them “The Water Is Wide” and “My Losing Season”.
Seltzer's insightful close readings of Conroy's work are supplemented by interviews and archival material, shedding new light on the often-complex dynamics between text and context in Conroy's oeuvre. More broadly, Understanding Pat Conroy explores the ways that Conroy delights in troubling the boundaries that circumscribe the literary establishment, and links his work to existing debates about the contemporary American canon.
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Understanding Michael S. Harper
by Michael Antonucci
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
A fresh examination of Harper's body of work as an archive of Black life, thought, and culture.
The first book devoted to the groundbreaking poet's work, Understanding Michael S. Harper locates Harper's poetic project within Black expressive tradition. The study examines poems drawn from the eleven volumes of verse that Harper (1938—2016) produced between 1970 and 2010, bringing attention to his poetry's sustained engagement with music, literature, and the visual arts. Author Michael Antonucci offers readers an account of the poet's career while assessing his verse and providing a sense of its perspective on Black America and the American experience.
Throughout his examination of Harper's verse, Antonucci builds on the critical attention the poet received at the outset of his career-he was twice nominated for the National Book Award. Exploring the poet's celebrated examinations of history, kinship, and Black music, Understanding Michael S. Harper develops and expands critical dialogues about the poet and his body of work, which, Antonucci argues, presents a counternarrative about the composition and origins of the United States, reshaping prevailing discourse about race, nation, and identity.
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Understanding Alice Walker
by Thadious M. Davis
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner's large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker's biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker's complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations.
Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers's Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender.
Davis traces Walker's literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.
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Understanding Colson Whitehead
by Derek C. Maus
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
In 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine-and frequently defy-accepted notions of truth.
Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions, Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits of the formulas of the genres in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of American culture.
Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of Whitehead's attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings by which Americans have defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.
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Understanding Tracy Letts
by Thomas Fahy
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in drama as well as Tony Awards for best play and best actor, Tracy Letts has emerged as one of the greatest playwrights of the twenty-first century. Understanding Tracy Letts, the first book dedicated to his writing, is an introduction to his plays and an invitation to engage more deeply with his work-both for its emotional power and cultural commentary.
Experiencing a Tracy Letts play often feels akin to reading a Cormac McCarthy novel, watching a Cohen Brothers film, and seeing an episode of Breaking Bad at the same time. His characters can be ruthlessly cruel and funny, selfish and generous, delusional and incisive, and deceptive and painfully honest. They keep secrets. They harbor biases and misconceptions. And in their quest to find love and understanding, they often end up being the greatest impediments to their own happiness. As a writer, Letts can move seamlessly from the milieu of a Texas trailer park to the pulsating nightlife of London's countercultural scene, the stifling quiet of small-town Ohio to the racial tensions of urban Chicago. He thrives in the one-act format, in plays like Mary Page Marlow and The Minutes, as well as the epic scope of August: Osage County and Linda Vista. With a musician's sense of timing, Letts shifts between humor and heartache, silence and sound, and the mundane and the poetic. And he fearlessly tackles issues such as gender bias, racism, homophobia, and disability rights. Contemporary American life thus becomes a way to comment on the country's troubled history from Native American genocide to the civil rights movement. The personal narratives of his characters become gateways to the political.
Understanding Tracy Letts celebrates the range of Letts's writing, in part, by applying different critical approaches to his works. Whether through the lens of disability studies, the conspiracy genre, food studies, the feminist politics of quilting, or masculinity studies, these readings help bring out the thematic richness and sociopolitical dimensions of Letts's work.
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Understanding Stewart O'Nan
by Heike Paul
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
This first book-length study of Stewart O'Nan's work offers a comprehensive introduction to his writings and carefully examines recurring thematic concerns and stylistic characteristics of his novels. The author of eighteen novels, several works of nonfiction, and two short-story collections, O'Nan received the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society's Gold Medal for best novel for Snow Angels and the Drew Heinz Prize for In the Walled City. In 1996 Granta magazine named him one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists.
Paul argues that O'Nan is not only a writer of popular fiction but also has developed into a major literary voice worthy of canonical status and of having a firm place in school, college, and university curricula. To this end Paul analyzes his use of formulas of long-standing popular American genres, such as the Western and the gothic tale, as he re-invents them in innovative and complex ways creating a style that Paul describes as "everyday gothic." She also offers a critical examination of O'Nan's treatment of American myths and vivid descriptions of struggling middle class settings and individuals who lead precarious lives. Paul believes this first critical study of O'Nan's collected works will be instrumental in building a critical archive and analysis of his oeuvre.
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Understanding David Foster Wallace
by Marshall Boswell
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Since its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction-namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King. Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back. Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and post structuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership-the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.
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Understanding Jonathan Franzen
by Timothy W. Galow
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
The first comprehensive study to address Franzen's work to date, including his latest novel, Crossroads
Jonathan Franzen-novelist and essayist-is a critical darling, commercial success, and magnet for controversy. His career took off with the publication of The Corrections (2000), which won a National Book Award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His follow-up, Freedom (2009), received so much attention that it started a debate over the politics of critical attention. Love him or hate him, Franzen has proven to be a crucial figure in twenty-first century American letters, and the publication of each new novel has been a major literary event.
In Understanding Jonathan Franzen, Timothy W. Galow studies Franzen's first five novels and surveys his most recent, Crossroads, which was published to much fanfare in 2021. He traces Franzen's work from its roots in late twentieth-century literary theory and experimental postmodernism through the socially conscious family novels for which the author is best known. This careful analysis provides a new lens for viewing each of the works and demonstrates why Franzen's stories of (white, bourgeois) American life have inspired and provoked readers for over two decades.
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Understanding Louise Erdrich
by Seema Kurup
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
In Understanding Louise Erdrich, Seema Kurup offers a comprehensive analysis of this critically acclaimed Native American novelist whose work stands as a testament to the struggle of the Ojibwe people to survive colonization and contemporary reservation life. Kurup traces in Erdrich's oeuvre the theme of colonization, both historical and cultural, and its lasting effects, starting with the various novels of the Love Medicine epic, the National Book Award–winning The Round House, The Birchbark House series of children's literature, the memoirs The Blue Jays Dance and Books and Island in Ojibwe Country, and selected poetry. Kurup elucidates Erdrich's historical context, thematic concerns, and literary strategies through close readings, offering an introductory approach to Erdrich and revealing several entry points for further investigation. Kurup asserts that Erdrich's writing has emerged not out of a postcolonial identity but from the ongoing condition of colonization faced by Native Americans in the United States, which is manifested in the very real and contemporary struggle for sovereignty and basic civil rights. Exploring the ways in which Erdrich moves effortlessly from trickster humor to searing pathos and from the personal to the political, Kurup takes up the complex issues of cultural identity, assimilation, and community in Erdrich's writing. Kurup shows that Erdrich offers readers poignant and complex portraits of Native American lives in vibrant, three-dimensional, and poetic prose while simultaneously bearing witness to the abiding strength and grace of the Ojibwe people and their presence and participation in the history of the United States.
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Understanding Steven Millhauser
by Earl G. Ingersoll
Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series
Earl Ingersoll introduces the fiction of Steven Millhauser, whose distinguished career of more than four decades includes eight books of short fiction and four novels, the latest being the Pulitzer Prize–winning Martin Dressler (1996). In Understanding Steven Millhauser, Ingersoll explores Millhauser's twelve books chronologically, revealing the development of the thematic interests and narrative strategies of a major contemporary American writer and a master of fiction who cares as deeply about his craft as the modernists did earlier in the past century. While most examinations of an author's work begin with at least a biographical sketch, Ingersoll has faced distinct challenges because Millhauser has resisted efforts to read his fiction through the lens of his biography. Responding to an interviewer's request for a brief biography, Millhauser provided the succinct 1943–. Part of such resistance, Ingersoll argues, arises from Millhauser's belief that if readers have too many questions about an author's work, the author has failed and no amount of response can redress that failure. Millhauser's central characters, such as August Eschenburg and J. Franklin Payne, are often themselves artists or technicians who are overreachers, and Ingersoll shows that Millhauser's early expressions of literary realism have given way to interest in departures from the real. For Millhauser, stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams. Millhauser's strength is the ability to sustain obsessions because works of fiction succeed insofar as they are able to supplant reality. As a master fabulist, Ingersoll argues, Millhauser is preoccupied with extravagance both in the subject matter of his fiction and in his style. Whether it is Martin Dressler doing himself in by designing and constructing increasingly complex hotels or the miniaturists in the short story Cathay pushing their impulse to extremes, past the eye's ability to see their art objects, Millhauser's fiction is full of such an impulse, which can produce prolific artists as well as compulsive lunatics. The triumph of Millhauser's craft, Ingersoll shows, is that it merges a fascination with the relationship between imagination and experience with a precise and allusive prose to produce works seamlessly joining the everyday with the radical and fantastic, in forms ranging from travelogues of the imagination to works merging the waking world with the world of dreams.