The narrator of Villa Bunker receives letters, dozens of them, written by his mother in an isolated seaside villa, which tell of his parents' troubles in this uninhabitable house, which is soon to become a kind of labyrinth roamed by memories and long-buried feelings. At first the narrator's parents fret most about the villa's physical deterioration, but soon their own psychological deterioration becomes the inescapable focus of their stories. Is their joint madness due to the villa's aberrant architecture? Or is the isolation of the villa to blame? Or were they mad all along? The narrator is left to decipher the clues, himself in turn becoming prey to his own house, which like memory and time, seems in a state of permanent metamorphosis.
A memoir and meditation on the themes of separation and silence, The Summer of the Elder Tree was Marie Chaix's first book to appear in fourteen years, and deals with the reasons for her withdrawal from writing and the events in her life since the death of her mother (as detailed in Silences, or a Woman's Life). With uncompromising sincerity, and in the same beautiful prose for which she is renowned, Marie Chaix here takes stock of her life as a woman and writer, as well as the crises that caused her to give up her work. The Summer of the Elder Tree has its roots in Chaix's previous books while standing alone as a work of immense power: a new beginning.
Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, A Brief History of Yes-her first since 2008's scathing and erotic The Mirror in the Well-as a "e;literary fado,"e; referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling of what the Portuguese call saudade-meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irrepreably lost. A Brief History of Yes tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American letters has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.
Featuring essays and tributes by Jonathan Lethem, Marjorie Perloff, and Gerald Howard among others, this issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction focuses on the life and work of Gilbert Sorrentino, with a special focus on his most popular novel, the endlessly fascinating, frustrating, and hilarious Mulligan Stew.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction was founded in 1981 to promote a vision of literary culture that is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers outside the popular attention continue to be written about and discussed.
In the tradition of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, and Raymond Queneau's The Flight of Icarus, Robert Pinget's Mahu or The Material tells the story of Mahu, a lazy man who may be a character in his friend Latirail's failing novel, which is taken over by characters invented by Sinture, yet another writer. The latter half of the novel consists of Mahu's strange and hilarious musings on everything from belly dancers to how he catches ideas from other people in the same way he catches germs. Mahu is Pinget's funniest novel, featuring a mix of dark humor and manic word-games, and is as inventive and energetic now as when it was first published.
On Tuesday, October 12, 1954, Pierre Vernier, a teacher in a Paris lyc?e, begins setting down an account that is to be a complete record of the life lived by himself, his students, and his fellow teachers. He begins by meticulously recording what he already knows of his students, their relationships to one another, and the books they're studying. Then he's forced to enlist his nephew--who's in his class--to report on the private lives of the other boys. To record all reality, he must know all that has passed, is passing, and will pass through his pupils' minds. Degrees is an extraordinary novel exposing one man's obsessive project, the impossibility of its completion, and the damaging effect this obsession has on both Vernier and those who surround him.
Paying homage to the Italian-American experience, Italian Stories celebrates an Italian neighbourhood in the Bronx during the 1930s and '40s, and mourns the loss of this ethnic identity with the migration of subsequent generations to the suburbs. With stories that are both melancholy and comic, Papaleo here explores the contradictory desires of assimilation: his characters want to live the life of the average American while maintaining a strong link to their rich heritage. In addition, Papaleo rails against the damaging stereotypes of Italian-Americans propagated by the media in movies and television.
"Sentence for sentence, nobody in America writes better than Stanley Elkin." The New Republic
Part political thriller and part love story, this work explores the "small things" that give shape and meaning to the big events".
In God Head, Scott Zwiren boldly and courageously records the terrifying, destructive experience of manic depression. From a promising young college student to mental hospitals to a confined, out-of-control, roller-coaster life on New York City's Upper West Side, Zwiren's narrator traces from the inside the horrors of an existence that swings between numbing depression and exalting highs.
Be it known that The Tar Baby, while just as jovial but much randier, has nothing to do with Uncle Remus. It's the quarterly of a little, very literary magazine of Galapagos Junior College (California) and this book will appear with some eye-catching visual effects beginning with the little black bare-assed boy with cheeks who is just as well off without a diaper considering the number of referrals to what it might have been loaded with. This particular issue is a memorial to Anatole Waxman-Weissman, 1931-1972, a lexicographer and logomachist who devoted his life to variant versions of a work (full of "cloacal musings") on Wittgenstein before he ended it by walking into a bus (deliberately?). The issue contains comments on both the contribution of this "booby hatch philosopher" as well as his early on rite de passage in the hands of the ladies in a nearby motel bordello - he marries the daughter of its housemother who runs off with a plumber. Along with a good deal of infighting among departmental thick heads as well as the brawling of the natives, this is tilled in via bits and pieces - pieces which might include anything from a recipe for turtle pie to an account of the Tong War of 1858. Will there be any exegetes? It's hard to say since the level is quite high and quite low at the same time - think of it as both scatologica slapstick and an academic sendup which is funny, in spots. (Kirkus Reviews)
This is the final novel of one of the most innovative, comic Brazilian writers of this century. It takes the form of an anonymous high school science teacher's journal about an unpublished novel written by his deceased lover, a young woman named Julia Marquezim Enone. Her novel's central character, Maria da Franca, is a destitute and mentally unstable woman at odds with the Brazilian social welfare system, from which she is trying to claim benefits for time spent in a psychiatric hospital. The journal represents the science teacher's attempt to understand Julia's novel and, the process, Julia herself and the relationship they once shared. Rather than providing him with comfort and a better understanding of his beloved, the teacher's explorations create an ever-widening circle of questions and fears about himself, her, and finally any attempt to understand anything about anyone. But the narrator's failures become the reader's comic delights.
History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.
Comprised of 150 poems, with a title taken from Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", this collection skips from the strict form of the sonnet to the freedom of prose poetry. It contains a variety of forms and tones that work together to describe Paris, its people, its writers, its monumental past, and its unsteady response to change.
Koula falls in love with a young man she meets routinely on the tube ride home to her husband and kids. Attracted to older women, the young man introduces her to a different life than she's used to, a life filled with cigarettes, seedy bars and illicit meetings in a rundown flat. This novel charts the emotional fluctuations of these characters.
Hino's novels have been compared to the work of J. G. Ballard. Available for the first time in English: his masterpiece Island of Dreams.
This issue of the "Review of Contemporary Fiction" is, for the first time, devoted to--but not devotional toward--contemporary British fiction. Bringing together writers, literary critics, and academics with the aim of challenging fossilized approaches to British contemporary fiction, and attesting to the vitality (or otherwise) of the British novel today, contributors such as Stewart Home, China Mi?ville, Maureen Freely, and Patricia Waugh pose difficult questions about the status of the literary in contemporary Britain--where it's been, and where it's going.
It wasn't until after Dumitru Tsepeneag fled Romania for France in 1971 that he was able to speak frankly about the literary movement that he had helped create.
Memories of My Father Watching TV has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat", "Highway Patrol", "Bonanza", and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, Memories is finally a sad lament of a father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.
Emil, the unwanted child of two young parents, is adopted by Yoel and Leah, a childless couple. Yet, as the years pass, it becomes clear that Emil doesn't bear much resemblance to the parents who've loved and raised him. Is his name the only thing his real parents have left him? Kin traces the movements of Emil and his four parents as they walk through the same city, nearby but apart, searching for each other in the faces of passersby; until Yoel, now old, becomes determined to do the impossible: return his grown son-a lonely man approaching middle age-to his birth parents. In prose that is both minimal and subtly off kilter, acclaimed Israeli novelist Dror Burstein introduces us to an Israel that is as peculiar, and poignant, as Donald Barthelme's America: ranging from an apocalyptic future to the petty annoyances of daily life, from shifting continents to tiny heartbreaks.
Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page is an unconventional study of Robert Coover's work from his early masterpiece The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the recent Noir (2010). Written in the second person, it offers a self-reflexive investigation into the ways in which Coover's stories often challenge the reader to resist the conventions of sense-making and even literary criticism. By portraying characters lost in surroundings they often fail to grasp, Coover's work playfully enacts a "e;(melo)drama of cognition"e; that mirrors the reader's own desire to interpret and make sense of texts in unequivocal ways. This tendency in Coover's writing is indicative of a larger refusal of the ready-made, of the once-and-for-all or the authoritative, celebrating instead, in its generosity, the widening of possibilities-thus inevitably forcing the reader-critic to acknowledge the arbitrariness and artificiality of her responses.
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