An accessible new and selected collection of poems for poetry insiders and general readers. Powerful, passionate, humorous, and often complex, yet fun to read. They go down easy, but pack a whallop.
The poems in Liver come at the reader from many angles at once, like a whirlwind or a warm shower. Charles Harper Webb is a poet of contradictions: humor and heartbreak, depth and accessibility, playfulness and seriousness, raw energy and careful craft. His poems glorify the spirit, but also the flesh, exemplified by the liver, the “organ whose name contains the injunction Live! . . . great One-Who-Lives, so we can too.” Even at their darkest, their most outraged and sorrowing, Webb’s poems affirm the world, and help us live in it gladly. Winner of the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert Bly.
Megastar Jonny Valentine, eleven-year-old icon of bubblegum pop, knows that the fans don’t love him for who he is. The talented singer’s image, voice, and even hairdo have been relentlessly packaged—by his L.A. label and his hard-partying manager-mother, Jane—into bite-size pabulum. But within the marketing machine, somewhere, Jonny is still a vulnerable little boy, perplexed by his budding sexuality and his heartthrob status, dependent on Jane, and endlessly searching for his absent father in Internet fan sites, lonely emails, and the crowds of faceless fans. Poignant, brilliant, and viciously funny, told through the eyes of one of the most unforgettable child narrators, this literary masterpiece explores with devastating insight and empathy the underbelly of success in 21st-century America. The Love Song of Jonny Valentine is a tour de force by a standout voice of his generation.
"Sometimes you do not truly observe something until you study it in reverse," writes Karim Issar upon arrival to New York City from Qatar in 1999. Fluent in numbers, logic, and business jargon yet often baffled by human connection, the young financial wizard soon creates a computer program named Kapitoil that predicts oil futures and reaps record profits for his company. At first an introspective loner adrift in New York's social scenes, he anchors himself to his legendary boss Derek Schrub and Rebecca, a sensitive, disillusioned colleague who may understand him better than he does himself. Her influence, and his father's disapproval of Karim's Americanization, cause him to question the moral implications of Kapitoil, moving him toward a decision that will determine his future, his firm's, and to whom—and where—his loyalties lie.
With a fresh and singular voice, Teddy Wayne marks his literary debut with the story of one 26 year old Middle Eastern man’s attempt to live the American Dream in New York City. Kapitoil provides an absorbing look into American culture and New York finance from an outsider’s perspective.
To most Americans, Mississippi is not a state but a scar, the place where segregation took its ugliest form and struck most savagely at its challengers. But to many Americans, Mississippi is also home. And it is this paradox, with all its overtones of history and heartache, that Anthony Walton—whose parents escaped Mississippi for the relative civility of the Midwest—explores in this resonant and disquieting work of travel writing, history, and memoir. Traveling from the Natchez Trace to the yawning cotton fields of the Delta and from plantation houses to air-conditioned shopping malls, Walton challenged us to see Mississippi's memories of comfort alongside its legacies of slavery and the Klan. He weaves in the stories of his family, as well as those of patricians and sharecroppers, redneck demagogues and martyred civil rights workers, novelists and bluesmen, black and white. Mississippi is a national saga in brilliant microcosm, splendidly written and profoundly moving.
A book of poetry with woodcuts by Olga Pastuchiv.
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
In this exuberantly praised book—a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner—David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.
Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles is the second book by D.J. Waldie, one of the most gifted writers on the American scene. As Patt Morrison notes in her foreword, "The suburb is America's lifeline and its punchline, and Waldie is its bard." Few observers can present the facts of everyday life with the texture and emotion of a symphony, the way Waldie does. A breathtaking progression from his much-celebrated book Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Where We Are Now is a compilation of Waldie's most intriguing recent works and an exploration of the meaning of place in Los Angeles, long regarded as the most placeless of American cities.
Since its publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s. An intensely realized and wholly original memoir about the way in which a place can shape a life, Holy Land is ultimately about the resonance of choices—how wide a street should be, what to name a park—and the hopes that are realized in the habits of everyday life.
