Death of a Ventriloquist


Book Description

Collects poems that explore the highs and lows of parenthood and personhood.




The Ventriloquists


Book Description

"Twelve-year-old street orphan Helene survives by living as a boy and selling copies of the country's most popular newspaper, Le Soir, now turned into Nazi propaganda. Helene's world changes when she befriends a rogue journalist, Marc Aubrion, who draws her into a secret network that publishes dissident underground newspapers. The Nazis track down Aubrion's team and give them an impossible choice: turn the resistance newspapers into a Nazi propaganda bomb that will sway public opinion against the Allies, or be killed. Faced with no decision at all, Aubrion has a brilliant idea. While pretending to do the Nazis' bidding, they will instead publish a fake edition of Le Soir that pokes fun at Hitler and Stalin - daring to laugh in the face of their oppressors. The ventriloquists have agreed to die for a joke, and they have only eighteen days to tell it."--




Dummy Days


Book Description

Examines the best of the Golden Age of ventriloquism, by profiling five performers who turned a vaudevillian gimmick into an American art form, including Edgar Bergen, Paul Winchell, Jimmy Nelson and Shari Lewis.




Another Ventriloquist


Book Description

Adam Penn Gilders was a virtuoso of the deadpan prose miniature. He published his stories in Paris Review, The Walrus and J&L Illustrated, before passing away in 2007, at the age of 36, of a brain tumor. Another Ventriloquist collects Gilders' charming vignettes, which fall somewhere between Aesop's fable and bitch session: "My friend Geoffrey, to my constant dismay, seems compelled to enjoy life's little pleasures, such as coffee or perfectly cooked eggs, all at once, without delay or hesitation. With coffee, for example, which he particularly loves, he drains his cup with almost demented eagerness, often before his companions have taken a single sip. It was as though the best experiences, like hot liquids, were liable to evaporate if measured out in teaspoons. He had what I considered a 'Now or Never' attitude which made me want to proclaim 'Never '" With this posthumous collection, Gilders bequeaths a gem of concision and wit.




How to Do Things with Dead People


Book Description

How to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies such as literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning. By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.




The Secret of Ventriloquism


Book Description

With themes reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, and Bruno Shulz, but with a strikingly unique vision, Jon Padgett's The Secret of Ventriloquism heralds the arrival of a significant new literary talent. Padgett's work explores the mystery of human suffering, the agony of personal existence, and the ghastly means by which someone might achieve salvation from both. A bullied child who seeks vengeance within a bed's hollow box spring; a lucid dreamer haunted by an impossible house; a dummy that reveals its own anatomy in 20 simple steps; a stuttering librarian who holds the key to a mill town's unspeakable secrets; a commuter whose worldview is shattered by two words printed on a cardboard sign; an aspiring ventriloquist who spends a little too much time looking at himself in a mirror. And the presence that speaks through them all.




Pennyweight Windows


Book Description

A major collection from ...an increasingly important poet for our times.--The Antioch Review




Knock Wood


Book Description

Originally published by Linden Press in 1984.




The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt Volume 1


Book Description

As any fan of comics knows, EC Comics still represent the best of golden age writing and artwork. Now, Dark Horse Books is proud to bring you the very first issues of EC's Tales from the Crypt, featuring the amazing artistic talents of Johnny Craig, Al Feldstein, George Roussos, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Graham Ingels, and Jack Kamen!