Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions


Book Description

From the author of Welcome to Camp America, an eerie exploration of America's performance of power and identity in the post-9/11 era What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Made on ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Necessary Fictionsdocuments mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of "Atropia" and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the US military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in "moulage"--fake wounds--as they prepare to deploy. Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer Debi Cornwall (born 1973) photographs this meta-reality--the artifice of war--presented in the book with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America's fantasy industrial complex. The book includes an essay by PEN Award-winning critical theorist Sarah Sentilles.




Necessary Fictions


Book Description

Selected as the 1998 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Award winner, and winner of the Midland Society of Authors Award for Adult Fiction, 1999. Storytelling and art are major themes of this collection. The stories center on the need for expression, the pain of failing in artistic expression, and the ways in which we construct imaginative representations of our lives, the "necessary fictions" that allow us to live. At the heart of the book is a series of three interconnected stories and a novella concerning Raymond Gerhardt and his family. Ray is a carpenter, a World War II veteran, obsessed with building the perfect home for his family. When he dies, a possible suicide, his wife and children are left to sort out the meaning of his life and their own.




Necessary Fictions


Book Description




Necessary Errors


Book Description

ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal • Slate • Kansas City Star • Flavorwire • Policy Mic • Buzzfeed “Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth.”—James Wood, The New Yorker The exquisite debut novel by the author of Overthrow that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague It’s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He’s arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them—including Jacob himself. Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain’s prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood—the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world—and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change.




Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions


Book Description

An autobiography of Michelle citron and her insights into Fimmaking and feminism




Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?


Book Description

Written in an easy-to-read, accessible style by teachers with years of classroom experience, Masterwork Studies are guides to the literary works most frequently studied in high school. Presenting ideas that spark imaginations, these books help students to gain background knowledge on great literature useful for papers and exams. The goal of each study is to encourage creative thinking by presenting engaging information about each work and its author. This approach allows students to arrive at sound analyses of their own, based on in-depth studies of popular literature. Each volume: -- Illuminates themes and concepts of a classic text -- Uses clear, conversational language -- Is an accessible, manageable length from 140 to 170 pages -- Includes a chronology of the author's life and era -- Provides an overview of the historical context -- Offers a summary of its critical reception -- Lists primary and secondary sources and index




The Necessary Fiction


Book Description

This unusual book is a fascinating work of personal criticism or "biblio-memoir" which will appeal to all interested in James Joyce's work, and, more widely, to those interested in responses to great art. It focusses on the life-long appeal of a particular work of art on a single individual who has been a leading Joyce scholar for 40 years. Professor Groden has taught Ulysses to undergraduates, to graduate students, and to adults outside of universities in a long and distinguished career. He is the author of two often-cited scholarly books on Joyce's novel, and he has overseen the 63-volume facsimile reproduction of his manuscripts. Groden says: "I've often been asked why I've devoted so much of my life to Joyce's novel. The Necessary Fiction tries to answer that question. I wrote the book partly with seasoned readers and scholars of Ulysses in mind, but I aimed it especially at readers who desire to read, have attempted to read, or have even succeeded in reading Joyce's novel and who will welcome an accessible, very personal introduction to it as well as a case for reading or rereading it." "A neologism that has been applied to my work - 'autobloomography' - captures what I am trying to do in The Necessary Fiction. "The first half of the book considers various possible reasons for Ulysses'powerful impact on me when I read it as a 19-year-old undergraduate at Dartmouth College and later worked on Joyce's manuscripts for his novel as a graduate student at Princeton University. This section deals with each reason in relation to a significant person in my early life. "The second half discusses Ulysses' continuing fascination for me in my professional adult life as a university professor and Joyce scholar. Throughout the book, I've interspersed accounts of my life with Ulysses with analyses of the novel itself." The Necessary Fiction is some 79,000 words long with an additional 9,600-word appendix that provides a chapter-by-chapter summary of Ulysses.




Land Fictions


Book Description

Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside




The New Adventures of Helen


Book Description

“One of Russia’s best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next.” —The New York Times At first glance, the stories in The New Adventures of Helen seems simple, even child-like, but a deep reading reveals satire and darkness manifested through classic fairy tale tropes characteristically upended by Petrushevskaya. These “adult fairy tales” ask deep questions about gender, love, history, memory, and the future, taking place in times between history and the now. These stories, quirky but yet inspired by a confident hopefulness, will inspire and provoke English-speaking readers across the globe.




Questing Fictions


Book Description

Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible to scholars, students, researchers, and general readers. Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The books offered through Minnesota Archive Editions are produced in limited quantities according to customer demand and are available through select distribution partners.