Author : Randall Craig
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 23,92 MB
Release : 1989
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780874133394
Theoretically grounded in classical and Renaissance writings, as well as in the work of modern theorists, this study analyzes the role of tragicomedy in the development of the English novel from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Diana of the Crossways, the Awkward Age, the Old Wives' Tale, and Ulysses are among the illustrative works discussed.
Author : Susanna Fogel
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 21,3 MB
Release : 2017-07-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1627797920
From filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel comes a comedic novel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents, over the course of three decades. Told entirely in letters to a heroine we never meet, we get to know the Fellers through their check-ins with Julie: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression. Together, their missives – some sardonic, others absurd, others heartbreaking – weave a tapestry of a very modern family trying (and often failing) to show one another they care. The titular “Nuclear Family” includes, among many others: A narcissistic former-child-prodigy father who has taken up haiku writing in his old age and his new wife, a traditional Chinese woman whose attempts to help her stepdaughter find a man include FedExing her silk gowns from Filene’s Basement. Their six-year-old son, Stuart, whose favorite condiment is truffle oil and who wears suits to bed. Julie’s mother, a psychologist who never remarried but may be in love with her arrogant Rabbi and overshares about everything, including the threesome she had with Dutch grad students in 1972.
Author : Alison Bechdel
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 38,40 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780618871711
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
Author : Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Publisher : Sourcebooks, Inc.
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 14,9 MB
Release : 2018-02-26
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1492664111
In the style of The Recovering, and Educated: A Memoir, Stephanie Wittels Wachs delves into the dark world of loss, grief, and addiction in a heartbreaking but hopeful memoir With a captivating foreward by Aziz Ansari One phone call was all it took to change Stephanie Wittels Wachs's life forever... Her younger brother, Harris, a comedy star known for his work on Parks and Recreation and for introducing the world to the art of the humblebrag, died of a heroin overdose. How do you make sense of such a tragic end to a life full of so much hilarious brilliance? In beautiful, unsentimental, and surprisingly funny prose, Stephanie Wittels Wachs alternates between her brother's struggle with addiction, which she learned about three days before her wedding, and the first year after his death, in all its emotional devastation. This compelling portrait of a comedic genius and a profound exploration of the love between siblings is A Year of Magical Thinking for a new generation of readers. Everything is Horrible and Wonderful will make you laugh, cry, and wonder if that possum on the fence is really your brother's spirit animal. A touching memoir that delves into addiction, grief recovery, and healing after loss, this poignant story ultimately showcases the enduring love we have for those we lose too soon.
Author : Shalom Auslander
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 25,69 MB
Release : 2012-01-12
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1101561289
A New York Times Notable Book 2012 The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: no one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there. To begin again. To start anew. But it isn’t quite working out that way for Kugel… His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won’t stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through. To complicate matters further, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one Kugel bought, and when, one night, he discovers history—a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history—hiding upstairs in his attic, bad quickly becomes worse. Hope: A Tragedy is a hilarious and haunting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit. It is a comic and compelling story of the hopeless longing to be free of those pasts that haunt our every present.
Author : Miguel de Unamuno
Publisher :
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 17,85 MB
Release : 1929
Category : English fiction
ISBN :
Dispensing with the conventions of action, time and place, and analysis of character, Mist proceeds entirely on the strength of dialog that reveals the struggles of what Unamuno called his 'agonists.' These include Augusto Perez, the pampered son of a recently deceased mother; the deceitful, scheming Eugenia, whom Augusto obsessively loves and idealizes; and Augusto's dog Orfeo, who gives a funeral oration upon his master's death. Augusto is to be married to Eugenia who leaves and causes him to contemplate suicide. Before he does that, however, he consults the book's author Unamuno, who informs him he cannot kill himself because he is a fictional character. Mist even includes a chapter that explains Unamuno's theory of the antinovel. Anticipating later writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Unamuno exploited fiction as a vehicle for the exploration of philosophical themes. First published in 1914, Mist exemplified a new kind of novel with which Unamuno aimed to shatter fiction's conventional illusions of reality. It is an antinovel that treats its fictionality ironically.
Author : Alison Bechdel
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 46,70 MB
Release : 2012-05-01
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN : 0547524366
The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem
Author : J.B. Reynolds
Publisher : Tsubaki Press
Page : 23 pages
File Size : 14,30 MB
Release : 2020-08-10
Category : Humor
ISBN : 0473374897
He wants sex. She wants to drive his car… It’s Nina’s third date with Jamie and she’s having second thoughts. He’s an insufferable jerk who only wants to talk about himself, and if it weren’t for his European sports car she would never have gone out with him in the first place. Discouraged by both Jamie’s choice of restaurant and his attempts at conversation, her evening is looking grim. If only she had a knight in shining armour to come to her rescue... A dramatic tale of determination, desire, and dating, The Golden Cockroach is the first instalment in a series of surprising and darkly humorous short stories. If you like relatable characters, amusing dialogue, and action spiced with both comedy and tragedy, then you’ll love J.B. Reynolds’s Crossing The Divide short story series. Ready to explore? Then get The Golden Cockroach today to begin your next literary journey!
Author : Jared Joseph
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 11,48 MB
Release : 2022-02-15
Category :
ISBN : 9781734306545
In the middle of the journey of our life Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood but then he founds a whole lot of literary movements and arguably modernity itself with his Divine Comedy that, nonetheless, inexplicably, didn't make God laugh. This serious absence caused God's non-divine counterparts, humans, to wonder: "Why are we in hell?" "Why is it so funny?" "And why can't I laugh?"
Author : Lori Ostlund
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 43,77 MB
Release : 2015-09-22
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1476790124
The debut novel from award-winning author Lori Ostlund—“smart, resonant, and imbued with beauty” (Publishers Weekly) that “provides considerable pleasure and emotional power” (The New York Times Book Review)—about a man who leaves his longtime partner in New Mexico for a tragicomic road trip deep into the mysteries of his own Midwestern childhood. Sensitive, bighearted, and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confinements of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like care of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco, Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Mortonville, Minnesota—a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron’s childhood heartbreaks and hopes. After Aaron’s father died in the town parade, it was the larger-than life misfits of his childhood who helped Aaron find his place in a world hostile to difference. But Aaron’s sense of rejection runs deep: when Aaron was seventeen, Dolores—his loving yet selfish and enigmatic mother—vanished one night. And when, all these years later, a new friend in San Francisco offers Aaron a way to locate his mother, his past and present collide, forcing Aaron to rethink his place in the world. “Touching and often hilarious...Ostlund writes with acuity and refreshing honesty about the messy complexity of being a social animal in today’s world...” (Booklist, starred review). “Everything here aches, from the lucid prose to the sensitively treated characters to their beautiful and heartbreaking stories...An example of realism in its most potent iteration: not a nearly arranged plot orchestrated by an authorial god but an authentic, empathetic representation of life as it truly is” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). After the Parade is a glorious anthem for the outsider.
