Three Plots for Poe


Book Description

An old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary mystery, and an avant-garde mystery are presented in Three Plots for Poe. This sequence is a tribute to the Gothic genius of Poe who shaped the mystery genre. At the same time, these tales explore three phases of the genres progress and at last escape its Gothic limits altogether. An old-fashioned mystery, Death Calls the Shots invokes the golden age of pulp mysteries in a way that led Jacques Barzun, one of the ultimate authorities on this era, to express his admiration of the story for its mood, plot, pace, and structure. A contemporary mystery,Love in the Modern Landscape offers an unusual blend of evil and intelligence endangering a pair of lovers who appear unequal to the threat. An avantgarde mystery, Still No Ice at the Fish Market opens with a pair of bangsa bomb exploding in the midst of lovemakingand ends up as one of the most unusual literary experiments in many years. Two alternating narrators in this story capture the extremes of classic clarity and Gothic chaos, wit and weirdness, as they hand the story to each other from one chapter to the next until the final chapter blends their separate styles. In all three novels, passionate love affairs become more powerful than evil in competing for the center of the story. As the genius who rules these Gothic games, the ghost of Poe is exorcised at last.




The Graffiti Genius


Book Description

The Graffiti Genius is a bittersweet romantic tale of what inspires a person. It is also a mystery mingled with suspense. Its setting of abandoned warehouses is as much a part of the story as its three main characters: a young woman unaware of her power as a muse, a gifted, young, Hispanic artist who portrays her, and an art conservator more used to salvaging multi-million dollar masterpieces than graffiti in a setting filled with waist-high weeds, drug deals, and homicides. The youthful artist finds his inspiration in the shy but irresistible model, and the art conservator finds her inspiration in discovering their identity while she neglects her restoration of a masterpiece. The artist also wrestles bitterly with his fathers murder as an innocent victim in a South American drug war, his familys journey to America where they struggle to survive, and his desire to join his brother, who has stayed to fight against the drug lords in his native land. As for the art conservator, she finds her toughness tested by the artists lack of loyalty to his talent and the looming demolition of the warehouses that will pulverize his paintings. Desperation makes her more ingenious in her quest to spare his finest works. In such a deadly setting, though, her efforts turn into a race to save the muse, the artist, and his art from violent forces threatening to put an end to all of them.




Crystallizing Chaos


Book Description

Crystallizing Chaos is a wryly comic tale of balancing academia with action and replacing footnotes with a sense of fun. A high-brow college student, Daniel Coventry, hopes to be a writer. He encounters the forgotten but immensely gifted pulp novelist Stephen Chidley, who wrote action-oriented novels by the dozens in a month apiece while living his adventures. He is also inspired by the novelists granddaughter Dora, who resides in Stephens home near Daniels dorm. Through Daniel, they become entangled with his best professor, Cynthia Schuler, an outspoken feminist and scholar. Cynthia also wrangles with her chauvinist, unfaithful husband and has fallen for her favorite student after many rounds of lovemaking in her office. Each of them confronts the fear of failure. Daniel is afraid of flunking if he cant complete a novel for his graduation. Stephen is afraid thathe abused his fabulous storytelling talents as a pulp writer who came close to greatness only in a single memorable novel. Dora is afraid of any loss of independence. Cynthia is afraid of failing Daniel and of losing him to Dora. Step by comic misstep, they confront their differences and the chasm that divides the ivory tower from popular culture. With a month remaining, they decide that only one solution will enable Daniel to begin his book and race to finish it in time forgraduation: Let him crystallize the chaos of their year-long battle in a way that blends the best of academia and action!




The Well of Lost Plots


Book Description

The third novel in the New York Times bestselling Thursday Next series is “great fun—especially for those with a literary turn of mind and a taste for offbeat comedy” (The Washington Post Book World). “Delightful . . . the well of Fforde’s imagination is bottomless.”—People “Fforde creates a literary reality that is somewhere amid a triangulation of Douglas Adams, Monty Python, and Miss Marple.”—The Denver Post With the 923rd Annual Bookworld Awards just around the corner and an unknown villain wreaking havoc in Jurisfiction, what could possibly be next for Detective Thursday Next? Protecting the world’s greatest literature—not to mention keeping up with Miss Havisham—is tiring work for an expectant mother. And Thursday can definitely use a respite. So what better hideaway than inside the unread and unreadable Caversham Heights, a cliché-ridden pulp mystery in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside? But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well itself is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books—like Caversham Heights—are scrapped for salvage. To top it off, a murderer is stalking Jurisfiction personnel and nobody is safe—least of all Thursday. Don’t miss any of Jasper Fforde’s delightfully entertaining Thursday Next novels: THE EYRE AFFAIR • LOST IN A GOOD BOOK • THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS • SOMETHING ROTTEN • FIRST AMONG SEQUELS • ONE OF OUR THURSDAYS IS MISSING • THE WOMAN WHO DIED A LOT







Wounded in Action


Book Description

Based on actual events and set against the historical backdrop of America's longest war, Wounded in Action tells the compelling and gripping story of courage and determination of one of the Army's most elite combat soldiers as he faces the realities of surviving near fatal wounds and struggles to overcome the life changing devastation inflicted on his mind and body from the explosion of an enemy landmine.




Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts


Book Description

Winner of the 2019 Patrick F. Quinn Award for the best book on Poe (awarded by the Poe Studies Association) Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts addresses Poe's connections with, critical assessments of, borrowings from, and effect on his literary peers. It situates Poe within his own time and place, paying particular attention to his interactions with, and impact on, figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins. John Cullen Gruesser rebuts myths that continue to cling to Poe, demonstrates Poe's ability to transform themes he encountered in the works of his literary contemporaries into great literature, and establishes the profound influence of Poe's invention of detective fiction on nineteenth-century American writers.




Plot, Story, and the Novel


Book Description

Giving a close critical reading to major texts by Dickens, Poe, Eliot, Melville, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, Professor Caserio provides an historical dimension to the developing fate of plot, story, and the novel. In addition, he challenges the major critical positions of Northrop Frye, Roland Barthes, and Edward Said with regard to the interpretation and evaluation of narrative trends. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.







Borges's Poe


Book Description

Esplin argues that Borges, through a sustained and complex literary relationship with Poe's works, served as the primary catalyst that changed Poe's image throughout Spanish America from a poet-prophet to a timeless fiction writer.