Too Much Flesh and Jabez

Too Much Flesh and Jabez PDF

Author: Coleman Dowell

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9780916583217

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Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a "perverse tale" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with unnaturally large genitals, she spins a tawdry tale of his frustrated relationship with his petite wife. Expressing all the bitterness of "an old woman's revenge," Miss Ethel's tale is nonetheless a sensitive depiction of rural life in the early years of World War II. Dowell's masterful use of the tale-within-a-tale to explore psychological states makes Too Much Flesh and Jabez a memorable achievement.

Fever Vision

Fever Vision PDF

Author: Gene Hayworth

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781564784575

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From his birth in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression to his suicide in Manhattan in 1985, Coleman Dowell played many roles. He was a songwriter and lyricist for television. He was a model. He was a Broadway playwright. He served in the U.S. Army, both abroad and at home. And most notably, he was the author of novels that Edmund White, among others, has called "masterpieces." But Dowell was deeply troubled by a depression that hung over him his entire life. Pegged as both a Southern writer and a gay writer, he loathed such categorization, preferring to be judged only by his work. Fever Vision describes one of the most tormented, talented, and inventive writers of recent American literature, and shows how his eventful life contributed to the making of his incredible art.

A Star-bright Lie

A Star-bright Lie PDF

Author: Coleman Dowell

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781564780225

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A Star-Bright Lie recounts the age-old story of the young provincial who comes to New York and is dazzled and betrayed by the bright lights of Broadway, but with a few kinks to the story: the provincial in this case was gay and would later develop into one of America's finest novelists. Coleman Dowell left Kentucky for New York in 1950 and spent the next decade trying to "make it" in the big city. With the same stylish verve and searching analysis that illuminate his fiction, Dowell recounts his frustrating experiences in show biz: early success as staff composer for a TV show (to which he was recommended by Tennessee Williams); next, touted as David Merrick's "Golden Boy, " a failed attempt to adapt O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! as a musical; several other attempts at a hit on Broadway; and finally, a sabotaged venture at making a musical of Carl Van Vechten's novel The Tattooed Countess. Throughout this memoir are unsparing portraits of Williams, Merrick, Van Vechten, Isak Dinesen, and others of the period. But the real star is Dowell himself: "his paranoia, his bedeviled fascination with glamour, his lyric response to nature, his nostalgia for a Kentucky he'd fled and then reinvented, his Gothic sense of horror, his touchy pride, his passion for black men, his alienation from both heterosexual society and the two forms of gay life he'd known" (from novelist Edmund White's foreword). Illustrated with eight pages of photographs (many, including the cover, by Van Vechten).

Arts and Letters

Arts and Letters PDF

Author: Edmund White

Publisher: Cleis Press

Published: 2006-08-02

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1573442488

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In these 39 lively essays and profiles, bestselling novelist and biographer Edmund White draws on his wide reading and his sly humour to illuminate some of the most influential writers, artists and cultural icons of the past century, among them Marcel Proust, Catherine Deneuve, George Eliot, Andy Warhol, André Gide, David Geffen, and Robert Mapplethorpe. 'Anyone who loves arts and letters even half as much as Edmund White will enjoy this fine collection by this admirable American writer.' - The Washington Post Book World

Gilbert Sorrentino

Gilbert Sorrentino PDF

Author: William McPheron

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9780916583675

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The trajectory of Gilbert Sorrentino's literary life can be tracked in this bibliography, from his first short story in a 1956 issue of his college literary magazine, through his involvement with the New York publishing scene in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally into the 1980s and early 1990, when his work, as at the beginning, once again is being published by small presses. The bibliography treats writings both by and about Sorrentino, uniting in one volume exhaustive descriptive analyses of primary works with annotated treatment of secondary sources. It thereby serves the needs not only of scholars and collectors interested in the physical production of Sorrentino's books but also of literary critics concerned with matters of reception and interpretation.

Josephine, the Mouse Singer

Josephine, the Mouse Singer PDF

Author: Michael McClure

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9780811207553

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Josephine, a mouse, takes a vow of celibacy in order to devote all her time to her art, singing.

The Harditts in Sawna

The Harditts in Sawna PDF

Author: Robert Nichols

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780811206846

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The third volume of Robert Nichols’s utopian tetralogy, Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai. In the previous books (Arrival and Garh City), we were treated to tantalizing glimpses of the imaginary central Asian country of Nghsi-Altai seen through the eyes of three travelers from the West, followed by an investigation of the city in a technologically advanced society which yet maintains an elaborate, "primitive" kinship system. We now turn to six narratives of village life, focusing on members of the Harditt family. Maddi, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl; Dhillon, a farm apprentice; his married older brother, Srikant -- these are the Harditt children of earlier volumes. "Women in Middle Age" tells of Sathan, their mother, and Nanda, their aunt, and the workings of the matriarchy in Sawna. An account is then given of the death of the grandfather, Old Harditt, and his translation into the family’s Ancestor Society. And finally, we see Venu, Sathan’s husband, as an elected official of the Wind Brotherhood of solar engineers. These are not, however, tales of individuals in the usual sense but probes in the web of relationships that constitutes a communal society, the widening circle of clan, tribe, and phratry. Each story, moreover, reveals an aspect of a delicate political-industrial balance -- for the world of Nghsi-Altai is modern, indeed a paradigm of an alternate society.

The Woman on the Bridge Over the Chicago River

The Woman on the Bridge Over the Chicago River PDF

Author: Allen R. Grossman

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9780811207157

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The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River is Allen Grossman's first collection with New Directions. His voice is astonishingly contemporary, his often dissociated imagery bordering on the surreal--yet one hears in his verse classical and Biblical echoes and, on occasion, darker medieval undertones. The brilliance of his imagination works against a measured eloquence, setting up a fine-edged tension not unlike the prophetic verse of William Blake, the wild dithyrambs of David, or the more controlled metrics of Catullus and Villon.

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