New Directions in Popular Fiction PDF Download

Author: Ken Gelder
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137523468
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
This book brings together new contributions in Popular Fiction Studies, giving us a vivid sense of new directions in analysis and focus. It looks into the histories of popular genres such as the amatory novel, imperial romance, the western, Australian detective fiction, Whitechapel Gothic novels, the British spy thriller, Japanese mysteries, the 'new weird', fantasy, girl hero action novels and Quebecois science fiction. It also examines the production, reproduction and distribution of popular fiction as it carves out space for itself in transnational marketplaces and across different media entertainment systems; and it discusses the careers of popular authors and the various investments in popular fiction by readers and fans. This book will be indispensable for anyone with a serious interest in this prolific but highly distinctive literary field.

Author: Juan Emar
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811231585
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
For the first time in English, a mind-bending, surreal masterpiece by “the forerunner of them all” (Pablo Neruda) In the city of San Agustín de Tango, the banal is hard to tell from the bizarre. In a single day, a man is guillotined for preaching the intellectual pleasures of sex; an ostrich in a zoo, reversing roles, devours a lion; and a man, while urinating, goes bungee jumping through time itself—and manages to escape. Or does he? Witness the weird machinery of Yesterday, where the Chilean master Juan Emar deploys irony, digression, and giddy repetitions to ratchet up narrative tension again and again and again, in this thrilling whirlwind of the ecstatically unexpected—all wed to the happiest marriage of any novel, ever. Born in Chile at the tail end of the nineteenth century, Juan Emar was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and lived in self-imposed exile from the literary circles of his day. A cult of Emarians, however, always persisted, and after several rediscoveries in the Spanish-speaking world, he is finally getting his international due with the English-language debut of Yesterday, deftly translated by Megan McDowell. Emar’s work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.

Author: Rachel Ingalls
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 081122709X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Now back in print, Mrs. Caliban is “totally unforgettable” (The New York Times Book Review) and “something of a miracle” (The New Yorker) In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research… Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates’s domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter—how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.

Author: Keith Ridgway
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811230864
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Ever since Keith Ridgway published his landmark cult novel Hawthorn & Child, his ardent fans have yearned for more Finally, Ridgway gives us A Shock, his thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good new novel. Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it’s at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They’re on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending. Perhaps Ridgway’s most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell—he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don’t know what time it is…

Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811215701
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
A book by Spain's greatest living writer weaves fiction and fact into a completely original and unforgettable hybrid. Called by its author a "false novel," Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his witty and sardonic 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls is a book Marías swears to be fiction, but which its "characters"--the real-life dons and professors and bookshop owners who have "recognized themselves"--fiercely maintain to be a roman à clef. With the sleepy world of Oxford set into fretful motion by a world that never "existed," Dark Back of Time begins an odyssey into the nature of identity and of time. Marías weaves together autobiography, a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost in Mexico.

Author: Peter Glassgold
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811206341
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Author: César Aira
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811229068
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Birthday is among the very best of Aira—it will surprise readers new to his work, and will deeply satisfy his many fans Before you know it you are no longer young, and by the way, while you were thinking about other things, the world was changing—and then, just as suddenly you realize that you are fifty years old. Aira had anticipated his fiftieth—a time when he would not so much recall years past as look forward to what lies ahead—but the birthday came and went without much ado. It was only months later, while having a somewhat banal conversation with his wife about the phases of the moon, that he realized how little he really knows about his life. In Birthday Aira searches for the events that were significant to him during his first fifty years. Between anecdotes ,and memories, the author ponders the origins of his personal truths, and meditates on literature meant as much for the writer as for the reader, on ignorance, knowledge, and death. Finally, Birthday is a little sad, in a serene, crystal-clear kind of way, which makes it even more irresistible.

Author: Ralph Cohen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000513017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
First published in 1974, New Directions in Literary History is a comprehensive attempt to present approaches to literary studies that have developed from phenomenology, stylistics and linguistics, Marxist reconsiderations of literature, interdisciplinary studies and analysis of reader response. Written by an international group of scholars, the essays are taken from the pages of New Literary History. They range from the Middle Ages to contemporary literature. European and American literary critics are here represented, together with an art critic, a philosopher and a novelist. Their essays deal with crucial problems in the study of literature: the relationship of the contemporary critic to works of the past; the place of method in literary study; how reading takes place; the role of the reader in different literary periods in providing a guide to interpretation; the language of literature and its relation to natural or ordinary language; the origin and decline of literary forms; and what constitutes literature, especially in the relation between fictional character and autobiography. Although the essays are essentially concerned with theoretical issues, they also examine the practical applications to literature. Students of English literature and literary theory will find this book particularly interesting.

Author: Julio Cortázar
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A master class from the exhilarating writer Julio Cortázar “I want you to know that I’m not a critic or theorist, which means that in my work I look for solutions as problems arise.” So begins the first of eight classes that the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar delivered at UC Berkeley in 1980. These “classes” are as much reflections on Cortázar’s own writing career as they are about literature and the historical moment in which he lived. Covering such topics as “the writer’s path” (“while my aesthetic world view made me admire writers like Borges, I was able to open my eyes to the language of street slang, lunfardo…”) and “the fantastic” (“unbeknownst to me, the fantastic had become as acceptable, as possible and real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening”), Literature Class provides the warm and personal experience of sitting in a room with the great author. As Joaquin Marco stated in El Cultural, “exploring this course is to dive into Cortázar designing his own creations.… Essential for anyone reading or studying Cortázar, cronopio or not!”

Author: Raymond Queneau
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811207898
Category : French fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Queneau uses a variety of literary styles and forms in ninety-nine exercises which retell the same story about a minor brawl aboard a bus.