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Kmart Realism
Kmart realism, also termed "low-rent tragedies", is a form of minimalist literature found in American short fiction that became popular in the 1980s. Style These short stories "represent and reproduce the disintegration of public life ndthe colonization of private life by consumer capitalism". Background The precursors of Kmart realism include the so-called ''trailer park fiction'', ''Diet-Pepsi minimalism'', and ''hick chic''. Author Tao Lin described Kmart realism as being "at its “height” maybe in the mid to late-80’s. Frederick Barthelme had 20-30 stories published in the ''New Yorker'', Mary Robison also had many stories in the ''New Yorker'', and Gordon Lish was publishing other people’s books and stories as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf and '' Esquire'' around then." Criticism A related definition describes the genre as American fiction that is characterized, among other things, by a fascination with consumption venues and brand names. John Gardner, in critic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kmart (United States)
Kmart Corporation ( , doing business as Kmart and stylized as kmart) is an American retail company that owns a chain of big box department stores. The company is headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, United States. The company was incorporated in 1899 as S. S. Kresge Corporation and renamed Kmart Corporation in 1977. The first store with the Kmart name opened in 1962 in Garden City, Michigan. At its peak in 1994, Kmart operated 2,486 stores globally, including 2,323 discount stores and Super Kmart Center locations in the United States. As of April 16, 2022, that number was down to nine, including just three in the continental United States.Tyko, Kelly (April 11, 2022"Kmart store closings 2022: Just three Kmarts remain after new round of closures"''USA Today'' From 2005 through 2019, Kmart was a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corporation. Since 2019, Kmart has been a subsidiary of Transform SR Brands LLC, a privately held company that was formed in 2019 to acquire assets ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Ford
Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel ''The Sportswriter'' and its sequels, ''Independence Day'', ''The Lay of the Land'' and ''Let Me Be Frank With You'', and the short story collection '' Rock Springs'', which contains several widely anthologized stories. Ford received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1996 for ''Independence Day''. Ford's novel ''Wildlife'' was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name. He won the 2018 Park Kyong-ni Prize. Early life Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of Parker Carrol and Edna Ford. Parker was a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas City company. Of his mother, Ford said, "Her ambition was to be, first, in love with my father and, second, to be a full-time mother." When Ford was eight years old, his father had a severe heart failure, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel own ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Victor Pelevin
Victor Olegovich Pelevin ( rus, Виктор Олегович Пелевин, p=ˈvʲiktər ɐˈlʲɛɡəvʲɪtɕ pʲɪˈlʲevʲɪn; born 22 November 1962) is a Russian fiction writer. His novels include ''Omon Ra'' (1992), ''The Life of Insects'' (1993), ''Chapayev and Void'' (1996), and '' Generation P'' (1999). He is a laureate of multiple literary awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize (1993) and the Russian National Bestseller (2004), the former for the short story collection '' The Blue Lantern'' (1991). His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity literary movement. Biography Victor Olegovich Pelevin was born in Moscow on 22 November 1962 to Zinaida Semenovna Efremova, an English teacher, and Oleg Anatolyevich Pelevin, a teacher at the military department of Bauman University. He lived on Tver ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Generation "П"
''Generation " П"/P'' is the third novel by Russian author Victor Pelevin. Published in 1999, it tells the story of Babylen Tatarsky, a Moscow 'creative' and advertising copywriter. The story deals with themes of post-Soviet Russia, consumerism, recreational drug use, and Mesopotamian mythology. An English translation by Andrew Bromfield was published by Penguin in the US as ''Homo Zapiens'', and by Faber and Faber in the UK as ''Babylon''. A film adaption by Victor Ginzburg was released on 14 April 2011. __TOC__ List of chapters # Generation 'P' # Draft Podium # Tikhamat-2 # The Three Riddles of Ishtar – Tatarsky runs into his old classmate, Gireiev, and visits his home outside of Moscow. Gireiev and Tatarsky consume some fly agaric mushrooms. Tatarsky, hallucinating, enters an abandoned construction site, viewing it as the ziggurat he read of in chapter three. # Poor Folk # The Path to Your Self # Homo Zapiens – Using a ouija board Tatarsky summons the spirit of Ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alex Shakar
Alexander Michael Shakar (born April 25, 1968) is an American novelist, short story writer, and academic. His novel ''Luminarium'' (Soho Press, 2011) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. His first novel, '' The Savage Girl'', was chosen as a "Notable Book" by ''The New York Times'', was a IndieBound pick, and has been translated into six languages. Early life and education Shakar was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Stuyvesant High School. He graduated from Yale University in 1990. He was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and earned his Ph.D. in English and creative writing from the University of Illinois Chicago. He is the son of actor Martin Shakar. Career In 1996, Shakar won the National Fiction Competition and the Independent Presses Editors' "Pick of the Year" for his first collection of short stories, '' City in Love''. Set in a mythical version of New York City, the book reimagines transformation myths of Ov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as ''cyberpunk''. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term " cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story " Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel '' Neuromancer'' (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s. After expanding on the story in ''Neuromancer'' with two more novels (''Count Zero'' in 1986, and '' Mona Lisa Overdrive'' in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pattern Recognition (novel)
''Pattern Recognition'' is a novel by science fiction writer William Gibson published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols. The action takes place in London, Tokyo, and Moscow as Cayce judges the effectiveness of a proposed corporate symbol and is hired to seek the creators of film clips anonymously posted to the internet. The novel's central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data. Other themes include methods of interpretation of history, cultural familiarity with brand names, and tensions between art and commercialization. The September 11, 2001 attacks are used as a motif representing the transition to the new century. Critics identify influences in ''Pattern Recognition'' from Thomas Pynchon's postmodern detective story ''The Crying of Lot 49''. ''Pat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dairy Queen
Dairy Queen (DQ) is an American chain of soft serve ice cream and fast food restaurants owned by International Dairy Queen, Inc. (a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway since 1998) which also owns Orange Julius, and formerly owned Karmelkorn and Golden Skillet Fried Chicken. Its corporate offices are in Bloomington, Minnesota. The first DQ restaurant was in Joliet, Illinois, a suburb in Chicago. It was operated by Sherb Noble and opened on June 22, 1940. It served a variety of frozen products, including soft serve ice cream.DairyQueen.com page:History of Dairy Queen, IDQ." History The soft-serve formula was first developed in 1938 by John Fremont "J.F." "Grandpa" McCullough and his son Alex. They convinced friend and loyal customer Sherb Noble to offer the product in his ice cream store in Kankakee, Illinois. On the first day of sales, Noble sold more than 1,600 servings of the new dessert within two hours. Noble and the McCulloughs went on to open the first Dairy Queen store in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-service Laundry
A self-service laundry, coin laundry, laundromat, or coin wash is a facility where clothes are washed and dried without much personalized professional help. They are known in the United Kingdom as launderettes or laundrettes, and in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as laundromats. In Texas and other parts of the south central United States, the term ''washateria'' is still used by some older speakers. General While most homes have their own washers and dryers, self-service laundries are used by many who do not have their own machines. Even those who have their own machines sometimes use them for large bedding and other items that cannot fit into residential washers and dryers. Staffed laundries Laundromats are an essential business in urban communities. Laundromat owners may employ someone to oversee and maintain the general laundromat throughout the day. Some laundries employ staff to provide service for the customers. Minimal service centres may simp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kentucky
Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia to the east; Tennessee to the south; and Missouri to the west. Its northern border is defined by the Ohio River. Its capital is Frankfort, and its two largest cities are Louisville and Lexington. Its population was approximately 4.5 million in 2020. Kentucky was admitted into the Union as the 15th state on June 1, 1792, splitting from Virginia in the process. It is known as the "Bluegrass State", a nickname based on Kentucky bluegrass, a species of green grass found in many of its pastures, which has supported the thoroughbred horse industry in the center of the state. Historically, it was known for excellent farming conditions for this reason and the development of large tobacco plantations akin to those in Virginia and North Carolin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tobias Wolff
Tobias is the transliteration of the Greek which is a translation of the Hebrew biblical name he, טוֹבִיה, Toviyah, JahGod is good, label=none. With the biblical Book of Tobias being present in the Deuterocanon/Apocrypha of the Bible, Tobias is a popular male given name for both Christians and Jews in English-speaking countries, German-speaking countries, the Low Countries, and Scandinavian countries. In English-speaking countries, it is often shortened to Toby. In German, this name appears as Tobias or Tobi; in French as Tobie; and in Swedish as Tobias or Tobbe. Tobias has also been a surname. In other languages * Danish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese: Tobias * Amharic: ጦቢያ (T’obīya) * Catalan: Tobies * Czech: Tobiáš, Tobias * Croatian: Tobijaš * Finnish: Topias, Topi * French: Tobie * Greek: Τωβίας ''(Tobías)'' * Hebrew: Tovia, Tuvya * Hungarian: Tóbiás * Italian: Tobia (name) * Lithuanian: Tobijas * Polish: Tobiasz * Russ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Don DeLillo
Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of ''White Noise'' brought him widespread recognition and won him the National Book Award for fiction. ''White Noise'' was followed in 1988 by '' Libra'', a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for ''Mao II'' in 1992 and for ''Underworld'' in 1998), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for ''Mao II'' in 1992 (receiving another PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for '' The Angel Esmeralda'' in 2012), won the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and won the Libra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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