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Mr. Difficult
"Mr. Difficult", subtitled " William Gaddis and the problem of hard-to-read books", is a 2002 essay by Jonathan Franzen that appeared in the 9/30/2002 issue of '' The New Yorker''. It was reprinted in the paperback edition of '' How to Be Alone'' without the subtitle. The essay describes the experience of being thought of as difficult by his readers and his own experience at reading difficult books. Franzen then provides an extended commentary on most of Gaddis's novels. The essay has attracted strong reactions. Novelist Ben Marcus had a negative opinion. Novelist Cynthia Ozick mentioned the Franzen/Marcus disagreement as part of a larger picture on the nature of reviewing. Author and publisher Phil Jourdan also had a negative opinion. A 2013 review of Gaddis's letters described the literary significance of Gaddis by summarizing Franzen's essay. Mrs. M—'s complaint The essay begins by describing some of the negative reactions his third novel, '' The Corrections'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Gaddis
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. (December 29, 1922 – December 16, 1998) was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, ''The Recognitions'', was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, ''J R'' and ''A Frolic of His Own'', won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. National Book Foundation: Awards"National Book Award Winners: 1950–2009" Retrieved March 28, 2012. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as '' The Rush for Second Place'' (2002). ''The Letters of William Gaddis'' was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013. A MacArthur Fellow, Gaddis is widely considered one of the first and most important American postmodern writers."William Gaddis: A Portfolio," ''Conjunctions'' 41 (2003), 373–415. Life and career Gaddis was born in New York City to William Thomas Gaddis, who worked "on Wall Street and in politics", and Edith (Charles) Gaddis, who worked her way up from being secr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For ''Gravity's Rainbow'', Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction."National Book Awards – 1974" . Retrieved 2012-03-29. (With essays by Casey Hicks and Chad Post from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog. The mock acceptance speech by Irwin Corey is not reprinted by NBF.) Hailing from |
James Reiss
James Reiss ( ; July 11, 1941 – December 2, 2016) was an American poet and novelist. Biography Reiss grew up in the Washington Heights section of New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ... and in northern New Jersey. He earned his B.A. and his M.A. in English from the University of Chicago. His poems have appeared in magazines that include ''The Atlantic'', ''Esquire (magazine), Esquire'', ''The Nation'', ''The New Republic'', ''The New Yorker'', ''Poetry (magazine), Poetry'', ''Slate (magazine), Slate'', and ''Virginia Quarterly Review''. He has won grants from the Creative Artists Public Service Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Actress In The House
''Actress in the House'' is Joseph McElroy Joseph Prince McElroy (born August 21, 1930) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is noted for his long postmodern novels such as '' Women and Men''. Personal background McElroy was born on August 21, 1930, in Brookl ...'s eighth novel. Lawyer Bill Daley follows up an unusual phone call from stage actress Becca Lang by attending her show. Daley is appalled when Becca is slugged rather brutally in what was clearly supposed to have been a stage slap. He stays afterward, and she moves into his life. Plot summary The novel is told in three portions, "First Night", "First Week", "First Love", and a short epilogue, "Extend". Several time frames are included in the novel, mostly told using the present tense, frequently with no direct indication that the present tense of one book section is unrelated to the present tense of the immediately previous book section. The main events of the novel are set in 1970, late ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanley Elkin
Stanley Lawrence Elkin (May 11, 1930 – May 31, 1995) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships. Biography Elkin was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Chicago from age three onwards. He did both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961 for his dissertation on William Faulkner. During this period he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957. In 1953 Elkin married Joan Marion Jacobson. He was a member of the English faculty at Washington University in St. Louis from 1960 until his death, and battled multiple sclerosis for most of his adult life. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. During ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph McElroy
Joseph Prince McElroy (born August 21, 1930) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is noted for his long postmodern novels such as '' Women and Men''. Personal background McElroy was born on August 21, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Brooklyn Heights. He graduated from Poly Prep Country Day School in 1947 and was given an Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award in 2007 from the school's Board of Governors. He graduated from Williams College in 1951. The following year, McElroy earned a master's degree from Columbia University. He served in the Coast Guard from 1952 to 1954, and then returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1961.''World Authors 1975–1980 In 1961, McElroy married Joan Leftwich, of London, in London. She is the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews; her father, Joseph Leftwich, was a translator and anthologizer of Yiddish poetry. The McElroys' only child, Hanna, was born in 1967. McElroy assisted with the birth. C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Hawkes (novelist)
John Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr. (August 17, 1925 – May 15, 1998), was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended some traditional constraints of narrative fiction. Biography Born in Stamford, Connecticut, Hawkes was educated at Harvard College, where fellow students included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Creeley. Although he published his first novel, '' The Cannibal'', in 1949, it was ''The Lime Twig'' (1961) that first won him acclaim. Thomas Pynchon is said to have admired the novel. His second novel, ''The Beetle Leg'' ( 1951), an intensely surrealistic Western set in a Montana landscape, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th-century American literature. Hawkes took inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov and considered himself a follower of the Russian-American translingual author. Nabokov's story "Signs and Symbols" was on the reading list for Hawkes' writin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barry Hannah
Barry Hannah (April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.Kellogg, Carolyn (March 2, 2010)"Author Barry Hannah, 67, has died" ''Los Angeles Times''. Retrieved May 18, 2013. Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi. He wrote eight novels and five short story collections. His first novel, ''Geronimo Rex'' (1972), was nominated for the National Book Award. ''Airships'', his 1978 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the American Civil War, and the modern South, won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The following year, Hannah received the prestigious Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hannah won a Guggenheim, the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story. He was awarded the Fiction Prize of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Lett ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the ''Houston Post'', was managing editor of ''Location'' magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of ''Fiction'' (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Life Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His father and mother were fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later and Barthelme's father became a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later study journalism. Barthelme won a Scholastic Writing Award in Short Story in 1949, while a student at Lamar High School in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Barth
John Simmons Barth (; born May 27, 1930) is an American writer who is best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include ''The Sot-Weed Factor'', a satirical retelling of Maryland's colonial history, and ''Lost in the Funhouse'', a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. Though Barth's work has been controversial among critics and readers, he was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his novel ''Chimera'' with John Williams for ''Augustus''. Despite Barth's influence on postmodern literature in America, his influence and publicity have decreased since his novels were published. Life John Barth, called "Jack", was born in Cambridge, Maryland. He has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister Jill. In 1947 he graduated from Cambridge High School, where he played drums and wrote for the school newspaper. He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Adv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art". Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Gass
William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, ''A Temple of Texts'' (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel '' The Tunnel'' received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel ''Middle C'' won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal. Early life and education William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, a steel town, where he attended local schools. He described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities. His father had been trained as an architect but, whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
