Ecstatic Cahoots

In this remarkable collection of bite-size stories, Stuart Dybek, one of our most prodigious writers, explores the human appetite for rapture and for trust. With fervent intensity and sly wit, he gives each tale his signature mix of characters—some almost ghostly, others vividly real—who live in worlds tinged with surreal potential. There are crazed nuns hijacking streetcars, eerie adventures across frozen ponds, and a boy who is visited by a miniature bride and groom every night in his uncle's doomsday compound. Whether they are about a simple transaction, a brave inquiry, a difficult negotiation, or shared bliss, the stories in Ecstatic Cahoots target the friction between our need for ecstatic self-transcendence and our passionate longing for trust between lovers, friends, family, and even strangers. Call it micro-fiction or mini-fiction, flash fiction or short shorts. Whatever the label, the marvelous encounters here are marked by puzzlement, anguish, and conspiratorial high spirits. In this thrilling collection, Stuart Dybek has once again re-envisioned the possibilities of fiction, creating myriad human situations that fold endlessly upon each other, his crackling prose drawing out the strange, the intimate, and the mysterious elements in each.

Presents a series of critical essays discussing the structure, themes, and subject matter of Fitzgerald's story of the love between wealthy Jay Gatsby and the beautiful Daisy Buchanan.

The only authorized edition of the twentieth-century classic, featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

A compelling account of contemporary life; both interesting and tragic. "He had been a high-bouncing lover who had savoured the pleasure of being caught on the throes of a vibration that flowed from a clap of cymbals struck upon a spire. It needn't have ended but it had. He would carry the echo of it with him but the actual pulsation had ceased. A memory had been formed. Danny felt relieved-it was easier to carry memories than people with him.

Steiner (English, Univ. of Pennsylvania) delivers a lucidly written elaboration of "interactive aesthetics" first broached in her examination of the revival of beauty in contemporary art, Venus in Exile (2001). Here the focus is the artist's model, broadly conceived as a paradoxical site of reality/artificiality and power/lack of power. Steiner incorporates a wide range of material to explain early history (the Pygmalion myth, Galatea, Eve, and Pandora), the postmodernist turn (Edie Sedgwick, muse of Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan), and recent developments (Second Life, blogging, Wikipedia, bioethics). Concepts (mimesis, spectacle), literature (Kathleen Rooney's Live Nude Girl of 2008, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year of 2007, Milton, Keats, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Vladamir Nabokov, Nathaniel Hawthorne); art (Michelangelo, Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Mapplethorpe, Hannah Wilke, Vanessa Beecroft, Gillian Wearing, Oron Catts, Helena Almeida, Ann Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Frederick Hart, John Kindness, Peter Eisenman, Rachel Whiteread), theory (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Frederic Jameson, Judith Butler, Rene Girard), and art history (Michael Fried, Sir Kenneth Clark) are woven into a rich tapestry informed by Steiner's favorite semioticians, Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. General Readers; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by E. K. Mix.

In The Vanishing Moon, Joseph Coulson writes with insight and beauty about the American working-class, about the strength and strain of family bonds, and about tragic incidents that haunt the human psyche over a lifetime. Set in Cleveland and Detroit, the novel chronicles two generations of the Tollman family, opening at the start of the Great Depression and moving forward through five decades to the Vietnam War. The first narrator, Stephen Tollman, looks back on his early adventures with his older brother, as both boys try to shield their siblings from the confusion and vulnerability of financial ruin. Later, as World War II approaches, Katherine Lennox, musician and political activist, offers an outsider’s view of the Tollmans, mesmerizing both Stephen and his brother with her energy and ambition. James Tollman comes of age in the 1960s, and as the youngest son in the family’s second generation, he strives to understand his father and mother amidst a summer of assassinations and civil unrest. Stephen returns to finish the story, struggling to hold his own against the currents of memory and abandoned dreams. Told with the compression and intensity of a poem, The Vanishing Moon is a novel of desire, unyielding necessity, and the people and places that inevitably disappear from our lives.

The Great Gatsby is a delightful concoction of Real Housewives, a never-ending Academy Awards after-party, and HBO's Sopranos. Shake over ice, add a twist of jazz, a spritz of adultery, and a little pink umbrellaand you've got yourself a 5 o'clock beverage that, given the 1920s setting, you wouldn't be allowed to drink.The one thing all these shows and Gatsby have in common is the notion of the American Dream. The Dream has seen its ups and downs. But from immigration (certainly not a modern concern, right?) to the Depression (we wouldn't know anything about that), the American Dream has always meant the same thing: it's all about the Benjamins, baby.Yet Gatsby reminds us that the dollars aren't always enough. As we learned from Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, you can put on the dress, but you still aren't going to know which fork to use. Especially if you're bootlegging to make the money for the dress. Even when they have the cash, newly made millionaires are still knocking at the door for the accepted elite to let them in. If the concept of the nouveau riche (the newly rich) has gone by the wayside, the barriers to the upper echelon (education, background) certainly haven't. So there you have it. There's more to the Gatsby cocktail than sex, lies, and organized crime. Although those are there, too, which, as far as reading the book goes, is kind of a motivation in itself.