Edwin Mullhouse

Edwin Mullhouse, a novelist at 10, is mysteriously dead at 11. As a memorial, Edwin's bestfriend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons.

A parody of a literary biography starring a 10-year-old novelist who is mysteriously dead at 11—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler. As a memorial, Edwin Mullhouse's best friend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons.

Waiting for the End examines two dozen contemporary novels within the context of a half century of theorizing about the function of ending in narrative. That theorizing about ending generated a powerful dynamic a quarter-century ago with the advent of feminist criticism of masculinist readings of the role played by ending in fiction. Feminists such as Theresa de Lauretis in 1984 and more famously Susan Winnett in her 1991 PMLA essay, Coming Unstrung, were leading voices in a swelling chorus of theorist pointing out the masculinist bias of ending in narrative. With the entry of feminist readings of ending, it became inevitable that criticism of fiction would become gendered through the recognition of difference transcending a simple binary of female/male to establish a spectrum of masculine to feminine endings, regardless of the sex of the writer. Accordingly, Waiting for the End examines pairs of novels - one pair by Margaret Atwood and one by Ian McEwan - to demonstrate how a writer can offer endings at either end of the gender spectrum.

This new volume in the JPS Guides series is a fiction reader?s dream: a guide to 125 remarkable works of fiction. The selection includes a wide range of classic American Jewish novels and story collections, from 1867 to the present, selected by the author in consultation with a panel of literary scholars and book industry professionals. Roth, Mailer, Kellerman, Chabon, Ozick, Heller, and dozens of other celebrated writers are here, with their most notable works. Each entry includes a book summary, with historical context and background on the author. Suggestions for further reading point to other books that match readers? interests and favorite writers. And the introduction is a fascinating exploration of the history of and important themes in American Jewish Fiction, illustrating how Jewish writing in the U.S. has been in constant dialogue with popular entertainment and intellectual life. Included in this guide are lists of book award winners; recommended anthologies; title, author, and subject indexes; and more.

In these compelling new essays, leading critics sharpen our understanding of the narrative structures that convey meaning in fiction, taking as their point of departure the narratological positions of Dorrit Cohn, Grard Genette, and Franz Stanzel. This collection demonstrates how narratology, with its attention to the modalities of presenting consciousness, offers a point of entry for scholars investigating the socio-cultural dimensions of literary representations. Drawing from a wide range of literary texts, the essays explore the borderline between fiction and history; explain how characters are constructed by both author and reader through the narration of consciousness; show how gender shapes narrative strategies ranging from the depiction of consciousness through intertextuality to the representation of the body; address issues of contingency in narrative; and present a debate on the crucial function of person in the literary text. The contributors are Stanley Corngold, Gail Finney, Kte Hamburger, Paul Michael Ltzeler, David Mickelsen, John Neubauer, Thomas Pavel, Jens Rieckmann, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Judith Ryan, Franz Stanzel, Susan Suleiman, Maria Tatar, David Wellbery, and Larry Wolff. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the work of such major theologians as Lesslie Newbigin and Stanley Hauerwas, the "Christian story" is communal, and the individual Christian achieves meaning only through participation in this communally recounted narrative. While Alan Jacobs acknowledges the importance of the communal story, he suggests that something has been neglected in the development of narrative theology -- the narrative dimension of individual Christian lives. Looking Before and After encourages us to ask how individual lives can, in a specifically Christian sense, be meaningful, how we can discern and rightly interpret those meanings, and how we might tell our own stories in ways that avoid the dangers of presumption and despair. In his typically beautiful writing style, Jacobs here reinvigorates narrative theology and demonstrates the power of individual life stories well told and properly understood.

Earl Ingersoll introduces the fiction of Steven Millhauser, whose distinguished career of more than four decades includes eight books of short fiction and four novels, the latest being the Pulitzer Prize–winning Martin Dressler (1996). In Understanding Steven Millhauser, Ingersoll explores Millhauser’s twelve books chronologically, revealing the development of the thematic interests and narrative strategies of a major contemporary American writer and a master of fiction who cares as deeply about his craft as the modernists did earlier in the past century. While most examinations of an author’s work begin with at least a biographical sketch, Ingersoll has faced distinct challenges because Millhauser has resisted efforts to read his fiction through the lens of his biography. Responding to an interviewer’s request for a brief biography, Millhauser provided the succinct “1943–.” Part of such resistance, Ingersoll argues, arises from Millhauser’s belief that if readers have too many questions about an author’s work, the author has failed and no amount of response can redress that failure. Millhauser’s central characters, such as August Eschenburg and J. Franklin Payne, are often themselves artists or technicians who are “overreachers,” and Ingersoll shows that Millhauser’s early expressions of literary realism have given way to interest in departures from the “real.” For Millhauser, “stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams.” Millhauser’s strength is the ability to sustain obsessions because works of fiction succeed insofar as they are able to supplant reality. As a master fabulist, Ingersoll argues, Millhauser is preoccupied with extravagance both in the subject matter of his fiction and in his style. Whether it is Martin Dressler doing himself in by designing and constructing increasingly complex hotels or the miniaturists in the short story “Cathay” pushing their impulse to extremes, past the eye’s ability to see their art objects, Millhauser’s fiction is full of such an impulse, which can produce prolific artists as well as compulsive lunatics. The triumph of Millhauser’s craft, Ingersoll shows, is that it merges a fascination with the relationship between imagination and experience with a precise and allusive prose to produce works seamlessly joining the everyday with the radical and fantastic, in forms ranging from travelogues of the imagination to works merging the waking world with the world of dreams.