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"Humorous fiction Fiction."
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Among strange victims : a novel
\"\"His tools are brilliant syntax, the ability to achieve highly powerful, recurrent images, a set of relationships between the plot strands that are more than a forced structure, and humor, a corrosive humor that never leads to laughter, but is present in every phrase of the book, charged with relentless sardonic irony.\"-FactorcriticoRodrigo likes his vacant lot, its resident chicken, and being left alone. But when passivity finds him accidentally married to Cecilia, he trades Mexico City for the sun-bleached desolation of his hometown and domestic life with Cecilia for the debauched company of a poet, a philosopher, and Micaela, whose allure includes the promise of time travel. Earthy, playful, and sly, Among Strange Victims is a psychedelic ode to the pleasures of not measuring-- Provided by Publisher
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The Golden Ass
With accuracy, wit, and intelligence, this remarkable new translation ofThe Golden Assbreathes new life into Apuleius's classic work. Sarah Ruden, a lyric poet as well as a highly respected translator, skillfully duplicates the verbal high jinks of Apuleius's ever-popular novel. It tells the story of Lucius, a curious and silly young man, who is turned into a donkey when he meddles with witchcraft. Doomed to wander from region to region and mistreated by a series of deplorable owners, Lucius at last is restored to human form with the help of the goddess Isis.
The Golden Ass, the first Latin novel to survive in its entirety, is related to the Second Sophistic, a movement of learned and inventive literature. In a translation that is both the most faithful and the most entertaining to date, Ruden reveals to modern readers the vivid, farcical ingenuity of Apuleius's style.
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A fairly good time, with green water, green sky
\"An NYRB Classics Original Mavis Gallant's two novels are as memorable as her many short stories. Full of wit, whim, and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here accompanied by Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallant's unparalleled skill as a storyteller. Shirley Perrigny (nee Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroin of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young, widowed girl recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe is fond of quoting from Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis to describe her life and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley's life begin to recede Philippe having apparently though not definitively left her freewheeling, makeshift and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could the unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story? Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant's first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcee, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerants--in Venice, Cannes, and Paris--glamorous and dependent. From this untidy life and the false notes of her mother, Flor attempts to flee, with little hope of escape\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Boys from Possum Grape
Set in the days of small, local banks when embarrassing entrepreneurs were the one family in town who bought a new car every year-those cars everyone else called 'gunboats-and the bad guys came with black hats, this rollicking send-up of stupid criminals who even Barnie Fife could have outwitted makes for belly-laughs while reading and memories that will bring smiles to readers' faces.
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The waiter
\"In the tradition of modern classics The Dinner and A Gentleman in Moscow comes The Waiter, in which the finely tuned balance of a grand European restaurant (that has seen better days) is irrevocably upset by an unexpected guest. In a centuries-old European restaurant called The Hills, a middle-aged waiter takes pride in the unchangeable aspects of his job: the well-worn uniform, the ragged but solid tablecloths, and the regular diners. Some are there daily, like Graham \"Le Gris\"--also known as The Pig--and his dignified group of aesthetes; the slightly more free-spirited drinking company around Tom Sellers; and the closest one can get to personal friends of the waiter, Edgar and his young daughter, Anna. In this universe unto itself, there is scarcely any contact between the tables...until a beautiful and well-groomed young woman walks through the door and upsets the delicate balance of the restaurant and all it has come to represent. Like living in a snow globe, The Waiter is a captivating study in miniature. Everything is just so, and that's exactly how the waiter needs it to be. One can understand why he becomes anxious when things begin to change. In fact, given the circumstances, anxiety just might be the most sensible response... With the sophistication of The Remains of the Day and the eccentricity of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Waiter marks the North American debut of an exciting new voice in literary fiction\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Jewish Humor and Woody Allen's Short Fiction
Woody Allen's short fiction has received much less scholarly attention than his films. Scholars who have investigated the humorous qualities of Allen's short stories and casual pieces have noted his penchant for absurdity and non sequitur, his use of the Little Man as a vehicle for humor, and the linguistic dimensions of his joke scripts rather than his Jewish comic sensibilities. Beginning with a brief overview on how Jewish humor has contributed to the comic achievements of American culture and drawing on analyses of the main characteristics of Jewish humor, this article adds to the scholarship by exploring the influence of Jewish humorous traditions on Woody Allen's short fiction.
Journal Article
The hippopotamus : a novel
\"\"I've suffered for my art, now its your turn.\" So begins the tale of Ted Wallace, unaffectionately known as the Hippopotamus. Failed poet, failed theater critic, failed father and husband, Ted is a shameless womanizer, drinks too much, and is at odds in his cranky but maddeningly logical way with most of modern life. Fired from his newspaper, Ted seeks a few months' repose and free liquor at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his old friend Michael Logan, to whose beautiful and mysterious son David, Ted is godfather\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Day My Mother Cried and Other Stories
The lasting charm of Kaufman’s stories lies in a delightful mix of personal incidents and observations set against an anchoring backdrop of cultural tradition. His new collection is filled with tales from his parents’ homeland in the Ukraine, his own childhood reminiscences, and his adult travels. We watch the young author forced alongside \"every Jewish boy on the block\" to emulate Yehudi Menuhin on a ten-dollar violin with a moldy bow until the boy is spared by an innate lack of talent and his father’s judgment of his concert: \"Enough is enough is more than enough.\" Kaufman is carefully attuned to the awkwardness of adulthood as well as to that of early adolescence. In \"Interlude in Bangkok,\" his narrator scours the city for a synagogue while pursued by a prostitute. Later he and a friend encounter Greta Garbo in a museum café and are too frightened to approach her. \"I am not she,\" intones the mysterious movie star, and in his own way, Kaufman says that of himself in these stories through an autobiograp
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Big chickens fly the coop
Four fearful chickens venture out to see the farmhouse, with humorous results.
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The adventures of Tom Sawyer ; Tom Sawyer abroad
This is a small sampling of Mark Twain's life-long fulminations against the editors, printers, and proofreaders who, subtly or grossly, altered his work and shrouded his intentions as they transmitted his writing from manuscript to type. Through unauthorized changes and inadvertent errors, Mark Twain's first publishers brought out texts full of thousands of errors in form and content. Later publishers then based their reprints on these corrupt editions and added errors of their own. It is the aim of the Iowa-California edition to strip away this accretion of error and present texts faithful to the author's intention. By comparing all the life-time version of Mark Twain's works, the editors are able to isolate the author's revisions from the printers and publishers' changes. The record of this comparison supplies not only the evidence for editorial decisions, but also the history of the author's efforts to shape his work. In addition, these volumes include previously uncollected work, work that has long been out of print, and such unpublished writing as related drafts, working notes, and marginalia. The texts are established at the Center for Textual Studies at the University of Iowa or at the Mark Twain Papers in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The costs for editorial work have been met by generous support from the Editing Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, and other institutional and private donors. The edition is published by the University of California Press with financial assistance from the Graduate College at the University of Iowa. All volumes are submitted to the Center for Editions of american Authors, or to its successor, the Committee for Scholarly Editions, for examination and approval
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