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Sven Birkerts
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Agape AgapeISBN 0142437638 (0-14-243763-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Agape Agape'Book summary:William Gaddis's final work, Agape Agape, is an effective distillation of his philosophy and a powerful personal statement regarding the state of modern culture. The book is written in the form of a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness monologue delivered by a dying elderly man, himself attempting to complete his final work, a social history of the player piano in America. Desperate to complete his work before the onset of madness or death and fighting the effects of medication, the frantic narrator offers a meandering discussion of his work, which explores technology's artistically stifling influence. The narrator has isolated a particularly profound example of this in the player piano, an artistic invention that alternately replaced the artist. Technology, the narrator argues, has heightened the value of passivity, entertainment, and mediocrity, leading to the impending "collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look." The narrator fervently claims that only through artistic courage can we achieve understanding, transcendence, and discover the uniting spirit of creativity, a brotherly "agape" love.
As Joseph Tabbi explains in his informative afterword, Agape Agape is the result of years of research and consideration by Gaddis, and the novella explores technological advancement and the response to this advancement, both actual and hypothetical, by such figures as Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Tolstoy. While an impressive work of scholarship, Agape Agape is foremost an emotional decree, Gaddis's final statement of outrage and sadness at our cultural direction and a plea for change. At less than 100 sparsely punctuated pages, the book is an efficient combustion of energy and an affecting depiction of personal and cultural disintegration. At once a condemnation, warning, and affirmation, it reflects Gaddis's apprehensions but also his enduring faith in the power of creation. A worthwhile starting point for newcomers to Gaddis's work, Agape Agape is a memorable end to the career of a gifted thinker. --Ross Doll [via]
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American Energies: Essays on Fictionby Sven BirkertsISBN 0688106129 (0-688-10612-9)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Againby Sven BirkertsISBN 1555974899 (1-55597-489-9)
Softcover, Graywolf Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again'Book summary:[via]The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners.In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.More editions of Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again:
An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th Century Literatureby Sven BirkertsISBN 0879238070 (0-87923-807-0)
Softcover, David R Godine Pub
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Bookwormby Sven BirkertsISBN 1593720238 (1-59372-023-8)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetryby Sven BirkertsISBN 0688078613 (0-688-07861-3)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Ageby Sven BirkertsISBN 0865479577 (0-86547-957-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age'Book summary:What hath the inexpensive personal computer, the portable cassette player, and the CD-ROM wrought? Are books as we know them dead? And does--or should--it matter if they are? Birkerts, a renowned critic, examines the practice of reading with an eye to what the future will bring. [via]
More editions of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age:
- The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age: ISBN 0449910091 (0-449-91009-1)
Softcover, Ballantine Books - The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age: ISBN 057119849X (0-571-19849-X)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux - The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age: ISBN 0865479577 (0-86547-957-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
- The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age: ISBN 0449910091 (0-449-91009-1)
Hopeful Monstersby Nicholas Mosley, Sven BirkertsISBN 1564782425 (1-56478-242-5)
Softcover, Dalkey Archive Pr
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The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge And His Hangman And Suspicionby Friedrich Durrenmatt, Joel Agee, Sven BirkertsISBN 0226174441 (0-226-17444-1)
Softcover, Univ of Chicago Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge And His Hangman And Suspicion'Book summary:This volume offers bracing new translations of two precursors to the modern detective novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, whose genre-bending mysteries recall the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipate the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In The Judge and His Hangman, Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in Suspicion, Barlach pursues a former Nazi doctor by checking into his clinic with the hope of forcing him to reveal himself. The result is two thrillers that bring existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling convergence.[via]More editions of The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge And His Hangman And Suspicion:
Longwood Introduction to Fictionby Sven BirkertsISBN 0205133363 (0-205-13336-3)
Hardcover, Allyn & Bacon, Incorporated
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My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Timeby Sven BirkertsISBN 0142003093 (0-14-200309-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time'Book summary:In The Gutenburg Elegies, a widely acclaimed New York Times Notable Book, Sven Birkerts won attention as a graceful and thoughtful essayist, an eloquent advocate of literature in an age of electronic media. Now he shows what only literature can do, in a moving, compelling, brilliantly written memoir that probes what it means to be an American with roots in a distant culture.
As a boy growing up in suburban Detroit, Birkerts always felt intensely uncomfortable with his family's ties to Latvia-the birthplace of all four of his grandparents. And yet his struggle to find his own path led inexorably back through the overgrown garden of family lore. Birkerts deftly weaves his own history (from struggles with his overbearing father to adventures at Woodstock, from lost loves to his emergence as a writer) with episodes from his ancestors' lives-scenes from Riga and Moscow during the Russian Revolution, tales of Paris and mistresses and family scandals. My Sky Blue Trades is destined to be a classic exploration of the immigrant experience and the writer's inner life. [via]More editions of My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time:
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Mysteriesby Sven BirkertsISBN 0374530297 (0-374-53029-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mysteries'Book summary:The main character, like the title says, is a mysterious guy. Nagel arrives in a Norwegian town with plenty of money and goodwill, and though kind of an eccentric, seems to start to fit in with the local crowd. But it's almost as if Nagel only just landed on Earth, and while he wishes to live correctly, has no idea how to do it. Published at the end of the last century, Mysteries is an existentialist novel, very strange, often very funny, often sad and largely asking the question, "Why live?" [via]
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Reading Life: Books for the Agesby Sven BirkertsISBN 1555974643 (1-55597-464-3)
Softcover, Graywolf Pr
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Readingsby Sven BirkertsISBN 1555972837 (1-55597-283-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Readings'Book summary:Sven Birkerts got his start as an expert appraiser of such European imports as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz. Yet he soon expanded his scope to literature of all stripes, and turned out to be a particularly pungent critic of American fiction. His thoughts on individual writers were invariably eloquent and refreshingly cant-free. But Birkerts also had a gift for cultural trend-spotting: his superb deflation of Gordon Lish and his acolytes was the high point of his first collection, An Artificial Wilderness. More recently, however, he has mutated into something of a gloom-and-doom specialist. First came The Gutenberg Elegies, in which Birkerts defended the printed word against all electronic comers (i.e., CD-ROMS, audiobooks, and the Internet). Then he edited an anthology of essays by like-minded technophobes--although to be fair, at least a few participants confessed to a secret online addiction.
Now Birkerts has published Readings, which resembles a greatest-hits package but is heavily skewed toward the author's Chicken Little side. In the first essay, for example, he ponders the "millennial warp"--his sense "that our old understandings of time--and, therefore, of life itself--are in many ways useless." "The Idea of the Internet" is a eulogy to the solitary self, soon to be engulfed by the "massive electronic nervous system" of the Net. It's not that these aren't provocative ideas. The problem is that when the author diverts his attention from a particular text, his customarily lucid prose can turn to sociological fudge. The good news, however, is that Readings does contain a generous helping of vintage Birkerts. There are shrewd and enlightening pieces on Rilke, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Don DeLillo, as well as such deep-focus delights as "When Lightning Strikes." And in an essay on Seamus Heaney's sonnet sequence "Clearances," Birkerts puts his finger on one of the primary rewards of literature: "Reading the end of the poem, I feel as though some obstacle in my own life has been removed." Even better, he conveys why--and a critic who can so eloquently analyze his own sense of elation is one we'd better listen to. --James Marcus [via]
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Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Museby Sven BirkertsISBN 1555972489 (1-55597-248-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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World Lightby Halldor Laxness, Magnus Magnusson, Sven BirkertsISBN 0375727574 (0-375-72757-4)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'World Light'Book summary:As an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation: the belief that one day he will be a great poet. The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poets life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness.
As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this magnificently humane novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Olafs ambition drives him onwardand into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several susceptible womenWorld Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel. [via]More editions of World Light:
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Writing Wellby Donald Hall, Sven BirkertsISBN 0321012062 (0-321-01206-2)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Writing Well'Book summary:Co-authored by two esteemed writers, Writing Well, is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose.
[via]More editions of Writing Well:
- Writing Well: ISBN 0321439015 (0-321-43901-5)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group - Writing Well: ISBN 0673469166 (0-673-46916-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins College Div - Writing Well: ISBN 0823065324 (0-8230-6532-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins College Div - Writing Well: ISBN 0673533344 (0-673-53334-4)
Hardcover, Harpercollins - Writing Well: ISBN 0321012062 (0-321-01206-2)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group
- Writing Well: ISBN 0321439015 (0-321-43901-5)
Writing Well/Students Editionby Donald Hall, Sven BirkertsISBN 0673462242 (0-673-46224-2)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley
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Elegia a Gutenberg / Gutenberg Elegy: El Futuro De La Lectura En La Era Electronica / the Reading Future in the Electronic Ageby Sven BirkertsISBN 8420654450 (84-206-5445-0)
Softcover, Alianza Editorial Sa
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