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Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Donald M. Kartiganer, J. Abadie. 2000
William Faulkner was born September 25, 1897. In honor of his centenary the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference of 1997 brought…
together twenty-five of the most important Faulkner scholars to examine the achievement of this writer generally regarded as the finest American novelist of the twentieth century. The essays and panel discussions that make up Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect provide a comprehensive account of the man and his work, including discussions of his life, the shape of his career, and his place in American literature, as well as fresh readings of such novels as The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and Go Down, Moses. What emerges from this commemorative volume is a plural Faulkner, a writer of different value and meaning to different readers, a writer still challenging readers to accommodate their highly varied approaches to what André Bleikasten calls Faulkner's abiding “singularity.”The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)
Par Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck. 2011
Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper…
and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. After years of combing library archives, government documents, and private collections across the country, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck have selected twenty-one of Hamer's most important speeches and testimonies. As the first volume to exclusively showcase Hamer's talents as an orator, this book includes speeches from the better part of her fifteen-year activist career delivered in response to occasions as distinct as a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, and a summons to testify in a Mississippi courtroom. Brooks and Houck have coupled these heretofore unpublished speeches and testimonies with brief critical descriptions that place Hamer's words in context. The editors also include the last full-length oral history interview Hamer granted, a recent oral history interview Brooks conducted with Hamer's daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer demonstrates that there is still much to learn about and from this valiant black freedom movement activist.Perspectives on Percival Everett (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)
Par Keith B. Mitchell. 2013
Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet…
underexamined African American authors working today. Although to date Everett has published eighteen novels, three collections of short fiction, three poetry collections, and one children's book, his work has not garnered the critical attention that it deserves. Perhaps one of the most vexing problems scholars have had in trying to situate Everett's work is that they have found it difficult to place him and his work within a prescribed African American literary tradition. Because he happens to be African American, critics have expectations of so-called authentic African American fiction; however, his work often thwarts these expectations. In Perspectives on Percival Everett, scholars engage all of his creative production. On the one hand, Everett is an African American novelist. On the other hand, he pursues subject matters that seemingly have little to do with African American culture. The operative word here is “seemingly;” for as these essays demonstrate, Everett's works falls well within as well as outside of what most critics would deem the African American literary tradition. These essays examine issues of identity, authenticity, and semiotics, in addition to postmodernism and African American and American literary traditions—issues essential to understanding his aesthetic and political concerns.Conversations with Natasha Trethewey (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Joan Wylie Hall. 2013
United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966) describes her mode as elegiac. Although the loss of her murdered mother…
informs each book, Trethewey's range of forms and subjects is wide. In compact sonnets, elegant villanelles, ballad stanzas, and free verse, she creates monuments to mixed-race children of colonial Mexico, African American soldiers from the Civil War, a beautiful prostitute in 1910 New Orleans, and domestic workers from the twentieth-century North and South. Because her white father and her black mother could not marry legally in Mississippi, Trethewey says she was "given" her subject matter as "the daughter of miscegenation." A sense of psychological exile is evident from her first collection, Domestic Work (2000), to the recent Thrall (2012). Biracial people of the Americas are a major focus of her poetry and her prose book Beyond Katrina, a meditation on family, community, and the natural environment of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The interviews featured within Conversations with Natasha Trethewey provide intriguing artistic and biographical insights into her work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet cites diverse influences, from Anne Frank to Seamus Heaney. She emotionally acknowledges Rita Dove's large impact, and she boldly positions herself in the southern literary tradition of Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. Commenting on "Pastoral," "South," and other poems, Trethewey guides readers to deeper perception and empathy.Conversations with Robert Stone (Literary Conversations Series)
Par William Heath. 2016
Ever since A Hall of Mirrors depicted the wild side of New Orleans in the 1960s, Robert Stone (1937-2015) has…
situated novels where America has shattered and the action is at a pitch. In Dog Soldiers, he covered the Vietnam War and drug smuggling. A Flag for Sunrise captured revolutionary discontent in Central America. Children of Light exposed the crass values of Hollywood. Outerbridge Reach depicted how existential angst can lead to a longing for heroic transcendence. The clash of religions in Jerusalem drove Damascus Gate. Traditional town-gown tensions amid twenty-first-century culture wars propelled Death of the Black-Haired Girl.Stone's reputation rests on his mastery of the craft of fiction. These interviews are replete with insights about the creative process as he responds with disarming honesty to probing questions about his major works. Stone also has fascinating things to say about his remarkable life--a schizophrenic mother, a stint in the navy, his involvement with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and his presence at the creation of the counterculture. From the publication of A Hall of Mirrors until his death in 2015, Stone was a major figure in American literature.Alan Moore: Conversations (Conversations with Comic Artists Series)
Par Eric L. Berlatsky. 2011
British comics writer Alan Moore (b. 1953) has a reputation for equal parts brilliance and eccentricity. Living hermit-like in the…
same Midlands town for his entire life, he supposedly refuses contact with the outside world while creating his strange, dense comics, fiction, and performance art. While Moore did declare himself a wizard on his fortieth birthday and claims to have communed with extradimensional beings, reticence and seclusion have never been among his eccentricities. On the contrary, for long stretches of his career Moore seemed to be willing to chat with all comers: fanzines, industry magazines, other artists, newspapers, magazines, and personal websites. Well over one hundred interviews in the past thirty years serve as testimony to Moore's willingness to be engaged in productive conversation. Alan Moore: Conversations includes ten substantial interviews, beginning with Moore's first published conversation, conducted by V for Vendetta cocreator David Lloyd in 1981. The remainder cover nearly all of his major works, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, Marvelman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, From Hell, Lost Girls, and the unfinished Big Numbers. While Moore's personal life and fraught business relations are discussed occasionally, the interviews chosen are principally devoted to Moore's creative practices and techniques, along with his shifting social, political, and philosophical beliefs. As such, Alan Moore: Conversations should add to any reader's enjoyment and understanding of Moore's work.Conversations with William Gibson (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Patrick A. Smith. 2014
“After reading Neuromancer for the first time,” literary scholar Larry McCaffery wrote, “I knew I had seen the future of…
[science fiction] (and maybe of literature in general), and its name was William Gibson.” McCaffery was right. Gibson's 1984 debut is one of the most celebrated SF novels of the last half century, and in a career spanning more than three decades, the American-Canadian science fiction writer and reluctant futurist responsible for introducing “cyberspace” into the lexicon has published nine other novels. Editor Patrick A. Smith draws the twenty-three interviews in this collection from a variety of media and sources—print and online journals and fanzines, academic journals, newspapers, blogs, and podcasts. Myriad topics include Gibson's childhood in the American South and his early adulthood in Canada, with travel in Europe; his chafing against the traditional SF mold, the origins of “cyberspace,” and the unintended consequences (for both the author and society) of changing the way we think about technology; the writing process and the reader's role in a new kind of fiction. Gibson (b. 1948) takes on branding and fashion, celebrity culture, social networking, the post-9/11 world, future uses of technology, and the isolation and alienation engendered by new ways of solving old problems. The conversations also provide overviews of his novels, short fiction, and nonfiction.Conversations with John A. Williams (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Jeffrey Allen Tucker. 2018
One of the most prolific African American authors of his time, John A. Williams (1925-2015) made his mark as a…
journalist, educator, and writer. Having worked for Newsweek, Ebony, and Jet magazines, Williams went on to write twelve novels and numerous works of nonfiction. A vital link between the Black Arts movement and the previous era, Williams crafted works of fiction that relied on historical research as much as his own finely honed skills. From The Man Who Cried I Am, a roman à clef about expatriate African American writers in Europe, to Clifford's Blues, a Holocaust novel told in the form of the diary entries of a gay, black, jazz pianist in Dachau, these representations of black experiences marginalized from official histories make him one of our most important writers.Conversations with John A. Williams collects twenty-three interviews with the three-time winner of the American Book Award, beginning with a discussion in 1969 of his early works and ending with a previously unpublished interview from 2005. Gathered from print periodicals as well as radio and television programs, these interviews address a range of topics, including anti-black violence, Williams's WWII naval service, race and publishing, interracial romance, Martin Luther King Jr., growing up in Syracuse, the Prix de Rome scandal, traveling in Africa and Europe, and his reputation as an angry black writer. The conversations prove valuable given how often Williams drew from his own life and career for his fiction. They display the integrity, social engagement, and artistic vision that make him a writer to be reckoned with.Conversations with Sterling Plumpp (Literary Conversations Series)
Par John Zheng. 2016
Conversations with Sterling Plumpp is the first collection of interviews with the renowned poet of Home/Bass and other much-admired works.…
Spanning thirty years and drawn from literary and scholarly journals and other media, these interviews offer insights into his poetic innovation of blues and jazz and his mastery of black vernacular in poetry. This collection seems fundamental to an understanding of the life and work of an African American poet who has been innovative in fusing blues and jazz rhythms with poetic insight and in vivifying the vernacular landscape of African American poetry.Born in 1940 in Clinton, Mississippi, Plumpp has been living in Chicago since 1962. Home/Bass received the 2014 American Book Award. The finest blues poet of his generation, Plumpp became a model for contemporary poetry and poetics and a leading figure in the tradition of blues/jazz poetry. He continues to reinvent the language while exploring the registers of individual and communal memory and of local, national, and global history. His poetry is important in attempts to define the black aesthetic from the era of the Harlem Renaissance to the seminal Black Arts Movement. It is also important for its re-articulation of the Great Migration, especially expressed by blues musicians who left Mississippi for Chicago.Out of the Shadow of Leprosy: The Carville Letters and Stories of the Landry Family
Par Claire Manes. 2013
In 1924 when thirty-two-year-old Edmond Landry kissed his family goodbye and left for the leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, leprosy, now…
referred to as Hansen's disease, stigmatized and disfigured but did not kill. Those with leprosy were incarcerated in the federal hospital and isolated from family and community. Phones were unavailable, transportation was precarious, and fear was rampant. Edmond entered the hospital (as did his four other siblings), but he did not surrender to his fate. He fought with his pen and his limited energy to stay connected to his family and to improve living conditions for himself and other patients Claire Manes, Edmond's granddaughter, lived much of her life gripped by the silence surrounding her grandfather. When his letters were discovered, she became inspired to tell his story through her scholarship and his writing. Out of the Shadow of Leprosy: The Carville Letters and Stories of the Landry Family presents her grandfather's letters and her own studies of narrative and Carville during much of the twentieth century. The book becomes a testament to Edmond's determination to maintain autonomy and dignity in the land of the living dead. Letters and stories of the other four siblings further enhance the picture of life in Carville from 1919 to 1977.I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb
Par Betty Press. 2011
I Am Because We Are features 125 black-and-white photographs by Betty Press taken all over East and West Africa since…
1987, combined with related African proverbs compiled by Annetta Miller, an American born in Tanzania. The book highlights the importance of proverbs in educating members of African societies on how to think, how to behave, and how to have a better life. Press took these photographs with the goal of making a significant educational and artistic contribution to the appreciation and understanding of African culture and society as well as our own. The photographs of daily life deal with knowledge, cooperation, love, beauty, friendship, hope, humor, sorrow, happiness, gratitude, dance, tradition, faith, peace, war, death, and human relationships. These are the same themes found in African proverbial language. Thus came the natural idea of coupling images with proverbs. Together they offer a powerful expression of African life and the universality of human emotions, ideas, and knowledge.Conversations with Jay Parini (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Michael Lackey. 2014
Jay Parini (b. 1948) is best known for his novel about Leo Tolstoy's last year, The Last Station, which has…
been translated into more than twenty-five languages and made into a Hollywood film. But he has also published numerous volumes of poetry; biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck; novels; and literary and cultural criticism. This book contains the most important interviews with the former Guggenheim fellow; former Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; and former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London. Parini's work is valuable not just because of its high quality and intellectual range. Parini's life and writings often seem like a seminar table, with friends gathered, talking and trading stories. He has openly written poems in conversation with writers he knew personally: Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He has, in his own life, kept an ongoing conversation with many literary friends over the years—Alastair Reid, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Ann Beattie, Julia Alvarez, Peter Ackroyd, A. N. Wilson, and countless others. These interviews offer a more comprehensive understanding of Parini's work as a poet, scholar, public intellectual, literary critic, intellectual historian, biographer, novelist, and biographical novelist. More importantly, these interviews will contribute to our understanding of the history of ideas, the condition of knowledge, and the state of literature, all of which Parini has played an important role in shaping.Faulkner's Sexualities: Dana Andrews (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Faulkner. 2010
William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm…
of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns. In Faulkner's Sexualities, contributors query Faulkner's life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner's fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do his texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a southern sexuality? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation
Par Ann Charters, Samuel Charters. 2010
John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of…
Kerouac’s life they were—in Holmes’s words—“Brother Souls.” Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar American society that for them had lost its direction. Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term “Beat Generation” to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes. From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac’s wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife to read the pages of Holmes’s manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes’s final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951, he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road. Biographer Ann Charters was close to John Clellon Holmes for more than a decade. At his death in 1988 she was one of a handful of scholars allowed access to the voluminous archive of letters, journals, and manuscripts Holmes had been keeping for twenty-five years. In that mass of material waited an untold story. These two ambitious writers, Holmes and Kerouac, shared days and nights arguing over what writing should be, wandering from one explosive party to the next, and hanging on the new sounds of bebop. Through the pages of Holmes’s journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers.Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Jay Watson And James G. Thomas Jr.. 2016
Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Thadious M. Davis, Matthew Dischinger, Dotty Dye, Chiyuma Elliott, Doreen Fowler, Joseph Fruscione, T. Austin Graham,…
Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Lisa Hinrichsen, Randall Horton, George Hutchinson, Andrew B. Leiter, John Wharton Lowe, Jamaal May, Ben Robbins, Tim A. Ryan, Sharon Eve Sarthou, Jenna Sciuto, James Smethurst, and Jay WatsonAt the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction that “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans,” a goal that “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading.” In the spirit of Glissant’s prediction, this collection places William Faulkner’s literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the United States and the Caribbean. The volume’s seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas.Contributors place Faulkner’s work in illuminating conversation with writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Randall Kenan, Edward P. Jones, and Natasha Trethewey, along with the musical artistry of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton.In addition, five contemporary African American poets offer their own creative responses to Faulkner’s writings, characters, verbal art, and historical example. In these ways, the volume develops a comparative approach to the Faulkner oeuvre that goes beyond the compelling but limiting question of influence—who read whom, whose works draw from whose—to explore the confluences between Faulkner and black writing in the hemisphere.Passing: A Novel
Par Patricia Jones. 1999
Like a glass of lemonade that is both sweet and tart, writer Patricia Jones mixes up a refreshing blend of…
deep emotion and raw truth, tempered by a grounded dose of wisdom.To Lila Giles, the term "passing" refers to those pale-hued folks who take advantage of their creamy shade by crossing into the white world. Descended from a long line of an elite Baltimore family awash with "high-colored" skin just right for "passing", family lore told Lila that not one of them would have thought to deny their true selves and rich history in such a way. It is this sense of pride that bonds the Giles family together -- a bond strongly enforced by Lila's controlling stepmother Eulelie. But the delicate balance of this branch of the family Eulelie has so carefully engineered is threatened when Lila's brother decides to marry a woman from an oh-so-very-wrong family.A proud though severe matriarch, Eulelie Giles has ruled her four grown stepchildren with a heavy self-righteousness that could break the spirit of the most sound opponent, let alone the nearly thirty-year-old Lila. Relentlessly loyal to her privileged world, Eulelie has ingrained upon Lila and her three other stepchildren the importance of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable blacks. Despite her strident belief in an unyielding class line, Eulelie has kept a secret about her own past that manages to affect, in more ways than a few, anyone who enters her life. As the wedding day draws closer, Lila begins to look at her reality versus Eulelie's, and what Lila finds leads to a confrontation between stepmother and stepdaughter that could finally shatter Eulelie's reign over Lila and the family, but ultimately, one that will lead Eulelie back to the truth.Filled with multi-dimensional characters and rich with atmosphere, Passing is a story of tangled family relationships; the secrets, misunderstanding, and deceptions that hold them together.Chester Brown: Conversations (Conversations with Comic Artists Series)
Par Dominick Grace and Eric Hoffman. 2013
The early 1980s saw a revolution in mainstream comics—in subject matter, artistic integrity, and creators' rights—as new methods of publishing…
and distribution broadened the possibilities. Among those artists utilizing these new methods, Chester Brown (b. 1960) quickly developed a cult following due to the undeniable quality and originality of his Yummy Fur (1983–1994). Chester Brown: Conversations collects interviews covering all facets of the cartoonist's long career and includes several pieces from now-defunct periodicals and fanzines. It also includes original annotations from Chester Brown, provided especially for this book, in which he adds context, second thoughts, and other valuable insights into the interviews. Brown was among a new generation of artists whose work dealt with decidedly nonmainstream subjects. By the 1980s comics were, to quote a by-now well-worn phrase, “not just for kids anymore,” and subsequent censorious attacks by parents concerned about the more salacious material being published by the major publishers—subjects that routinely included adult language, realistic violence, drug use, and sexual content—began to roil the industry. Yummy Fur came of age during this storm and its often-offensive content, including dismembered, talking penises, led to controversy and censorship. With Brown's highly unconventional adaptations of the Gospels, and such comics memoirs as The Playboy(1991/1992) and I Never Liked You (1991–1994), Brown gradually moved away from the surrealistic, humor oriented strips toward autobiographical material far more restrained and elegiac in tone than his earlier strips. This work was followed by Louis Riel (1999–2003), Brown's critically acclaimed comic book biography of the controversial nineteenth-century Canadian revolutionary, and Paying for It (2011), his best-selling memoir on the life of a john.Peter Bagge: Conversations (Conversations with Comic Artists Series)
Par Kent Worcester. 2015
For fans of Peter Bagge (b. 1957) and his bracing satirical writing and drawing, this collection offers a perfect means…
to track how he describes his career choices, work habits, preoccupations, and comedic sensibility since the 1980s. Featuring a new interview and much previously unavailable material, this book delivers insightful, occasionally gossipy, sometimes funny, and often tart conversations. His career has intersected with the modern history of comics, from underground comix and indie comics to comics journalism and graphic nonfiction. Bagge's detailed, garrulous, and often grotesquely funny (and discomfiting) work harks back to the underground generation, recalling Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, while also pointing forward to the emergence of alternative comics as a distinct genre. His signature series, the rawly humorous Hate (1990-1998) and his editorship (1983-1986) of the often outrageous Weirdo magazine, founded by Crumb, established Bagge as a leading voice in alternative comics, and his rude, wildly expressive cartooning makes him a counterpoint to the still introspection of recent literary graphic novels. In his career over three decades, Bagge has left his mark on various formats and genres, as a prolific cartoonist, an accomplished musician, and a sometime essayist, editor, and animator. While his creative output encompasses autobiographical comics, graphic nonfiction, magazine illustrations, gag cartoons, minicomics, political commentary, superhero parodies, comic strips, animated videos, and one-page humor pieces, Bagge stands out for creating continuity-based graphic stories that revolve around sharply defined, over-the-top fictional characters. Libertarians know him for his comics journalism, as his graphic biography of Margaret Sanger in 2013 reaches new audiences. While some have lazily branded Bagge as a grunge-era visual satirist, his creative restlessness and expanding body of work make it difficult to confine him within any single genre, cultural niche, or historical moment.Faulkner and Film (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Peter Lurie, Ann J. Abadie. 2014
Considering that he worked a stint as a screenwriter, it will come as little surprise that Faulkner has often been…
called the most cinematic of novelists. Faulkner's novels were produced in the same high period as the films of classic Hollywood, a reason itself for considering his work alongside this dominant form. Beyond their era, though, Faulkner's novels—or the ways in which they ask readers to see as well as feel his world—have much in common with film. That Faulkner was aware of film and that his novels’ own “thinking” betrays his profound sense of the medium and its effects broadens the contexts in which he can be considered. In a range of approaches, the contributors consider Faulkner’s career as a scenarist and collaborator in Hollywood, the ways his screenplay work and the adaptations of his fiction informed his literary writing, and how Faulkner’s craft anticipates, intersects with, or reflects upon changes in cultural history across the lifespan of cinema. Drawing on film history, critical theory, archival studies of Faulkner's screenplays and scholarship about his work in Hollywood, the nine essays show a keen awareness of literary modernism and its relation to film.Conversations with Ken Kesey (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Scott F. Parker. 2014
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. His debut novel, One…
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial sensation that was followed soon after by his most substantial and ambitious book, Sometimes a Great Notion. His other books, including Demon Box, Sailor Song, and two children's books, appeared amidst a life of astounding influence. He is maybe best known for his role as the charismatic and proto-hippie leader of the West Coast LSD movement that sparked “The Sixties,” as iconically recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the introduction to “An Impolite Interview with Ken Kesey,” Paul Krassner writes, “For a man who says he doesn't like to do interviews, Kesey certainly does a lot of them.” What's most surprising about this statement is not the incongruity between disliking and doing interviews but the idea that Kesey could possibly have been less than enthusiastic about being the center of attention. After his two great triumphs, writing played a lesser role in Kesey's life, but in thoughtful interviews he sometimes regrets the books that were sacrificed for the sake of his other pursuits. Interviews trace his arc through success, fame, prison, farming, and tragedy—the death of his son in a car accident profoundly altered his life. These conversations make clear Kesey's central place in American culture and offer his enduring lesson that the freedom exists to create lives as wildly as can be imagined.