That Old Ace In The Hole

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That Old Ace in the Hole

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416588922
Total Pages : 387 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis That Old Ace in the Hole by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book That Old Ace in the Hole written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx comes an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love. Bob Dollar is a young man from Denver trying to make good in a bad world. Out of college and aimless, Dollar takes a job with Global Pork Rind, scouting out big spreads of land that can be converted to hog farms. Soon he's holed up in a two-bit Texas town called Woolybucket, where he settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old Texas ranch owners will hold on to their land, even when their children want no part of it. Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original, That Old Ace in the Hole traces the waves of change that have shaped the American West over the past century—and in Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irrepressible characters in contemporary fiction.

Hole in One!

Author : Chris Rodell
Publisher : Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1449400035
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (494 download)

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Book Synopsis Hole in One! by : Chris Rodell

Download or read book Hole in One! written by Chris Rodell and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The golfer lines up the shot. It's a long one, and the chances of acing it are nil. He says a prayer, swings, and - hallelujah! - he scores a hole in one. Many golfers confess to murmuring earnest prayers that they, too, may join the 42,000 people a year who catch lightning in a bottle and score a hole in one. It's an excitement that many lucky golfers say they remember with more clarity than their first kiss. That's because nothing in the grand old game is as mysterious yet mundane as the ace. Scott Hoch has had 26; fellow pro Fred Couples just two. Blind men and women have hit them, as have first-time golfers, three-year-old toddlers, and hundred-year-old widows. Richard Nixon is the only president to have scored one and he said it was a greater thrill than winning an election. Filled with fun facts and anecdotes, Hole in One! is a comprehensive clearinghouse of unusual stories involving the aura and accomplishment of scoring an ace. Readers will find out how duffers call upon unusual good luck charms and customs from foreign countries to ensure their swinging success. Hole in One! is the perfect book for all golfers who love the game, whether they're accomplished players or rank amateurs.

The Shipping News

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0743519809
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (435 download)

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Book Synopsis The Shipping News by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book The Shipping News written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.

Barkskins

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1501164481
Total Pages : 736 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Barkskins by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Barkskins written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Magnificent.” (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See) From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, marvelously dramatic novel about the destruction of the world’s forests. In the late seventeenth century, two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in Canada, then known as New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, they become woodcutters—barkskins. Sel suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman, and their descendants live trapped between two hostile cultures. Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years—their travels across North America, to Europe, China and New Zealand under stunningly brutal conditions—the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence and cultural annihilation. Again and again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face-to-face with possible ecological collapse. Proulx’s inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid—in their greed, lust, vengefulness or their compassion and hope—that we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a superb marriage of history and imagination.

Fen, Bog and Swamp

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1982173378
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (821 download)

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Book Synopsis Fen, Bog and Swamp by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Fen, Bog and Swamp written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Literary Hub!* *A 2022 NBCC Awards Nonfiction Finalist and a 2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist* From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, this riveting deep dive into the history of our wetlands and what their systematic destruction means for the planet “is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action” (Esquire). “I learned something new—and found something amazing—on every page.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth’s survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit. In a vivid and revelatory journey through history, Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. She introduces the early explorers who launched the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever. A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is “an unforgettable and unflinching tour of past and present, fixed on a subject that could not be more important” (Bill McKibben). “A stark but beautifully written Silent Spring–style warning from one of our greatest novelists.” —The Christian Science Monitor

Postcards

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416588914
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Postcards by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Postcards written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: E. Annie Proulx's first novel, Postcards, winner of the 1993 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, tells the mesmerizing tale of Loyal Blood, who misspends a lifetime running from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. Blood's odyssey begins in 1944 and takes him across the country from his hardscrabble Vermont hill farm to New York, across Ohio, Minnesota, and Montana to British Columbia, on to North Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico and ends, today, in California, with Blood homeless and near mad. Along the way, he must live a hundred lives to survive, mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils and trapping, prospecting for uranium, and ranching. In his absence, disaster befalls his family; greatest among their terrible losses are the hard-won values of endurance and pride that were the legacy of farm people rooted in generations of intimacy with soil, weather, plants, and seasons. Postcards chronicles the lives of the rural and the dispossessed and charts their territory with the historical verisimilitude and writerly prowess of Cather, Dreiser, and Faulkner. It is a new American classic.

Bird Cloud

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439171718
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (391 download)

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Book Synopsis Bird Cloud by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Bird Cloud written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx’s piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there. “Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians—and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

Heart Songs and Other Stories

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416588906
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Heart Songs and Other Stories by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Heart Songs and Other Stories written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before she wrote the bestselling Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

Fine Just the Way It Is

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416571671
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Fine Just the Way It Is by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Fine Just the Way It Is written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-09-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt (her second), National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winner Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral new collection.

Brokeback Mountain

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0743275306
Total Pages : 72 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (432 download)

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Book Synopsis Brokeback Mountain by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Brokeback Mountain written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working a sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer." "Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it."--BOOK JACKET.

The Ranger

Author : Ace Atkins
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101516100
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ranger by : Ace Atkins

Download or read book The Ranger written by Ace Atkins and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-06-09 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE FIRST NOVEL IN ACE ATKINS’ NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING QUINN COLSON SERIES. “In Quinn Colson, bestselling author Ace Atkins has created an American hero in a time when we need him.”—C. J. Box After years of war, Army Ranger Quinn Colson returns home to the rugged, rough hill country of northeast Mississippi to find his native Tibbehah County overrun with corruption, decay, meth runners, and violence. His uncle, the longtime county sheriff, is dead. A suicide, he’s told, but others—like tomboy deputy Lillie Virgil—whisper murder. In the days that follow, it’s up to Colson to discover the truth, not only about his uncle, but about his family, his friends, his town, and himself. And once it’s discovered, there’s no going back for this real hero of the Deep South.

Holes

Author : Louis Sachar
Publisher : Yearling
ISBN 13 : 0307798364
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis Holes by : Louis Sachar

Download or read book Holes written by Louis Sachar and published by Yearling. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking classic is now available in a special anniversary edition with bonus content. Winner of the Newbery Medal as well as the National Book Award, HOLES is a New York Times bestseller and one of the strongest-selling middle-grade books to ever hit shelves! Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes. It doesn't take long for Stanley to realize there's more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment —and redemption. Special anniversary edition bonus content includes: A New Note From the Author!; "Ten Things You May Not Know About HOLES" by Louis Sachar; and more!

Vernon God Little

Author : DBC Pierre
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 13 : 0802194354
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis Vernon God Little by : DBC Pierre

Download or read book Vernon God Little written by DBC Pierre and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If Huckleberry Finn were set on the Mexican-American border and written by the creators of South Park, it might read something like this.” —San Francisco Chronicle Hailed by critics and lauded by readers for its riotously funny and scathing portrayal of America in an age of trial by media, materialism, and violence, Vernon God Little was an international sensation when it was first published in 2003 and awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize. The memorable portrait of America is seen through the eyes of a wry, young protagonist. Fifteen-year-old Vernon narrates the story with a cynical twang and a four-letter barb for each of his townsfolk, a medley of characters. With a plot involving a school shooting and death-row reality TV shows, Pierre’s effortless prose and dialogue combine to form a novel of postmodern gamesmanship. “A dangerous, smart, ridiculous, and very funny first novel . . . Pierre renders adolescence brilliantly, capturing with seeming effortlessness the bright, contradictory hormone rush of teenage life.” —Sam Sifton, The New York Times

Bad Dirt

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0743273486
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (432 download)

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Book Synopsis Bad Dirt by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Bad Dirt written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx returns with another stellar collection of short stories bound to be even more successful than her bestselling, critically acclaimed Close Range. Annie Proulx’s new collection is peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control. Born to ranching, drawn to it, or desperate to get out, they inhabit worlds that are isolated and often dangerous. Trouble comes at them from unexpected angles, and they drive themselves through it, hardheaded and resourceful. No one writes better than Proulx about the American west and about lives that may no longer be viable. This is a stunning collection by one of the most vivid and exhilarating writers of our time.

Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed

Author : John F. Ross
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 1250033780
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed by : John F. Ross

Download or read book Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed written by John F. Ross and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sensational true story of Eddie Rickenbacker, America's greatest flying ace At the turn of the twentieth century two new technologies—the car and airplane—took the nation's imagination by storm as they burst, like comets, into American life. The brave souls that leaped into these dangerous contraptions and pushed them to unexplored extremes became new American heroes: the race car driver and the flying ace. No individual did more to create and intensify these raw new roles than the tall, gangly Eddie Rickenbacker, who defied death over and over with such courage and pluck that a generation of Americans came to know his face better than the president's. The son of poor, German-speaking Swiss immigrants in Columbus, Ohio, Rickenbacker overcame the specter of his father's violent death, a debilitating handicap, and, later, accusations of being a German spy, to become the American military ace of aces in World War I and a Medal of Honor recipient. He and his high-spirited, all-too-short-lived pilot comrades, created a new kind of aviation warfare, as they pushed their machines to the edge of destruction—and often over it—without parachutes, radios, or radar. Enduring Courage is the electrifying story of the beginning of America's love affair with speed—and how one man above all the rest showed a nation the way forward. No simple daredevil, he was an innovator on the racetrack, a skilled aerial dualist and squadron commander, and founder of Eastern Air Lines. Decades after his heroics against the Red Baron's Flying Circus, he again showed a war-weary nation what it took to survive against nearly insurmountable odds when he and seven others endured a harrowing three-week ordeal adrift without food or water in the Pacific during World War II. For the first time, Enduring Courage peels back the layers of hero to reveal the man himself. With impeccable research and a gripping narrative, John F. Ross tells the unforgettable story of a man who pushed the limits of speed, endurance and courage and emerged as an American legend.

Close Range

Author : Annie Proulx
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416588892
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Close Range by : Annie Proulx

Download or read book Close Range written by Annie Proulx and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize–winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short story collections of our time. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below," a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home. In "Brokeback Mountain," the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's violent intolerance. These are stories of desperation, hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes—confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty—with the more benign values of the new west. Stories in Close Range have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Oblivion

Author : David Foster Wallace
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 075951156X
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (595 download)

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Book Synopsis Oblivion by : David Foster Wallace

Download or read book Oblivion written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2004-06-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.