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| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Reading Stanley Elkin Peter J. Bailey, 1985 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Living End Stanley Elkin, 2004 A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Mr. Ellerbee - until he is senselessly killed during a liquor-store holdup - is a good husband, a good boss, and an overall good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings. After a whirlwind tour of the afterlife, Ellerbee finds himself in Hell for a litany of minor offenses, including taking the Lord's name in vain, keeping his store open on the Sabbath, and thinking that Heaven looks like a theme park. And so begins Elkin's hilarious, imaginative vision of life after death.--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Living End Stanley Elkin, 2010-10-26 Elkin’s darkly comic novel of the afterlife—the story of one man’s redemptive journey to hell and back When he is killed during a holdup at his Minneapolis liquor store, Ellerbee’s bad luck is only beginning. After a short stint in heaven, Ellerbee is banished to hell, abruptly and without explanation. What follows is a surreal and memorable adventure that brings Ellerbee face-to-face not only with his murderer’s accomplice, but also with God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and a host of others, all in his quest for salvation unlike any other. Moving and witty, The Living End is a hilarious send-up of afterlife clichés and a masterful exploration of the absurdities of human existence. This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Shouting Down the Silence David C Dougherty, 2010-10-01 Shouting Down the Silence presents the first complete biography of Stanley Elkin, a preeminent novelist who consistently won high marks from critics but whose complexities of style seemed destined to elude the popular acclaim he hoped to attain. From the publication of his second novel, A Bad Man, in 1967 to his death in 1995, Elkin was tormented by the desire for both material and artistic success. Elkin's novels were taught in colleges and universities, his fiction received high praise from critics and reviewers (two of his novels won National Book Critics Circle Awards), and his short stories were widely anthologized--and yet he was unable to achieve renown beyond the avant-garde, or to escape the stigma of being an academic writer. He wanted to be Faulkner, but he had trouble being Elkin. Drawing on personal interviews and an intimate knowledge of Elkins's life and works, David C. Dougherty captures Elkin's early life as the son of a charismatic, intimidating, and remarkably successful Jewish immigrant from Russia, as well as his later career at Washington University in St. Louis. A frequent participant at the annual Bread Loaf Writers' conference, he was the friend--and sometime antagonist--of other important writers, particularly Saul Bellow, William Gass, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Coover. Despite failed attempts to bridge the gap from his academic post to wide popular success, Elkin continued to write essays, stories, and novels that garnered unerring praise. His was a classic dilemma of an intellectual aesthete loath to make use of the common devices of popular appeal. The book details the ambition, the success, the friction, and the foibles of a writer who won fame, but not the fame he wanted. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Lorrie Moore, Heidi Pitlor, 2015-10-06 Witness the ever-changing history and identity of America in this collection of 40 stories collected from the first 100 years of this bestselling series. For the centennial celebration of this annual series, The Best American Short Stories, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls “all its wildnesses of character and voice.” These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write “as an aid to love-making.” Nancy Hale’s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen’s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver’s “minimalism,” a term he disliked, and Grace Paley’s “secular Yiddishkeit.” Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot Díaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Dismantlings Matt Tierney, 2019-12-15 For the master's tools, the poet Audre Lorde wrote, will never dismantle the master's house. Dismantlings is a study of literary, political, and philosophical critiques of the utopian claims about technology in the Long Seventies, the decade and a half before 1980. Following Alice Hilton's 1963 admonition that the coming years would bring humanity to a crossroads—machines for HUMAN BEINGS or human beings for THE MACHINE—Matt Tierney explores wide-ranging ideas from science fiction, avant-garde literatures, feminist and anti-racist activism, and indigenous eco-philosophy that may yet challenge machines of war, control, and oppression. Dismantlings opposes the language of technological idealism with radical thought of the Long Seventies, from Lorde and Hilton to Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin to Huey P. Newton, John Mohawk, and many others. This counter-lexicon retrieves seven terms for the contemporary critique of technology: Luddism, a verbal and material combat against exploitative machines; communion, a kind of togetherness that stands apart from communication networks; cyberculture, a historical conjunction of automation with racist and militarist machines; distortion, a transformative mode of reading and writing; revolutionary suicide, a willful submission to the risk of political engagement; liberation technology, a synthesis of appropriate technology and liberation theology; and thanatopography, a mapping of planetary technological ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Dismantlings restores revolutionary language of the radical Long Seventies for reuse in the digital present against emergent technologies of exploitation, subjugation, and death. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Handbook of American Folklore Richard M. Dorson, 1986-02-22 Includes material on interpretation methods and presentation of research. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Best American Short Stories , 1978 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Franchiser Stanley Elkin, 2010-10-26 The comic story of a man’s obsessive quest to build a fast food empire across America For the better part of the 1970s, entrepreneur Ben Flesh could expand his business kingdom with the snap of his fingers. His fast food restaurants and electronics stores were all a part of his rapidly growing domain, remaking America one enterprise at a time. But when a series of personal and professional catastrophes strike unexpectedly, Ben finds himself on the verge of losing it all. Hailed as one of Stanley Elkin’s greatest works, The Franchiser is a biting satire of American consumerism and the story of one man’s all-consuming determination to create his lasting legacy, one business at a time. This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: A Temple of Texts William H. Gass, 2010-02-10 From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essays—his first since Tests of Time, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. These twenty-five essays speak to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from a deep commitment to the word. Here is Gass on Rilke and Gertrude Stein; on friends such as Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, and William Gaddis; and on a company of “healthy dissidents,” among them Rabelais, Elias Canetti, John Hawkes, and Gabriel García Márquez. In the title essay, Gass offers an annotated list of the fifty books that have most influenced his thinking and his work and writes about his first reaction to reading each. Among the books: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“A lightning bolt,” Gass writes. “Philosophy was not dead after all. Philosophical ambitions were not extinguished. Philosophical beauty had not fled prose.”) . . . Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (“A man after my own heart. He is capable of the simplest lyrical stroke, as bold and direct as a line by Matisse, but he can be complex in a manner that could cast Nabokov in the shade . . . Shakespeare may have been smarter, but he did not know as much.”) . . . Gustave Flaubert’s letters (“Here I learned—and learned—and learned.”) And after reading Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Gass writes “I began to eat books like an alien worm.” In the concluding essay, “Evil,” Gass enlarges upon the themes of artistic quality and cultural values that are central to the books he has considered, many of which seek to reveal the worst in people while admiring what they do best. As Gass writes, “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words.” A Temple of Texts is Gass at his most alchemical. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Best American Short Stories, 1978 Shannon Ravenel, Ted Solotaroff, 1978 Short stories by Ian McEwan, Max Schott, Paul Bowles, Peter Marsh, James Kaplan, Joy Williams, Mark Helprin, Peter Taylor, Tim McCarthy, Stanley Elkin, Harold Brodkey, Leslie Epstein, Natalie Petesch, Robert Sorrells, Jonathan Baumbach, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Cullinan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Lhluchan Sintetos, Theodore Solotaroff, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, John Gardner, Mary Ann Malinchak Rishel, and more. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Do-Over! Robin Hemley, 2009-05-11 Robin Hemley's childhood made a wedgie of his memory, leaving him sore and embarrassed for over forty years. He was the most pitiful kindergartner, the least spirited summer camper, and dateless for prom. In fact, there's nary an event from his youth that couldn't use improvement. If only he could do them all over a few decades later, with an adult's wisdom, perspective, and giant-like height . . . In the spirit of cult film classics like Billy Madison and Wet Hot American Summer, in Do-Over! Hemley reencounters papier-mâché, revisits his childhood home, and finally attends the prom -- bringing readers the thrill of recapturing a misspent youth and discovering what's most important: simple pleasures, second chances, and the forgotten joys of recess. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Comic Sense Thomas Pughe, 2013-03-09 The idea for this study came to me in the course of my reading of innova tive US-American! fiction of the last three decades. I observed that much of it is cast in the comic mode - or, more precisely, that there seems to be in contemporary fiction an affinity between 'innovation' and 'the comic' and that this affinity, furthermore, appears to be characteristic of postmo dernism. It is obvious, at the same time, that comic has become an elusive and, more often than not, a disputable category. Frederick Karl, in his sur vey of American Fictions 1940-1980, maintains, for instance, that much comic writing consists in ridicule that lacks deeper intellectual and cul tural roots. Wit and mockery, he notes, by themselves have little lasting value. Even in the best of such fiction, Gravity's Rainbow, one is made aware of attenuated skits stiched onto previous segments, rather than baked in by a defined point of view. (Karl: 27) Such assessments of course challenge my view that the comic is in significant ways connected with what is innovative in postmodernist US-American fiction. Yet the term comic -or related terms like humour, parody, irony and so fort- is regularly and heavily employed in discussions or reviews of con temporary fiction. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Twayne Companion to Contemporary Literature in English: Ammons-Lurie Richard H. W. Dillard, Amanda Cockrell, 2003 This new title offers a unique collection of critical essays on writers of poetry and fiction of the past 25 years. This two-volume anthology provides detailed, updated entries on approximately 100 American, Canadian, British and Irish writers, including Maya Angelou, John Ashbery, Mary Gaitskill, Ted Hughes, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas Pynchon and Anne Tyler. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Companion to Literature Abby H. P. Werlock, 2009 Praise for the previous edition:Booklist/RBB Twenty Best Bets for Student ResearchersRUSA/ALA Outstanding Reference Source ... useful ... Recommended for public libraries and undergraduates. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Pilgermann Russell Hoban, 1983-01-01 'Pilgermann here. I call myself Pilgermann, it's a convenience. I don't know what I am now .' |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Autobiographical Eye Daniel Halpern, 1993 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Antæus Daniel Halpern, 1982 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Antaeus , 1982 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The autobiographical eye , 1982 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Stanley Elkin's Greatest Hits Stanley Elkin, 1980 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: A Bad Man Stanley Elkin, 2003 Breaking the law in a foolhardy attempt to accommodate his customers, unscrupulous department store owner Leo Feldman finds himself in jail and at the mercy of the warden, who tries to break Leo of his determination to stay bad. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Major 20th-century Writers , 1991 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Missouri Review , 1985 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Literary Review , 1978 An international journal of contemporary writing. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: American Review Ted Solotaroff, 1976 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Critical Survey of Short Fiction: Essays, research tools, indexes , 2001 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Twentieth-century Short Story Explication , 1989 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Short Story Index , 1989 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Encyclopedia of the American Short Story Abby H. P. Werlock, 2015-04-22 Two-volume set that presents an introduction to American short fiction from the 19th century to the present. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Twentieth-century Short Story Explication Warren S. Walker, 1993 Contains nearly 32,500 entries that provide a bibliography of interpretations that have appeared since 1900 of short stories published since 1800. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Encyclopedia of the American Novel Abby H. P. Werlock, 2015-04-22 Praise for the print edition: ... no other reference work on American fiction brings together such an array of authors and texts as this. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Virginia Quarterly Review , 1981 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Ghost Writer Philip Roth, 1979 The first novel in Roth's Zuckerman Bound trilogy, The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E.I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life. --From publisher description. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: AR; American Review , 1977 The magazine of new writing. |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Books of the Times , 1978 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: The Best American Short Stories of the Century John Updike, Katrina Kenison, 2000 Including one new story and an Index by author of every story that has ever appeared in the series, this new volume offers a spectacular tapestry of fictional achievement (Entertainment Weekly). |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Books of Fifty Years Walter Jacob, 1984 |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers Stanley Elkin, 2000 This imagination of Elkin's sneaks up, tickles, surprises, shocks and kills. It makes stories that are deadly funny. The New York Times |
| the conventional wisdom stanley elkin: Modern American Literature Dorothy Nyren Curley, Maurice Kramer, Elaine Fialka Kramer, 1969 A compilation of representative critical comments provides critical portraits of important late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers, with bibliographies for all included authors. |
CONVENTIONAL Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of CONVENTIONAL is formed by agreement or compact. How to use conventional in a sentence. Synonym Discussion of Conventional.
CONVENTIONAL | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
CONVENTIONAL definition: 1. traditional and ordinary: 2. used to refer to weapons that are not nuclear, or to methods of…. Learn more.
CONVENTIONAL Definition & Meaning - Dictionary.com
Conventional definition: conforming or adhering to accepted standards, as of conduct or taste.. See examples of CONVENTIONAL used in a sentence.
Conventional - definition of conventional by The Free Dictionary
1. conforming or adhering to accepted standards, as of conduct or taste. 2. pertaining to or established by general consent or accepted usage: conventional symbols. 3. ordinary rather …
CONVENTIONAL definition and meaning | Collins English …
Someone who is conventional has behaviour or opinions that are ordinary and normal. ...a respectable married woman with conventional opinions. People still wore their hair short and …
What does CONVENTIONAL mean? - Definitions.net
Conventional refers to something that is usual, traditional, or generally accepted and followed by most people. It often describes things that follow established rules, standards, or methods. It …
Conventional - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms - Vocabulary.com
Conventional is an adjective for things that are normal, ordinary, and following the accepted way. Ho-hum. This word describes what is typical and ordinary and that which follows accepted …
Conventional Definition & Meaning | Britannica Dictionary
CONVENTIONAL meaning: 1 : used and accepted by most people usual or traditional; 2 : of a kind that has been around for a long time and is considered to be usual or typical
conventional adjective - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and …
Definition of conventional adjective from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. (often disapproving) tending to follow what is done or considered acceptable by society in general; …
conventional | meaning of conventional in Longman Dictionary …
conventional meaning, definition, what is conventional: a conventional method, product, practice...: Learn more.
CONVENTIONAL Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of CONVENTIONAL is formed by agreement or compact. How to use conventional in a sentence. Synonym Discussion of Conventional.
CONVENTIONAL | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
CONVENTIONAL definition: 1. traditional and ordinary: 2. used to refer to weapons that are not nuclear, or to methods of…. Learn more.
CONVENTIONAL Definition & Meaning - Dictionary.com
Conventional definition: conforming or adhering to accepted standards, as of conduct or taste.. See examples of CONVENTIONAL used in a sentence.
Conventional - definition of conventional by The Free Diction…
1. conforming or adhering to accepted standards, as of conduct or taste. 2. pertaining to or established by general consent or accepted usage: conventional symbols. 3. ordinary rather than different …
CONVENTIONAL definition and meaning | Collins English Dictio…
Someone who is conventional has behaviour or opinions that are ordinary and normal. ...a respectable married woman with conventional opinions. People still wore their hair short and dressed conventionally. A …
