Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays

Essays on literature, pop culture, and more from the cult novelist and critic Tom McCarthy

Fifteen brilliant essays written over as many years provide a map of the sensibility and critical intelligence of Tom McCarthy, one of the most original and challenging novelists at work today. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish explores a wide range of subjects, from the weather considered as a form of media, to the paintings of Gerhard Richter and the movies of David Lynch, to Patty Hearst as revolutionary sex goddess, to the still-radical implications of established masterpieces such as Ulysses (how do you write after it?), Tristram Shandy, and the unsung junky genius Alexander Trocchiâ€™s darkly beautiful Cainâ€™s Book. The longer â€œRecessionalâ€ examines the place of time in writingâ€”how writing makes a new time of its own, a time apart from institutional timeâ€”while the startling â€œNothing Will Have Taken Placeâ€ moves from MallarmÃ© and Don DeLillo to the ball mastery of Zidane to look at how art, whether that of a poet, novelist, or athlete, destroys given codes of meaning and behavior, returning them to play. Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistenceâ€”among them the artist Ed Ruschaâ€™s Royal Road Test, a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military dominationâ€”and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?
Country USA
Brand New York Review Books
Manufacturer New York Review Books
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9781681370866
Color Silver
ReleaseDate 2017-05-09
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781681370866

Country	USA
Brand	New York Review Books
Manufacturer	New York Review Books
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9781681370866
Color	Silver
ReleaseDate	2017-05-09
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781681370866

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays

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