Marian died by her own hand exactly one year ago. The author approaches Marian's death from the viewpoints of the people that touched her life including her lover, her best friend, and even her enemies.
A man returns home from Vietnam to his now abandoned family homestead outside of Nashville, suffering from a serious psychological wound incurred in combat. He meets up with a childhood friend who is black, and together they battle against a platoon of Klansmen for the literal salvation of a local preacher.
A novel that has drawn comparisons with the work of J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor, Edisto centers on one Simons Everson Manigault, a twelve-year-old possessed of a vocabulary and sophistication way beyond his years and a preadolescent bewilderment with the behavior of adults. These include his mother, who is known as the Du...more
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two men-Gibreel Farishta, the biggest movie star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years-plummet from the sky. Washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English ...more
What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more p...more
Michel Foucault’s work has profoundly affected the teaching of such diverse disciplines as literary criticism, criminology, and gender studies. Arguing that definitions of abnormal behavior are culturally constructed, Foucault explored the unfair divisions between those who meet and those who deviate from social norms. In Foucault For Beginners...more
With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate love...more
Two of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers debate a perennial question.In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world's leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Edlers to debate an age-old question: is there such...more