Results by title

Reading eight major contemporary authors through the lens of chaos theory, Conte offers new and original interpretations of works that have been the subject of much critical debate

The place is Skull Valley in central Arizona, the time the 1930s. Taking food as his theme, Weston paints an instructive and often hilarious portrait of growing up, of rural family life under difficult circumstances, and of a remote Arizona community trying to hold body and soul together during tough times. His book recalls life in a lineman's shack, interlaced with "disquisitions on swamp life, rotting water, and the complex experience of finding enough to eat during the Great Depression."

Central to Weston's account is his mother Eloine, a valiant woman rearing a large brood in poverty with little help from her husband. Eloine cooks remarkably well—master of a small repertory from which she coaxes ideas surprising even to herself—and feeds her family on next to nothing. She is a woman whose first instinct is to cry out "Lord, what am I going to feed them" whenever visitors show up close to mealtime. Recalls Weston, "Her strength lay in a practical- and poverty-born sense that there must be more edible food in the world than most people realized," and he swears that six out of seven meals were from parts of four or five previous meals coming round again, like the buckets on a Ferris wheel.

Although Weston evokes a fond remembrance of a bygone era that moves from Depression-era Skull Valley to wartime Prescott, rest assured: food—its acquisition, its preparation, its wholehearted enjoyment—is the foundation of this book. "I did not have a deprived childhood, despite its slim pickings," writes Weston. "If I recall a boiling pig's head now and then, it is not to be read as some Jungian blip from Lord of the Flies but simply a recurring flicker of food-memory." Whether remembering his father's occasional deer poaching or his community's annual Goat Picnic, Weston laces his stories with actual recipes—even augmenting his instructions for roasted wild venison with tips for preparing jerky.

Dining at the Lineman's Shack teems with sparkling allusions, both literary and culinary, informed by Weston's lifetime of travels. Even his nagging memory of desperate boyhood efforts to trade his daily peanut-butter sandwich for bacon-and-egg, baloney, jelly, or most anything else is tempered by his acquaintance with "the insidious sa-teh sauce in Keo Sananikone's hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Kapahulu Street"—a peanut-butter-based delicacy for which he obligingly provides the ingredients (and which he promises will keep, refrigerated in a jar, for several weeks before baroque things begin to grow on it).

Through this tantalizing smorgasbord of memories, stories, and recipes, John Weston has fashioned a wholly captivating commentary on American culture, both in an earlier time and in our own. Dining at the Lineman's Shack is a book that will satisfy any reader's hunger for the unusual—and a book to savor, in every sense of the word.

A woman is buried by a musician who has sworn to protect her. A narcoleptic is found, still dreaming, with cryptic symbols engraved into her back. In an elegant loft, a silver-haired man studies the torso of a comatose surfer, and the bodies of the two men are transformed into an intricate work of art. These are only a few of the tortous stories of Rob Hardin, a veteran studio musician and stylist whose work has been called "impeccable" by Dennis Cooper.

Distorture is a fiercely modern book full of jeweled descriptions of violent eroticism. In Distorture, his first book of stories, Rob Hardin subverts nineteenth century romanticism and redefines the aesthetics of excess. Distorture splices the digital and the autumnal with the drive of the dark ambient music and the elegance of a late Liszt Sonata.

This first Gnomon Press edition was published in 1990.

Divine Right’s Trip is a countercultural classic that captures the spirit of the 1960s and early 1970s. The novel follows Divine Right (D. R.) Davenport, a restless young man on a journey of self-discovery, as he embarks on a cross-country road trip in his beloved but unreliable old Volkswagen bus, Urge. Accompanied at times by his free-spirited girlfriend, Estelle, D. R. embarks on an odyssey that takes him through communes, small towns, and encounters with eccentric characters, each offering insights into D. R.’s own struggles with identity, freedom, and belonging.

Originally published as a serial in the Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971, Divine Right’s Trip is both a road novel and a coming-of-age story, reflecting the era’s tensions between individualism and community, rebellion and responsibility. Gurney Norman’s writing is infused with humor, sharp social observation, and a deep appreciation for the landscapes and people of Appalachia, where D. R. ultimately finds himself confronting his roots.

A defining work of Appalachian literature and the countercultural movement, Divine Right’sTrip remains a thought-provoking exploration of personal growth, societal change, and the search for meaning in an ever-shifting world.

A pivotal in the study of history and politics, not only in Alabama but in the other states of the South
 
Barnard’s account is elegantly concise, the labor of conspicuous scholarship. In an effort to analyze Alabama’s political bedrock, the author has tapped virtually every source. What results is a cogent and harmonious theme.

When Hopi/White Mountain Apache anthropologist Tony M. Smokerise is found murdered in his office at Central Highlands University, the task of solving the crime falls to jaded Choctaw detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Charles T. Clarke. A seemingly tolerant and amicable office of higher education, the university, Monique soon learns, harbors parties determined to destroy the careers of Tony and his best friend, the volatile Oglala anthropologist Roxanne Badger. In the course of her investigation, Monique discovers that the scholars who control Tony’s department are also overseeing the excavation of a centuries-old tribal burial site that was uncovered during the construction of a freeway. Tony’s role in the project, she realizes, might be the key to identifying his murderer. This virtuosic mystery novel explores, in engrossing detail, the complex motives for a killing within the sometimes furtive and hermetic setting of academia.

The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation, 1997

In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians reached their zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as “the bowman of the glance.

Helima, Awad’s wife, must deal with the reality of today’s Nubia, a poverty-stricken bottomland. Men like Awad now work in Cairo for good wages while the women remain at home in squalor, dominated by the Islam of their conquerors and ignorant of the glory now covered by the Nile’s water. Left to tend Awad’s sick mother and his dying country, Halima grows despondent and learns the truths behind the Upper Egyptian lyric: “Time, you are a traitor—what have you done with my love?

Through his characters’ pain and suffering, Idris Ali paints in vibrant detail, with wit and a keen sense of history’s absurdities, the story of cultures and hearts divided, of lost lands, impossible dreams, and abandoned lives.