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4 books match the query 'Brennan, Karen'

cover of Monsters

Monsters

Karen Brennan

Four Way Books, 2016

Literal as well as metaphorical monsters inhabit this book of 38 innovative fictions. Here the reader will encounter not only zombies and ghosts, but a lyrical dream braided into a brutal and sorrowful real world. Monsters’ vision embodies the heartbreakingly private and depressingly public—and the funny flipside of it all.
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cover of Television, a memoir

Television, a memoir

Karen Brennan

Four Way Books, 2022

Television, a memoir is a hybrid collection of autobiographical pieces, tragi-comic in spirit, that depict a woman’s life evolving through time and culture in fragmentary glimpses. Indeterminate in genre, Television is a fluid text that sometimes reads as poetry, sometimes as prose, while exploring classism, ableism, and feminism in a world defined by the advent of new media and, for the author, a privilege that often felt suffocating. Working structurally and thematically, television creates conceptual mileposts in the memoir, with certain programs and cultural references corresponding to specific eras in the author’s past, but it also gestures at an existential modality — the experience of a televisual life, the performative arrangements of nuclear families and neighborhoods, the periodic events and dramas of an adolescence watched from outside oneself.

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cover of The Garden in Which I Walk

The Garden in Which I Walk

Karen Brennan

University of Alabama Press, 2004

This extraordinarily polished and sophisticated story collection investigates the unaccountable ways in which literature and life entwine. In "Three Seaside Tales" a woman at a resort imagines herself in a Chekhov story only to succumb to banal everydayness, and in "Island Time" a young bride inexorably merges with Emma Bovary. Brennan's fictions position their readers at the edge of the known world, opening onto vistas of both erotic promise and ghastly beauty. The voices, youthful and aging, maniacal and restrained, represent our world's lost, scattering their words among surrealistic ruins, as though they have come to inhabit their own dreams. The lovely protagonist of "Saw" inexplicably maims herself with a chainsaw, literalizing in this violent impulse the self-destructive passion of all of Brennan's characters to actualize romance. These characters lead the reader through a charged, personal landscape of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic complexity. Their voices will continue to echo long after the book has been closed.
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cover of little dark

little dark

Karen Brennan

Four Way Books, 2014

little dark is a hybrid collection of poems and prose threaded together by an act of memoir. Here Brennan ruminates about “being” in the world, about her particular “self” through the tiny, distorted and often occluded aperture of memory. These poems have as their obsession “seeing” and “looking” and the failure of these acts to reveal anything definitive about our lives; instead little dark affirms mystery, the dissolution of boundaries between the seen and unseen (or forgotten) world.
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