Love, dishonor, marry, die; cherish, perish a novel
From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth centuryThrough his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time....
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| Format: | Downloads eBook Books eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2013.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Go to Downloadable eBook Here. |
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| Summary: | From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth centuryThrough his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form. LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box -- an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work. Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff "magnificent," a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse. From the Hardcover edition. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource |
| Format: | Requires OverDrive Read (file size: N/A KB) or Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 8101 KB) or Kobo app or compatible Kobo device (file size: N/A KB) or Amazon Kindle (file size: N/A KB). |
| ISBN: | 9780385535229 |
| Author Notes: | Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as an editor and publicist for various publishers. His essays appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, GQ, Details, Salon, and Slate. He also wrote three essay collections. Fraud and Don't Get Too Comfortable received Lambda Literary Awards and Half Empty received the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He appeared frequently on This American Life. He also acted in several stage plays written by David Sedaris. He wrote the screen adaptation for, and starred in, a 20-minute film, The New Tenants, which won the Academy Award for best live-action short film in 2009. He died from cancer on August 9, 2012 at the age of 47. (Bowker Author Biography) |
