Books in the American Literature Series series

True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by award-winning playwright and poet Dan O'Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph-of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu-altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O'Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to investigating the source of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living.

The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits‿what appears‿to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence.

"You'll Like it Here is a haunting bricolage, divided into three parts, that excavates the forgotten history of Redondo Beach in the early 1900's through old news clippings, advertisements, recipes and other ephemera that speak to the ills of male stoicism, industrialization and capitalism, and environmental displacement. Ashton used digital archives from the Redondo Reflex and other city adjacent newspapers as the basis for his surrealist account, masterfully tracing this larger shift away from coastal maritime repose in the wake of the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II through momentary fragments that feel as real and palpable as they do transient, mythological, and strangely reminiscent of our current times."--Provided by publisher.

An Evening of Romantic Lovemaking is the tale of a would-be standup comedian/terrorist as he hilariously and heart-wrenchingly performs his last act in front of an audience who may or may not be there. Curtis White calls it ¿both the funniest and one of the saddest novels I¿ve ever read¿ and ¿a work of comic genius. While comparisons to Gilbert Sorrentino, Mark Leyner, and Flann O¿Brien will be made, Slotky¿s voice is entirely his own and one yoüll not soon forget.¿

From Museum of Modern Art editor Emily Hall, a debut novel in the first person about the place of art and the artist in the world.

The Bern Book is a travelogue, a memoir, a ¿diary of an isolated soul¿ (Darryl Pinckney), and a meditation on the myth and reality of race in midcentury Europe and America.In 1953, having left the US and settled in Bern, Switzerland, Vincent O. Carter, a struggling writer, set about composing a ¿record of a voyage of the mind.¿ The voyage begins with Carter¿s furiously good-humored description of how, every time he leaves the house, he must face the possibility of being asked ¿the hated question¿ (namely, Why did you, a black man born in America, come to Bern?). It continues with stories of travel, war, financial struggle, the pleasure of walking, the pain of self-loathing, and, through it all, various experiments in what Carter calls ¿lacerating subjective sociology.¿ Now this long-neglected volume is back in print for the first time since 1973.

Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.

Considered by many to be Elkin's magnum opus, George Mills is, an ambitious, digressive and endlessly entertaining account of the 1,000 year history of the George Millses. From toiling as a stable boy during the crusades to working as a furniture mover, there has always been a George Mills whose lot in life is to serve important personages. But the latest in the line of true blue-collar workers may also be the last, as he obsesses about his family's history and decides to break the cycle of doomed George Millses. An inventive, unique family saga, George Mills is Elkin at his most manic, most comic and most poignant. First published by Random House (1982), most recent paperback by Avon (1996).

Now finally collected into a single volume, the Sherbrookes trilogy-Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness-is Nicholas Delbanco's most celebrated achievement. Centering upon one New England clan and their estate in southwestern Vermont-a full thousand acres, including the bleak and chilly Big House, from which the volatile Sherbrookes have such trouble escaping-these books form a virtuoso portrait of the love, pride, resentment, and even madness we inherit from our families. Written in his characteristically opulent, bravura prose, Delbanco is here revealed as a Henry James for our time: a passionate cataloger of human strength and frailty. Edited and revised by the author some thirty years after its first publication, the trilogy-"e;made new"e; as the single-volume Sherbrookes-can now be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.

In 2010, the Newseum in Washington D.C. finally obtained the suit O. J. Simpson wore in court the day he was acquitted, and it now stands as both an artifact in their "e;Trial of the Century"e; exhibit and a symbol of the American media's endless hunger for the criminal and the celebrity. This event serves as a launching point for Ishmael Reed's Juice!, a novelistic commentary on the post-Simpson American media frenzy from one of the most controversial figures in American literature today. Through Paul Blessings-a censored cartoonist suffering from diabetes-and his cohorts-serving as stand-ins for the various mediums of art-Ishmael Reed argues that since 1994, "e;O. J. has become a metaphor for things wrong with culture and politics."e; A lament for the death of print media, the growth of the corporation, and the process of growing old, Juice! serves as a comi-tragedy, chronicling the increased anxieties of "e;post-race"e; America.

"No one is better than William H. Gass at communicating the sublime and rapturous excitement of reading." Washington Post

In The Circus of Trust, Mark Tardi implicates us all in a pastoral of detritus where "the same indifferent sun" unflinchingly tracks devastation as part of the most routine actions.

Lines from a Canvas offers the public one of the best kept secrets in the world of poetry for years, the work of Jacob Miller. His poems uniquely traverse the cultural territory from Homer to the Grateful Dead, taking the reader from ancient Greece and Rome to the Holocaust to the Cold War to Vietnam to 9/11.

The denizens of Kelton, New York - a bedroom community some fifty miles from Manhattan - are a well-heeled bunch who spend an awful lot of time playing rummy. There is Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, and her complacent brother Marshall, who doesn't like his friends to confide in him. There are the bumbling and overindulged Fabia and Victor, another sibling duo, and their friend Irving, a meek mama's boy. Into their cloistered lives come Claire and Nadia Tosti, two sisters from Paris, whose take-charge tactics stir the winds of enterprise, romance, and change. Through them, Alice is led to a swarthy Italian who helps her orchestrate a successful restaurant business. Irving pairs up with Claire, finally winning freedom from his eccentric, cat-loving mother. Victor embraces Nadia and the antiques trade, while Fabia discovers a potential romance with Victor's French pen pal. Only Marshall finds himself eluded by love, a predicament that will lead him from the snug environs of Kelton to the crude energies of the Midwest. In bistros, galleries, bars, and theaters, the protagonists eat, drink, criticize each other, and debate the worlds of art, music, literature, life, and love.

Ava Klein, thirty-nine, lover of life, world traveler, professor of comparative literature, is dying. From her hospital bed on this, her last day on earth, she makes one final ecstatic voyage. People, places, offhand memories, and imaginary things drift in and out of Ava's consciousness and weave their way through the narrative. The voices of her three former husbands emerge: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. The ways people she loved expressed themselves in letters or at the beach or at the moment of desire return to her. There is Danilo, her current lover, a Czech novelist, and others, lovers of one night, as she sings the endless, joyous, erotic song cycles of her life, because "Dusk and the moment right before shapes are taken back is erotic. And the dark". The voices of her literary loves as well are woven into the narrative: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Lorca, Frisch, among others. These writers comment on and help guide us through the text. We hear the voices of her parents, who survived the Treblinka death camp, and of her Aunt Sophie, who did not. War permeates the text, for on Ava Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above all we hear Ava's voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure, of astonishment, the voice of regret, the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence". Ava is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates". The fragments of the novel are combined to make a new kind of wholeness, allowing environments, states of mind, and rhythms not ordinarilyassociated with fiction to emerge. Ava's theme is the poignancy of mortality, the extraordinary desire to live, the inevitability of death - the things never done, never understood, the things never said, or said right, or said enough. Ava yearns and the reader yearns with her, struggling to hold on to all that slips away. "I came to celebrate. I came to praise", Ava says, and on every page she does just that - marveling at the mystery of her precious, disappearing life: the pressure of the tide, the sea-soaked steps, wild roses and rose hips, the finches at the feeder, the way the swing swung. "We took the overnight train", she says. "You kissed me everywhere. A beautiful, passing landscape. Imagined in the dark".

"It's outrageous that an educated man and a gifted writer like Mr. Mathews could make such a public confession of such shameful activities." Q. Kuhlmann, author of The Eye of Anguish: Subversive Activity in the German Democratic Republic