Kirjahaku

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married his mother twice. The Afterlife is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to learn the nature of his origins.

Donald Antrim's mother Louanne was a difficult woman: an operatically suicidal, chainsmoking, delusional alcoholic who even when sober believed that her cat Merlin was a descendant of the Arthurian necromancer. Seeing his own life bound up in her relentless deterioration, Donald Antrim embarks on this strange, marvellous memoir in an attempt to make sense of his mother and her legacy.A series of tragic-comic adventures in psychological dysfunction, Antrim's personal journey takes him wandering across the Southern states of America, tracing the bust-ups, reconciliations, and migrations of his warring parents. Gradually he unpicks the stories of his childhood, and the characters: his handsome sportsman uncle; his hardworking, bewildered Episcopalian grandparents; and his mother herself - alarming, melodramatic, manipulative, reckless and brave. This is a vivid, unmissable Technicolor slideshow of a memoir.

Twenty psychoanalysts and a narrator meet for dinner in a pancake house. The narrator, Tom, finds himself locked in a bear hug by Bernhardt, the father figure of the group. The effects are disastrous as he is forced into an out-of-body experience and watches as his friendships and marriage unravel.

A masterful story collection-heartbreaking and hilarious-from one of America's greatest writers Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim's stories. As they do the things we all do-bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo-they're confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved. These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America's most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as "one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years." The Emerald Light in the Air is Antrim's best book yet: the story collection that reveals him as a master of the form.

As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his life. In this moving memoir, Antrim vividly recounts what led him to the roof and what happened after he came back down: two hospitalisations, weeks of fruitless clinical trials, the terror of submitting to ECT—and the saving call from David Foster Wallace that convinced him to try it—as well as years of fitful recovery and setback. One Friday in April reframes suicide—whether in thought or action—as an illness in its own right, a unique consequence of trauma and personal isolation, rather than the choice of a depressed person. A necessary companion to William Styron’s classic Darkness Visible, this profound, insightful work sheds light on the tragedy and mystery of suicide, offering solace that may save lives. Named one of the Most Anticipated of Books of 2021 by The Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub and The Millions.

As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his life. In this moving memoir, Antrim vividly recounts what led him to the roof and what happened after he came back down: two hospitalisations, weeks of fruitless clinical trials, the terror of submitting to ECT—and the saving call from David Foster Wallace that convinced him to try it—as well as years of fitful recovery and setback. Through a clear and haunting reckoning with the author’s own story, One Friday in April confronts the limits of our understanding of suicide. Donald Antrim’s personal insights reframe suicide—whether in thought or in action—as an illness in its own right, a unique consequence of trauma and personal isolation, rather than the choice of a depressed person. A necessary companion to William Styron’s classic Darkness Visible, this profound, insightful work sheds light on the tragedy and mystery of suicide, offering solace that may save lives.

In elegant, precise prose Donald Antrim crafts funny, tender stories of men and women disorientated by love, loss, and bouts of sorrow. An unfaithful husband goes out to buy flowers for his wife, while across town a new couple, both survivors of difficult childhoods, find comfort together in other people's apartments. On the edge of a university campus, a group of students are brought together by their ageing drama professor, whose predilection for pot and crush on his star pupil threaten to tip their performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream into a surreal and dangerous farce. And in the title story, a bereaved art teacher drives into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia intending to throw away his ex-girlfriend's paintings.

Having accidentally inspired the local suburbanites to draw and quarter the town's blood-thirsty Mayor, Pete Robinson - civic-minded schoolteacher and enthusiastic historian of the Medieval Inquisition - embarks on a tenuous election campaign. But his sleepy town has entered a period of crisis; the local park is littered with landmines, the neighbours are building deadly moats around their homes, and his beautiful wife, Meredith, has discovered dark and powerful talents within herself, which threaten to transfigure their once serene lives forever. In amongst this chaos, can Mr Robinson satisfy the terrible will of the people? By turns funny and phantasmagorical, fiercely intelligent and imaginative, Donald Antrim's first novel of suburban civics turned macabre is a new American classic.

Ninety-nine brothers (one couldn't make it) gather in their decaying ancestral mansion.There's Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, and Noah; Nick, Dennis, Bertram, Russell, and Virgil. The doctor, the documentary filmmaker, and the sculptor in burning steal; the eldest, the youngest, and the celebrated "perfect" brother, Benedict. Bound by blood and a common streak of insanity, they have come together to feast, carouse, abuse each other and seek and inter, once and for all, the long-lost, cremated remains of their domineering father.

Donald Antrim er av disse, for norske lesere, skjulte litterære skattene som stadig dukker opp på lister over fremdragende forfattere eller med vedhenget "en av Amerikas største forfattere". Og med rette, for når Antrim meisler ut sine ømme, og samtidig morsomme historier om menn og kvinner, desorienterte av kjærlighet, tap og sorg, er det vanskelig å ikke gi seg hen. Gjennom de sju novellene som er samlet her møter vi en rekke par og en samling menn som kjemper for å finne sitt glimt av lykke på tross av de betingelsene livet gitt dem, i kamp med depresjoner, alkohol, ambisjoner og en fortid som gjerne henter dem igjen idet de trodde de skulle unnslippe. Scenen er gjerne avenyer, cafeer og fester på New Yorks Manhattan, men også et landlig Virginia der uværet rensker luften og bringer fram dens smaragdgrønne skjær. Antrims utsøkte og empatiske prosa, og hans rikholdige og detaljerte fiksjonsverden utforsker gleden og det følelsesmessige kaoset i det vi gjerne kaller livet. Donald Antrim (f. 1958) debuterte i 1993 med romanen Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World og har siden skrevet to romaner. Antrim har lenge vært fast bidragsyter med noveller i The New Yorker, og denne samlingen er første gang hans eksellering i kortformen samles mellom to permer.