Alexander Theroux

Nominated twice for the National Book Award, proposed as well for the 1973 Pulitzer Prize by the late Guy Davenport (juror with Edmund Fuller, Herman Kogan), a master of prose and a genius in his own right, Alexander Theroux has been highly praised by everyone from Saul Bellow to Cormac McCarthy, from Anthony Burgess to Robertson Davies, from Norman Mailer to John Updike, from Andrew Wyeth to Will Friedwald, from Jacques Pepin to Robert Crumb. Davenport fondly wrote of his subject, "As Nigel Nicolson wrote of James Pope Hennessy, I would say of Alexander Theroux - 'He dipped his fingers deep into the treasury of the language, dishing out strange words like rubies, and his sentences, paragraphs, chapters, finish, when another writer's might simply end.' No page of his does not blaze like jewels in Ali Baba's cave."Alexander Theroux now comes to us in full flame with Later Stories, a collection of 13 new explosive narratives, only one which has been previously published, the third and last volume of this series, including Early Stories and Fables. His genius for plot, the power of his sparkling invention, the unsparing brilliance of his satire, the unforeseen twists and force of irony he wields, along with the astounding philosophical sense that inform his insights, are truly matchless. No scenario is predictable. Intrigue underpins the tale of an enigmatic Iraqi writer who is sought out with devastating consequences. We encounter an opinionated feminist poet from Maine, merciless in her impatience but eminently quotable. An operatic tenor in Italy faces down a waistline problem. A greedy diamond merchant flees Nazi-occupied France only to meet with grave consequences. Why in one story does a ballerina refuse to appear at curtain calls? What, in another, is the unforeseen and final turn of fate in the life of a young, seemingly unredeemable English thug? How do books and reading effect the life of young Filipina orphan brought to New Hampshire? We are presented a masterful college lecture on a French painter that amounts to a personal confession. We meet a group of seminarians who to pass the time seek a playful diversion. False piety figures in several tales with catastrophic results. And we are treated to a new saga of the Mayflower pilgrims.With the turn of each page, we find again Theroux's love affair with language, his passion for the perfect phrase, a scholar's pressing need to inform.As literary critic Larry McCaffery in "A Rose to Look At" in Some Other Frequency writes, "Of contemporary fiction writers, only Alexander Theroux comes close to poet and novelist Robert] Kelly in terms of being able to articulate his concerns within the full range of words and storytelling skills available to writers."

Nominated twice for the National Book Award, proposed as well for the 1973 Pulitzer Prize by the late Guy Davenport (juror with Edmund Fuller, Herman Kogan), a master of prose and a genius in his own right, Alexander Theroux has been highly praised by everyone from Saul Bellow to Cormac McCarthy, from Anthony Burgess to Robertson Davies, from Norman Mailer to John Updike, from Andrew Wyeth to Will Friedwald, from Jacques Pepin to Robert Crumb. Davenport fondly wrote of his subject, "As Nigel Nicolson wrote of James Pope Hennessy, I would say of Alexander Theroux - 'He dipped his fingers deep into the treasury of the language, dishing out strange words like rubies, and his sentences, paragraphs, chapters, finish, when another writer's might simply end.' No page of his does not blaze like jewels in Ali Baba's cave."Alexander Theroux now comes to us in full flame with Later Stories, a collection of 13 new explosive narratives, only one which has been previously published, the third and last volume of this series, including Early Stories and Fables. His genius for plot, the power of his sparkling invention, the unsparing brilliance of his satire, the unforeseen twists and force of irony he wields, along with the astounding philosophical sense that inform his insights, are truly matchless. No scenario is predictable. Intrigue underpins the tale of an enigmatic Iraqi writer who is sought out with devastating consequences. We encounter an opinionated feminist poet from Maine, merciless in her impatience but eminently quotable. An operatic tenor in Italy faces down a waistline problem. A greedy diamond merchant flees Nazi-occupied France only to meet with grave consequences. Why in one story does a ballerina refuse to appear at curtain calls? What, in another, is the unforeseen and final turn of fate in the life of a young, seemingly unredeemable English thug? How do books and reading effect the life of young Filipina orphan brought to New Hampshire? We are presented a masterful college lecture on a French painter that amounts to a personal confession. We meet a group of seminarians who to pass the time seek a playful diversion. False piety figures in several tales with catastrophic results. And we are treated to a new saga of the Mayflower pilgrims.With the turn of each page, we find again Theroux's love affair with language, his passion for the perfect phrase, a scholar's pressing need to inform.As literary critic Larry McCaffery in "A Rose to Look At" in Some Other Frequency writes, "Of contemporary fiction writers, only Alexander Theroux comes close to poet and novelist Robert] Kelly in terms of being able to articulate his concerns within the full range of words and storytelling skills available to writers."

Fables, the second volume to be published of Theroux's short stories, truly among his richest and thought-provoking, is a compilation of among his most imaginative, daring, whimsical, highly inspired, and characteristically unconventional work. It will be followed by the third and last of the triad, Later Stories.This collection, which includes pieces long and short, including two ballads, has been much anticipated by his faithful readers. In these narratives, Theroux has mastered in the originality of sheer invention the folklorish, even fairy-tale quality, of the moral fable, touching in his chronicles on the tried-and-true plots of romance, mythology, mystery, puzzles, secrets, and questions of intrigue without making any of the pieces didactic or overly doctrinal. We encounter in this gathering an assemblage of little sagas, epics, and apologues an intrepid explorer deep in the Amazon jungle seeking a black orchid for Queen Victoria. A disturbed German violin student undergoes in the course of his lessons a strange and unpredictable response to a rare, priceless instrument. A love story in old China finds two sweethearts in the dire peril of a venomous court intrigue. The ancient linen wrapping of Egyptian mummies leads to a weird conspiracy that takes place, unpredictably, in the state of Maine. The neuroses of a mother-hating son have ghastly consequences in his own marriage. Nothing can match for weird enchantment the wizard-architect named Vinegarfly.At the turn of every page a surprise awaits in these unforgettable stories, where, in his own right proving a wizard himself of the language, Theroux handles words like Faberg his eggs, for, in a final analysis, language once again is his subject. As David Bowman observed in the New York Times, "Alexander Theroux . . . is one of America's premier frotteurs, to use a French term the impeccable James Salter applies to someone who 'rubs words in his hand.'"

Fables, the second volume to be published of Theroux's short stories, truly among his richest and thought-provoking, is a compilation of among his most imaginative, daring, whimsical, highly inspired, and characteristically unconventional work. It will be followed by the third and last of the triad, Later Stories.This collection, which includes pieces long and short, including two ballads, has been much anticipated by his faithful readers. In these narratives, Theroux has mastered in the originality of sheer invention the folklorish, even fairy-tale quality, of the moral fable, touching in his chronicles on the tried-and-true plots of romance, mythology, mystery, puzzles, secrets, and questions of intrigue without making any of the pieces didactic or overly doctrinal. We encounter in this gathering an assemblage of little sagas, epics, and apologues an intrepid explorer deep in the Amazon jungle seeking a black orchid for Queen Victoria. A disturbed German violin student undergoes in the course of his lessons a strange and unpredictable response to a rare, priceless instrument. A love story in old China finds two sweethearts in the dire peril of a venomous court intrigue. The ancient linen wrapping of Egyptian mummies leads to a weird conspiracy that takes place, unpredictably, in the state of Maine. The neuroses of a mother-hating son have ghastly consequences in his own marriage. Nothing can match for weird enchantment the wizard-architect named Vinegarfly.At the turn of every page a surprise awaits in these unforgettable stories, where, in his own right proving a wizard himself of the language, Theroux handles words like Faberg his eggs, for, in a final analysis, language once again is his subject. As David Bowman observed in the New York Times, "Alexander Theroux . . . is one of America's premier frotteurs, to use a French term the impeccable James Salter applies to someone who 'rubs words in his hand.'"

Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville's Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. Both Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat were nominated for the National Book Award.Early Stories, the first book of Theroux's fiction to be published in fourteen years, constitutes an addition to one of modern American literature's most lauded and entertaining bodies of work. It is also the first volume in his story triad (Fables and Later Stories soon to follow).Nobody writing today has a keener instinct for obsession, hypocrisy, sexual jealousy, envy, human folly, the lineaments of vanity, greed, and romantic disappointment, and, yes, grace. A feast of comic joy awaits you in this long-awaited collection. Here, the sword arm of satire is swung high We encounter an intractable woman who refuses to divulge the secret to her spaghetti sauce. A tourist discovers a modern Nestor in an English pub. An idealistic teacher who is also a broken-hearted lover leaves us speechless over his overwhelming fixation. A hide-bound feminist goes to Italy to learn pasta making. A beautiful Bostonian, becoming a fashion model, achieves a much different goal. What is the effect of summer camp on a sensitive youngster? How does a hunt in Cracow for the alpenstock of great Copernicus end up a comic farce? Does a young boy with a genius IQ fulfill his promise? What happens when a collector discovers the rarest autograph in American letters? Nothing prepares the reader for the twists and turns of these unsparing but brilliantly plotted stories. Language is, however, the subject, the splendid gift of one of the nation's word-masters, a magician who fashions words out of his fingertips. Satire, it is said, swipes off the noggin but leaves the head in place. Here, the head still manages to find its voice- to our great and continuing pleasure.

Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville's Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. Both Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat were nominated for the National Book Award.Early Stories, the first book of Theroux's fiction to be published in fourteen years, constitutes an addition to one of modern American literature's most lauded and entertaining bodies of work. It is also the first volume in his story triad (Fables and Later Stories soon to follow).Nobody writing today has a keener instinct for obsession, hypocrisy, sexual jealousy, envy, human folly, the lineaments of vanity, greed, and romantic disappointment, and, yes, grace. A feast of comic joy awaits you in this long-awaited collection. Here, the sword arm of satire is swung high We encounter an intractable woman who refuses to divulge the secret to her spaghetti sauce. A tourist discovers a modern Nestor in an English pub. An idealistic teacher who is also a broken-hearted lover leaves us speechless over his overwhelming fixation. A hide-bound feminist goes to Italy to learn pasta making. A beautiful Bostonian, becoming a fashion model, achieves a much different goal. What is the effect of summer camp on a sensitive youngster? How does a hunt in Cracow for the alpenstock of great Copernicus end up a comic farce? Does a young boy with a genius IQ fulfill his promise? What happens when a collector discovers the rarest autograph in American letters? Nothing prepares the reader for the twists and turns of these unsparing but brilliantly plotted stories. Language is, however, the subject, the splendid gift of one of the nation's word-masters, a magician who fashions words out of his fingertips. Satire, it is said, swipes off the noggin but leaves the head in place. Here, the head still manages to find its voice-to our great and continuing pleasure.

Britney Spears loathes meatloaf and all lumpy stuff. Arturo Toscanini hated fish. Ayn Rand despised salads. Alexander Theroux sEinstein s Beets is a study of the world of food and food aversions. The novelist and poet probes the secret and mysterious attitudes of hundreds of people mostly famous and well-known toward eating and dining out, hilariously recounting tales of confrontation and scandalous alienation: it contains gossip, confession, embarrassment, and perceptive observations."

The publication of Alexander Theroux s Collected Poems, a gathering of more than 660 poems, an astonishing creative output, will be among the major literary events of the year. Here is a full cornucopia of sonnets, odes, ballads, free verse, triolets, pure, satires, narratives, dramatic monologues, fanciful meditations, flytings and harangues, ruminations on death and lost love, and no end of lyrics both beautiful and fierce. Taken altogether they contrive to make up a record of the author s deepest thoughts and reflect the dramatis personae of his life. Theroux captures in his work those rare, frail, but precious truths, inaccessible to the common run of men that would otherwise have vanished into nescience. Sardonic, astute, impertinent, tender, clever, warmhearted, delphic, truculent, comic, defiantly aggressive, and often achingly personal, he shows an intensity of observation and invention."

National Book Award nominee, critic and one of America 's least compromising satirists, Alexander Theroux takes a comprehensive look at the colorful language of pop lyrics and the realm of rock music in general in The Grammar of Rock silly song titles; maddening instrumentals; shrieking divas; clunker lines; the worst (and best) songs ever written; geniuses of the art; movie stars who should never have raised their voice in song but who were too shameless to refuse a mic; and the excesses of awful Christmas recordings. Praising (and critiquing) the gems of lyricists both highbrow and low, Theroux does due reverence to classic word-masters like Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, lyricists as diverse as Hank Williams, Buck Ram, the Moody Blues, and Randy Newman, Dylan and the Beatles, of course, and more outr ones like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Fall (even Ghostface Killa), but he considers stupid rhymes, as well nonsense lyrics, chop logic, the uses and abuses of irony, country music macho, verbal howlers, how voices sound alike and why, and much more. In a way that no one else has ever done, with his usual encyclopedic insights into the state of the modern lyric, Theroux focuses on the state of language the power of words and the nature of syntax in The Grammar of Rock. He analyzes its assaults on listeners impulses by investigating singers styles, pondering illogical lunacies in lyrics, and deconstructing the nature of diction and presentation in the language. This is that rare book of discernment and probing wit (and not exclusively one that is a critical defense of quality) that positively evaluates the very nature of a pop song, and why one over another has an effect on the listener.