Скачать книгу - Slant

In 1860, Milton Bradley invented The Checkered Game of Life . Having journeyed from Springfield, Massachusetts, to New York City to determine interest in this combination of bright red ink, brass dials, and character-driven decision-making, Bradley exhausted his entire supply of merchandise just two days after his arrival in the city; within a few months, he had sold forty thousand copies. That same year, Walt Whitman left Brooklyn to oversee the printing of the third edition of his Leaves of Grass in Massachusetts. In Slantwise Moves , Douglas A. Guerra sees more than mere coincidence in the contemporary popularity of these superficially different cultural productions. Instead, he argues, both the book and the game were materially resonant sites of social experimentation—places where modes of collectivity and selfhood could be enacted and performed. Then as now, Guerra observes, «game» was a malleable category, mediating play in various and inventive ways: through the material forms of pasteboard, paper, and india rubber; via settings like the parlor, lawn, or public hall; and by mutually agreed-upon measurements of success, ranging from point accumulation to the creation of humorous narratives. Recovering the lives of important game designers, anthologists, and codifiers—including Anne Abbot, William Simonds, Michael Phelan, and the aforementioned Bradley—Guerra brings his study of commercially produced games into dialogue with a reconsideration of iconic literary works. Through contrapuntal close readings of texts and gameplay, he finds multiple possibilities for self-fashioning reflected in Bradley's Life and Whitman's «Song of Myself,» as well as utopian social spaces on billiard tables and the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance alike. Highlighting meaningful overlap in the production and reception of books and games, Slantwise Moves identifies what the two have in common as material texts and as critical models of the mundane pleasures and intimacies that defined agency and social belonging in nineteenth-century America.

Belieu is one of the poets that Copper Canyon has been invested in since the beginning of her career Fourth Belieu book published by Copper Canyon Belieu’s debut volume was selected the Washington Post Book World as one of the top 5 poetry books of the year Belieu’s last book was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Her work has appeared in many major publications including New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly Belieu has taught hundreds of students Washington University, Boston University, Kenyon College, Ohio University, and numerous writing workshops… she is currently teaching at Florida State University. Belieu co-founded VIDA, which consistently makes waves in the literary world

Tell It Slant is a bold, luscious first novel by Beth Follett, publisher of one of Canada's most exciting and respected small presses, Pedlar Press. The novel tells – slantedly, of course – the story of Nora Flood, a young woman who lives between two sets of voices: those of her own fragmented desires and the internalized voices of western culture, which have always denigrated or refused her deepest desires. She struggles with these contradictory forces, overwhelmed, at times mute, seeking the roots of her psychosexual malaise, searching for the possibility of her own true voice, caught in an obsession that drags her away from the exploration of her own appetites and hungers into its sterile heart. But through the interventions of Djuna Barnes, creator of the literary Nora Flood of Barnes' novel Nightwood, this Nora begins to slip between the cracks and fissures of obsession to shape a life of her own. With language that is lush and startling and a shape that is disjointed and elliptical, Tell It Slant is a brave and beautiful book.