For the boy narrator of this tale, to be a man one must kill one's father. He plays out the fantasy as he watches a war movie with him on TV. "My father was a German pontoon bridge ... he had to be taken out."

2-sprachiger Lektüreband mit einer Erzählung von Jonathan Frantzen und einer Audio-CD mit dem englischen Text; für Lernende mit guten Vorkenntnissen.

While paratexts – among them headnotes, footnotes, or endnotes – have never been absent from American literature, the last two decades have seen an explosion of the phenomenon, including (mock) scholarly footnotes, to an extent that they seem to take over the text itself. In this Special Focus we shall attempt to find the reasons for this astonishing development. In our first (diachronic) section we shall explore such texts as might have fostered the present boom, from fictions by Edgar Allan Poe to Vladimir Nabokov to Mark Z. Danielewski. The second (synchronic) section, will concentrate on paratexts by David Foster Wallace, perhaps the “father” of the post-postmodern footnote, as well as those to be found in novels by Bennett Sims, Jennifer Egan and Junot Diaz, among others. It appears that, while paratexts definitely point to a high degree of self-reflexivity in the author, they equally draw attention to the textual and authorial functions of the works in which they exist. They can thus cause a reflection on the boundaries between genres like fiction, faction, and autobiography, as well as serving to highlight a host of pedagogical and social concerns that exist in the interstices between fiction and reality.

Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American literature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of literature. Yet, as conservative critics marked the century's twilight hours by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside that canon for too long. By reading 1990s literature in a sequence of shifting contexts - from independent presses to the AIDS crisis, and from angelology to virtual reality - American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 provides the fullest map yet of the changing shape of a rich and diverse decade's literary production. It offers new perspectives on the period's well-known landmarks, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, but also overdue recognition to writers such as Ana Castillo, Evan Dara, Steve Erickson, and Carole Maso.

Juli'n R'os's latest comic extravaganza is at once a serious literary excavation and a lecture as delivered by Groucho Marx on the subject of that great (and often imposing) cornerstone of world literature: James Joyce's "Ulysses." Every book is born out of an earlier book (or books), and much as Joyce's novel unraveled Homer scene by scene, R'os's "The House of Ulysses" returns the favor, giving us the story of several bickering characters hoping to get to the bottom of Joyce's masterpiece (by force, if necessary), their conversation walking the line between a slapstick parody of the Joyce industry and a legitimate "guide for the perplexed." Focusing on each of Ulysses' characters, ideas, and references in turn, "The House of Ulysses" provides a playful, punning, ideal companion for the experienced Joycean and cautious Ulysses-procrastinator alike: one novel dreaming its way through another.

A searingly funny and passionate fictional monologue of woman who refuses to accept the constraints of life in 1950s Brazil.

Russell H. Greenan's "It Happened in Boston?" is one of the most radical narratives to appear in the late 1960s ("this is a book that encompasses everything" as David L. Ulin noted in "Bookforum"). Yet due in large part to the difficulty of classifying Greenan's fiction, many readers are unaware of his other novels. In "The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan," Tom Whalen, drawing widely from the American literary tradition, locates Greenan's lineage in the work of Hawthorne and Poe "where allegory and dream mingle with and illuminate realism," as well as in the fiction of Twain, West, Hammett, Cain, and Thompson. Examining Greenan's characteristic themes and strategies, Whalen provides perceptive readings of the dark comedies of this criminally neglected American master, and in a coda reflects on Greenan's career and the reception of his work.

In the tradition of Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Georges Perec’s Je me souviens, this delightful “novel” offers a thousand answers to the question, “What are you thinking?” (Or, as translator Ian Monk puts it: “Penny for them?”) The answers are spontaneous, revealing, ominous, insignificant, grotesque, amusing, lecherous, tragic and trivial by turns, and lovable in their cheerful imperfection. This is a book about the basics: love, sexuality, death, and all the other things that lurk in our everyday thoughts.

"One of the most influential modernist, and latterly postmodernist, authors in Estonia." Context

The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself: "Here begins the revelation of a kiosk." With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user's guide to evanescence: "I have become attuned / to the disappearance of all things / and of my self . . ."