<TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>American Romances</TitleText> <Subtitle>Essays</Subtitle>

City Lights Books transfers@onixsuite.com 20130918 eng

COM.ONIXSUITE.9780872864986 03 01 City Lights Books 01 GCOI 87286100558220 02 0872864987 03 9780872864986 15 9780872864986 BC <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>American Romances</TitleText> <Subtitle>Essays</Subtitle> 1 A01 Brown, Rebecca Rebecca Brown Rebecca Brown is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award. Her books include: The Gifts of the Body, Excerpts From A Family Medical Dictionary, The Terrible Girls, The Dogs, Annie Oakley's Girl, and The End of Youth. She was awarded a Genius Award and grant from Seattle's weekly magazine, The Stranger. 01 eng 256 00 256 03 20 american history;Brian Wilson;Nathaniel Hawthorne;puritans;Rebecca Brown 24 Internet CL Hierarchy Essays 24 Internet CL Hierarchy Gay & Lesbian 24 Internet CL Hierarchy Women 01 American Romances is the winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. <a href="http://www.citylightspodcast.com/rebecca-brown-robert-gluck-kevin-killian-dodie-bellamy/" target="blank"></a> Listen to Rebecca Brown read from American Romances at City Lights at our podcast home page. This collection of mordant, poignant and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry and incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be "American." The impulse to tell our worst to a bunch of strangers in order to be accepted into the community has been fueling American self-hood for 300 years: There's a direct line from the Puritan confession narrative to all of our seamy, lurid cultural voyeurism. Whose stories are ours to tell and whose are not? Despite the collection's mostly playful and entertaining tone, what's being discussed quite seriously are the ways in which America has tried and failed to craft and tell its own story. Fully embracing the theory of the literary Romance as a place where the probable opens up into the impossible, Brown lets her imagination run wild and envisions unlikely meetings and fantastical connections that span the course of America's cultural history: the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and Nathaniel Hawthorne intersect as representatives of west coast hedonism and east coast Puritanism; Gertrude Stein presides over a same-sex religious movement; John Wayne and Shane stand in for the author's father who may or may not have been JFK's wing man during the Cuban Missile Crisis; a mad Finnish-American painter turns Seattle's Hooverville into heaven; H.G. Wells' Invisible Man reveals his/her secret sex life. Praise for American Romances: "Everything and nothing is sacred in Rebecca Brown's essays. Tongue, word, thought, and intellect all conspire in a free language love of living history, divination, sex, solitude and amusement. She is America's only real rock n' roll schoolteacher. Lessons layered with profundity and protracted parallels. Where old world religion, Gertrude Stein and Oreo cookies co-exist in an actual and mystic world of wonder." –Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth "If Rebecca Brown's talent for prose were any tighter, it would be a lyric – to a pop standard. An homage – a menage – to America, exposing what's laid bare in a comic tragic redux. I laughed till it hurt." –Van Dyke Parks, composer/arranger "Anyone who can get from the Eucharist, to a Necco Wafer, to the goo between the wafers, to the Inquisition to the goo between the legs of excited young women is a distant sibling of mine. She can dash and she can drift and she is not much interested in the really bad parts that might qualify as confession. She likes the float of quotidian living and I like to read the words upon which she floats." –Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar Praise for Rebecca Brown: "A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown." —The New York Times "Throughout her writing career, Brown has exhibited a rare sensitivity in delving into difficult, uncomfortable material—death, disease, imperfect bodies and minds . . . there's also humor and sensuality so intense it's visionary . . ." —San Francisco Chronicle "The straightforward prose style belies Brown's penchant for brilliant narrative, which at any moment can turn from the gentle and intimate to the violent and bizarre." —Utne Reader Watch a <a target="blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuDeoprcRoQ&feature=channel_page">video</a> of Rebecca Brown's reading for the Creative Writing Program's BathHouse Events Series at Eastern Michigan University. 02 New England Puritanism meets West Coast hedonism in an inventive remix of America's cultural history. 08 "Like cowgirls? Like flyboys? Like reading? Then you'll really like Rebecca Brown. . . . These essays mash autobiography with heritage in mischievous but poignant, painful prose. Imminently readable, unambiguously personal, and ultimately revelatory, each essay begins with a quote or two by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Brown traces the arc of our cultural identity from the original 'City on the Hill' to a 'suburb in the sand' (where the Beachboys lived in Hawthorne, California). Brian Wilson's bleak childhood is juxtaposed with both Hawthorne’s and the author’s. These high interest matrixes make for a galloping read. Coupled with an uncanny knack for finding connections, is a percussive, even mesmerizing rhythm. . . . We come from guilt — Brown lays bare our wounds and in doing so she kindles our hope for understanding." — Jeffrey Cyphers Wright The Brooklyn Rail 08 "The essays in American Romances cover a lot of ground: listening, faith, invisibility, extreme reading, the West. They practically read themselves, that's how much fun they are." —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Newsday 08 "In American Romances, her new book of essays, Rebecca Brown has a voice that is full of pop references, family stories, and the fruits of a lifetime of -- in her perfect phrase – extreme reading. The voice is a hoot, and it is dead serious. This is writing with exquisite control, fully up to the task Brown takes on of playing a fierce game of beach ball with deep problems of American (and personal) history and identity." —Susan Stinson Lambda Literary Foundation 08 "Rebecca Brown's American Romances tickles the minds of her readers, enticing their imaginations and provoking their sensibilities to follow her on journey through a course of history that explores all figures and moments iconic to the American experience. Making bold statements in drawing delightfully unexpected connections, this collection of essays conscientiously acknowledges its wild, sometimes carnivalesque perceptions and flourishes them for the reader unapologetically. With its frank curiosity and often irreverent confessions, Brown’s pen produces a voice that is both refreshing and confidential – one has the distinct impression that as readers we are being offered a glimpse into thoughts and experiences that have not before been uttered, let alone written. The endnotes that culminate each chapter maintain the collection’s insightful and witty humor. Drawing upon literature, film, music and history, American Romances is a work whose wide spectrum probes at the reader’s senses and, as varying frequencies resonate within her audience, Brown has written a book that, in fact, Becomes more your own with every read." —Natalie Yasmin Soto Sixers Review 08 "Ultimately, American Romances offers bold reflection on the complicated question of trying to figure out just what is and isn't American. Rebecca Brown has written a fun and powerful book that balances its insight with entertainment." —Ted English Molossus 08 "In American Romances, Brown uses author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his work as a springboard for leaping into considerations of literary history, religion, music, pop culture, human sexuality and more. A little surprisingly, the automobile does not figure into this eclectic mix, but I'd still advise buckling your seatbelt before you take off through Brown's amazing mindscape, and holding on tight as she careens in dazzling form and at breakneck speed around ideas about work ethic, race and gender warfare, religious fanaticism, family dynamics, memory and manifest destiny." —Barbara Lloyd McMichael The Bellingham Herald 08 "'Some things, no matter how far apart, occur again the same. They happen the same again and over again. The same except for different, and forever.' Now that we are swimming in information, facts often seem more like flotsam than train tracks leading anywhere. The circle seems ever more appropriate as the shape of history. Rebecca Brown, info-entrepreneur, can write her own history, pairing, for example, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Brian Wilson (who grew up in Hawthorne, Calif.). 'Hawthorne, writer from the east, and Hawthorne, suburb in the west, are twisted in a Mobius strip: the child and its evil twin, the maker and its son. The City on the Hill became the suburb in the sand.' Out of this archaeology comes a new view of Puritanism, scarlet letters, dreams of the Founding Fathers. Snail paths intersect at junctions (matrices) formed by common names and places. Brown admits to being a nostalgic child (nostalgia as a kind of pain, 'The pain of returning returns . . . the pain of leaving what you left / and knowing what you wanted never was.') The essays in 'American Romances' cover a lot of ground: listening, faith, invisibility, extreme reading, the West. They practically read themselves, that's how much fun they are." -- Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times 08 "Brown's voice sounds more relaxed, more confident, than ever before. Her new stories fold history, theory, memory, and outright lies into rich, articulate essays that stretch the boundaries of your brain." —Brendan Kiley The Stranger 08 "In this anomalous collection of eight essays, Brown (The Gifts of the Body) juxtaposes her personal history with classic literature and movies. . . This whimsical flight of imagination shows how books and reading have influenced the author's life. Recommended for creative writing students and aspiring writers." —Joyce Sparrow Library Journal 23 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100558220/extras/AmericanRomanceExcerptCL.pdf 04 03 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100558220/images/87286100558220L.jpg 07 03 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100558220/images/87286100558220S.jpg 30 07 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100558220/extras/Stacey_and_Rebecca_Interview.MP3 http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100558220 City Lights Publishers 01 City Lights Publishers 20090601 08 16 oz City Lights Books 01 WORLD 20 20090601 01 02 16.95 USD