Books about Birkerts from Amazon.com

What hath the inexpensive personal computer, the portable cassette player, and the CD-ROM wrought? Are books as we know them dead? And does--or should--it matter if they are? Birkerts, a renowned critic, examines the practice of reading with an eye to what the future will bring. .
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(20070204).
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Co-authored by two esteemed writers, Writing Well, is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose. This concise, lively text covers all aspects of writing but is best known for its signature chapters on words, sentences, and paragraphs. Going beyond the basics of composition, the text teaches originality and elegance in writing encouraging students to develop their own written voice. Sample student papers Ð including several works-in-progress - allow students to learn the writing process through the work of their peers. A brief handbook section rounds out the coverage..
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The main character, like the title says, is a mysterious guy. Nagel arrives in a Norwegian town with plenty of money and goodwill, and though kind of an eccentric, seems to start to fit in with the local crowd. But it's almost as if Nagel only just landed on Earth, and while he wishes to live correctly, has no idea how to do it. Published at the end of the last century, Mysteries is an existentialist novel, very strange, often very funny, often sad and largely asking the question, "Why live?".
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Co-authored by two esteemed writers, Writing Well, is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose.

Donald Hall, National Book Critics Circle Award winner and Pulitzer Prize nominee, and Sven Birkerts, recipient of awards from the National Book Critics Circle and PEN, bring their talents to this concise, lively text that covers all aspects of writing but is best known for its signature chapters on words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Writing Essays, Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Grammar

General Interest; Improving Writing

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William Gaddis's final work, Agape Agape, is an effective distillation of his philosophy and a powerful personal statement regarding the state of modern culture. The book is written in the form of a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness monologue delivered by a dying elderly man, himself attempting to complete his final work, a social history of the player piano in America. Desperate to complete his work before the onset of madness or death and fighting the effects of medication, the frantic narrator offers a meandering discussion of his work, which explores technology's artistically stifling influence. The narrator has isolated a particularly profound example of this in the player piano, an artistic invention that alternately replaced the artist. Technology, the narrator argues, has heightened the value of passivity, entertainment, and mediocrity, leading to the impending "collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look." The narrator fervently claims that only through artistic courage can we achieve understanding, transcendence, and discover the uniting spirit of creativity, a brotherly "agape" love.

As Joseph Tabbi explains in his informative afterword, Agape Agape is the result of years of research and consideration by Gaddis, and the novella explores technological advancement and the response to this advancement, both actual and hypothetical, by such figures as Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Tolstoy. While an impressive work of scholarship, Agape Agape is foremost an emotional decree, Gaddis's final statement of outrage and sadness at our cultural direction and a plea for change. At less than 100 sparsely punctuated pages, the book is an efficient combustion of energy and an affecting depiction of personal and cultural disintegration. At once a condemnation, warning, and affirmation, it reflects Gaddis's apprehensions but also his enduring faith in the power of creation. A worthwhile starting point for newcomers to Gaddis's work, Agape Agape is a memorable end to the career of a gifted thinker. --Ross Doll.
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Like Sartre, Camus, and Kundera before him, Nicholas Mosley has put forth a supremely challenging work that relies as much on philosophical and political themes as pure storytelling. Max Ackerman and Eleanor Anders are ambitious intellectuals--British and German, respectively--whose fascination with the scientific trends and political upheaval of the 20th century take them around the world and, eventually, into each other's arms. Intensifying, perhaps complicating the narrative of this 1990 Whitbread Prize winner is Mosley's use as a metaphor the Talmudic myth of the Lamed-Vov, a tale of 36 upstanding people for whom God sustains life on Earth. Left unanswered is whether Ackerman and Anders are among them. .
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In The Gutenburg Elegies, a widely acclaimed New York Times Notable Book, Sven Birkerts won attention as a graceful and thoughtful essayist, an eloquent advocate of literature in an age of electronic media. Now he shows what only literature can do, in a moving, compelling, brilliantly written memoir that probes what it means to be an American with roots in a distant culture.

As a boy growing up in suburban Detroit, Birkerts always felt intensely uncomfortable with his family's ties to Latvia-the birthplace of all four of his grandparents. And yet his struggle to find his own path led inexorably back through the overgrown garden of family lore. Birkerts deftly weaves his own history (from struggles with his overbearing father to adventures at Woodstock, from lost loves to his emergence as a writer) with episodes from his ancestors' lives-scenes from Riga and Moscow during the Russian Revolution, tales of Paris and mistresses and family scandals. My Sky Blue Trades is destined to be a classic exploration of the immigrant experience and the writer's inner life..
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