Books about Antiheroes from Amazon.com

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Emily the Strange is not your ordinary thirteen-year-old girl - she's got a razor-sharp wit as dark as her jet-black hair, a posse of moody black cats and famous friends in very odd places! She's got a broodingly unique way of experiencing the world, and you're invited along for the ride. Legions of fans worldwide have joined forces to make Emily a pop-culture phenomenon..
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Chinese contemporary art is currently enjoying a worldwide boom, fetching record-breaking prices at auction houses around the globe. The country's rapid transition from Communism to consumerism, and the dizzying changes brought about by urbanization, globalization and new technologies have created a fascinating explosion of art overwhelmingly concerned with the search for self-identity in a society that, from Confucius to Mao, has traditionally disregarded individualism for the collective good.
Avatars and Antiheroes reflects the schizophrenic undercurrents of a nation in continuous fast-forward. From the Cynical Realism and Political Pop movements associated with the post-Tiananmen generation of artists such as Yue Minjun, whose grinning representations of himself as antihero seem to mock the revolutionary heroes of old, to the pop-culture generation spearheaded by Cao Fei, whose digital avatars live in a world without borders, this book showcases the work of the most important contemporary artists to emerge from China in recent years.
Stunning full-color plates of the work of Chinas leading painters, photographers, sculptors, performance artists, video artists, and even a fireworks artist are complemented by insightful commentary from Beijing-based art specialist Claudia Albertini, who personally interviewed many of the artists featured.
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Here's a book that succeeds on several different levels: as a gripping (if slightly eccentric) thriller, as a political statement, and as a social document about the way people can lead colorful and dangerously exciting underground lives even in a repressive country. Wang Shuo is a pioneer in what China has labeled "hooligan literature," writing novels, movie scripts, television series, and songs about people and subjects deemed so unfit for public consumption that his work is officially banned (although widely popular). Playing for Thrills, the first of his books to appear in English, is narrated by a former soldier and current wise guy named Fang Yan, who spends his time gambling, eating, drinking, trying to have sex, and wondering if he was indeed involved in the murder of a former army buddy 10 years ago, as the police seem to think. In Howard Goldblatt's lively translation, the author's dialogue has the snap of enhanced reality: "Not so fast," says a character called Fat Man Wu as he describes the small, exclusive "party" that he and Fang Yan belong to. "With us it's instinct. Sooner or later every member of our party cools his heels in jail--that's how we keep things jumping politically." --Dick Adler.
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Victor Brombert is one of that vanishing breed, the man of letters His previous books, which include studies of Hugo, Stendhal, and Flaubert, have tended to focus on French literature But Brombert is equally at home in English, German, Russian, and Italian, and seems to remember almost every sentence he's read, which gives his prose precisely the kind of allusive depth that's lacking in most academic criticism. Certainly his over-the-top mastery of the canon puts him in an excellent position to write In Praise of Antiheroes--a vest-pocket survey of the antihero in literature, ranging over 150 years and 5 different languages.

Brombert traces the birth of the antihero--a "perturber and a disturber," and occasionally what we moderns might call a slacker--back to Georg Buchner's Woyzeck. He then fast-forwards to such antiheroic masterworks as Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk and Nikolai Gogol's nightmare vision of haberdashery, "The Overcoat." These are all fictional or dramatic works, which seem to be the most likely incubators of contrarian victory. Yet the centerpiece of Brombert's book is his chapter on Primo Levi's classic Holocaust memoir, Survival in Auschwitz. The author zooms in on a particular episode, in which Levi tutors a fellow prisoner in Italian by quoting Dante's terza rima reconstruction of Ulysses. In the ultimate antiheroic setting--the dehumanizing black hole of the concentration camps--this pedagogical labor strikes Brombert as a spiritual triumph: "The recourse to Dante's poetry, in order to teach Italian to an Alsatian fellow inmate in a German camp deep inside Poland, where Yiddish is the common tongue, becomes a symbol of universality and of the possible survival of meaning." Whether Levi, who chalked up his own survival to luck, quite fits into this pantheon of rebels and obstructionists is open to debate. But like In Praise of Antiheroes, his last-ditch recourse to Homer reminds us that old-fashioned humanism has plenty of life in it yet. --Bob Brandeis.
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This book is a discussion of 75 of the most popular films in America from 1921 through 1999 and the changes that have taken place in how masculinity is portrayed in the movies over that period of time. Traditionally in popular films, men have met challenging tasks, but what they accomplish and how successful they are have been drastically changed since the early 1920s. Prior to World War II, men were most often presented within the context of a family. After the war, men were presented as concerned with issues beyond their immediate families, and after 1970, they were portrayed as being overwhelmed by their situations. Recently, popular films have tended to focus on the relationships between them. This work documents these changes over eight decades, using the movies as vehicles to illustrate the major transformations..
Price: $39.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

There seems to be an unspoken rule among mystery writers that once the author has created a successful character, the obligation to fans demands regular installments in the hero's life history, whatever the author's literary aspirations. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was famously unsuccessful at killing off Sherlock Holmes and resurrected his detective in response to public outcry. Michael Connelly's police procedural series featuring Harry Bosch has garnered numerous top mystery awards, including the coveted Edgar. But, strangely, it is his deviations from Bosch, including The Poet and Blood Work, that have drawn the biggest readerships--and have won awards of their own to boot (The Poet was honored with the 1997 Anthony Award). Now, once again, Connelly follows up the success of a Bosch book, Angels Flight, with a non-series tale that pushes Connelly's already impressive body of work into new territory.

Void Moon traces the path of Cassie Black, a gifted thief who struggles with the temptation of "outlaw juice" (the burning desire to live the fast life of crime and payoffs) even while she regularly attends her probation meetings. It's not that hawking Porsches to newly flush young Hollywood males isn't satisfying, but... well, it isn't. After years away, she returns to her old striking grounds in Las Vegas for one last big mark hoping to pave her way into a new life. But Cassie discovers that her old Las Vegas is a new town with a new skyline and new (and more deadly) bad guys; it is also a place haunted by the ghost of her lover-partner Max. When her take proves to be 10 times larger than she imagined, her road to freedom runs afoul of the Mob while a morally questionable--and openly vicious--PI sniffs her trail.

With its attractive central character, meticulous plot, and glitzy packaging, Void Moon seems perfectly poised for the New York Times bestsellers list. That is not to say, however, that Connelly has "dumbed down" his usual presentation. The novel displays Connelly's stunning ability to breathe reality into his fiction with the subtle details that can only come from careful research and his years of experience reporting on crime for the L.A. Times. What other author has so lovingly described the aftermath of crime? The jail sentence, recidivism, the numbing visits to the parole officer where "she held the plastic cup she would have to squat over and fill while an office trainee, dubbed the wizard because of the nature of her monitoring duty, watched to make sure it was her own urine going into the container." While we Connelly fans are always eager to read the next Bosch, once again we're not disappointed with Connelly's "vacation." --Patrick O'Kelley.
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