Books about Squalor from Amazon.com

In his fiction debut, the notorious British artist Jake Chapman satirizes the standard paperback romance novel in his own inimitable way, slashing the genre down to bare bones and creating a disfigured version from the remains. The Marriage of Reason & Squalor is a corollary to the visual work for which Jake Chapman, in collaboration with his brother Dinos, is best known. The novel opens when our heroine, Chlamydia Love, is gifted a desert island by her fiancee, but develops a fascination with its rightful owner, the devilishly unattractive writer Helmut Mandragorass, instead. A battle begins over the ownership of the island and, ultimately, Chlamydia's love. Included as an insert is Mandragorass' opus Come Hell or High Water, along with a number of actual rejection letters sent to Mandragorass/Chapman from publishers who perhaps should have known better. Also featured are 20 limited edition color prints by Chapman--in the guise of Chlamydia Love.
Price: $17.16 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Reading TheCatcher in the Rye has become a rite of passage for young Americans, landing the book on bestseller lists (and banned book lists) each year, even though it was published a half century ago. What is it about J. D. Salinger and his body of work that has left such a lasting mark on American fiction? And who better to answer that question than the current generation of writers?

Here are fourteen of the most vital voices in the contemporary American fiction scene pulling no punches in response to a writer who continues to beguile, charm, fascinate, and frustrate generations of readers. Contributors Walter Kirn, Ren? Steinke, Charles D’Ambrosio, Emma Forrest, Aleksander Hemon, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Amy Sohn, John McNally, Karen E. Bender, Thomas Beller, Benjamin Anastas, Aimee Bender, Joel Stein, and Jane Mendelsohn turn themselves inside out as they discuss their personal reactions to reading Salinger classics–not only The Catcher in the Rye but also Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, and the short stories–and explore, with begrudging gratitude, how Salinger helped to form the deepest reaches of their literary imaginations..
Price: $13.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

What does it mean to love a character in a book? Many of us do. Many of us always have. These loves are not the subject of late-night phone conversations with friends or entries in our secret diaries. Yet, as Anne Roiphe reveals in her stunning new book, the characters we know only in fiction live forever in our hearts and our minds. We are what we read.

In For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor, Roiphe takes us on a glorious tour of the relationships she has had with the great male characters of American fiction: Holden Caulfield, Robert Jordan, Dick Diver, Rabbit, Nathan Zuckerman, Frank Bascombe, and Max and Mickey. In her literary love life Roiphe is a serial monogamist. When she is involved with one character, she is exclusively his until another comes along. She is an audience, an imaginary lover, and a critic, too -- but a critic only in the way a relative carps or chides at the escapades of a dear one. Though a woman, she identifies with her male heroes; as a woman, she feels love, awe, worry, and tenderness toward them at the same time. Never have the great male creations of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Salinger, Roth and Updike, Ford and Sendak come alive so vibrantly through the critical imagination of a fellow novelist.

What we discover on the printed page often carries over to our real-life encounters with the opposite sex, and so Roiphe weaves fragments of her own life story throughout the book. At different times in her life, men like Holden, Rabbit, Nathan, and Frank taught her much of what she knows about how men feel, how they experience love and loss, how they are like and yet unlike her. Piece by piece, Roiphe uncovers a portrait of the male soul, in all its rage and glory.

A personal odyssey as well as a celebration of the joys of reading, For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor is a winning blend of self-discovery, criticism, and autobiography that will inspire everyone in love with the written word..
Price: $3.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

SQUALOR AND SPLENDOR, Tales of East and West, is a series of unusual travel stories that take place in Europe and Asia covering the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia (Bali), Papua New Guinea, England, Spain, and Morocco The title refers to the two polarities of the traveler’s experience: unpleasant encounters and observations of degrading experiences balanced by the ecstasy of beautiful lands and new and fascinating experiences.

"Flesh" deals with prostitution in the Philippines and the narrator’s strange reaction to it. "Revolution" portrays a spoiled, bored member of the Marcos class that was to fall in the revolution of 86. "Million Girls" is the story of a typical Philippine prostitute. "Boracay " is the odd story of a man who mistakes a young Filipino transvestite for a girl. "Green Man" is a parable of reverse racism in Japan. "Jean Shrimpton" relates the oddly connected experiences of a man in London over a period of eighteen years. "Wimbledon" is about a student who has a not so idyllic experience as a cook in a steak house. "Bali" deals with the negative effects of tourism on that no longer enchanted island. "Morocco" shows a young westerner encountering the drug and hippie culture, along with a persistent boy prostitute, in that atypical Muslim country. "Hemingway" is an ironic look at the Hemingway heroic myth in Spain. "Siquijor" is an account of faith healing and magic on that island in the Philippines. The subject is a well-known faith healer named Tibor..
Price: $5.28 [Notify me when price goes down.]