Frank Lentricchia

"Do killers, artists, and terrorists need one another? In Crimes of Art and Terror, Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe explore the disturbing adjacency of literary creativity to violence and even political terror. Lentricchia and McAuliffe begin by anchoring their penetrating discussions in the events of 9/11 and the scandal provoked by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center as a great work of art, and they go on to show how political extremism and avant-garde artistic movements have fed upon each other for at least two centuries." "Crimes of Art and Terror reveals how the desire beneath many romantic literary visions is for a terrifying awakening that would undo the West's economic and cultural order. This is also the desire, of course, of what is called terrorism. As the authority of writers and artists recedes, it is criminals and terrorists, Lentricchia and McAuliffe suggest, who inherit this romantic, destructive tradition. Moving freely between the realms of high and popular culture, and fictional and actual criminals, the authors describe a web of impulses that catches an unnerving spirit."--Jacket.

"Thomas Lucchesi Jr. is a college professor in the American heartland whose obsessions and compulsions include traveling to visit friends in their last moments of life - because grief alone inspires him to write - and searching for secret meaning in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Himself a writer of "stories full of violence in a poetic style," Lucchesi tells his students that he teaches "only because [his] fiction is commercially untouchable" and to "never forget that." Austerely isolated, anxiety-ridden, and relentlessly self-involved, Lucchesi nonetheless cannot completely squelch his eagerness for love.". "Having become "a mad Ahab of reading," who is driven to dissect the "artificial body of Melville's behemothian book" to grasp its truth, Lucchesi allows his thoughts to wander and loop from theory to dream to reality to questionable memory. But his black humor-tinged musings are often as profoundly moving as they are intellectual, such as the section in which he describes a chance meeting with a similarly-named mafia don or another in which he ponders the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to the significance of a name - and then attempts to share these thoughts with a sexy, middle-aged flight attendant.". "Despite apparent spiritual emptiness, Lucchesi in the end does find "a secret meaning" to Moby-Dick. Lentricchia's creations reveal this meaning through a series of self-reflective metaphors, in much the way that Melville himself did in and through Moby-Dick."--BOOK JACKET.

"At eighteen Robert Tagliaferro, an orphan of ambiguous racial and ethnic identity, disappears from his hometown of Utica, New York. At sixty he returns, forgotten by nearly everyone and searching the bin of memory for something to salvage. Having lived for decades inside a bookstore, his search for identity has taken him into the world of great literature and the history of Utica itself, and so his quest must be to create a memory, a history, and an identity from his reading. He becomes a man made of words, a patchwork of styles and rhetoric, an artifice."--BOOK JACKET. "In the cellar of a restaurant, Robert tells his stories of the past to six other men: stories of Utica, of New York State, and ultimately of America itself, as well as of the intimate involvement of Italian immigrants with these histories. The other characters respond in a kind of collective storytelling, a play of voices probing the various themes of history, genealogy, fatherhood, race, lost children, the presentness of the past, community, and, finally, storytelling itself as the power guiding all, informing their sense of everything, as they grope imaginatively toward a sense of life and their place in it."--BOOK JACKET.

Set in Utica, New York, in the 1950s , Johnny Critelli evokes the richness, conflicts, lusts, and longings of an Italian-American community trying to embrace American culture as it clings to its own. In Utica, food, family, religion, and Joe DiMaggio are equally transcendent. Every extra penny in town in invested in Little League in a romantic homage to athletic greatness and to a Yankee line-up studded with Italian-American names. At the heart of this story are three generations of the author's own family and Johnny Critelli, a mythical orphan who may have disappeared years before Lentricchia's birth, but who continues to obsess him. Raw and rapturous, this novel extols the creativity of the mind and tenacity of the spirit. . The Knifemen is an explosive, blunt-force evocation of the evil voices inside men. It presents a chilling, rapid descent into the mental hell of Richard Assisi, a respectable gynecologist and apparently decent man, who turns self-hatred onto everyone around him, especially those who love him most. Richard is a man moving through ordinary rooms and saying familiar things, but all the while with slaughter and misogyny in his heart. Intensely compelling, The Knifemen dissects the metaphysics of maleness, exposing the primordial lurch toward violence and blood lust.

Hypnotic, fantastical, and irreverent, The Edge of Night takes us beyond autobiography. In this soulful confession, Frank Lentricchia, one of the most controversial figures in America's literary establishment, explores his erotic and meditative relationship with language, family, and middle-aged manhood. From a childhood spent in an old-world household in Utica, New York, through his ascent to intellectual infamy at Duke University, Lentricchia - once described by the New York Times as "the Dirty Harry of contemporary literary theory" - strips away the usual veneer of memoir. As he writes, "I take my liberation where I find it. . Lentricchia transports us to scenes large and small from his singular journey. Whether sipping espresso in a Little Italy cafe, obsessed with the cruelty embedded in the face of a nearby Mafia patron, escaping, inevitably it almost seems, to a Trappist monastery, or realizing the fragility and violence of love amid a simple jumping game with two young daughters, Lentricchia captivates us with piercing observations about himself and his intimate relationships. Pushing expository writing to its limits and sometimes beyond, he reveals a passion for art and life as disarming as it is profound.

Introducing a gritty new detective series set in the bleak hinterlands of upstate new York. Washed up private investigator Eliot Conte would rather be teaching American literature and listening to opera than taking pictures of spouses in flagrante delicto. But he flamed out of an academic career when he hung the Provost of UCLA out a window, and he had to come home, to bleak Utica, New York, where his aging father, Silvio Conte, a political kingmaker, is still cutting deals and hustling appointments, and his all but in blood brother Antonio Robinson is the city's first black Chief of Police. But now Antonio's asking him for a favour that, to Eliot, doesn't seem like the kind of thing a police chief should ask for ... especially as he begins to uncover a trail of evidence leading back to the most sensational hit in local Mafia history. In a Utica marked by economic devastation and racial tensions, Eliot picks up one strand after another, weaving his way through a web of allegiances, grudges, and his own dark demons. Who is the spider at the center of it all?

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her brilliant brother, trying to hold her own in a world of poverty and hard edges. Matt's brain is his ticket out of Honey Creek. Ruth, without options, cleaves instead to her tough, half-crazy mother. May, and eventually to Ruby, the sweet but slightly deranged young man she loves, marries, and supports. Ruth spots stains at Trim 'N Tidy Dry Cleaners, bowls at the Town Lanes, and tries in vain to keep the peace at home between May, whose lashing criticisms blow though the cramped house at gale force, and Ruby, who spends his days getting stoned and watching reruns of Bewitched on television. When the precarious household erupts in violence, Ruth is the only one who can piece their story together - and she gets at the truth inn a manner at once ferocious, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In this powerful, incandescent novel,, Jane Hamilton has worked a small miracle., she has given voice to a young woman you have passed on the street a thousand times. Perhaps you have never noticed her, but the next time you see her, you will know who she is. Passionate in her commitment in life, Ruth is a stunning testament of the human capacity for mercy, compassion, and love. The Book of Ruth is a magnificent debut.

The life and poetry of Robert Frost are presented through an array of exclusive film footage, video clips, photographs, narration and text. Included are 1500 pages of critical and biographical information, ninety minutes of audio performances by Frost himself and an original documentary film on the poet's life.

"The Sadness of Antonioni follows Hank Morelli, a young assistant professor of film obsessed with Antonioni's L'Avventura. As he embarks on an unlikely romance with a Wendy's cashier, he is also drawn into the mystery of his grandfather's underworld connections and tempted by his department chair and his department chair's mysterious girlfriend to take part in a monstrous film project they are planning. Haunted throughout by the terror of time's raw present without exit."--Page 2 of cover.