Author: Bret Easton Ellis File Type: epub In this seductive and chillingly nihilistic novel, Bret Easton Ellis, the author ofAmerican Psycho, returns to Los Angeles, the city whose moral badlands he portrayed unforgettably inLess Than Zero. This time is the early eighties. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city. Dirk sees his best friend killed in a desert car wreck, then rifles through his pockets for a last joint before the ambulance comes. Cheryl, a wannabe newscaster, chides her future stepdaughter, Youre tan but you dont look happy. Jamie is a clubland carnivore with a taste for human blood. As rendered by Ellis, their interactions compose a chilling, fascinating, and outrageous descent into the abyss beneath L.A.s gorgeous surfaces.

Author: Frederick Seidel File Type: epub A stunning new collection from the beguiling and magisterial poet (The New York Times Book Review) hr Something is going on. Something is wrong.Frederick Seidel-the ghoul (Chicago Review), the triumphant outsider (Contemporary Poetry Review)-returns with a dangerous new collection of poems. Nice Weather presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel-and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, elegiac, this book adds new music and menace to his masterful body of work.ReviewPraise for Nice WeatherThere is no contemporary poet writing in English as witty, as shrewd, as touching and as debonair as Frederick Seidel. Thats a lot of praise, but he surely merits it . . . [His] is the best kind of flippancy, informed by melancholy, anger at the technological wizardry more potent than faith, and a senseechoed throughout the collectionof the imminence of death . . . If Seidel resembles anyone, it is Frank OHara, who died as a result of an absurd accident on the beach at Fire Island while still a young man. OHara was gay and Seidel is most decidedly not, but they both appear to be living in, and for, the moment as they explore the delights and horrors of New York City. I love the pair of them, especially for their refusal to indulge in vain pedantry or seriousness too solemn to account for the daily comedy of our lives. Paul Bailey, The Independent[Seidels] use of expressive language to describe grotesque scenes adds a certain lyrical menace to his established body of work . . . In the opening poem, Night, Seidel writes Something is going on. Something is wrong, as vignettes of a night in the city unfold. Indeed, Nice Weather is an eloquent exploration of the cruel, corrupt, horrifying topics that plague Seidels mind. Heralded by The New York Times as a triumphant outsider in American poetry, Seidels latest release makes for a riveting reading experience, filled with witty social criticisms and eloquent reflections. Malibu Magazinebr br In all his work, Seidel remains a larger than life figure, full of vice, menace, and power, and capable of uttering the most shocking thoughts. He writes with the same risky power as John Berryman and Sylvia Plath in their confessional poems. Berryman, however, wrote of his inner torments by inventing a surrogate named Henry, while Plath incarnated herself in a series of voracious, quasi-mythical speakers. Seidel, by writing under his own name yet predicating such impossible and scandalous things of himself, raises the stakes of confessional poetry to a new level . . . His new collection, Nice Weather, out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, betrays no falling off in daring or up-to-the-moment engagement . . . What is new is the sense, pervasive in Nice Weather, that he is coming to the end of his life and, what may be worse, of his potency. Like the late work of Robert Lowell, Nice Weather confronts these losses with a combination of nostalgic resignation and fierce defiance . . . The most moving poems in Nice Weather, however, are those in which Seidel reflects on his artistic accomplishment and how it weighs in the balance with death. At times he is cynical and dismissive . . . In other poems, he seems to regret the way the persona he has constructed in his work will replace him in the world after he disappears . . . But it is not for a writer like Seidel to ask for the readers pity. He remains, even now, a poet of wonderful fearlessness and daring, and he deserves to be remembered as the transgressive adventurer he is A Jew found frozen on the mountain at the howling summit, Immortally preserved singing to the dying planet from it. Adam Kirsch, *Tablet Magazine *Praise for Frederick SeidelThe most frightening American poet everphallus-man, hangman of political barbarismSeidel is the poet the twentieth century deserved. Calvin Bedient, *Boston Review [Seidel is] a carnivore if not a cannibal in the blandly vegan compound of contemporary poetry . . . Thank God for Fred Seidel. Michael Hofmann, Poetry There had never been a poet like this one before the poet of a new contemporary form, a highlight reelone spectacular feat after another, with all the humdrum stuff spliced out. Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books Frederick Seidel, for fifty years and across ten collections, has been writing our most serious, beautiful, and essential poems, poems that are shocking in their art and astonishing in their truth, and that remind us, in their forms, why poetry was once a vital part of cultural life. Wyatt Mason, Harpers Magazine In the desert of contemporary American poetry, Frederick Seidels work awaits the weary reader like an oasis. James Lasdun, The Guardian The excellent table manners combined with a savage display of appetite this is what everyone notices in Seidel. Yet he wouldnt be so special or powerful a poet of whats cruel, corrupt, and horrifying had he not also lately shown himself to be a great poet of innocence. Benjamin Kunkel, Harpers Magazine*About the AuthorFrederick Seidels many books of poems include The Cosmos Trilogy, Ooga-Booga, and Poems 1959-2009.

Author: Daniel McCormack File Type: pdf Hierarchical relationshipsrules that structure both international and domestic politicsare pervasive. Yet we know little about how these relationships are constructed, maintained, and dismantled. This book fills this lacuna through a two-pronged research approach first, it discusses how great power negotiations over international political settlements both respond to domestic politics within weak states and structure the specific forms that hierarchy takes. Second, it deduces three sets of hypotheses about hierarchy maintenance, construction, and collapse during the post-war era. By offering a coherent theoretical model of hierarchical politics within weaker states, the author is able to answer a number of important questions, including Why does the United States often ally with autocratic states even though its most enduring relationships are with democracies? Why do autocratic hierarchical relationships require interstate coercion? Why do some hierarchies end violently and others peacefully? Why does hierarchical competition sometimes lead to interstate conflict and sometimes to civil conflict? **From the Back Cover Hierarchical relationshipsrules that structure both international and domestic politicsare pervasive. Yet we know little about how these relationships are constructed, maintained, and dismantled. This book fills this lacuna through a two-pronged research approach first, it discusses how great power negotiations over international political settlements both respond to domestic politics within weak states and structure the specific forms that hierarchy takes. Second, it deduces three sets of hypotheses about hierarchy maintenance, construction, and collapse during the post-war era. By offering a coherent theoretical model of hierarchical politics within weaker states, the author is able to answer a number of important questions, including Why does the United States often ally with autocratic states even though its most enduring relationships are with democracies? Why do autocratic hierarchical relationships require interstate coercion? Why do some hierarchies end violently and others peacefully? Why does hierarchical competition sometimes lead to interstate conflict and sometimes to civil conflict? Daniel McCormack was Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. His current research focuses on political violence in America. About the Author Daniel McCormack was Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. His current research focuses on political violence in America.

Author: Victoria Langland File Type: pdf Speaking of Flowers is an innovative study of student activism during Brazils military dictatorship (196485) and an examination of the very notion of student activism, which changed dramatically in response to the student protests of 1968. Looking into what made students engage in national political affairs as students, rather than through other means, Victoria Langland traces a gradual, uneven shift in how they constructed, defended, and redefined their right to political participation, from emphasizing class, race, and gender privileges to organizing around other institutional and symbolic forms of political authority. Embodying Cold War political and gendered tensions, Brazils increasingly violent military government mounted fierce challenges to student political activity just as students were beginning to see themselves as representing an otherwise demobilized civil society. By challenging the students political legitimacy at a pivotal moment, the dictatorship helped to ignite the student protests that exploded in 1968. In her attentive exploration of the years after 1968, Langland analyzes what the demonstrations of that year meant to later generations of Brazilian students, revealing how student activists mobilized collective memories in their subsequent political struggles. **