Author: Wright Morris File Type: epub Nowhere in [Morriss] fiction does emotion emerge from detail so beautifully as in this precise and vivid book. . . . The triumph of the book, in terms of craft, is that we experience the sense of the slow passage of time so necessary to such a story. . . . The heart of the book is its tactful rendering of the emotional history of several women. . . . Precise, satisfying, and complete.New York Times Book Review **From Publishers Weekly This 1981 National Book Award winner links three generations of Midwestern women to a form of unison singing in unmeasured time known as plainsong. Morris writes compellingly of women, of loneliness and contradictory needs, of the half-submerged life, a plainsong that is all too seldom heard, noted PW. 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Morris snagged a National Book Award for this 1980 novel. LJs reviewer observed that it is at once a song of the Plains and plainsong melody which illuminates the beauty and complexity of human life. The plot follows the female members of a family living in Nebraska from the late 1800s to modern times. It remains rich in sensory detail, controlled in style, and powerful in impact (LJ 1180). 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Fred Moten File Type: pdf Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis.Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies Jazz and the Literary Imagination In The Universal Machinethe concluding volume to his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single beingFred Moten presents a suite of three essays on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon, in which he explores questions of freedom, capture, and selfhood. In trademark style, Moten considers these thinkers alongside artists and musicians such as William Kentridge and Curtis Mayfield while interrogating the relation between blackness and phenomenology. Whether using Levinass idea of escape in unintended ways, examining Arendts antiblackness through Mayfields virtuosic falsetto and Anthony Braxtons musical language, or showing how Fanons form of phenomenology enables black social life, Moten formulates blackness as a way of being in the world that evades regulation. Throughout The Universal Machineand the trilogy as a wholeMotens theorizations of blackness will have a lasting and profound impact. **Review Its this spirit of the collective effort of study and exchange and resonance, the effort to keep the channels open and keep listening, that has made Moten (or, maybe, Motens) such a celebrated thinker. At the end of sentences like these, you want to say something like Amen. (Jess Row Bookforum 2018-04-01) Review Fred Moten is one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in black studies. TheUniversal Machine offers us a social poetics of blackness in its rigorous and extended engagement with Kant, Levinas, Arendt, and Fanon. The book is a provocative and incisive meditation on the violence of the esteemed categories of western philosophy man, universe, reason, and world. What becomes clear over the course of its pages is the critical role of blackness (black life, black study) in producing thought of the outside and the vision of another world, or, better yet, no world, just the love and caress of earth. The density of its argument and the labyrinthine beauty of its sentences define Motens body of work and trouble the line between critical thought and poetry. (Saidiya Hartman) In TheUniversal Machine, Fred Motens extraordinary prose and thought lights up with love the other, dancing civilization black radicalism is. As political philosophy the elliptical and attentive analysis reanimates Levinas, Arendt, and Fanon, among others, learning from their dissident phenomenology and repudiating the Enlightenment racism that shaped their concepts and politics. Reading in the Black Marxist tradition of Cedric Robinson and civil rights too, the book induces its own kinetic revolutionary blackness, its own figures of fugitive improvisation and solidarity. Each reading minute is absorbing and reverie-inducing, dissolving the ground of the interpretive habits weve been taught to bring to thought and the world. (Lauren Berlant)