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What Is What Was by Richard Stern (Paperback, 2002)

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About this product

Product Information

What Is What Was, Richard Stern's fifth orderly miscellany, is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the already well-known My Ex, the Moral Philosopher, appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praised as almost the invention of a new genre ): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a thought experiment for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer. The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage, or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write). There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, What Is What Was is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders?and about writing American prose.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
The University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13
9780226773261
eBay Product ID (ePID)
95418366

Product Key Features

Book Title
What Is What Was
Author
Richard Stern
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Topic
Literary Theory
Publication Year
2002
Number of Pages
328 Pages

Dimensions

Item Height
216mm
Item Width
149mm
Item Weight
414g

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Richard Stern
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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