Twice Upon A Time (Rice Modern Masters Series) - Softcover

Stern, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0892633379 ISBN 13: 9780892633371

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Several years ago, with the acclaimed Twice Told Tales, Daniel Stern began weaving fresh modern tales from the thematic threads of great texts of the past. Now, these new, half-dozen, bold and witty variations prove once again that there are no real boundaries where books, ideas, lives, and love are concerned.

Twice Upon a Time focuses on some classic favorites Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville and A Hunger Artist” by Frank Kafka and turns them upside down with enchanting results. Pushing the boundaries even further, two famous poems by Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning” and The Man with the Blue Guitar,” draw forth stories both rueful and comic. And, as Eastern Europe was crumbling, Stern was inspired to write a novella of youth and lost illusions called A Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.”

About this title

About the Author:

DANIEL STERN is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of English in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. He is the author of nine novels, two collections of sort stories, a play and several screenplays. He has won the Paris Review's John Train Humor Award, and the International Prix du Souvenir Award for Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Stern (An Urban Affair, 1980, etc.), a polished and generous writer in his novels, has developed a small literary vaudeville act. In 1989's Twice Told Tales, and in this new collection, he has taken as a premise that books ``could be basic to a fiction; as basic as a love affair, a trauma, a house, a mother, a landscape, a lover, a job, or a sexual passion.'' Like homages to recently fashionable critical ideas (the erotics of reading, reader-response theory), the six stories here choose poems or novels, even The Communist Manifesto, to be pivots around which the characters directly spin--and which they indirectly reconstitute. The artifice is stifling. Except for one, the stories bob around in their literary brines unable to address anything beyond the radius of a creative-writing workshop. The only one that truly works--``Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville'': a hack screenwriter's final noncompliance--works because it speaks of Hollywood knowledge, and of people caught, even destroyed by, that knowledge. Nothing else in the book has this emotional reflux. Careful but charmless. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0892633379
• ISBN 13: 9780892633371
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240