Items related to Notts: A Striking Novel
During the coal-miners strike in England in the early 1980s, two Americans--a mild-mannered assistant professor and a fiery graduate student--meet on an airplane on the way to Nottingham, England, and come face to face with the impact of Thatcherism. IP.
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About the Author:
William O'Rourke is currently professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
From Kirkus Reviews:
Too smart for his own good, a hapless American teacher dies in a cynical game between British and Irish political factions in this digressive academic thriller from O'Rourke (Criminal Tendencies, 1987, etc.)--a mix of terrorism, striking coal miners, university trendiness, and a love affair doomed by a seemingly insignificant treachery. Michael O'Dwyer is a professor at a third-rate New Jersey college, on a visit to Nottingham for a conference on George Orwell. Jessie Jackson, a younger woman he meets on the plane, is a starry-eyed radical American labor organizer from Berkeley, traveling to England during the 1985 coal strike to show the colors on behalf of US coal miners. The two have a week together, visiting the doomed strikers and their organizers, shuttling between tourist jaunts and firsthand experience of the worker's despair, that could be the stuff of a slightly more bittersweet David Lodge novel. But as interpolated pages from a British police inquest make clear, something terrible is going to happen to this couple. The details add up: the impression that Michael's Irish name and looks makes during a time of IRA bombings, Jessie's radical naivet‚, her shabby-sinister English connections, particularly David, who seems tense whenever Michael shows up. The climax finds the couple driving around London in a borrowed car that, we suspect, holds a bomb: Jessie finally admits she was asked by IRA sympathizers back in California to decoy British customs by picking up an Irish- looking male and traveling with him. As she and Michael discuss what they to do, we already know from the inquest that someone- -British MI5, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the IRA--has decided to take lethal preventive action. Too many scenes feel like mini-essays, and characters lecture at the drop of a hat. But fine description, a well-constructed story, and a sympathetic portrayal of the generally overlooked American and British working class carry this one over its dull patches. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherDa Capo Press
- Publication date1996
- ISBN 10 1569248060
- ISBN 13 9781569248065
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages250
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Notts: A Striking Novel
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ISBN 10: 1569248060
ISBN 13: 9781569248065
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Good. Hardcover with DJ. The DJ has some shelf wear. Light wear to the book, lightly tanned pages. No apparent marks. Tracking available on most domestic orders. Seller Inventory # mon0000131502
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Notts: A Striking Novel
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Book Description hardcover. Condition: Very Good in Dustjacket. 1st edition. New York. 1996. Marlowe & Company. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 1569248060. 241 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration Untitled (Landscape with Figure) by Joseph Cornell. keywords: Literature America . FROM THE PUBLISHER - Two American innocents abroad, one a mild-mannered assistant professor of Stereotype on his way to an Orwell conference in Nottingham commemorating the end of 1984 and the other a fiery graduate student on her way to study the National Union of Miners' ongoing mining strike, meet aboard a 747 as it wings them to England where they experience Thatcherism at full tide and where their romantic entanglement proves disastrous. William O'Rourke's fourth novel illuminates the gap between academic political' concerns and the realpolitik of labor disputes and international terrorism, as well as the notions of duplicitous texts and fictions within fictions, the novel of manners versus the novel of action. What is stereotyping but fear of ambiguity? O'Rourke asks indelibly in this postmodern anti-thriller thriller. inventory #22445. Seller Inventory # z22445
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First American Edition. Minor shelf wear to binding. Light wear & soiling on edges of text block. Inscribed by author on title page. The dust jacket shows some light handling, in a mylar cover. Signed by Author. Seller Inventory # JCOSoroNOT
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Notts: A Striking Novel
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. Author signed on the title page and inscribed on the half-title page. Gilt lettering on white covers in a white pictorial dust jacket. 8vo, 240pp. The dust jacket has a single small chip at the head of the spine. Signed by Author(s). Seller Inventory # 003789
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