Potboiler

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Amos Oz

Reality and fiction blend in an ingenious Rothian short novel from the celebrated author of A Tale of Love and Darkness - witty but elegiac, playful and sexy but somehow deadly serious, it's about a bored writer who goes to a reading and has a brief sexual skirmish with a female reader. Or does he?The novel centres around 8 hours in the life of the Author (unnamed), a literary celebrity in his forties, who is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading. Bored, he looks for distraction - and finds copy. On the way he stops at a cafe where he 'bumps into' some of his own characters. In his head he conjures up the life stories of the people he meets, not least Ricky, an equally bored but seductive waitress. Later, even as the reading from his new book is underway, and the obligatory inane questions ("Why do you write? Do you write with a pen or on a computer?) have come and gone — he weaves stories round the audience and the panel. Afterwards, the Author invites the professional reader for a drink before walking her home. It turns out she lives just opposite, so she goes home and he wanders off into the night. But he returns, climbs the many flights of stairs to the flat, where she lives alone with her cat - and they have a brief but steamy sexual skirmish. Or is this merely a middle-aged writer's fantasy? We never quite know where reality ends and invention begins. He spends the rest of the night wandering, smoking, inventing, regretting and thinking till dawn. The Rhyming of the title refers to the popular couplets of a Hebrew poet, once a household name but now virtually forgotten, whose little rhymes about life punctuate the story. At dawn, the Author reads in yesterday's paper that the poet has just died, almost unnoticed.This is a gem of a work by a master, about writing, reading, growing old and the elusive chimera of literary posterity.

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Shawn Klomparens

An earnest journey from heartache to heartthrob and all the emotions along the way; at once an old-fashioned love story and a cautionary tale of self-reinvention.In San Diego County, it hasn't rained in 580 days. But for weatherman Andy Dunne, everything else is changing fast...Only a few weeks ago, he was a newly divorced, slightly overweight meteorologist for an obscure satellite radio station, hiding his secret love for a colleague, the beautiful--and very much married--Hillary Hsing. But nearly overnight, Andy has landed a new gig, flying a magic carpet in a bizarre live-action children's TV show. So what is affable, basically decent Andy Dunne going to do now that he can do practically anything he wants? With a parade of hot moms begging for his autograph and a family that needs his help more than ever, Andy has a lot of choices. First, though, there's this thing with Hillary, their heated text messages, a long-awaited forecast for rain -- and a few other surprises he never saw coming...From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Jill Campbell

Examining Henry Fielding's sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, Natural Masques breaks with old critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding's "masculinity" with Samuel Richardson's "feminine" sensibilities. It argues that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding's writings, and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries. It therefore offers an argument about Fielding's period as well as about his major works, which are analyzed in connection with a variety of related texts - from satires on the castrati to educational treatises, Whig propaganda, and debates in political theory. Approaching gender as a complex system of relations, Campbell investigates Fielding's treatments of masculine and feminine identities across the arenas of eighteenth-century political, social, and literary conflict and change. The plays with which Fielding began his literary career are particularly explicit concerning his interest in problems of gender. Some of their most recurrent satiric targets - domineering women, castrato singers, beaux - disrupt the expected economy of sexual roles, and Fielding's productions of his own plays often featured the dramatic spectacle of this disruption, with men cast in women's roles, and women in men's. In the opening scenes of Joseph Andrews, Fielding frames his parodic response to Pamela by reversing the sexes of the two participants in Richardson's scenario of embattled chastity. Campbell shows how throughout Fielding's writings, the suspicion that sexual roles are merely assumed - and therefore subject to alteration and appropriation - intimates a more general possibility that personal identity is always in some sense impersonated, incoherent, mutable. . Campbell draws on recent work that sees the eighteenth century as a crucial moment in the history of sexuality and gender, and she critiques new treatments of the novel's function in defining domestic femininity.

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Joey Goebel

Vincent Spinetti is the archetypal tortured artist-a sensitive young writer who suffers from alienation, parental neglect, poverty, depression, alcoholism, illness, nervous breakdowns, and unrequited love. However, he is unaware that these torments are due to the secret manipulations of New Renaissance, an experimental organization that hopes to improve mindless main-stream culture by raising writers who emphasize artistic quality over commerce. New Renaissance hires ex-musician Harlan Eiffler to manipulate its most promising prodigy, Vincent. Wickedly antisocial and disgusted by what passes for entertainment in the twenty-first century, Harlan ensures that Vincent remains a true artist. He poses as Vincent's manager and nurtures his career, all the while continuing to torture him. Smart, funny, and poignant, Torture the Artist examines the timeless idea that true art can only result from suffering. About the author: Joey Goebel was born and raised in Henderson, Kentucky. He has a B.A. in English from Brescia University. He is the author of The Anomalies and former lead singer of the Mullets and Novembrists.