American Dreams A Novel edition by Bruce Price Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : American Dreams A Novel edition by Bruce Price Literature Fiction eBooks 
In the author’s words “American Dreams was a radical experiment, because the whole idea was to let the stories erupt and evolve on their own. I would draw a word and then use that word in the most interesting sentence I could think of, and then create the next most interesting (and connected) sentence I could think of, and so on until the energy ran out. Much to my surprise, I wrote an entire chapter the first time I tried this technique. It was as if I had discovered a magic lamp. And that’s the way it continued a single word created each chapter. As I created more characters, I made a chart and assigned them numbers and then I rolled dice to decide which character would run into which other character. After all, in real life you’re constantly running into new people. Who knows why?”
American Dreams A Novel edition by Bruce Price Literature Fiction eBooks
(I review only books about education, until today. This is a special case, as you'll see.)American Dreams, surely one of the best experimental novels in American literature, was published 29 years ago by legendary indie publisher Martin Shepard/The Permanent Press.
I recently came across a long-forgotten compilation of rave reviews. "Wow," thought I (the author), "this is one really amazing book. I had forgotten just how good it is. More people should know about it."
Here are eleven rave reviews, followed by an expose of how this unique book came about:
"American Dreams recalls other roller-coaster pop preachments on `the American experience' by Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, and Hunter S. Thompson. Emerson wrote `never read a book less than a year old' and it's too early to make comparisons between Price and these writers; but he is working their territory and knows it well." --Manhattan
"Price...obviously a talented writer... has written a funny, stylistically innovative novel that includes everything a popular novel should have: romance, sex, adultery, crime, religion, sickness, death, and even Texas." --Publishers Weekly
"It's a dazzler, for both language and organization. By comparison, Vonnegut is dull, his prose flat. Although Price doesn't do the San Francisco/absurd genre that Italo Calvino does, American Dreams reminded me of Cosmicomics and T Zero in the ways in which each chapter works out a particular notion, metaphor, event." --Professor Thomas Friedman, Syracuse University
"An enjoyable cornucopia of characters including Texas millionaire Carlyle (`the shirt he was wearing would have given the entire staff at Women's Wear Daily apoplexy'), who felt that `God must like mediocre people. He made so many of them.' In addition there is Mrs. Carlyle (No 2 and 4), who believed "life had been much more fun when she hadn't known the first thing about it', and Higgins, who wondered `why the news was always happening somewhere else, never where he was.'" -- Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
"The author reveals a seriousness of intent by his strategy and tactics. His people are exaggerations of the stereotypes we meet in the tabloids and the soaps, public people whose fortunes lie in their abilities to stir the undeveloped and therefore unfulfilled imagination of what one character calls `the C average mentality that manages the country'... the creatures of stage, screen and legislatures who keep alive that aspect of the American Dream which underlies our right to do whatever suits us, regardless of its effects on others." --Bestsellers
"Here is a book so stuffed with vivid characters that it requires, by way of prologue, a listing of dramatic personae (titled `Chapter Zero'). If you don't get around to reading this one, let me leave you with one of Price's more amusing - and disturbing - thoughts: "Nothing dwindles so fast as love. Ditto happiness, fame, skill, money, and whatever time you've got left. Basically, nothing's all that secure. Here today, gone by late afternoon. Sometimes you get one hour service.'" --Philadelphia Inquirer
"Price's dark vision of America is shot through with lightning flashes of penetrating humor and unsettling insight. In American Dreams he's managed to make even dispair lyrical. It's filled with the kind of passages you want to copy and show to friends." --Marco Vassi
"American Dreams has been compared to the work of Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelm, writers for whom plot and character are less important than the play of language. In Price's case the book is also a vehicle for his awesome grasp of the big issues facing modern life. He doesn't hesitate to interrupt a steamy bedroom scene or an achingly comic moment with intense philosophical discussions on the nature and fate of mankind... A roller coaster ride through the United States as complex and as puzzling as it is breathtaking. This is a one-of-a-kind novel that has all the makings of a classic." --Mary Lou Cohalan, in the Suffolk County News
"The humorous turn of phrase is Bruce Price's most powerful weapon in American Dreams. His innovative turns of phrase prove as disturbing as they are entertaining... there is a love of language evident on every page. Sentences are meant to be read over and over as you roll the words around and smile at the visual images that arise from the typeset page." --The Bloomsbury Review
"A complex collection of characters engage in a complex pattern of wheeling, dealing, fighting, killing, making love and occasionally dying in this episodic view of life today. As each goes about his or her daily life their actions affect other characters and these characters in turn, influence others, until their lives are careening off each other like billiard balls handled by an exceptionally deft player." --Virginia Beach Sun
"American Dreams by Bruce Price, `In which the author speaks of everyday life in the greatest country on earth....a simple little story concerning a statue, three divorces, a heart attack, several infidelities, a burglary, some marriages, a double suicide, a $2 million scam, a hit play and a man looking for God, as aren't we all...'
"So Bruce Price sums up his own novel on his title page. He has indeed listed all the ingredients of his plot, but the proof of the pudding is not in the recipe but in the eating. That is to say, it is not the events of the book but their cunning interconnectedness that characterizes the plot of this energetic little book." --American Book Review
-------------------------------
These reviews trickle in over many months. By that time the book has sold a few thousand copies and faded into the past. No-name author, small press, there is no budget to tell people, hey, this is really something special.
Also, I was a little defensive for two reasons. The book was written in an experimental way--should this be bragged about or kept secret? This technique, as the reviews make clear, did liberate an amazing amount of fresh, interesting language. That's good. The experimental method also released a parade of fresh, rambunctious characters. That was problematical.
The immediate problem was that when people read chapter 1 and become interested in the characters, they don't see those characters in the next few chapters. Chapter 2, 3 and 4 introduce new characters. You know their names from Chapter Zero and the chapters are short. But the book requires a bit of patience until the characters start to cycle around and interact with each other.
Note that all these reviewers enjoyed this book without knowing what I'm now about to tell you. They went with it. Any reader who does that will probably have an excellent literary experience with this unusual and lively book.
I had experimented with writing poems by drawing random words from the dictionary. This is a surrealist technique. The idea is to tap into your unconscious; you tap into wherever dreams come from (which is part of the meaning of the title).
I thought, well, maybe I could write longer passages, maybe a short story or even a novel. I assumed this was a completely unreasonable ambition. I assumed that each word I drew would be the catalyst for only a paragraph or page at most. But I plunged in, and here's what happened. I would draw a word and then use that word in the most interesting sentence I could think of, and then create the next most interesting (and connected) sentence I could think of, and so on until the energy ran out. Much to my surprise, I wrote an entire chapter the first time I tried this technique. It was as if I had discovered a magic lamp. And that's the way it continued: a single word created each chapter.
The first word I drew was "disclosure" and the sentence I came up with was "He decided to make a full disclosure." So, out of nowhere, I have a man, he has a secret, and he's decided to reveal it. What will happen next? "Disclosure" has a financial feel about it, so I veered away toward romance. And the next two sentences are: "The trip up to the lake. The woman named Bonnie."
Typically, I believe people say that Naked Lunch by William Burroughs is the most outstanding experimental novel in American literature. Burroughs wrote the novel in a standard way and then cut it up and reassembled it, sort of a collage technique.
American Dreams was a more radical experiment, because the whole idea was to let the stories erupt and evolve on their own. I didn't want to second-guess them. I didn't want to say, oh, maybe this should happen...That's the way you normally work. But in this book I let things go their own way. Indeed, I thought of editing as cheating.
As I created more characters, I made a chart and assigned them numbers and then I rolled dice to decide which character would run into which other character. After all, in real life you're constantly running into new people. Who knows why?
Historically, the phrase American Dream was always in the singular. It was one thing. The title American Dreams was more original in 1986 than it may sound now. I was saying that every one of us has a different American dream. All the people in the book were dreaming, each in his own way. I was dreaming them, and they were dreaming themselves, that's how I thought of it.
PS: Raymond Chandler was no surrealist, not at all experimental, but he tapped into the same spirit when he offered his immortal advice: if you don't know what to write next, have a guy come through the door with a gun.
------------------------------------
See "10: MAX your creativity" on Improve-Education.org for discussion of the experimental method.
Amazon has copies for sale at many levels. The Permanent Press, as the name suggests, keeps its books in print: http://thepermanentpress.com/index.php/back-list/american-dreams.html. For signed copies visit Lit4u.com.
------------------------------------
Product details
|
Tags : American Dreams: A Novel - Kindle edition by Bruce Price. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading American Dreams: A Novel.,ebook,Bruce Price,American Dreams: A Novel,The Permanent Press
People also read other books :
- Special Forces Training Bible Studies for Men edition by Michael J De Grave Religion Spirituality eBooks
- Glimpses Unintended Genie Hoyne 9780692810835 Books
- The Hounds of God A Tale of 13th Century England The Aldinoch Chronicles Book 2 edition by Deborah Bogen Literature Fiction eBooks
- Belle Beau Historical regency romance edition by Gayle Buck Literature Fiction eBooks
- Slumped PT 1 edition by Jason Brent Literature Fiction eBooks
American Dreams A Novel edition by Bruce Price Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
I was amazed by this book, with its rich mix of characters that intersect in unexpected ways. The writing was mesmerizing. Yet there was something about the book I couldn't quite put my finger on... I later learned that chance was at the heart of the book--not just in the way characters appear and disappear, but in the way the entire book was generated. The author literally rolled the dice. For each chapter, he picked a single word at random from a dictionary, then used that word in the first sentence. This simple rule reminded me of John Cage's music with its reliance on chance and spontaneous invention. The difference between Price and Cage is that Price's book is completely accessible. Perhaps that's the reason "American Dreams" is still underground and not yet recognized as the important work of literature it is.
I wrote an article about the philosopher Jacques Derrida in which I argued that his writing style was a pastiche of the great innovative authors of the day--the free association of Joyce, the internal dialogues of Faulkner, and --yes--the generative use of chance in Bruce Price's novel.
Simply put, "American Dreams" is THE masterpiece among the many experimental works of literature in the 20th Century.
(I review only books about education, until today. This is a special case, as you'll see.)
American Dreams, surely one of the best experimental novels in American literature, was published 29 years ago by legendary indie publisher Martin Shepard/The Permanent Press.
I recently came across a long-forgotten compilation of rave reviews. "Wow," thought I (the author), "this is one really amazing book. I had forgotten just how good it is. More people should know about it."
Here are eleven rave reviews, followed by an expose of how this unique book came about
"American Dreams recalls other roller-coaster pop preachments on `the American experience' by Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, and Hunter S. Thompson. Emerson wrote `never read a book less than a year old' and it's too early to make comparisons between Price and these writers; but he is working their territory and knows it well." --Manhattan
"Price...obviously a talented writer... has written a funny, stylistically innovative novel that includes everything a popular novel should have romance, sex, adultery, crime, religion, sickness, death, and even Texas." --Publishers Weekly
"It's a dazzler, for both language and organization. By comparison, Vonnegut is dull, his prose flat. Although Price doesn't do the San Francisco/absurd genre that Italo Calvino does, American Dreams reminded me of Cosmicomics and T Zero in the ways in which each chapter works out a particular notion, metaphor, event." --Professor Thomas Friedman, Syracuse University
"An enjoyable cornucopia of characters including Texas millionaire Carlyle (`the shirt he was wearing would have given the entire staff at Women's Wear Daily apoplexy'), who felt that `God must like mediocre people. He made so many of them.' In addition there is Mrs. Carlyle (No 2 and 4), who believed "life had been much more fun when she hadn't known the first thing about it', and Higgins, who wondered `why the news was always happening somewhere else, never where he was.'" -- Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
"The author reveals a seriousness of intent by his strategy and tactics. His people are exaggerations of the stereotypes we meet in the tabloids and the soaps, public people whose fortunes lie in their abilities to stir the undeveloped and therefore unfulfilled imagination of what one character calls `the C average mentality that manages the country'... the creatures of stage, screen and legislatures who keep alive that aspect of the American Dream which underlies our right to do whatever suits us, regardless of its effects on others." --Bestsellers
"Here is a book so stuffed with vivid characters that it requires, by way of prologue, a listing of dramatic personae (titled `Chapter Zero'). If you don't get around to reading this one, let me leave you with one of Price's more amusing - and disturbing - thoughts "Nothing dwindles so fast as love. Ditto happiness, fame, skill, money, and whatever time you've got left. Basically, nothing's all that secure. Here today, gone by late afternoon. Sometimes you get one hour service.'" --Philadelphia Inquirer
"Price's dark vision of America is shot through with lightning flashes of penetrating humor and unsettling insight. In American Dreams he's managed to make even dispair lyrical. It's filled with the kind of passages you want to copy and show to friends." --Marco Vassi
"American Dreams has been compared to the work of Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelm, writers for whom plot and character are less important than the play of language. In Price's case the book is also a vehicle for his awesome grasp of the big issues facing modern life. He doesn't hesitate to interrupt a steamy bedroom scene or an achingly comic moment with intense philosophical discussions on the nature and fate of mankind... A roller coaster ride through the United States as complex and as puzzling as it is breathtaking. This is a one-of-a-kind novel that has all the makings of a classic." --Mary Lou Cohalan, in the Suffolk County News
"The humorous turn of phrase is Bruce Price's most powerful weapon in American Dreams. His innovative turns of phrase prove as disturbing as they are entertaining... there is a love of language evident on every page. Sentences are meant to be read over and over as you roll the words around and smile at the visual images that arise from the typeset page." --The Bloomsbury Review
"A complex collection of characters engage in a complex pattern of wheeling, dealing, fighting, killing, making love and occasionally dying in this episodic view of life today. As each goes about his or her daily life their actions affect other characters and these characters in turn, influence others, until their lives are careening off each other like billiard balls handled by an exceptionally deft player." --Virginia Beach Sun
"American Dreams by Bruce Price, `In which the author speaks of everyday life in the greatest country on earth....a simple little story concerning a statue, three divorces, a heart attack, several infidelities, a burglary, some marriages, a double suicide, a $2 million scam, a hit play and a man looking for God, as aren't we all...'
"So Bruce Price sums up his own novel on his title page. He has indeed listed all the ingredients of his plot, but the proof of the pudding is not in the recipe but in the eating. That is to say, it is not the events of the book but their cunning interconnectedness that characterizes the plot of this energetic little book." --American Book Review
-------------------------------
These reviews trickle in over many months. By that time the book has sold a few thousand copies and faded into the past. No-name author, small press, there is no budget to tell people, hey, this is really something special.
Also, I was a little defensive for two reasons. The book was written in an experimental way--should this be bragged about or kept secret? This technique, as the reviews make clear, did liberate an amazing amount of fresh, interesting language. That's good. The experimental method also released a parade of fresh, rambunctious characters. That was problematical.
The immediate problem was that when people read chapter 1 and become interested in the characters, they don't see those characters in the next few chapters. Chapter 2, 3 and 4 introduce new characters. You know their names from Chapter Zero and the chapters are short. But the book requires a bit of patience until the characters start to cycle around and interact with each other.
Note that all these reviewers enjoyed this book without knowing what I'm now about to tell you. They went with it. Any reader who does that will probably have an excellent literary experience with this unusual and lively book.
I had experimented with writing poems by drawing random words from the dictionary. This is a surrealist technique. The idea is to tap into your unconscious; you tap into wherever dreams come from (which is part of the meaning of the title).
I thought, well, maybe I could write longer passages, maybe a short story or even a novel. I assumed this was a completely unreasonable ambition. I assumed that each word I drew would be the catalyst for only a paragraph or page at most. But I plunged in, and here's what happened. I would draw a word and then use that word in the most interesting sentence I could think of, and then create the next most interesting (and connected) sentence I could think of, and so on until the energy ran out. Much to my surprise, I wrote an entire chapter the first time I tried this technique. It was as if I had discovered a magic lamp. And that's the way it continued a single word created each chapter.
The first word I drew was "disclosure" and the sentence I came up with was "He decided to make a full disclosure." So, out of nowhere, I have a man, he has a secret, and he's decided to reveal it. What will happen next? "Disclosure" has a financial feel about it, so I veered away toward romance. And the next two sentences are "The trip up to the lake. The woman named Bonnie."
Typically, I believe people say that Naked Lunch by William Burroughs is the most outstanding experimental novel in American literature. Burroughs wrote the novel in a standard way and then cut it up and reassembled it, sort of a collage technique.
American Dreams was a more radical experiment, because the whole idea was to let the stories erupt and evolve on their own. I didn't want to second-guess them. I didn't want to say, oh, maybe this should happen...That's the way you normally work. But in this book I let things go their own way. Indeed, I thought of editing as cheating.
As I created more characters, I made a chart and assigned them numbers and then I rolled dice to decide which character would run into which other character. After all, in real life you're constantly running into new people. Who knows why?
Historically, the phrase American Dream was always in the singular. It was one thing. The title American Dreams was more original in 1986 than it may sound now. I was saying that every one of us has a different American dream. All the people in the book were dreaming, each in his own way. I was dreaming them, and they were dreaming themselves, that's how I thought of it.
PS Raymond Chandler was no surrealist, not at all experimental, but he tapped into the same spirit when he offered his immortal advice if you don't know what to write next, have a guy come through the door with a gun.
------------------------------------
See "10 MAX your creativity" on Improve-Education.org for discussion of the experimental method.
has copies for sale at many levels. The Permanent Press, as the name suggests, keeps its books in print http//thepermanentpress.com/index.php/back-list/american-dreams.html. For signed copies visit Lit4u.com.
------------------------------------
0 Response to "⇒ Descargar Gratis American Dreams A Novel edition by Bruce Price Literature Fiction eBooks"
Post a Comment