[PDF] The Last Dream 0 Rama eBook

Author : Bruce McCall
Publisher : Crown
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 50,92 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Humor
ISBN :

GET BOOK

"When the postwar economic boom fostered such prosperity that easy credit allowed even hourly workers to plunge themselves hopelessly into debt, a brand-new car became an attainable dream for millions in the 1950s. And soon came dream cars to further stimulate their automotive saliva glands. By mid-decade, every American carmaker was parading its glittering glimpses of four-wheeled futurism before a dazzled public -- flights of styling fancy and functional wonderment blaring 'Headed for your driveway soon!' while mumbling, sotto voce, 'Don't hold us to it.' " So begins Bruce McCall's tongue-in-cheek history of Detroit's dream car era. From the author of the cult classic Zany Afternoons comes perhaps the sharpest, funniest, most original overview of Fifties culture -- and Fifties cars -- yet published. The Last Dream-o-Rama is a surrealistic satire, not just of the dream car phenomenon but of the conformist and materialistic value system that produced it. From the Quizfire 5000 Jackpot to the Nixoneer Squelchchoramic to the Bongo Beatnik Ferlinghetti TurboHipster, McCall's lavish illustrations and the antic text memorably restore the world of America in the Fifties in all its glitzy grandeur.

Author : David Remnick
Publisher : Modern Library
Page : 546 pages
File Size : 35,68 MB
Release : 2010-03-09
Category : Humor
ISBN : 0812979974

GET BOOK

The New Yorker is, of course, a bastion of superb essays, influential investigative journalism, and insightful arts criticism. But for eighty years it’s also been a hoot. Now an uproarious sampling of its funny writings can be found in this collection, by turns satirical and witty, misanthropic and menacing. From the 1920s onward—but with a special focus on the latest generation—here are the humorists who have set the pace and stirred the pot, pulled the leg and pinched the behind of America. The comic lineup includes Christopher Buckley, Ian Frazier, Veronica Geng, Garrison Keillor, Steve Martin, Susan Orlean, Simon Rich, David Sedaris, Calvin Trillin, and many others. If laughter is the best medicine, Disquiet, Please! is truly a wonder drug.

Author : Bill Scheft
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 12,41 MB
Release : 2009-10-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0061882135

GET BOOK

Morton Martin Spell -- a once-brilliant, now-infirm seventy-five-year-old writer -- is sliding into delirium. He thinks Mount Sinai Hospital is an exclusive golf course and his catheter is a gym bag. His only link to reality is his thirty-five-year-old nephew, who makes his living as a hired gun for thirteen softball teams and still goes by the name College Boy. But College Boy's body has begun to betray him -- almost as much as his lack of ambition. (His only legitimate paycheck comes from a gig as a laugher on a morning radio show.) Not only that, the Dirt King, a small-time gangster who controls all the replacement soil in Central Park, is after College Boy. As their lives collide, College Boy takes refuge in the arms of Sheila -- his uncle's cleaning woman and a part-time call girl. And then it gets weird.

Author : Derek S. Dodson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 35,1 MB
Release : 2009-06-25
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0567153207

GET BOOK

Dodson reads the dreams in the Gospel of Matthew (1:18b-25; 2:12, 13-15, 19-21, 22; 27:19) as the authorial audience. This approach requires an understanding of the social and literary character of dreams in the Greco-Roman world. Dodson describes the social function of dreams, noting that dreams constituted one form of divination in the ancient world, and looks at the theories and classification of dreams that developed in the ancient world. He then moves on to demonstrate the literary dimensions of dreams in Greco-Roman literature. This exploration of the literary representation of dreams is nuanced by considering the literary form of dreams, dreams in the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, the inventiveness of literary dreams, and the literary function of dreams. The dreams in the Gospel of Matthew are then analyzed in this social and literary context. It is demonstrated that Matthew's use of dreams as a literary convention corresponds to the script of dreams in other Greco-Roman narratives. This correspondence includes the form of the Matthean dreams, dreams as a motif of the birth topos (1:18b-25), the association of dreams and prophecy (1:22-23; 2:15, 23), the use of the double-dream report (2:12 and 2:13-15), and dreams as an ominous sign in relation to an individual's death (27:19). An appendix considers the Matthean transfiguration as a dream-vision report.

Author : Bruce McCall
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 11,56 MB
Release : 2013-11-05
Category : Humor
ISBN : 0698160665

GET BOOK

The billionaire Russian “oiligarch” whose replica of Czar Alexander II’s yacht plies a vast man-made Crimean lake, brimming not with water but billions of gallons of petroleum from his own pipeline… The packaged-suttee mogul Sir Sith Ram Pramba, who sliced the top off Mount Everest and installed it on his terrace atop a Park Avenue apartment building… The heir to a California railroad spike fortune who uses a private cross-country tunnel, assembled from giant redwoods laid end to end, for 120-mph runs in cars from his exotic équipe between San Francisco and New York… The vast Montana lodge where Gulfstreams land in the living room and an ex-CIA drone ferries fresh casks of Côtes du Rhône along the three-mile route between the wine cellar and the dining hall… The unsinkable forty-room polystyrene iceberg cum floating vacation retreat where Claude Ste. Nervous, the Quebec Styrofoam king, cruises the Arctic Ocean in high summer and, riding on his tamed polar bear, hunts for baby seals… These and dozens more of that new breed of swashbuckling post-millennial Midases dedicated to self-indulgent fun—whatever the cost in money, ecological mayhem, environmental devastation, and other such nuisances—are celebrated in This Land Was Made for You and Me (but Mostly Me), this lavishly illustrated chronicle that nobody expected or even wanted, but that Bruce McCall and David Letterman went ahead and created anyway.

Author : Bruce McCall
Publisher : Farrar, Straus & Giroux (BYR)
Page : 42 pages
File Size : 31,58 MB
Release : 2008-09-30
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN :

GET BOOK

Marveltown's adults are outstanding inventors, but when their best engineers create giant but stupid robots that threaten the town, it is the children's outrageous creations that save the day.

Author : Patrick Wright
Publisher : Watkins Media Limited
Page : 783 pages
File Size : 41,2 MB
Release : 2020-12-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1912248751

GET BOOK

The story of Uwe Johnson, one of Germany's greatest and most-influential post-war writers, and how he came to live and work in Sheerness, Kent in the 1970s. Towards the end of 1974, a stranger arrived in the small town of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He could often be found sitting at the bar in the Napier Tavern, drinking lager and smoking Gauloises while flicking through the pages of the Kent Evening Post. "Charles" was the name he offered to his new acquaintances. But this unexpected immigrant was actually Uwe Johnson, originally from the Baltic province of Mecklenburg in the GDR, and already famous as the leading author of a divided Germany. What caused him to abandon West Berlin and spend the last nine years of his life in Sheerness, where he eventually completed his great New York novel Anniversaries in a house overlooking the outer reaches of the Thames Estuary? And what did he mean by detecting a "moral utopia" in a town that others, including his concerned friends, saw only as a busted slum on an island abandoned to "deindustrialisation" and a stranded Liberty ship full of unexploded bombs? Patrick Wright, who himself abandoned north Kent for Canada a few months before Johnson arrived, returns to the "island that is all the world" to uncover the story of the East German author's English decade, and to understand why his closely observed Kentish writings continue to speak with such clairvoyance in the age of Brexit. Guided in his encounters and researches by clues left by Johnson in his own "island stories", the book is set in the 1970s, when North Sea oil and joining the European Economic Community seemed the last hope for bankrupt Britain. It opens out to provide an alternative version of modern British history: a history for the present, told through the rich and haunted landscapes of an often spurned downriver mudbank, with a brilliant German answer to Robinson Crusoe as its primary witness.

Author : A. R. Morlan
Publisher : Wildside Press LLC
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 17,90 MB
Release : 2013-07-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1434446190

GET BOOK

The author says: "The stories in this collection are an outgrowth of my lamentable childhood, as well as a reflection of those things in life which I found fascinating--in that they could mentally take me away from the horror of my daily life, and at least on the level of imagination offer me something worth waking up each morning for. Thus, the universes in this collection center around outsiders, artists, and freaks (be they natural-born or self-made); some of the stories are interconnected, but also designed to stand alone. I’ve included afterwords for each to shine additional light on both the works and their cultural personal inspirations. But more than a collection, to me this volume is a glimpse into my creative soul--and as such, it may not be perfect, it might not even be logical, but it is what I am, love it or hate it." Six cutting-edge stories of a bizarre, near-future America, a mix of strange cultures and curious characters, featuring tattoo artists, origami masters, Irezumi, the De Novo Shinkansen, Qatmandude...and the Blue Moon Roach Hotel!"