Some trick : thirteen stories /
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of chance and games of s...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
New Directions Publishing Corporation,
[2018]
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| Subjects: | |
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| Summary: | For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. "Look," a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove "more complicated than they had first appeared" and "at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate." In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt's signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly "taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination." |
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| Item Description: | This WorldCat-derived record is shareable under Open Data Commons ODC-BY, with attribution to OCLC "A New Directions book." "A new directions book" -- title page |
| Physical Description: | viii, 197 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm |
| ISBN: | 0811227820 9780811227827 |
| Place of Publication: | United States -- New York (State) -- New York |