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Like Blood in Water
Yuriy Tarnawsky
€ 24.37
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Description for Like Blood in Water
Paperback. Includes stories about: a candidate for major surgery struggles unsuccessfully to avoid it; two strangers meet, and eventually marry, after participating in scream therapy; a pianist stops playing because he believes his hand is not there when he sits at the keyboard; among others. Num Pages: 192 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 216 x 140 x 12. Weight in Grams: 268.
In these five surrealist collages, waking life continually gives way before the onslaught of dreams. Yuriy Tarnawsky has condensed the vastness of scope typical of novels into shorter fragments - mininovels - that require the reader's active participation. The tone is a balance of dead-pan comedy and solemn gothic, sometimes a near-parody of wide-eyed candor, sometimes recounting utterly mad or barely conceivable states of affairs. A candidate for major surgery struggles unsuccessfully to avoid it. Two strangers meet, and eventually marry, after participating in scream therapy. A pianist stops playing because he believes his hand is not there when he sits at the keyboard. A character sees the giant blue and white flowers he has craved his whole life only at the instance of his electrocution. Tyler Pavarotti, a tailor, voluntarily takes a role in a production in which he will be killed. Tarnawsky's language is elegant and careful, and his studied concentration of rhythm allows his work to transcend prose, nestling somewhere within the realm of musical composition. Both tragic and beautiful, in these stories life dissolves in time like blood in water.
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2007
Publisher
The University of Alabama Press United States
Number of pages
192
Condition
New
Number of Pages
192
Place of Publication
Normal, United States
ISBN
9781573661355
SKU
V9781573661355
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Yuriy Tarnawsky
Yuriy Tarnawsky is the author of 19 collections of poetry, seven plays, nine books of fiction, a biography, and numerous articles and translations. Born in Ukraine but raised in the West, he has worked as a computer scientist and professor of Ukrainian literature and culture at Columbia University. He resides in White Plains, New York.
Reviews for Like Blood in Water
When I get rich I'll get a pied-a-terre on Yuriy Tarnawsky's planet. It's very wild on the surface and cool and calm in the interior. The palm fronds don't decay. - Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poems ""Tarnawsky's are the second opinions we seek, almost recognize, then do, for they are made of the sounds, power sources, bizarre jobs, people coming our way, fitted together both by us and a culture by turns demanding and uncaring if we sleepwalkers notice or not: alarming, intelligent, caught again and again in the grasp of the author's surprise and yearning."" - Joseph McElroy ""For his great collection, Meningitis, Yuriy Tarnawsky engineered a grammar that drove the compulsions and angst of American middle class deep into the nerves of the reader. These are conditions John Updike is able only to describe and decorate with pretty phrases. In his Three Blondes and Death Tarnawsky peels back the skin of our obsessions to make you feel the pulse of American life that Philip Roth can only discuss through his characters. Tarnawsky is the real artist. Like Blood in Water carries his experiment deeper into the American night, with work that is bright and moving and original. Everyone needs to taste these works of one of our most daring and powerful writers."" - Steve Katz