With his trademark intelligence and humor, Curtis White argues that the American left needs a new and compelling spiritual basis for its politics, and that its seeds can be discovered in Thoreau's spiritual politics of refusal and a return to human "fundamentals" especially work, home, and food. Along the way, White offers a shrewd reading of the cult classic Office Space, a scathing critique of Bill Maher's political comedy, and other acerbic cultural commentary. The book includes provocative interviews with James Howard Kunstler, John de Graaf, and Michael Ableman.
With his trademark intelligence and humor, Curtis White argues that the American left needs a new and compelling spiritual basis for its politics, and...
"Memories of My Father Watching TV" has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat, " "Highway Patrol, " "Bonanza, " and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, "Memories" is finally a sad lament of father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of...
"Memories of My Father Watching TV" has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows h...
Requiem is a darkly comic novel about what it means to be human in a culture obsessed with sex and death. With a structure loosely based on the Mass for the Dead, this ambitious novel includes letters-to-the-editor, an e-mail correspondence with a porn queen, scenes from the lives of classical musicians, and retellings of biblical stories. In the process, White charts the rise and fall of the Human from the Bible (pre-human), to the Enlightenment (the invention of the human), to the digital age (post-human). In an America where everyone keeps a secret website, and where a modern Prophet...
Requiem is a darkly comic novel about what it means to be human in a culture obsessed with sex and death. With a structure loosely based on the Mas...
A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings--until he is killed during a senseless liquor-store hold-up. Suddenly smote by a deity as indifferent as history, Ellerbee is off on a whirlwind tour of a distressingly familiar theme-park Heaven and inner-city Hell--to learn, along with his late coworkers and a marvelously vivid cast of characters, that much of what they've always heard about God's love, God's wrath, and the afterlife is, unfortunately, quite true.
A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings--unti...
What if Western revolution and Eastern reincarnation were discovered to be the same thing? What if the Hindu classic "The Mahabharata" and Hugo's "Les Miserables" were in fact the same book? And what would it feel like if one person were able to experience this epic east/west continuance in one life? This delightfully eccentric novel orbits about the character of one "Siva," a woman who is perhaps a Hindi divinity, probably merely a Midwestern housewife, but also very possibly a porn-queen. Her web of tales takes her bewildered husband and the reader on a mythic and philosophic storytelling...
What if Western revolution and Eastern reincarnation were discovered to be the same thing? What if the Hindu classic "The Mahabharata" and Hugo's "Les...
Trained relentlessly to work and consume, we make daily lifestyle decisions that promote corporate profits more than our own well-being. We also find ourselves working more, living in fragmented communities, and neglecting our most basic spiritual and political values. As Curtis White puts it, In order to live, you will be asked to do what is no good, what is absurd, trivial, demeaning, and soul killing. Although we belong to the world s most affluent society, somehow we never have the chance to ask: How shall we live?With his trademark humor and acerbic wit, White raises this impertinent...
Trained relentlessly to work and consume, we make daily lifestyle decisions that promote corporate profits more than our own well-being. We also find ...
Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the crisis in the first place. With his trademark wit, White argues that the solution might very well come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination.
Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capita...
