?This is one of those times, a time choked in the weeds of academic and civilian formalism. To put it mildly, most of what we see in print in North America is unbearably trivial and singularly devoid of courage.??Andrei Codrescu, "The Disappearance of the Outside." Known to the general public as a radio commentator on National Public Radio, Romanian-born essayist and poet Andrei Codrescu has developed a variety of voices throughout his career: Transylvanian humorist on NPR, surrealist poet in his many volumes of poetry, academic essayist in his philosophical writings and historical novelist....

Gregory Corso is the most intensely spiritual of the Beat generation poets and still by far the least explored. The virtue of Kirby Olson s "Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist "is that it is the first book to place all of Corso s work in a philosophical perspective, concentrating on Corso as a poet torn between a static Catholic Thomist viewpoint and that of a progressive surrealist.While Corso is a subject of great controversyhis work often being seen as nihilistic and wildly comicOlson argues that Corso s poetry, in fact, maintains an insistent theme of doubt and faith with regard to his early...

Is comedy postmodern?Kirby Olson posits that no one has been more marginalized than the comic writer, whose irreverent truths have always made others uncomfortable. In a literary age that purports to champion diversity, comic writers remain an underclass huddling at the fringes of the canon. Olson challenges the status quo by inviting the comic writer into the center of literary debate.In the growing discipline of humor studies, Olson is the first to create a substantial link between the fields of comedy and postmodernism, discovering in comic writers a philosophy of oddness and paradox that...