Occasional desire : essays / David Lazar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lazar, David, 1957-

Standardized Title:

Essays. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American essays--21st century.

American essays.

Essay.

Physical Description:

218 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2013]

Summary:

In his new collection of essays, Occasional Desire, David Lazar meditates on random violence and vanished phone booths, on the excessive relationship to jewelry that links Kobe Bryant and Elizabeth Taylor, on Hitchcock, Francis Bacon, and M. F. K. Fisher. He explores, in his concentrically self-aware, amused, and ironic voice, what it means to be occasionally aware that we are surviving by our wits, and that our desires, ulterior or obvious, are what keep us alive. Lazar also turns his attention on the essay itself, affording us a three-dimensional look at the craft and the art of reading and writing a literary form that maps the world as it charts the peregrinations of the mind.

Contents:

Unfamiliar Essays

Calling for His Past 3

Manhattan Cab 11

Across the River 12

The City Always Speaks: London, New York, San Francisco 21

The Coat 30

Ostensible Occasions

Occasional Desire: On the Essay and the Memoir 39

Queering the Essay 61

Reading "New Year's Eve" 68

Playing Ourselves: Pseudodocumentary and Persona 82

The Useable Past of M. F. K. Fisher: An Essay on Projects 92

On Mentors 116

The Art of Survival

On Dating 131

Death, Death, Death, Death, Death 144

On Gifts 165

Self-Portrait: Francis Bacon's Deformity 194

On the Art of Survival: North by Northwest 203.

ISBN:

9780803246386

0803246382

OCLC:

830837459