Book of Men: Eighty of the World's Best Writers on How to Be a Man - Softcover

Mccann, Colum

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250047765 ISBN 13: 9781250047762

Verlag: Macmillan USA, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Eighty pieces of short fiction and nonfiction on manhood by some of the world's best writers, presented by Colum McCann, Esquire, and Narrative 4.

To help launch the literary nonprofit Narrative 4, Esquire asked eighty of the world's greatest writers to chip in with a story, all with the title, "How to Be a Man."

The result is The Book of Men, an unflinching investigation into the essence of masculinity.

The Book of Men probes, with the poignant honesty and imagination that only these writers could deliver, the slippery condition of manhood. You will find men striving and searching, learning and failing to learn, triumphing and aspiring; men who are lost and men navigating their way toward redemption. These stories don't just explore what it is to be a man or how to achieve manliness, but ultimately what it is to be a human-with all of its uncertainty, complexity, clumsiness, and beauty.

With contributions from literary luminaries as diverse as the subjects they capture, and curated by the editors of Esquire, National Book Award winner Colum McCann, and Narrative 4, a global nonprofit devoted to using storytelling as a means to empathy, The Book of Men might not teach you how to negotiate a deal or mix a Manhattan, but it does scratch at that most eternal of questions: What is a man?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Colum McCann, a contributing editor at Esquire and cofounder of Narrative 4, is the National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin. He is also the author of Dancer, Everything in This Country Must, This Side of Brightness, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, and Songdogs. His new novel is TransAtlantic.

Esquire is a general interest men's magazine published by Hearst. Since its founding in 1933, it has been a showcase for the world's premiere fiction, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Stephen King.

Narrative 4 is a group of authors and activists who believe that something as simple as a story can change the world. It connects people and communities everywhere through the sharing of stories and works to create a global narrative for all of us.

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The Book of Men

Eighty Writers On How To Be A Man

By Colum McCann

Picador

Copyright © 2013 Narrative 4
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-04776-2

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Introduction, 
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 
Rabih Alameddine, 
Kurt Andersen, 
Jodi Angel, 
Taylor Antrim, 
M. C. Armstrong, 
Dan Barry, 
Gioconda Belli, 
John Berger, 
Amy Bloom, 
Darrell Bourque, 
John Boyne, 
James Lee Burke, 
Gabriel Byrne, 
Aifric Campbell, 
Ron Carlson, 
Bill Cheng, 
Scott Cheshire, 
Ed Conlon, 
Sloane Crosley, 
Michael Cunningham, 
Roddy Doyle, 
Jennifer DuBois, 
Geoff Dyer, 
Ben Fountain, 
Assaf Gavron, 
David Gilbert, 
Alex Gilvarry, 
Philip Gourevitch, 
Andrew Sean Greer, 
Mohsin Hamid, 
Adam Haslett, 
Alan Heathcock, 
Aleksandar Hemon, 
Joe Henry, 
Khaled Hosseini, 
Bronwen Hruska, 
Marlon James, 
Bret Anthony Johnston, 
Randall Kenan, 
Etgar Keret, 
William Kittredge, 
Nick Laird, 
Elinor Lipman, 
Vanessa Manko, 
Ayana Mathis, 
Colum McCann, 
Ian McEwan, 
Patrick McGrath, 
Jon McGregor, 
Antonio Monda, 
Robert Mooney, 
Liz Moore, 
Dina Nayeri, 
Téa Obreht, 
Edna O'Brien, 
Joseph O'Connor, 
Mary O'Malley, 
Michael Parker, 
Benjamin Percy, 
Jason Porter, 
Ron Rash, 
Salman Rushdie, 
John Burnham Schwartz, 
Mona Simpson, 
Jessica Soffer, 
Rob Spillman, 
Matt Sumell, 
Manil Suri, 
Daniel Torday, 
Monique Truong, 
Luis Alberto Urrea, 
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, 
Daniel Wallace, 
Jess Walter, 
Josh Weil, 
Terry Tempest Williams, 
John Wray, 
Tiphanie Yanique, 
Mario Alberto Zambrano, 
About the Editors, 
About Esquire, 
About Narrative 4, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Our Sundays always tasted like peppers that flared hot in the rice and soups and stews. We sat in the kitchen, knees fresh from pews, and watched our houseboy pounding them in pairs. He held the phallic pestle — thump thump thump — while we coughed and spluttered with watery eyes. Nobody tastes them raw, it wasn't wise. But we did, and then we'd shout and jump to the fridge for ice.

My mom sang an Igbo song about strong women. It wasn't too trite, but it told of places she didn't know, streams, goddesses, women who couldn't read. Women like that would squeeze peppers, I heard, and force them between their daughters' legs —"so they'll stop following boys." But Eros was good for sons. No peppers to curb sons' paths to manhood.

Nigerian author CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, who received a 2008 MacArthur Fellowship, is the author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and most recently, Americanah.

CHAPTER 2

Rabih Alameddine

The beating of your heart kept me awake last night. For months after you died I kept seeing you everywhere, hearing you, your voice, sonorous, throaty, reverberating in my ear. I wasn't crazy, I knew you were dead, I buried you after all, I mean, I burned you, cremation was what they called it. But I kept seeing you, doing dishes in the kitchen with your back to me, I'd call your name as you stacked each plate in our plastic dish rack but you didn't look back and then you were gone in a flash and I was left with nothing, not even an afterimage. I didn't mistake you for anybody, I never saw you in a crowd, thinking someone else was you, no, it was never like that. I would never mistake you. I saw you in the hallway, in our hallway, under the Turkish lamp we brought back from Istanbul when we were there so long ago, must have been 1987, before the virus began to scour us. The disease killed so much within us. While I was alive I loved you while you were alive and I love you now but I forgot for a while. Forgive me, I couldn't go on obsessing about you all the time so you disappeared or hid deep in my lakes, as if I bleached my memory, but you came back, you know, like a fungal infection, remember thrush, the furry white stains that attacked your tongue and we couldn't get rid of them and you hated it and I hated it and you wanted it over. You'd been gone for decades, why now, why infect my dreams now? What flood was this? I was buying groceries yesterday morning where a young Third Worlder mopped the floor, back and forth, back and forth, around a yellow sign that announced PISO MOJADO, the mephitic aroma of disinfectant assaulted my senses, and you jumped the levee of my memory, I thought of you right then. Proust might have had his madeleine, but bleach was all ours, my darling, all ours. The tomatoes didn't look too good and I just went home. I'd been a coward, I was scared, do notice I said scared and not frightened, you taught me the difference, you said, Children get scared, men might feel afraid, might even feel terror, but men don't get scared. I'd been so lonely since you died and left me, you left me roofless in a downpour. You gripped the bedrail when you left and I had to pry your fingers one by one, it took fifty-seven minutes because my hands were shaking so much, did you know that? You sincerely believed that the distance between you and me would one day disappear. You told me I was not my father and you were not him either, but how could we not be, how could we not be? You held out your arms and said, Join me, but I couldn't, and you said, Let me love you, and I couldn't because you wanted so to be so close, and you held out the fireman's net and said, Jump, and I couldn't, I felt the fall was much too great, I chose to go back into the fire because that was what men did. I could hardly bear the beauty of you. You said, I liked it when you doze on my chest, but I said, The hair on your chest irritated my cheeks and made it difficult to sleep. You were gone for so long and I moved along and everyone told me I was alive, but last night, in my bed, each time my ear touched the single pillow I heard the beating of your heart once more. Once more, please. Once more. Once more. Once more. My heart is restless until it rests in thee.

Lebanese writer and painter RABIH ALAMEDDINE is the author of Koolaids; I, the Divine; and most recently, An Unnecessary Woman.

CHAPTER 3

Kurt Andersen

More than any other church in Lincoln, St. Mary's was a building people tended to treat as a public space, a general assembly spot for events that weren't christenings, weddings or funerals. That's because it was big and old and downtown, right across K Street from the Nebraska state capitol; because it didn't serve liquor, so you could bring the kids; and because it was Catholic, which in the middle of the twentieth century made it a kind of Switzerland for Protestants — made Lutherans and Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists more comfortable than they might've been at a Protestant church of a denomination not their own. Thus Lincolnites of all kinds would gather in St. Mary's basement to play bingo, listen to polka bands, watch ventriloquists, whatever.

The day after Thanksgiving in 1952, St. Mary's put on a macaroni buffet dinner and variety show, $1.50 a ticket. It sold out. The main attraction was an actual celebrity, a young guy who'd hosted his own afternoon TV show up in Omaha for a couple of years since graduating from the University of Nebraska.

Kids made up half the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Macmillan USA
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250047765
• ISBN 13: 9781250047762
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 284
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Picador; https://www.panmacmillan.com/picador; ; Units 1 & 2 Chater Court; Market Deeping; Lincs; PE6 8AH; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland