{"product_id":"9781681370873","title":"Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays","description":"\u003cb\u003eEssays on literature, pop culture, and more from the cult novelist and critic Tom McCarthy\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eFifteen  brilliant essays written over as many years provide a map of the  sensibility and critical intelligence of Tom McCarthy, one of the most  original and challenging novelists at work today. \u003ci\u003eTypewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish\u003c\/i\u003e explores a wide range of subjects, from the weather considered as a  form of media, to the paintings of Gerhard Richter and the movies of  David Lynch, to Patty Hearst as revolutionary sex goddess, to the  still-radical implications of established masterpieces such as \u003ci\u003eUlysses\u003c\/i\u003e (how do you write after it?),\u003ci\u003e Tristram Shandy\u003c\/i\u003e, and the unsung junky genius Alexander Trocchi’s darkly beautiful \u003ci\u003eCain’s Book\u003c\/i\u003e.  The longer “Recessional” examines the place of time in writing—how  writing makes a new time of its own, a time apart from institutional  time—while the startling “Nothing Will Have Taken Place” moves from  Mallarmé and Don DeLillo to the ball mastery of Zidane to look at how  art, whether that of a poet, novelist, or athlete, destroys given codes  of meaning and behavior, returning them to play. Certain points of  reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed  Ruscha’s \u003ci\u003eRoyal Road Test\u003c\/i\u003e, a photographic documentation of the  roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a  traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans  and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and  the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining  conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to  engage in the active reinvention of the world?","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47182773747952,"sku":"9781681370873","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781681370873_p0.jpg?v=1763692183","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781681370873","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}