Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel [Kindle Edition] Author: David Rakoff | Language: English | ISBN:
B00B3GMHWO | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Download Download Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century
Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form.
LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal.
The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box—an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work.
Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff "magnificent," a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.
From the Hardcover edition. Direct download links available for Download Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel
- File Size: 8828 KB
- Print Length: 128 pages
- Publisher: Doubleday (July 16, 2013)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00B3GMHWO
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,184 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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The first thing that will strike most readers about Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, aside from its unusual title, is that it is written in rhymed couplets, most lines being ten, eleven, or twelve, syllables, some jogtrotting regularly, others hop-skipping, many of the couplets ending in striking and witty rhymes, almost Byronic in their inventiveness. On the other hand, as is so much the fate of poets writing in English, most of the rhymes just happen, self-effacing, and we move along almost without noticing them. All this (and it is a lot) adds to the pleasure of reading the linked narratives that make up, in the form of brief chapters, this novella (really it is not sufficiently developed, even with its sweep across a couple of centuries, to be called a novel).
David Rakoff's "novel in verse" is not as formally uncommon as many readers might think. Long narratives--both fictional (novels?) and nonfiction (historical, autobiographical, biographical)--have been a small but steady presence in the literary world. (David Mason, Ludlow; Ruth Padel, Darwin: A Life in Verse; Daryl Hine, In and Out; Vikram Seth, Golden Gate, are just a few book-length works in a variety of genres, but all written in verse.) It is difficult, in fact, to define or even identify a "novel in verse" that could not just as easily be called a "long narrative poem" (one thinks of William Morris's saga of Jason and the Argonauts, for example), though comparison with the Brownings' big poems--Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh or Robert's The Ring and the Book, might open some parameters. Even Herman Melville's Clarel might offer some points of reference, but the better point of comparison would probably be Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.
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