Search results for ""author allan macdonell""

Punk Elegies arrives like a chemically unstable mixture of Richard Yates and Damon Runyon. Set along Hollywood Boulevard at the birth of punk and the death of the seventies, the thirty-three melancholic, comic laments of Punk Elegies are a mesmerizing concoction of delusion and revelation. A cultural moment, a marriage, and one young man's mind and soul spiral through a series of boundless possibilities and arrive at a harrowing finality. In the end, on the spin cycle of destiny, MacDonell circles alone, naked and bewildered in the labyrinth of a pre-AIDS bathhouse inferno. The first sunrise of the rest of his life dares him to step outside.

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Do you ever look forward to what life will be like once you are dead?Functioning as a double-rainbow bridge connecting the ordinary now with the stack of memories that create the past and the netherworld ahead, Now That I Am Gone is the memoir of an everyman’s existence as it goes on without him. His wife, his friends, his dogs, they all navigate to fill in the empty spaces he has left behind. As his ashes cool, old rivals and older paramours swoop in to claim his spoils.His life has flashed before his eyes. His regrets, what he will miss, what he is happy to leave behind, all the ways he had been hoping to depart—all of this and more he has confessed. The only chapter left is to reveal what happens to him in the place he goes once he is gone, and that hidden knowledge is exactly what comes next.

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