Liberty's Excess: Fictions

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University of Alabama Press, 2000 - 177 pages
In interconnected and mutually enfolding texts protagonists face off with some deformation of being: psychological, sexual, political, philosophical. Plots play out across the body, as if formed, deformed, reformed by culture. Drugs, violence, and sex inscribe the literal flesh of "figures" standing in for what formerly passed for character. In these fictions a woman is more likely to appear with a needle in her arm than a baby. Sometimes a woman cannot be distinguished from a man at all.

Cutting from subject to object, severing the eye/I from skin, these fictions bring America back to its body. In Liberty's Excess, capitalism and individualism lose their cover stories, releasing desire all over culture's deadening hum. Yuknavitch is both master and mistress of this dis-formed beauty, creating a landscape neither Waste Land nor Kansas nor Pomo Glitter.

 

Contents

Bravo America 11
Waiting to See 20
An American Couple 33
Cusp 55
The Garden of Earthly Delights 71
Blood Opus 89
from The Boy Stories 97
Three Studies 147
Burning the Commodity 158
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About the author (2000)

Lidia Yuknavitch teaches fiction writing, literature, and cultural studies at Pacific University and San Diego State.

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