Daniel Bowles

Thomas Meinecke

To have, to be, and to appear: that is the topic of twenty-four-year-old Vivian's master's thesis, an ambitious work that explores the role of gender in social, artistic, and intellectual pursuits. To gather her research, Vivian peppers her friends and classmates with a series of increasingly provocative questions guaranteed to spark the curiosity of anyone who has ever questioned why things are the way they are, particularly regarding the perception of gender between individuals and in society. Adventurous listeners are subsequently led through the same questions by a diverse quintet of characters: bisexual Korinna, a star tennis player and obsessive reader of Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's theories of sexuality; Frauke, a lesbian doctoral student writing her dissertation about Christ's foreskin; Frauke's fiancée Angela, formerly Angelo, a Bible-reading Italian Catholic who considers himself a lesbian; and Hans, a self-described male feminist who believes that men suffer from “reproduction envy.” Groundbreaking author Thomas Meinecke brings his innovative writing style to this arresting novel, sampling words and texts the way a disc jockey samples music, spinning seemingly disparate tunes into a single, glowing melody of human consciousness.

Tomboy

The United States prides itself on being the world's melting pot, but during a long, hot summer in coastal North Carolina, three young people will put that theory to the test. A German named Tillmann is vacationing in the States with his girlfriend and corresponding with an African American colleague about the evolution of blues music. Over the course of the season, the trio's discussions range from Mariah Carey to Ronald Reagan, from the Black Power movement to Nazi Germany. And as a hurricane churns across the Atlantic, their exploration of how ethnicity, race, and gender are defined -- particularly for America's African and Jewish diasporas -- will culminate in revelations about their own ethnic identities. Thomas Meinecke's groundbreaking writing style is on full display in Pale Blue, as the writer-DJ has crafted his insightful novel with the same uncanny skill with which jazz and blues musicians create their improvisational styles.

Pale Blue

How are we to think of satire if it has ceased to exist as a discrete genre? This study proposes a novel solution, understanding the satiric in the postwar era as a set of writing practices: figures of inversion, myth-making, and citation. By showing how writers and theorists alike deploy these devices in new contexts, this book reexamines the link between German postwar writing and the history of satire, and between literature and theory.

Daniel Bowles

Books

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