Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
My 1980s & Other Essays

My 1980s & Other Essays

Koestenbaum, Wayne

Paperback

Letters & EssaysGeneral SociologyGLBTQIA Studies

Publisher Price: $25.00

ISBN10: 0374533776
ISBN13: 9780374533779
Publisher: Fsg Originals
Published: Aug 13 2013
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.89 Width: 5.10 Depth: 7.46
Language: English

Wayne Koestenbaum returns with a zesty and hyper-literate collection of personal and critical essays on the 1980s, including essays on major cultural figures such as Andy Warhol and Brigitte Bardot.

Wayne Koestenbaum has been described as an impossible lovechild from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag (Bidoun). In My 1980s and Other Essays, a collection of extravagant range and style, he rises to the challenge of that improbable description.

My 1980s and Other Essays opens with a series of manifestos--or, perhaps more appropriately, a series of impassioned disclosures, intellectual and personal. It then proceeds to wrestle with a series of major cultural figures, the author's own lodestars and lodestones: literary (John Ashbery, Roberto Bolaño, James Schuyler), artistic (Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol), and simply iconic (Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Lana Turner). And then there is the personal--the voice, the style, the flair--that is unquestionably Koestenbaum. It amounts to a kind of intellectual autobiography that culminates in a string of passionate calls to creativity; arguments in favor of detail and nuance, and attention; a defense of pleasure, hunger, and desire in culture and experience.

Koestenbaum is perched on the cusp of being a true public intellectual--his venues are more mainstream than academic, his style is eye-catching, his prose unfailingly witty and passionate, his interests profoundly wide-ranging and popular. My 1980s should be the book that pushes Koestenbaum off that cusp and truly into the public eye.

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