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This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Sleeping in Flame, Bones of the Moon, the Land of Laughs. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Sleeping in Flame is a novel by the American writer Jonathan Carroll. Originally published in 1988, the novel was nominated for a World Fantasy Award the following year. The book's title is a reference to the cremation of Nicholas, who (after seeing Luc off in style with the help of a couple of actor friends) is tragically killed at an airport in a terrorist raid. Although that is one literal translation of the book's title, it could also have a number of other meanings, along the lines of the fairy tale imagery throughout the novel. The oxymoron of the imageto sleep in fireis like something out of a Grimm Brothers tale. Also, phoenix imagery comes to mind as well, in that a being emerges reborn from flames.Carroll often has very vivid titles to his novels but they don't always make sense literally, even if they come from direct quotes from the novels themselves. In many ways like Symbolist poetry, they are meant to stick in the reader's mind and stimulate their imagination, rather than guide it to a specific place or idea. The narrator, Walker Easterling, is a film actor and screenwriter. His director friend Nicholas Sylvian introduces him to Maris York, a sculptress who makes model cities and who is freeing herself from Luc, her abusive partner. On the day Maris and Walker meet, Luc has just threatened to kill her, so Walker and Nicholas take her away to Vienna, where Maris and Walker commence a relationship. Walker, who knows nothing about his parents or family background, discovers that he can perform magical acts and has dreams of inhabiting another identity, that of an Austrian named Moritz Benedikt who fought in the Fir...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=9530396 ... Read more

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Despite an oeuvre spanning more than 20 years and a disavowal of any signature style, Mary Ellen Carroll has throughout her career been investigating a single, fundamental question: What is a work of art? The resulting multifarious, provocative and often wry outpouring in architecture, writing, performance, photography, filmmaking, printmaking, sculpture and painting has been collected into this book--the New York conceptual artist's long-awaited first monograph. Carroll's work interrogates the relationship between subjectivity, language and power; at its core is a dedication to political and social critique. The touchstones of her practice are the double, the imitation and the copy, and these motifs are applied to a range of ends--from conjuring the unheimlich to probing the means of distribution and interpretation of the work of art. A Carroll piece may involve something as seemingly effortless as trademarking an idea by another artist or as complex and bold as walking out the door penniless with only her passport and the clothes on her back to spend six weeks in a foreign country. Carroll imbues all her work with a strong performative element; even a new opus, involving the rotation of a Houston tract home on its foundation, is conceived as a way of making architecture perform. ... Read more