Bucking the Tiger by Bruce Olds

Bucking the Tiger by Bruce Olds

An American Library Association Notable Book

John Henry Holliday was an Ivy League-educated dentist from a genteel Georgia family when at the age of twenty-one he was diagnosed with consumption and given six months to live. Instead, over the next fifteen years, he composed of his sojourn on America's western frontier a paean to the ways in which a man might bluff death--and attain a measure of immortality.

In Bucking the Tiger, Bruce Olds uses a pan-dimensional, genre-blurring collage of original poems, reconstituted news accounts, adulterated epigraphs, song lyrics and photographs, simulated eyewitness testimony, fictionalized memoir, invented correspondence, re-imagined folk history--less to restore the past of a figure who in his lifetime was more thoroughly mythologized than Jesse James or Billy the Kid, than to re-story it entirely.

Evoking Doc Holliday's checkered careers as a frontier dentist, itinerant saloon gambler, professional faro dealer, and occasional shootist (including his involvement in the fabled gunfight at the OK Corral), Bucking the Tiger displaces the popular image of the Latin-spouting serial killer with the reality of a human being who, exiled to an emotional and physical landscape to which he was singularly unsuited, strove to make of his self-affliction an expression of sustained, if often violent, art.

Reared in the Upper Midwest, Bruce Olds has lived at various periods in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami and Chicago. He is the author of three award-winning works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize nominated The Moments Lost (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), Bucking the Tiger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001 ) and the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Raising Holy Hell (Henry Holt, 1995). His nonfiction work has appeared in Granta and American Heritage among other publications. His book reviews have been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald. After working his way through college as a Teamster, Olds worked for several years at daily newspapers, first in Philadelphia, then in Baltimore, as an award-winning columnist, feature writer, and book reviewer, before leaving the business mid-career to devote himself full time to writing fiction. His sui generis approach to his historical fictions--one that is genre-blurring, multi-dimensional, frankly collagist, and that privileges language and architecture over strict historicity--is, he suspects, in part the result of his having as an undergraduate studied under and been influenced by the pioneering literary Postmodernist scholar Ihab Hassan. Olds's novel about the abolitionist John Brown, Raising Holy Hell, was an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nominee, amd was named Novel of the Year by the Notable Books Council of the American Library Association. It also received the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award for Fiction. Bucking the Tiger, an ALA Notable Book, was adapted for the stage as The Confessions of Doc Holliday. His third, set in turn-of-the-century Chicago and Michigan's Upper Peninsula, plumbed parts of his own family history. The father of an adult son, Olds lives along the Atlantic Coast of northern South Carolina.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780312420246
ISBN 10	0312420242
Titel	Bucking the Tiger
Autor	Bruce Olds
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	St. Martins Press-3PL
Erscheinungsjahr	2002-08-03
Seitenanzahl	384
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar