Bøger af Joni Murphy

Like Nolan's Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin, a radiant novel tracking the lifecycle of a silver screen starlet rising against the backdrop of the mid-20th century. Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles--the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate--vie for control of Barbara's consciousness. As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles--vampire's victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction. Joni Murphy's Barbara is a deep character study of a woman losing hold and recapturing her identity through the art and technology of moviemaking. Through an intimate first-person perspective, the novel follows Barbara as she navigates decades and genres--from austere 1950s family dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics--glimpsing herself in the reflective and deadly shards of the long 20th Century.

Double Teenage tells the story of two young teenagers (best friends, Celine and Julie) who are coming of age in the 1990s along the US-Mexico bordera place where nothing seems to happen, but only because what counts as 'something' is defined by far-off centres of power. In their small, desert town and small-scale life, they become a twin pair. Through their love of theatre, they find their way into a wider world, rich with opportunity, but at the same time, dense with situations of peril and violence.This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on the paradoxes of Western cultureobsessed with depictions of fantasy sexual violence, while at the same time, willfully blind to the many ways in which desire and hurt twine together in real life; where angry, emotional, and loving girls have been told time and again that they overthink things; where survival goes hand-in-hand with trauma and witnessing; where art, books, movies, TV, and plays work to both shield us from reality and also help us to face it, and powerful healing rituals can be made out of everyday material goodshoodie sweatshirts, homemade alcoholic punch, joints, and blood pacts. In this way, Double Teenage ultimately offers a way through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the trap of girlhood.Informed and influenced by the films of David Lynch, Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, Jacques Rivette, Murphy has developed an emotional dialogue in Double Teenage, one that wrestles with the borders of our bodies, our countries, and our realities. The borderlands (the US/Mexican and the Canadian/US) in this novel become gendered, performative spaces that are hard and soft, depending on who is trying to cross. Though the girls move away from the Southwest to Vancouver and Chicago, and gain entry into rarified academic and artistic circles, they discover that the violence and solitude of the borderlands are still stuck within them.In drawing comparisons to Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be and Chris Kraus's Summer of Hate, the harrowing narrative in Double Teenage will speak particularly to an audience of 'Under 40' women who are radical, possibly over-educated, if perhaps precariously employed. Art audiences, as well as people interested in literary fiction and criticism, will also be drawn to this novel's integration of books, theatre, and performance.

An Animal Farm for the Anthropocene.