Bøger af Michael Lackey

It was early morning when Zachery Morely's mother asked him to fetch some herbs from the garden. Unknowingly, this simple chore was going to turn into a life-altering event for him and, ultimately, his world. It was during this simple task that he found himself face to face to a powerful unknown being bent on destruction. It was this being... a demon who planted the bad seed, which would give rise to a horrific army. Zachery and his father, George, set off to seek the help of King Gabriel and his court to determine what kind of horrors could come from what looked to be an ordinary tree. It is not until it consumes a living creature and ultimately a human, did they realize this tree housed a demon. Their world was in trouble, and Zachery joins forces with the king and his guards on an epic journey through the lands of men, dwarves, and elves, in search of a hero. Zachery meets wizards and befriends a dragon in this fight against evil, and for all that is good. It is during these epic battles he discovers something- himself. Zachery realizes to find a hero; he had to be one. Through this, he sees that he is more powerful than he ever could imagine. This story will take you on a fast-paced adventure with battles that could determine the future of the world and forges a boy into a hero...

Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of 'truth' it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history.

Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, and it has become a dominant literary form over the last 35 years. What has not yet been scholarly acknowledged or documented is that the Irish played a crucial role in the origins, evolution, rise, and now dominance of biofiction. Michael Lackey first examines the groundbreaking biofictions that Oscar Wilde and George Moore authored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the best biographical novels about Wilde (by Peter Ackroyd and Colm Tóibín). He then focuses on contemporary authors of biofiction (Sabina Murray, Graham Shelby, Anne Enright, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who Lackey has interviewed for this work) who use the lives of prominent Irish figures (Roger Casement and Eliza Lynch) to explore the challenges of seizing and securing a life-promoting form of agency within a colonial and patriarchal context. In conclusion, Lackey briefly analyzes biographical novels by Peter Carey and Mary Morrissy to illustrate why agency is of central importance for the Irish, and why that focus mandated the rise of the biographical novel, a literary form that mirrors the constructed Irish interior.