Background
O'Brien, Geoffrey Paul was born on May 4, 1948 in New York City. Son of Joseph Aloysius and Margaret Dorothy O'B.
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( In Bardic Deadlines, writer and editor Geoffrey O'Brien...)
In Bardic Deadlines, writer and editor Geoffrey O'Brien collects twenty of his essays on poetry that originally appeared in the Voice Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books. O'Brien surveys an array of some of the most striking and innovative poets to emerge in recent decades, including Susan Howe, August Kleinzahler, Clark Coolidge, Nathaniel Mackey, Gustaf Sobin, and Michael O'Brien. Discussions of contemporary work are juxtaposed with considerations of other traditions going as far back as the second-century Chinese anthology The Songs of the South and the Sanskrit master Kalidasa, traditions considered highly relevant to current practice. There are engaging, in-depth portraits of the work of poets John Clare, Hugh MacDiarmid, Emily Bronte, Kenji Miyazawa, and Frank O'Hara, among others. There is also an exploration of the poetics of Walt Whitman that highlights themes addressed throughout the collection: the physicality and musicality of language, the spatial dimension of poetry, the intimate bond between poet and reader, and the secret and often obsessive strategies by which the poet hides secrets in plain sight and enlists the reader in the making of the poem. Each essay focuses on poetry as experience that impinges on basic questions of identity and being. Geoffrey O'Brien is the author of a number of nonfiction books and poetry collections, including Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1995, and The Hudson Mystery, and a fictional work, The Times Square Story. He is editor-in-chief of the Library of America.
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( The Phantom Empire is a brilliant, daring, and utterly ...)
The Phantom Empire is a brilliant, daring, and utterly original book that analyzes (even as it exemplifies) the effect that the image saturation of a hundred years of moving pictures have had on human culture and consciousness. In his intense and mysterious evocation of (seemingly) every kind of movie ever made, Geoffrey O'Brien erases the distinction between spectator and commentator and virtually reinvents film writing in our time.
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( Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymo...)
Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis … these are a few of the masters of noir responsible for the great lurid paperbacks of the thirties, forties, and fifties. With titles like The Big Sleep, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and Street of the Lost, with racy cover lines like "My gun-butt smashed his skull!" and "Ruthless terror ripped away the mask that hid cold fear," and with some of the most extraordinary cover illustrations ever to grace American literature, these paperbacks held the ingredients of American nightmares. In Harboiled America—lavishly illustrated with 135 paperback covers, and expanded with new material on Thompson, Goodis, and others—Geoffrey O'Brien masterfully explores the art, history, and ideas of the American paperback.
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(Poetry. "The precision and ordered intelligence of Geoffr...)
Poetry. "The precision and ordered intelligence of Geoffrey O'Brien's essays are turned inside out in the dream landscapes of his poetry. The result is a kind of spectral tapestry where words and images are stripped to their own inherent valence and deeper codings the better to hunt down resemblances and resolutions. The effects are mysterious, hypnotic, often breathtaking, and, I think, unique in American poetry"-August Kleinzahler.
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(ghosts from a narrative imagined in childhood find their ...)
ghosts from a narrative imagined in childhood find their home in the Hudson Valley
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(The invention of moving pictures has been one of the most...)
The invention of moving pictures has been one of the most powerful shapers of the unique consciousness of the modern age. This text attempts to explain the peculiar (and now universal) state of thought and feeling that has resulted. It examines what the viewer absorbs from the endlessly multiplying scenes of old silent films, classic movies with their "immortal" stars and such mutating genres as German westerns, Italian spy movies and Japanese vampire movies.
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( A delirious, brilliantly written fictional aria on the ...)
A delirious, brilliantly written fictional aria on the sleazy glory that was once Times Square ― illustrated with dozens of vintage photographs and B-movie stills. " . . . so this picture we're talking about is The Times Square Story this is New York, show biz, crossroads of the world, entertainment capital, international center for scope and variety and pacing, everything open after midnight, not just a bunch of dumb gangsters pushing people around, this one has jazz, exotic nightlife, hipster talk, blacks tights, psychoanalysis . . . " Imagine Damon Runyon on speed, with a graduate degree in cultural studies and access to the world's most extensive video archive of low-budget exploitation films, and you'll get some idea of the ultra-hip mind-movie that is Geoffrey O'Brien's The Times Square Story. It evokes the one-time glitter, the glamour, and the grunge of this fabled piece of real estate before it became Disneyfied ― its grind houses and strip joints and freak shows and novelty stores and night clubs and peep shows and fleabag hotels. The Times Square Story also celebrates the world of below-the-line filmmaking as the kid, the producer, the broken-down actor, and Miss Columbus 1952 struggle to bring Fury of Macumba to the big screen-their artistic impulses crippled by financial reality and human frailty. With more than fifty evocative photographs from the golden era of this mythic patch of asphalt, The Times Square Story is a roller-coaster ride through gaudy, seedy, glorious cultural territory. More than fifty evocative photographs
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( Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brillian...)
Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien delves into twentieth-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private, personal yet popular. O'Brien's book is more than a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. And it reaches far beyond a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity, with pop music--his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. Ultimately, it is an exploration of what we as listeners hear, what we think we hear, and how we connect that experience with the rest of our lives. The dizzying array of musical references plays like a sound-track as O'Brien explores how our lives are lived in the presence--and in the memory of the presence--of music.
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( Castaways of the Image Planet collects sixteen years' w...)
Castaways of the Image Planet collects sixteen years' worth of Geoffrey O'Brien's essays on film and popular culture, most originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Film Comment, Filmmaker, and the New York Times. The topics range from the invention of cinema to contemporary F-X aesthetics; from Shakespeare films to Seinfeld; from '30's screwball comedies to Hong Kong martial-arts movies; from the roots of sexploitation pictures to the televising of Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony. There is an emphasis on the unpredictable interactions between film as a medium apt for expressing the most private dreams and film as the mass literature of the modern world, subject to all the pressures of financing and marketing. Many of the pieces are profiles of individual directors or actors--Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Ed Wood, Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Dana Andrews, The Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby--whose careers are probed to look for the point where private obsession meets public myth-making.
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(1st Ed.)
1st Ed.
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( One of our best cultural critics here collects sixteen ...)
One of our best cultural critics here collects sixteen years' worth of essays on film and popular culture. Topics range from the invention of cinema to contemporary F-X aesthetics, from Shakespeare on film to Seinfeld, and we include essays on 30's screwball comedies, Hong Kong Martial Arts movies, to the roots of spy movies and the televising of Clinton's grand jury testimony. O'Brien emphasizes the unpredictable interactions between film as a medium apt for expressing the most private dreams and film as the mass literature of the modern world. Several of the pieces are profiles of individual actors or directors—Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Ed Wood, Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Dana Andrews, The Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby—whose careers are probed to look for the point where obsession meets public myth-making.
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(This title collects poems from the last half-decade, rang...)
This title collects poems from the last half-decade, ranging from a monologue from an unmade film noir to a sonic sculpture where sense is driven by sound. The narratives take their form from the myth-making of ordinary life, partly found and partly invented out of which we try to forge a connection between what has vanished and what is yet to come.
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(From one of our most original essayists and critics, a wi...)
From one of our most original essayists and critics, a wide-ranging, freewheeling, utterly brilliant foray into the last fifty years of pop music and the multitudinous ways to hear it. Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien has delved into 20th-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private; personal yet popular. This is not a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. It is not a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity with pop music-his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. It is an exploration of what listeners hear, what they think they hear, and how they connect it with the rest of their lives. The dizzying array of musical references will play through the reader's mind like a soundtrack as O'Brien explores how lives are lived in the presence-and in the memory of the presence-of music.
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(Survey of hard-boiled fiction paperbacks released in the ...)
Survey of hard-boiled fiction paperbacks released in the Forties and Fifties.
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(First Edition)
First Edition
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O'Brien, Geoffrey Paul was born on May 4, 1948 in New York City. Son of Joseph Aloysius and Margaret Dorothy O'B.
Student, Yale University, 1966—1967. Student, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1968—1970.
Editor, Reader's Catalog, New York City, 1987-1991; executive editor, Library. of America, New York City, 1992-1997; editor-in-chief, Library. of America, New York City, since 1998.
( Castaways of the Image Planet collects sixteen years' w...)
( The Phantom Empire is a brilliant, daring, and utterly ...)
( In Bardic Deadlines, writer and editor Geoffrey O'Brien...)
(From one of our most original essayists and critics, a wi...)
( A delirious, brilliantly written fictional aria on the ...)
(Here's the lowdown on the 25¢ paperbacks, the books that ...)
(BY O'Brien, Geoffrey ( Author ) { The Phantom Empire: Mov...)
(This title collects poems from the last half-decade, rang...)
( Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brillian...)
(The invention of moving pictures has been one of the most...)
( One of our best cultural critics here collects sixteen ...)
(ghosts from a narrative imagined in childhood find their ...)
(Survey of hard-boiled fiction paperbacks released in the ...)
( Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymo...)
(First Edition)
(Poetry. "The precision and ordered intelligence of Geoffr...)
(1st Ed.)
Married Carly Francis O'Brien, March 18, 1977. 1 child, Heather.
