Almost Interesting

David Spade is best known for his harsh “Hollywood” Minute Sketches on SNL, his starring roles in movies like Joe Dirt and Tommy Boy, and his seven-year stint as Dennis Finch on the series Just Shoot Me. Now, with a wit as dry as the weather in his home state of Arizona, the “comic brat extraordinaire” tells his story in Almost Interesting. First Taking fans back to his childhood as a wannabe cool younger brother and recounting his excruciating road-tour to fame—when he was regularly mistaken for a ten year-old, Spade then dishes about his time crisscrossing the country as a comedian, for low-paying gigs and dragging along his mother’s old suitcase full of props. He also covers his years on SNL during the beloved Rock/Sandler/Farley era of the 1990s, including his close working relationship and friendship with Chris Farley and brags about the ridiculous perks that fame has brought into his life, including the constant fear of being fired, a crazy ex-assistant who attacked him while he was sleeping, a run-in with Eddie Murphy on the mean streets of Beverly Hills, and of course an endless supply of hot chicks. Sometimes dirty, always funny, and as sharp as a tack, Almost Interesting reminds you why David Spade is one of our generation’s favorite funny guys.

Examines the importance of Leo Bersani’s work for queer theory, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, and film studies. For more than fifty years, Leo Bersani’s writing has inspired and challenged scholars in the fields of literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and film and visual studies. This is the first book-length collection on this important author. The book’s extensive introduction outlines in detail Bersani’s oeuvre, particularly its place in queer thought and his complicated relationships with the fields of queer theory and psychoanalysis. The subsequent contributions by notable scholars in various fields demonstrate the richness and open-endedness of his work. The book concludes with a new interview with Bersani. Mikko Tuhkanen is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright and the coeditor (with E. L. McCallum) of Queer Times, Queer Becomings, both also published by SUNY Press.

Vols. 1-26 include a supplement: The University pulpit, vols. [1]-26, no. 1-661, which has separate pagination but is indexed in the main vol.

One muggy summer in New England, an unemployed Grassman goes to work for the wealthy Bill Borrington, a "rock-hard dreamer" with a motley crew of hangers-on and a cattle farm in the Berkshires. The Grassman's mission: to transform a weedy field into a carpet of pristine putting green that will bring riches to Borrington and win the admiration of the ravishing Autumn Bliss. To reach his goal, the Grassman must contend with hostile cowboys, inmates from a women's prison, bad digestion, and above all the dreaded curse of the Zombini Sisters. From the author of Hail, Cigaros!, praised by Kirkus as "assured, ambitious, and unapologetically entertaining."

The Introspective Art of Mark Twain is a major new assessment of a towering American writer. Seeking to trace the development of Mark Twain's imagination, Douglas Anderson begins near the end of Twain's life, with the long dialogue What Is Man? that Twain published anonymously in 1906. In Twain's view, the little-read What Is Man? lies at the heart of his creative life. It is the central aesthetic testament that he employed to tell the story of his artistic evolution. Anderson follows the contours of that story as it unfolds over Twain's career. The portrait that emerges addresses the full scope of Twain's achievement, drawing on his autobiographical and travel writings, as well as the published and unpublished works of fiction that are by now deeply embedded in the world literary canon. “Steer by the river in your head,” Mark Twain's master pilot, Horace Bixby, once advised him, when the opaque atmosphere of the outer world made it impossible to see the actual Mississippi through which Twain was trying to guide his steamboat. For the purposes of this book, the river in one's head is not a mental construct of the physical world but the riverine networks of consciousness itself: the river that is the mind. The detailed discussions of individual books that structure each chapter direct the attention of Mark Twain's students and admirers, through inward rather than outward channels, toward a fuller appreciation for his legacy.