Trouble with Girls features Parker Hayes--a likeable guy looking for love and sex--at various points in his life in ten interconnected stories, from junior high and high school to post-grad and thirtysomething living in the real world. He's struggling to figure out how to be a man, and how to get--and hold on to--a woman. It seems that girls aren't paying any attention to Parker, or he's prematurely breaking up with women he's still in love with, or he's stringing along exes just to fill the time, then driving himself crazy trying to win them back. His best intentions never seem to turn out quite right. Though he hardly wants to admit it, it's obvious that Parker has trouble with girls. ?

Trouble with Girls: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Boswell, Marshall

United States

Delta

Alternative Atlanta

In a funny, poignant, wonderfully original debut novel, the author of the acclaimed short-story collection Trouble with Girls weaves a beguiling tale of fathers and sons, sons and lovers…and one unforgettable summer in a young man’s life–somewhere between a past he doesn’t understand and a future he’s not ready to live…. ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA For thirty-year-old Gerald Brinkman, life in Atlanta in the year 1996–the summer of the Olympics–doesn’t feel half bad. Writing reviews of basement rock bands for an alternative paper, Gerald has carefully avoided getting a real job, while watching his old friends from grad school start careers, marriages, and affairs–often with each other. But in this one life-changing summer, something is about to happen that will shake Gerald out of his complacency forever. Gerald’s father, his brilliant, vagabond, and utterly unhelpful father, wants to come and stay with him “for a while.” Ever since childhood, Gerald has tried to bury his relationship with his father under a life of carefully crafted wrong turns. And now Paul Brinkman has shown up with trash bags full of belongings, a medical crisis, and an unbearable confession to make. But Gerald knows one thing for sure: He doesn’t want to hear it. Try as he might to stop it, the future is bearing down on him. A job is being dangled in New York. A secret from his past is waiting to be revealed. An ex-girlfriend is suddenly sending mixed signals. And in one moment in one summer in the city of Atlanta, everything is about to change forever. When it does, Gerald is going to have a whole new vision of who he is, who his father and friends are, and what he must do next. An exhilarating and touching novel about family and flirtations, growing up and letting go, Alternative Atlanta brilliantly captures a time of life when everything seems possible and impossible at the same time. It is a work of dazzling storytelling from a writer of immense gifts.

DELACORTE PRESS

In a funny, poignant, wonderfully original debut novel, the author of the acclaimed short-story collection Trouble with Girls weaves a beguiling tale of fathers and sons, sons and lovers…and one unforgettable summer in a young man’s life–somewhere between a past he doesn’t understand and a future he’s not ready to live…. ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA For thirty-year-old Gerald Brinkman, life in Atlanta in the year 1996–the summer of the Olympics–doesn’t feel half bad. Writing reviews of basement rock bands for an alternative paper, Gerald has carefully avoided getting a real job, while watching his old friends from grad school start careers, marriages, and affairs–often with each other. But in this one life-changing summer, something is about to happen that will shake Gerald out of his complacency forever. Gerald’s father, his brilliant, vagabond, and utterly unhelpful father, wants to come and stay with him “for a while.” Ever since childhood, Gerald has tried to bury his relationship with his father under a life of carefully crafted wrong turns. And now Paul Brinkman has shown up with trash bags full of belongings, a medical crisis, and an unbearable confession to make. But Gerald knows one thing for sure: He doesn’t want to hear it. Try as he might to stop it, the future is bearing down on him. A job is being dangled in New York. A secret from his past is waiting to be revealed. An ex-girlfriend is suddenly sending mixed signals. And in one moment in one summer in the city of Atlanta, everything is about to change forever. When it does, Gerald is going to have a whole new vision of who he is, who his father and friends are, and what he must do next. An exhilarating and touching novel about family and flirtations, growing up and letting go, Alternative Atlanta brilliantly captures a time of life when everything seems possible and impossible at the same time. It is a work of dazzling storytelling from a writer of immense gifts. From the Hardcover edition.

Dial Press Trade Paperback

Early in his career, John Updike announced his affinity with the Christian existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others. Because of this, many of Updike's critics have interpreted his work from within a Christian existentialist context. Yet Kierkegaard and Barth provide Updike with much more than a mere context, for their dialectical thinking serves as the springboard for Updike's own unique dialectical vision, a complex matrix of ethical precepts, theological beliefs, and aesthetic principles that governs nearly all of his literary output. Nowhere else in his immense corpus is this vision more clearly and thoroughly expressed than in his four Rabbit novels, which were gathered into the single volume Rabbit Angstrom in 1995. However, because Updike's critics have chosen to read the Rabbit novels as discrete, freestanding texts, they have by and large failed to extract the precepts of this private vision.
In John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy, Marshall Boswell redresses this imbalance by treating the Rabbit tetralogy as a single, unified "mega-novel." He demonstrates that, taken together as a single work, the four discrete sections of the tetralogy not only provide a coherent and complete articulation of Updike's unique existential vision but also compose a unified work of remarkable formal complexity. Boswell brings to Updike's work the concept of "mastered irony," a term coined by Kierkegaard to describe the presentation of two legitimate but contradictory sides of an issue. In the Rabbit novels, these issues range from adultery to drug addiction, from race to redemption, with each issue examined through the refracting lens of Updike's own ironic method. Boswell shows that although each of the four individual Rabbit novels confirms this dialectical strategy in a unique way, the completed tetralogy comprises an additional series of dialectical pairs that sustain, rather than resolve, thematic and formal tension. Ultimately, the structure of the finished "mega-novel" echoes the work's thematic rationale.
To help readers who are interested in a particular Rabbit novel, Boswell devotes a chapter to each individual section of the tetralogy. At the same time, he treats each novel as an integral part of the more comprehensive whole. Honoring the full complexity of Updike's provocative thinking without losing sight of the tetralogy's popular appeal, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy makes a valuable addition to the study of Updike's work.

John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (Volume 1)

University of Missouri Press

Early in his career, John Updike announced his affinity with the Christian existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others. Because of this, many of Updike's critics have interpreted his work from within a Christian existentialist context. Yet Kierkegaard and Barth provide Updike with much more than a mere context, for their dialectical thinking serves as the springboard for Updike's own unique dialectical vision, a complex matrix of ethical precepts, theological beliefs, and aesthetic principles that governs nearly all of his literary output. Nowhere else in his immense corpus is this vision more clearly and thoroughly expressed than in his four Rabbit novels, which were gathered into the single volume Rabbit Angstrom in 1995. However, because Updike's critics have chosen to read the Rabbit novels as discrete, freestanding texts, they have by and large failed to extract the precepts of this private vision.In John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy, Marshall Boswell redresses this imbalance by treating the Rabbit tetralogy as a single, unified "mega-novel." He demonstrates that, taken together as a single work, the four discrete sections of the tetralogy not only provide a coherent and complete articulation of Updike's unique existential vision but also compose a unified work of remarkable formal complexity. Boswell brings to Updike's work the concept of "mastered irony," a term coined by Kierkegaard to describe the presentation of two legitimate but contradictory sides of an issue. In the Rabbit novels, these issues range from adultery to drug addiction, from race to redemption, with each issue examined through the refracting lens of Updike's own ironic method. Boswell shows that although each of the four individual Rabbit novels confirms this dialectical strategy in a unique way, the completed tetralogy comprises an additional series of dialectical pairs that sustain, rather than resolve, thematic and formal tension. Ultimately, the structure of the finished "mega-novel" echoes the work's thematic rationale.To help readers who are interested in a particular Rabbit novel, Boswell devotes a chapter to each individual section of the tetralogy. At the same time, he treats each novel as an integral part of the more comprehensive whole. Honoring the full complexity of Updike's provocative thinking without losing sight of the tetralogy's popular appeal, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy makes a valuable addition to the study of Updike's work.

John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

University of Missouri

The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating “The Wallace Effect”-the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries. A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace's literary patriarchs and contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four novels published after Wallace's ascendency that attempt to demythologize Wallace's persona and his literary preeminence. By re-situating Wallace's work in a broader and more contentious literary arena, The Wallace Effect traces both the reach and the limits of Wallace's legacy.

The Wallace Effect (David Foster Wallace Studies, 2)

History & Criticism

Bloomsbury Academic

The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination (David Foster Wallace Studies)

This is about Parker, from Memphis, who is trying to become a man. He's twelve going on thirteen when we first meet him and suffering through an inning of Little League baseball. He's playing right field, in position and praying a ball won't come his way. It's a scene that sets the theme of his young life-he's ready, but he's terrified.
Parker's progress through middle-class life-high school, college, graduate school (he drops out), paying job in the real world (Atlanta at the millennium)-leads him to a lot of alarmingly seductive women who, more often than not, chew him up and spit him out. He hardly wants to admit it, but he has trouble with girls.
Then there's the one who doesn't spit him out-Rachel. In fact, Rachel's the only one he tries to dump. Sort of. He suggests seeing her only on an informal, between things basis, keeping-as far as sex goes-the options open.
Marshall Boswell's wry, beguiling first book is a canny portrait of a prototypical twenty-first century thirty-something American guy who's trying to balance sensitivity with good old-fashioned sensuality while he's on the make. Like a guy's guide to . . . well, hoping and flailing more than hunting and fishing. By the last story, Parker does catch that high hard one, but also comes to understand that it's Rachel, the prototypical twenty-first century thirty-something woman, who gets credit for the score.

Trouble with Girls (Shannon Ravenel Books)

Contemporary

A Shannon Ravenel Book

Understanding David Foster Wallace (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)

In Understanding David Foster Wallace, Marshall Boswell examines the four major works of fiction Wallace has published thus far: the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. In his readings of these works, Boswell affirms that Wallace, though still young, compels our attention not only for the singular excellence of his work but, perhaps more important, for his groundbreaking effort to chart a fruitful and affirmative new direction for the literary novel at a time of bleak prospects. 
In addition to providing self-contained readings of each text, Boswell places Wallace within a trajectory of literary innovation that begins with James Joyce and continues through Wallace's most important postmodern forebears, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Although Wallace is sometimes labeled a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still unnamed--and perhaps unnameable--third wave of modernism. Boswell contends that in charting an innovative course for literary practice, Wallace does not seek merely to overturn postmodernism, nor simply to return to modernism. Instead he moves resolutely forward as his writing hoists the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.

Reference

Univ of South Carolina Pr

Understanding David Foster Wallace guides readers through thoughtful examinations of Wallace's novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and first two short story collections, Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. In his readings of these works, Marshall Boswell affirms that Wallace (1962-2008), in his fiction, compels our attention for the singular excellence of his work and his groundbreaking effort to chart a fruitful and affirmative new direction for literary fiction. In addition to providing self-contained readings of each text, Boswell places Wallace within a trajectory of literary innovation that begins with James Joyce and continues through John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Boswell contends that in charting a new course for literary practice, Wallace did not seek merely to overturn postmodernism or simply to return to modernism. Instead he moved resolutely forward with his fiction hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.

University of South Carolina Press

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Books by Boswell, Marshall

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boswell, Marshall. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Trouble with Girls: Stories

Alternative Atlanta

Alternative Atlanta

John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (Volume 1)

John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion

The Wallace Effect (David Foster Wallace Studies, 2)

The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination (David Foster Wallace Studies)

Trouble with Girls (Shannon Ravenel Books)

Understanding David Foster Wallace (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)

Understanding David Foster Wallace (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)