Articles liés à Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book

Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book - Couverture rigide

Webb

 
9780932511171: Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book

Synopsis

In these postmodernist episodes of high comedy, Don Webb turns Ovid's classic work, The Metamorphosis , on its head. Awarded the 1988 Illinois State University/Fiction Collective Prize through a nationwide fiction comition, Webb's first book of fiction, Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book, explores the theme of change in hitherto unimagined manifestations from the everyday to the mysterious to the miraous. These eight dozen "metamorphoses" are widely funny, profound, and ike change itself always surprising.


With rare originality and breadth, Webb draws upon Egyptian mythology, molear biology, classical poetry, contemporary pop ture, literary theory, Eastern mysticism, and science fiction, composing them into an offbeat fugue on the theme of transformation.


"Metamorphosis No. 39" resurrects the ancient Egyptian gods, Set, Toth, and Osiris, who return to America to mastermind a plot to alter contemporary consciousness. Their scheme includes the broadcast of subliminal archetypal images during returns of "I Love Lucy." In a later metamorphosis, another ancient god Dionysius returns to modern day Atlantic City to recruit winos for a new band of satyrs.


Ancient gods are not the only agents of change. Metamorphosis also spreads to the White House in an episode describing the clandestine life of the president's drug supplier who risks death to satisfy the chief executive's taste for organic hallucinogens.


A hilarious New Age western saga unfolds in "Metamorphosis No.5" W.B. Porter, the "Last of the Singing Cowboys" a hero with a degree in chemical engineering and a proficiency on the sitar foils the Uzi-toting Mendoza gang "tough hombres schooled in the Fourteen Mysteries of Toltec Sorcery" in their attempt to pull a heist on a condo construction project.

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