One Grain Of Sand Puppet Theater

The Image of the Puppet in Italian Theater, Literature and Film

With the advancement of cybernetics, avatars, animation, and virtual reality, a thorough understanding of how the puppet metaphor originates from specific theatrical practices and media is especially relevant today. This book identifies and interprets the aesthetic and cultural significance of the different traditions of the Italian puppet theater in the broader Italian culture and beyond. Grounded in the often-overlooked history of the evolution of several Italian puppetry traditions – the central and northern Italian stringed marionettes, the Sicilian pupi, the glove puppets of the Po Valley, and the Neapolitan Pulcinella – this study examines a broad spectrum of visual, cinematic, literary, and digital texts representative of the functions and themes of the puppet. A systematic analysis of the meanings ascribed to the idea and image of the puppet provides a unique vantage point to observe the perseverance and transformation of its deeper associations, linking premodern, modern, and contemporary contexts.

The Brahmavâdin

The Novels of Jimmy Breslin

Tough, funny, moving fiction from the New York Times–bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Jimmy Breslin was not only “the biggest, the baddest, the brashest, the best columnist in New York City,” he was also an outstanding New York Times–bestselling novelist, equally comfortable with comedy and tragedy, often intermixing the two (New YorkDaily News). Collected here are four of his best-loved novels, including three New York Times bestsellers. World Without End, Amen: Hoping to find redemption, disgraced, alcoholic NYPD cop Dermot Davey travels to Ulster—the heart of the increasingly bloody Irish Troubles—to find the father who abandoned him as a child, in this New York Times bestseller. “Excellent . . . Breslin writes prose in a New York idiom with a shrewdness all his own.” —The New York Times The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight: Breslin’s New York Times–bestselling, madcap novel of the sloppiest turf war ever launched by the Brooklyn mob was the basis for the hilarious movie starring Jerry Orbach as the witless Kid Sally Palumbo and a young pre–Godfather II Robert De Niro. “A very funny novel . . . and a good one.” —The Village Voice Table Money: This New York Times bestseller “about flesh-and-blood working people” is the story of Owney Morrison, a Vietnam vet who returns home to Queens with a Congressional Medal of Honor and few prospects (Studs Terkel). Owney takes up the family legacy as a sandhog—a tunnel worker. But when his drinking gets out of control, his wife Dolores considers leaving with their baby daughter rather than being dragged down by a man who feels safest one hundred feet below the street. “[A] serious literary novel, a superior work of fiction.” —The New York Times Forsaking All Others: Puerto Rican drug dealer Teenager will stop at nothing to dominate the South Bronx narcotics trade—but a scorching affair between a crime boss’s daughter who’s literally married to the mob and Teenager’s childhood friend, legal aid lawyer Maximo Escobar, threatens to ruin the entire operation. Before it’s all over, the South Bronx is going to burn. “A novel of considerable complexity and richness.” —Chicago Tribune