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Who's on first

Who's on First is a novel of international espionage and intrigue that hooks the reader from the very beginning. The year is 1956, and the United States is locked in a do-or-die space race with the Russians. Who will get to outer space first? Once again Blackford Oakes is called upon. This time he kidnaps two Russian missile scientists who can help put the Americans out in front for good. But he must dodge a murderous entourage of KGB agents and Hungarian freedom fighters if he is to accomplish his mission.

Who's on first?

Who's on first? : new and selected poems

"There is no one quite like Lloyd Schwartz, whose unique combination of comedy and pathos is rare in contemporary American poetry. Over the years and books, Schwartz has developed a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, producing poems that are hilarious in their depiction of unsettling social situations, while still managing to find the kernel of poignancy buried in everyday encounters. He is a master of the speech-driven style of verse, which is based on overheard, interrupted, or invented conversations that are by turns humorous and deeply unsettling, intimate yet decorous. In the new poems section, Schwartz brings his broad experience across the arts (including his many years as a music critic and commentator) to bear, with poems that recall the feeling of both performing and apprehending a piece of music, say, or a painting, a film, or a poem; he explores the figures depicted within these artworks, their fears and desires, revealing whole unexplored, interior worlds, a universe in a pack of tarot cards. This collection, which gathers the very best of Schwartz's work over his long, distinguished career, amply displays the tenderness and delicacy of feeling that we've come to rely on in his poetry. "Who's on First?" is a fitting capstone to a long life lived in the arts"--For more than four decades, readers and critics have found Lloyd Schwartz's poems unlike anyone else's-a rare combination of the heartbreaking and the hilarious. With his ear for the poetry of the vernacular, Schwartz offers us a memorable cast of characters-both real and imagined, foolish and oracular. Readers experience his mother's piercing flashes of memory, the perverse comic wisdom of Gracie Allen, the uninhibited yet loving exhibitionists of antique pornography, and eager travelers crossing America in a club-car or waiting in a Brazilian airport. Schwartz listens to these people without judging-understanding that they are all trying to live their lives, whenever possible, with tenderness, humor, and grace. Who's on First? brings together a selection of poems from all of Schwartz's previous collections along with eagerly awaited new poems, highlighting his formal inventiveness in tangling and untangling the yarn of comedy and pathos. Underlying all of these poems is the question of what it takes and what it costs to make art.

History of Science and Technology

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Special Collections and University Archives’ Access to Personal Health Information Policy

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