Alexander Theroux

The conflicts between love and hate, good and evil, and life and art are explored in a portrait of Alaric Darconville, a twenty-nine-year-old professor at Quinsy College--a women's college in Virginia--who falls in love with and is jilted by one of his students

Darconville's Cat

A fascinating cultural history, these splendid essays on the three primary colors--blue, yellow, and red--extend to the artistic, literary, linguistic, botanical, cinematic, aesthetic, religious, scientific, culinary, climatological, and emotional dimensions of each color. QBPC Selection.

Three Essays

The Primary Colors

Theroux's second monograph for Fantagraphics on the world-class cartoonist and illustrator whose wide-ranging career spand 50 years and nearly 100 books, among which are the classics The Hapless Child, and The Loathsome Couple. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Gorey over the years, Theroux explores Gorey's artistic impulses, his vast and eclectic interst in popular culture, his acerbic and eccentric opinions on films, literature, and politics, and examines the nooks and crannies of Gorey's career. A loving tribute from a lifelong admirer.

The Strange Case of Edward Gorey

This is a collection of the National Book Award-nominated author’s poems: sonnets, odes, ballads, and more. The publication of Alexander Theroux’s Collected Poems, a gathering of more than 660 poems, an astonishing creative output, will be among the major literary events of the year. Here is a full cornucopia of sonnets, odes, ballads, free verse, triolets, pure, satires, narratives, dramatic monologues, fanciful meditations, flytings and harangues, ruminations on death and lost love, and no end of lyrics both beautiful and fierce. Taken altogether they contrive to make up a record of the author’s deepest thoughts and reflect the dramatis personae of his life. Theroux captures in his work those rare, frail, but precious truths, inaccessible to the common run of men that would otherwise have vanished into nescience. Sardonic, astute, impertinent, tender, clever, warmhearted, delphic, truculent, comic, defiantly aggressive, and often achingly personal, he shows an intensity of observation and invention.

Collected Poems

A brilliant satire from one of the great novelists of his time. In his first novel in nearly twenty years, Alexander Theroux, National Book Award Nominee, returns with a compendious satire, a bold and inquisitorial circuit-breaking examination of love and hate, of rejection and forgiveness, of trust and romantic disappointment, of the terrors of contemporary life. Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic, who, repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, but she exemplifies all that Eugene considers wrong with contemporary America (of which the publishing profession and its recognizable denizens serves as a microcosm)a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with inventive and relentless satire. Nostalgic for the old days and old manners, a way of life lost to grace, loving from afar a mysterious beauty named Rapunzel Wisht, Eugene fights against the rising tide of stupidity, focusing on Laura in the hope that by saving her he can validate his ethical beliefs. But feckless Laura and the colorful but bizarre cast of characters surrounding Eugenebrilliant bigots, nihilists, Generation-X slackers and zanies of all sexual persuasionsthreaten to pull him under, leading to the novel's unforgettable conclusion, a climax of betrayal and redemption of Dostoevskyan power.

Or, The Sexual Intellectual

Laura Warholic

Early Stories

Black and White

An Essay on Literature

Theroux Metaphrastes

Son tres. Azul, amarillo, rojo. El azul del misterio y la nobleza, de amplia y excesiva ambigüedad, el color más raro en el reino natural. El amarillo de las mejillas de los pingüinos emperador y de los celos en cualquier historia y geografía. Y el rojo del crepúsculo, de la sangre, de la capa en las corridas de toros y de los vestidos de novia chinos. Este libro singularísimo, extraordinario, propone un recorrido cultural fascinante por la dimensión artística, literaria, lingüística, botánica, cinematográfica, estética, religiosa, científica, culinaria y hasta emocional de cada color primario. La gran riqueza léxica y flexibilidad sintáctica, la perfección para armonizar la abstracción y el detalle y encontrar destellos, matices, leyendas, hallazgos de toda clase que se precipitan sobre nosotros en cascada, hacen de estos tres ensayos una imprevisible y gratificante teoría del conocimiento. Después de leer Los colores primarios, en admirable versión de Ariel Dilon, a nadie le pasará inadvertido que Alexander Theroux es uno de los grandes maestros de la lengua inglesa actual.

Los colores primarios

Britney Spears loathes meatloaf and “all lumpy stuff.” Arturo Toscanini hated fish. Ayn Rand despised salads. Alexander Theroux’s Einstein’s Beets is a study of the world of food and food aversions. The novelist and poet probes the secret and mysterious attitudes of hundreds of people―mostly famous and well-known―toward eating and dining out, hilariously recounting tales of confrontation and scandalous alienation: it contains gossip, confession, embarrassment, and perceptive observations.

Einstein's Beets

The Schinocephalic Waif

Fables, the second volume to be published of Theroux's short stories, truly among his richest and thought-provoking, is a compilation of among his most imaginative, daring, whimsical, highly inspired, and characteristically unconventional work. It will be followed by the third and last of the triad, Later Stories. This collection, which includes pieces long and short, including two ballads, has been much anticipated by his faithful readers. In these narratives, Theroux has mastered in the originality of sheer invention the folklorish, even fairy-tale quality, of the moral fable, touching in his chronicles on the tried-and-true plots of romance, mythology, mystery, puzzles, secrets, and questions of intrigue without making any of the pieces didactic or overly doctrinal. We encounter in this gathering an assemblage of little sagas, epics, and apologues an intrepid explorer deep in the Amazon jungle seeking a black orchid for Queen Victoria. A disturbed German violin student undergoes in the course of his lessons a strange and unpredictable response to a rare, priceless instrument. A love story in old China finds two sweethearts in the dire peril of a venomous court intrigue. The ancient linen wrapping of Egyptian mummies leads to a weird conspiracy that takes place, unpredictably, in the state of Maine. The neuroses of a mother-hating son have ghastly consequences in his own marriage. Nothing can match for weird enchantment the wizard-architect named Vinegarfly. At the turn of every page a surprise awaits in these unforgettable stories, where, in his own right proving a wizard himself of the language, Theroux handles words like Fabergé his eggs, for, in a final analysis, language once again is his subject. As David Bowman observed in the New York Times, "Alexander Theroux . . . is one of America's premier frotteurs, to use a French term the impeccable James Salter applies to someone who 'rubs words in his hand.'"

Fables

Any journey with Alexander Theroux is an education. Possessed of a razor-sharp and hyperliterate mind, he stands beside Thomas Pynchon as one of the sharpest cultural commentators of our time. So when he decided to accompany his wife ― the artist Sarah Son-Theroux ― on her Fulbright Scholarship to Estonia, it occasioned this penetrating examination of a country that, for many, seems alien and distanced from the modern world. For Theroux, the country and its people become a puzzle. His fascination with their language, manners, and legacy of occupation and subordination lead him to a revelatory examination of Estonia’s peculiar place in European history. All the while, his trademark acrobatic allusions, quotations, and digressions ― which take us fromHamlet through Jean Cocteau to Married… with Children ― render his travels as much internal and psychical as they are external and physical. Through these obsessive references to Western culture, we come to appreciate how insular the country has become, yet also marvel at its fierce individuality and preternatural beauty ― such is the skill of Theroux’s gaze. This travelogue of his nine months abroad also brims with anecdotes of Theroux’s encounters with Estonian people and ― in some of its most bitterly comedic episodes ― his fellow Americans whom he at times feels more alienated from than the frosty, humorless Europeans. Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery is as biting and satirical as it is witty and urbane; as curious and lyrical as it is brash and irreverent. It marks a new highlight in an already stellar career and a book that continues Fantagraphics’ exceptional line of prose works.

A Ramble Through the Periphery

Estonia

Novelist and critic Alexander Theroux analyzes the pop song. National Book Award nominee, critic and one of America’s least compromising satirists, Alexander Theroux takes a comprehensive look at the colorful language of pop lyrics and the realm of rock music in general in The Grammar of Rock: silly song titles; maddening instrumentals; shrieking divas; clunker lines; the worst (and best) songs ever written; geniuses of the art; movie stars who should never have raised their voice in song but who were too shameless to refuse a mic; and the excesses of awful Christmas recordings. Praising (and critiquing) the gems of lyricists both highbrow and low, Theroux does due reverence to classic word-masters like Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, lyricists as diverse as Hank Williams, Buck Ram, the Moody Blues, and Randy Newman, Dylan and the Beatles, of course, and more outré ones like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Fall (even Ghostface Killa), but he considers stupid rhymes, as well ― nonsense lyrics, chop logic, the uses and abuses of irony, country music macho, verbal howlers, how voices sound alike and why, and much more. In a way that no one else has ever done, with his usual encyclopedic insights into the state of the modern lyric, Theroux focuses on the state of language ― the power of words and the nature of syntax ― in The Grammar of Rock. He analyzes its assaults on listeners’ impulses by investigating singers’ styles, pondering illogical lunacies in lyrics, and deconstructing the nature of diction and presentation in the language. This is that rare book of discernment and probing wit (and not exclusively one that is a critical defense of quality) that positively evaluates the very nature of a pop song, and why one over another has an effect on the listener.

Art and Artlessness in 20th Century Pop Lyrics

The Grammar of Rock

The third novel from acclaimed, award-winning Alexander Theroux is a darkly realistic tale of adultery set in contemporary New England. Christian Ford is a man who is betrayed in an adulterous affair, only to discover that he himself betrayed a woman he loved and abandoned. Throughout the story, Christian attempts to understand the dangerously paradoxical nature of human relations and to show that adultery extends beyond mere physical infidelity.

Alexander Theroux

About

Books

Join the club