Movieola

by John Domini

Overview

Movieola is a collection of linked short stories that delights and exploits the language and paraphernalia of industrial Hollywood. The collection delves into a night at the movies, featuring all the familiar types — the rom-com, the action-adventure, the superhero and the spy — but the narratives are still under construction, and every story line is an opportunity for the unimaginable twist. Motive and identity are constantly shifting in these short stories that offer both narrative and anti-narrative, while the stunted shoptalk of the movie business struggles to keep up.

With the wit of Steve Erickson’s Zeroville and the inventive spirit of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, John Domini offers a collection at once comical and moving, carefully suspended between a game of language and a celebration of American film.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938103902
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	06/14/2016
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	430,059
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

John Domini has two short story collections and three novels in print, as well as one book of collected essays and criticism. He’s published fiction in Paris Review and Ploughshares, non-fiction in GQ and The New York Times, and won a poetry prize from Meridian. Grants include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The New York Times praised his work as "dreamlike... grabs hold of both reader and character," and Alan Cheuse, of NPR, described it as "witty and biting." He has taught at Harvard, Northwestern and elsewhere and makes his home in Des Moines.

Editorial Reviews

“If you've had it with the movies, John Domini in Movieola! will tell you, friskily, why.” —Padgett Powell

“Reading John Domini is always the smartest kind of fun - and beneath the brainy humor, the delicious wordplay, and the wry observations, there's a warm beating heart and a giddy excitement for our most egalitarian art form. Everyone who loves movies will love this book.” —Amber Sparks

“Like Coover’s A Night at the Movies, Movieola! demonstrates a lover’s attentiveness to the mannerisms and conventions of film. What Domini sneaks into the theater under his jacket, however, is a slyly disruptive deployment of the language of Hollywood insiderdom and wannabe insiderdom — the parody is unstinting, but the souls of the characters are never neglected. Two thumbs up!” —Chris Sorrentino

"A remarkable, droll meditation on film; in particular, on film genre; more particularly still, on how all great works of art either invent a genre or dissolve one.” —David Shields

From the Publisher