Arabian Nights of 1934 Paperback by Geoffrey O'Brien
Arabian Nights of 1934 Paperback by Geoffrey O'Brien
Product Details
- Publisher : Terra Nova Press (Aug. 1 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 194959727X
- ISBN-13 : 9781949597271
- Item weight : 340 g
- Dimensions : 14.76 x 1.68 x 21.44 cm
Arabian Nights of 1934 is a journey through the fevered dreamworld embodied in American movies of the early 1930s: an era that closed abruptly with the enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. It distills a thousand and one nights of Depression-era movie-going—plotlines, closeups, cityscapes, wisecracks, backchat, and frantic outbursts—into a haunting parallel life, the stories bleeding into one another as they did in the minds of the viewers whom they helped sustain.
Two of those viewers, it so happens, are O'Brien's own parents in their restless youth—one impatient to experience the world beyond the screen, one ready to take it on—and the glimpse we're afforded into the darkened theaters of their minds frames the book with an act of imagination at once tender and audacious.
About Author
Geoffrey O’Brien is a widely published poet, critic, and cultural historian whose books include Hardboiled America (1981), Dream Time (1988), The Phantom Empire (1993), The Times Square Story (1998), The Browser’s Ecstasy (2000), Sonata for Jukeboxes (2004), and Where Did Poetry Come From: Some Early Encounters (2020). He has published nine collections of poetry, most recently The Blue Hill (Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, 2018) and Who Goes There (2020). He was for many years editor in chief of The Library of America, and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Artforum, Film Comment, and other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn.
Author Residence: Brooklyn, NY
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