Distracted [Paperback]

Jalal Toufic (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2003

"Todo na koorta, espo sipito fuela laquna qui no uisi dar: Distracted puelo forta na scusi. 'Chorbs trada,' 'kobingo,' "Pressta fenna Tesserae'--ya kibsh Toufic ordinatarae. Tengo no sladin casamo. Morshada!!" (Peter Rose, film/video maker of Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time, The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, The Pressures of the Text, etc., peterrosepicture.com)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This year has already seen the publication of Toufic's Undying Love, or Love Dies (Post Apollo), a book that among other things unforgettably re-writes various versions of the Orpheus myth, as well as the release of a "revised and expanded" version of (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (also from Post Apollo), first published in 1993, and written for "mortals to death." (Vampires) is a sort of sequel to Toufic's 1991 debut Distracted, explicitly written for the living and here becoming what Toufic calls an "untimely collaboration" with the author of the original edition and of (Vampires) too. As one proceeds through the book's aphoristic prose paragraphs, very different eras and states of being seem to flow along and past one another and through the speaker's utterly unique sensibility. The book is thus not so much about what happens when Raymond Roussel repeats a sentence but changes billard (pool table) to pillard (plunderer), or about theories of the effects of "surpassing disaster" on cultures (including Jewish and Shi'ite) and literatures, or about reactions to how love, drunkenness and distraction are rendered by (and in) the deeply interconnected media of memory, film and language. Rather, the book records a kind of double or even multiple experience of these things (what Toufic elsewhere calls an "over-turn"), with eternal recurrence and total dissolution as its horizons. There is nothing else in literature like it.
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About the Author

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You (2005), 'Âshûrâ': This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009) and Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009). Several of his books are available for download at his website: jalaltoufic.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 134 pages
• Publisher: Tuumba Press; 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (January 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931157049
• ISBN-13: 978-1931157049
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,901,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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