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    The Ruins of My Daughter's Cities: An Imaginary Travelogue
    The Ruins of My Daughter's Cities: An Imaginary Travelogue
    The Ruins of My Daughter's Cities: An Imaginary Travelogue
    Ebook191 pages3 hours

    The Ruins of My Daughter's Cities: An Imaginary Travelogue

    By David Keffer

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    About this ebook

    Two well-loved books by Italo Calvino are “Invisible Cities” and “Cosmicomics”. In the former, Marco Polo regales Kublai Khan with descriptions, both profound and fanciful, of imagined cities that lie within the emperor’s vast domain. In the latter, Calvino develops short stories based on absurdly literal interpretations and explanations of scientific theories, past and present. “The Ruins of My Daughter’s Cities” is an amalgamation of both techniques. Inside the reader will find descriptions of cities that exist only in the imagination, created solely as a means of providing an explanation for the convoluted psychology of the relationship between a father and daughter.

    The description of each city is preceded by a short recounting of an episode of the daughter’s behavior that proves utterly outside the father’s ability to comprehend. Together, father and daughter then visit an imaginary city related to this event, which helps the father better understand the behavior. The destinations include such cities as the City of Noodles, the City of Drills, the City of Lost, Younger Brothers, the City of Wild and Meaningless Gesticulation and, let us not forget, the capital City of Ambiguous Anxieties.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Keffer
    Release dateJun 17, 2013
    ISBN9781301217595
    The Ruins of My Daughter's Cities: An Imaginary Travelogue
    Author

    David Keffer

    David J. Keffer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He pursued a technical education earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. After a year as a post-doctoral scholar at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he began his career as an engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he remains today. He has published about 100 technical papers in archival journals. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant to learn and to teach about sustainability in Seoul, Korea.Outside of engineering, David Keffer studied world literature and creative writing. He has published analytical articles on the works of Primo Levi and Kobo Abé. He created various reading aids to several classical Chinese novels. Over the past two decades, David Keffer has been active writing novels, poetry and stories. Several novels and illustrated stories are available from the Poison Pie Publishing House at http://www.poisonpie.com.Beginning in 2012, David Keffer began teaching a course on the subject of non-idiomatic improvisational music, of which he is a devoted listener and a topic which has led aided him on an investigation of a literature of non-idiomatic improvisation.David Keffer lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with his wife, Lynn, and two children. As a family, they enjoy hiking through the local mountains and are always on the look-out for poison pie and other ambivalent mushrooms that dot the landscape.

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      The Ruins of My Daughter's Cities - David Keffer

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