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Sophia Tolstoy
By Alexandra Popoff. 2010
As Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia Tolstoy experienced both glory and condemnation during their forty-eight-year marriage. She was admired as the…
muse and literary assistant to one of the world’s most celebrated novelists. But when in later years Tolstoy became a towering public figure and founded a new brand of religion, she was scorned for her disagreements with him. And it is this version of Sophia—malicious, shrill, perennially at war with Tolstoy—that has gone down in the historical record. Drawing on newly available archival material, including Sophia’s unpublished memoir, Alexandra Popoff presents a dramatically different and accurate portrait of the woman and the marriage. This lively, well-researched biography demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, Sophia was remarkably supportive of Tolstoy and was, in fact, key to his fame. Gifted and versatile, Sophia assisted Tolstoy during the writing ofWar and PeaceandAnna Karenina. Having modeled his most memorable female characters on her, Tolstoy admired his wife’s boundless energy, which he called “the force of life. ” Sophia’s letters, never before translated, illuminate the couple’s true relationship and provide insights into Tolstoy’s creative laboratory. Although long portrayed as an elitist and hysterical countess, Sophia was in reality a practical, independent-minded, generous, and talented woman who shared Tolstoy’s important values and his capacity for work. Mother of thirteen, she participated in Tolstoy’s causes and managed all business a airs. Popoff describes in haunting detail the intrusion into their marriage by Tolstoy’s religious disciple Vladimir Chertkov, who controlled Tolstoy at the end of his life and led a smear campaign against Sophia, branding her evil and mad. She is still judged by Chertkov’s false accounts, which dismissed her valuable achievements and contributions. During his later religious phase, Tolstoy renounced his property and copyright, and Sophia had to become the breadwinner. She published Tolstoy’s collected works and supported their large family. Despite the pressures of her demanding life, she realized her own talents as a writer, photographer, translator, and aspiring artist This vigorous, engrossing biography presents in fascinating depth and detail the many ways in which Sophia Tolstoy enriched the life and work of one of the world’s most revered authors.Under the Table: Saucy Tales from Culinary School
By Katherine Darling. 2009
The Other Side: A Memoir
By Lacy M. Johnson. 2014
Lacy Johnson's rich and poetic memoir, The Other Side, chronicles her brutal kidnapping and imprisonment at the hands of an…
ex-boyfriend, her dramatic escape, and her hard-fought struggle to recover. Lacy Johnson bangs on the glass doors of a sleepy local police station in the middle of the night. Her feet are bare; her body is bruised and bloody; U-bolts dangle from her wrists. She has escaped, but not unscathed. The Other Side is the haunting account of a first passionate and then abusive relationship; the events leading to Johnson's kidnapping, rape, and imprisonment; her dramatic escape; and her hard-fought struggle to recover. At once thrilling, terrifying, harrowing, and hopeful, The Other Side offers more than just a true crime record. In language both stark and poetic, Johnson weaves together a richly personal narrative with police and FBI reports, psychological records, and neurological experiments, delivering a raw and unforgettable story of trauma and transformation.Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood
By A. J. Albany. 2003
Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of life at all too early an age, A.J. Albany…
guides us through dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood shadowy underbelly and beyond. A. J. Albany's recollection of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl's unsentimental education. Joe played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but between gigs he slipped into drug-induced obscurity. It was during these times that his daughter knew him best. After her mother disappeared, six-year-old Amy Jo and her charming, troubled father set up housekeeping in a seamy Hollywood hotel. While Joe finished a set in some red-boothed dive, chances were you'd find Amy curled up to sleep on someone's fur coat, clutching a 78 of Louis Armstrong's "Sugar Blues" or, later, a photograph of the man himself, inscribed, "To little Amy Jo, always in love with you--Pops." Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of Old Lady Life at all too early an age, A. J. Albany guides us through the dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood's shadowy underbelly and beyond. What emerges is a raw, gripping, and surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young girl trying to survive among the outcasts, misfits, and artists who surrounded her.El ángel que nos mira
By Thomas Wolfe, José Ferrer Aleu. 1983
William Oliver Gant, cuyos antepasados ??se habían asentado en Pennsylvania, había sido aprendiz de cantero. Se trasladó finalmente al Sur…
y, después de dos matrimonios, llegó a Altamont, pequeña ciudad de montaña que es el equivalente ficcional del Asheville natal del autor. Allí conoció a Eliza Pentland, que venía de una establecida y excéntrica familia de esa región.Después de un noviazgo formal se casó con ella. Incluso entonces, Gant era un hombre salvaje y exuberante, capaz de borracheras épicas y dueño de una vitalidad indomable. A finales del siglo XIX, con más de 50 años, concibió su último hijo. Con esta introducción extraña y retrospectiva se establecen las circunstancias de los primeros años de Eugene Grant y los eventos de su primera infancia se graban y cuentan extensamente.Unlikely Love Stories
By Mike Mccardell. 2012
These are stories of the defender of a handicapped parking spot, a woman who has delivered homemade Valentine cards to…
neighbours for twenty years, and love between a widower and a woman who had never been on a date before. They are the stories that never make front page headlines, but that Mike, with his keen eye for observation, reveals to be just as meaningful and important.With a rare gift for bringing out the magic in everyday situations, Mike turns the spotlight on all the little, seemingly insignificant things that make life fascinating. His touching stories resonate with simple truths about people and the world that we live in. Readers will laugh and cry as Mike's infectiously positive outlook exposes how life is good, no matter what you have. As much as his good-news TV reports have become a BC institution, his annual collections have become a Christmas tradition. With close to 70,000 copies sold, the books have contributed over $80,000 to Variety-The Children's Charity.Getting Real
By Gretchen Carlson. 2015
A candid, funny memoir from the charismatic FOX News channel anchor and Miss America Pageant winner Celebrity news anchorwoman Gretchen…
Carlson shares her inspiring story and offers important takeaways for women (and men) about what it means to strive for and find success in the real world. With warmth and wit, she takes readers from her Minnesota childhood, where she became a violin prodigy, through college at Stanford and her in-the-trenches years as a cub reporter on local television stations before becoming a national news reporter. She describes her rise to anchor of The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson on FOX News channel as a testament to personal strength and perseverance. Carlson addresses the intense competitive effort of winning the Miss America Pageant, the challenges she's faced as a woman in broadcast television, and how she manages to balance work and family as the wife of high-profile sports agent Casey Close and devoted mother to their two children. An unceasing advocate for respect and equality for women, Carlson writes openly about her own struggles with body image, pageant stereotypes, building her career, and having the courage to speak her mind. She encourages women to strive for their goals, never give up, and always believe in themselves. In Getting Real, Carlson emerges as a living example of a woman not afraid to chase her dreams and embrace life fully.Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond
By Larry Mcmurtry. 1999
McMurtry (Pulitzer prize-winning author) read Walter Benjamin's essay about the death of the oral tradition in a Texas Dairy Queen…
20 years prior to writing this book. Benjamin's essay serves as a springboard for McMurtry's examination of the lost art of storytelling, the meaning of reading, the death of the cowboy, and the significance of Texas' vast frontier. These are recollections of a cowboy childhood and McMurtry's eventual escape from the life of men and horses and into the culture of books. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Siete Voces
By Rita Guibert. 1974
Profundas y emotivas entrevistas personales por Rita Guibert a Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, Octavio Paz, Julio…
Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez y Guillermo Cabrera Infante. El premio Nobel de literatura fue otorgado a Pablo Neruda en 1971, Miguel Angel Asturias en 1967, Octavio Paz en 1990 y a Gabriel García Márquez en 1982.Deadlines
By Tom Hawthorn. 2012
For more than a decade, the Globe and Mail has featured comprehensive obituaries of notable British Columbians by columnist Tom…
Hawthorn. He recounts the lives of the recently departed in an engaging style, finding anecdotes to illuminate personality, giving voice to those who no longer have one. These stories are not about death, but about life in all its sad, funny, exhilarating complexity.Gathered here are the best, the funniest, the most memorable of the passing parade of characters who make life in British Columbia so remarkable. Here are athletes and authors, warriors and scholars, innovators and trailblazers.You will meet the boxer Baby Face and a wrestler known as Mean Gene; the yodeling cowboy singer Alberta Slim and a geologist called Professor Midas; the last living member of the RCMP posse that tracked down the Mad Trapper of Rat River and a demon barber whose preferred murder weapon was alcohol. You'll go tracking with the the Cougar Lady of Sechelt, lift weights with the World's Strongest Man, and wince from the blows of police truncheons used against labour leader Steve Brodie on Bloody Sunday, much of the blood spilled that day his own.You also will meet politicians of all stripes (including prison stripes).Hawthorn bids adieu to a panoply of characters in obits that are colourful and touching. The exuberance of his writing makes this book one of the great nonfiction reads of the season.Salinger
By David Shields, Shane Salerno. 1945
Based on eight years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than 200 people--and published in coordination with the…
international theatrical release of a major documentary film from the Weinstein Company--Salinger is a global cultural event: the definitive biography of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the twentieth century.For more than fifty years, the ever elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by a fundamental lack of access and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information. Salinger remains, astonishingly, an enigma. The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed. No longer. In the eight years since Salinger was begun, and especially in the three years since Salinger's death, the authors interviewed on five continents more than 200 people, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger's World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last fifty-six years of Salinger's life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to never-before-published photographs (more than 100 throughout the book), diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, readers will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger's meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.If You Could See Me Now
By Michael Mewshaw. 2006
When Michael Mewshaw receives a call from a stranger who says she has reason to believe he is her biological…
father, Mewshaw realizes he has been half dreading, half hoping for this to happen for over thirty years. Just like the young woman who wants to find the last piece to the puzzle of her life, he thinks it's possible that in the same process he will discover the answer to questions that have plagued him for decades. But first he has to make sure that she is who she claims to be.In this fascinating memoir, Mewhsaw confronts his own past, the chaos of his family, and complicated memories of the woman he once loved who went on to success as an ambassador, Under Secretary of State and a member of one of America's most influential families. His unusual role in the baby's birth, her adoption and, now, her search for her biological parents sets the stage for a revealing personal odyssey that offers a quest for identity and a journey of discovery, an obsession with recapturing the past and righting old wrongs, the constant potential for disappointment balanced against the possibility of redemption. As he finds his old flame and her old lover, rediscovering who he was and who he has become, he finds his life enriched in the process.The Uneasy Chair
By Wallace Stegner. 1988
Bernard Devoto was a wild intellectual from the Rocky Mountains, a rebel, iconolclast, and idealist who fled his stifling small…
town for teh intellectual freedom and community of Harvard. While he settled eastwrad in his career as a novelist, professor, editor, historian, and critic, he continued to love, to a point of passion, western openness, fgreedom, air, and society.National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and fellow westerner Wallace Stegner's life intersected with Devoto's many times, first by accident and later by friendship and example. They were kindred, both westerners by birth, upbringing, and demeanor, novelists by vocation, teachers by necessity, and historiuans and conservationists by a sheer compulsion inspired by the region that shaped them.Producing Women's Poetry, 1600-1730
By Gillian Wright. 2013
Producing Women's Poetry is the first specialist study to consider English-language poetry by women across the seventeenth and early eighteenth…
centuries. Gillian Wright explores not only the forms and topics favoured by women, but also how their verse was enabled and shaped by their textual and biographical circumstances. She combines traditional literary and bibliographical approaches to address women's complex use of manuscript and print and their relationships with the male-generated genres of the traditional literary canon, as well as the role of agents such as scribes, publishers and editors in helping to determine how women's poetry was preserved, circulated and remembered. Wright focuses on key figures in the emerging canon of early modern women's writing, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch, alongside the work of lesser-known poets Anne Southwell and Mary Monck, to create a new and compelling account of early modern women's literary history.Birth of a Bookworm
By Michel Tremblay, Sheila Fischman. 1994
In Birth of a Bookworm, Michel Tremblay takes the reader on a tour of the books that have had a…
formative influence on the birth and early development of his creative imagination; the physical and emotional world of his childhood is celebrated as the fertile ground on which his new, vivid way of seeing and imagining is built.Without You
By Anthony Rapp. 2006
Anthony Rapp captures the passion and grit unique to the theatre world as he recounts his life-changing experience in the…
original cast of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent. Anthony had a special feeling about Jonathan Larson's rock musical from his first audition, so he was thrilled when he landed a starring role as the filmmaker Mark Cohen. With his mom's cancer in remission and a reason to quit his newly acquired job at Starbucks, his life was looking up. When Rent opened to thunderous acclaim off Broadway, Rapp and his fellow cast members knew that something truly extraordinary had taken shape. But even as friends and family were celebrating the show's success, they were also mourning Jonathan Larson's sudden death from an aortic aneurysm. By the time Rent made its triumphant jump to Broadway, Larson had posthumously won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. When Anthony's mom began to lose her battle with cancer, he struggled to balance the demands of life in the theatre with his responsibility to his family. Here, Anthony recounts the show's magnificent success and his overwhelming loss. He also shares his first experiences discovering his sexuality, the tension it created with his mother, and his struggle into adulthood to gain her acceptance. Variously marked by fledgling love and devastating loss, piercing frustration and powerful enlightenment, Without You charts the course of Rapp's exhilarating journey with the cast and crew of Rent as well as the intimacies of his personal life behind the curtain.Mi libro enterrado
By Mauro Libertella. 2018
Relato autobiográfico sensible y equilibrado sobre la muerte de su padre, Héctor Libertella, escritor de culto e impulsor de un…
canon alternativo en la literatura argentina. En octubre de 2006 muere Héctor Libertella, escritor de culto de la literatura argentina y padre de Mauro Libertella. Cuatro años después el hijo escribe esta novela, que recuerda los últimos días de su padre y también los momentos fundamentales de la relación entre los dos. Mi libro enterrado enhebra así el hilo dorado de un vínculo filial. Como una caja de resonancias en miniatura, es al mismo tiempo una despedida, un réquiem, un homenaje, una canción desesperada y un texto que relata una entrada a la literatura: un libro sobre cómo se escribe un primer libro. Apoyado sobre un puñado de escenas de enorme impacto emocional, el autor genera una identificación instantánea. Ambientada en la Buenos Aires de fin de siglo, se puede leer, sin embargo, como una novela sobre cualquier padre en cualquier ciudad del mundo, dentro de la gran tradición de la literatura de duelo. La critica ha dicho... «Un libro conmovedor, no sólo por los hechos que narra sino por encontrar una voz propia, capaz de narrar esa miseria con una legibilidad encomiable. Un libro valiente e inolvidable.»Diego Zúñiga «Mauro narra el derrumbe de Héctor, su agonía, su muerte, su velatorio, su entierro, sin crudeza (porque la crudeza supondría efectismo) pero sin opacidad (porque la opacidad supondría afectación). Un registro notablemente auténtico, admirablemente honesto.»Martín Kohan «Un libro conmovedor en el mejor de los sentidos. Un homenaje íntimo, grave, lacónico.»Ignacio Echevarría «Este es un libro sobrio y muy bello, que no podría entenderse como ajuste de cuentas ni como un panegírico. Al momento de describir lo que hay en él, también brillan estas otras palabras, en necesario desorden, plenas, inevitables: nobleza y amor.»Alejandro ZambraReading Václav Havel
By David S. Danaher. 2015
As a playwright, a dissident, and a politician, Václav Havel was one of the most important intellectual figures of the…
late twentieth century. Working in an extraordinary range of genres - poetry, plays, public letters, philosophical essays, and political speeches - he left behind a range of texts so diverse that scholars have had difficulty grappling with his oeuvre as a whole.In Reading Václav Havel, David S. Danaher approaches Havel's remarkable body of work holistically, focusing on the language, images, and ideas which appear and reappear in the many genres in which Havel wrote. Carefully reading the original Czech texts alongside their English versions, he exposes what in Havel's thought has been lost in translation. A passionate argument for Havel's continuing relevance, Reading Václav Havel is the first book to capture the fundamental unity of his vast literary legacy.Peregrinaciones profanas
By Fernando Noy. 2018
Elegido Reina del célebre carnaval de Salvador Bahía, personaje central de la vida cultural argentina y animador gay inigualable de…
la escena under desde hace cuatro décadas, Fernando Noy cuenta todo en un libro imperdible donde conviven lo más granado de los habitués de los bares porteños de los 60 a las leyendas del tropicalismo. De Pizarnik a Caetano Veloso, de Mercedes Sosa a Tanguito, de Sumo a María Luisa Bemberg, Noy se ha convertido en el cronista más desenfadado de una historia que pedía a gritos su Homero. «¿Quién nos quita lo brillado?, se pregunta Fernando Noy y sigue el consejo de su amigo Pedro Lemebel que solía decirle, con sabiduría de Machi: 'No hables más, Noy: escríbelo'. Y finalmente lo hizo. Aquí están sus memorias, estas Peregrinaciones profanas, puro vértigo de purpurina, cemento y rincones donde el desamparo se convierte en jardín secreto. El propio nacimiento anunciado por la caída de un jinete mapuche; una cartografía del deseo suburbano con las locas del Oeste en los años 60; los náufragos hippies en flor; las temporadas en París o Bahía. Y, por supuesto, las amistades sagradas de Alejandra Pizarnik, Marosa Di Giorgio, María Luisa Bemberg, Batato Barea, Paco Jamandreu, Alejandro Urdapilleta y tantos más. Entre carnavales, lisergia y poetas, desfilan las deidades de Noy y él nos bendice con su misticismo afro-celta, sus túnicas y collares, su inefable paso andrógino que es maravilla, desafío y carcajada.»Mariana Enríquez «Cuando no existía la palabra queer la poeta, la vedette, la actriz, nuestro Fernando Noy, la estaba inventando. Lean estas memorias danzantes de la reina de la fiesta de la libertad y el arte.»Gabriela Cabezón Cámara «Sabíamos que Noy, poeta 24 horas, tenía el don de adelantarse al futuro. Ahora sabemos que es capaz de atravesar la memoria de su tiempo y recuperar un pasado por venir, impredecible, lleno de promesas.»Liliana Viola Noy va narrando un laberinto de encuentros increíbles, pero siempre reales. De la niñez patagónica a la adolescencia del yire hermafrodita con las locas del Oeste en los 60, a la fugaz militancia frustrada por su homosexualidad. El nacimiento alucinógeno y anfetamínico de venta libre en farmacias del hippismo se sobrexpone con el descubrimiento de la bohemia del Di Tella. La crónica de sus amistades son el índice onomástico de la Historia de la Cultura y el Espectáculo de la Argentina de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Cuando la Junta Militar prohibía los carnavales, Noy se coronaba reina en Bahía, donde se había exiliado. Trepado al árbol de un neuropsiquiátrico parisino donde había sido internado por tratar de recuperar "sus" joyas de faraona en medio de un viaje con drogas, ve llegar a Jackie O. y María Callas al hospital donde acababa de morir Aristóteles Onassis... Quien se anime a seguir, en estas páginas plagiadas a sí mismo, su incesante deambular, encontrará un mundo fantástico, sobreimpreso con purpurina, visible de noche. Y también para quienes buscan las claves de una fiesta eterna y compartida.Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers
By Edward Mendelson. 2015
A deeply considered and provocative new look at major American writers--including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and W.H. Auden--Edward Mendelson's Moral…
Agents is also a work of critical biography in the great tradition of Plutarch, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson. Any important writer, in Mendelson's view, writes in response to an idea of the good life that is inseparable from the life the writer lives. Fusing biography and criticism and based on extensive new research, Moral Agents presents challenging new portraits of eight writers--novelists, critics, and poets--who transformed American literature in the turbulent twentieth century. Eight sharply distinctive individuals--inspired, troubled, hugely ambitious--who reimagined what it means to be a writer. There's Saul Bellow, a novelist determined to rule as a patriarch, who, having been neglected by his father, in turn neglected his son in favor of young writers who presented themselves as his literary heirs. Norman Mailer's extraordinary ambition, suppressed insecurity, and renegade metaphysics muddled the novels through which he hoped to change the world, yet these same qualities endowed him with an uncanny sensitivity and deep sympathy to the pathologies of American life that make him an unequaled political reporter. William Maxwell wrote sad tales of small-town life and surrounded himself with a coterie of worshipful admirers. As a powerful editor at The New Yorker, he exercised an enormous and constraining influence on American fiction that is still felt today. Preeminent among the critics is Lionel Trilling, whose Liberal Imagination made him a celebrity sage of the anxiously tranquilized 1950s, even as his calculated image of Olympian reserve masked a deeply conflicted life and contributed to his ultimately despairing worldview. Dwight Macdonald, by contrast, was a haute-WASP anarchist and aesthete driven by an exuberant moral commitment, in a time of cautious mediocrity, to doing the right thing. Alfred Kazin, from a poor Jewish émigré background, remained an outsider at the center of literary New York, driven both to escape from and do justice to the deepest meanings of his Jewish heritage. Perhaps most intriguing are the two poets, W.H. Auden and Frank O'Hara. Early in his career, Auden was tempted to don the mantle of the poet as prophet, but after his move from England to America he lived and wrote in a spirit of modesty and charity born out of a deeply idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity. O'Hara, tireless partygoer and pioneering curator at MoMA, wrote much of his poetry for private occasions. Its lasting power has proven to be something different from its avant-garde reputation: personal warmth, individuality, rootedness in ancient traditions, and openness to the world.