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William Shakespeare: Great English Playwright & Poet
By Anna Carew-Miller. 2014
Few writers have had nearly the same effect on the English language as William Shakespeare. His plays and poems have…
been popular around the world for hundreds of years, long after Shakespeare himself had died. From Romeo & Juliet to Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote some of the most famous comedies and tragedies in history, stories both hilarious and horrible. Learn the story of one of the most important writers of all time in William Shakespeare: Great English Playwright & Poet.Emerson's Protégés
By Prof. David Dowling. 2014
In the late 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, lecturer, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, publicly called for…
a radical nationwide vocational reinvention, and an idealistic group of collegians eagerly responded. Assuming the role of mentor, editor, and promoter, Emerson freely offered them his time, financial support, and anti-materialistic counsel, and profoundly shaped the careers of his young acolytes--including Henry David Thoreau, renowned journalist and women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller, and lesser-known literary figures such as Samuel Ward and reckless romantic poets Jones Very, Ellery Channing, and Charles Newcomb. Author David Dowling's history of the professional and personal relationships between Emerson and his protégés--a remarkable collaboration that alternately proved fruitful and destructive, tension-filled and liberating--is a fascinating true story of altruism, ego, influence, pettiness, genius, and the bold attempt to reshape the literary market of the mid-nineteenth century.The Man from Essence
By Camille Cosby, Edward Lewis, Audrey Edwards. 2014
Essence magazine is the most popular, well respected, and largest circulated black women's magazine in history. Largely unknown is the…
remarkable story of what it took to earn that distinction.The Man from Essence depicts with candor and insight how Edward Lewis, CEO and publisher of Essence, started a magazine with three black men who would transform the lives of millions of black American women and alter the American marketplace. Throughout Essence's colorful and storied history, Ed Lewis remained the cool and constant presence, a quiet-talking corporate captain and business strategist who prevailed against the odds and the naysayers. He would emerge to become the last man standing--the only partner to survive the battles that raged before the magazine was sold to Time, Inc. in the largest buyout of a black-owned publication by the world's largest publishing company. By the time Lewis did the deal with Time, a little magazine that limped from the starting gate in 1970 with a national circulation of 50,000 had grown into a powerhouse with a circulation of more than a million and a pass along readership of eight million. The story of Essence is ultimately the story of American business, black style. From constant battles with a racist advertising community to hostile takeover attempts, warring partners packing heat, mass firings, and mass defections--all of which revealed inherent challenges in running a black business--the saga is as riveting as any thriller steeped in high drama, hijinks, and juicy dishing. In this engaging business memoir, Ed Lewis tells the inspiring story of how his own rise from humble South Bronx beginnings to media titan was shaped by the black women and men in his life. This in turn helped shape a magazine that has changed the face of American media.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.Mark Twain: A Life
By Ron Powers. 2005
Ron Powers's tour de force has been widely acclaimed as the best life and times, filled with Mark Twain's voice,…
and as a great American story.Samuel Clemens, the man known as Mark Twain, invented the American voice and became one of our greatest celebrities. His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.Signed, Sealed, Delivered
By Nina Sankovitch. 2014
The author of the much-admired Tolstoy and the Purple Chair goes on a quest through the history of letters and…
her own personal correspondence to discover and celebrate what is special about the handwritten letter. Witty, moving, enlightening, and inspiring, Signed, Sealed, Delivered begins with Nina Sankovitch's discovery of a trove of hundred year- old letters. The letters are in an old steamer trunk she finds in her backyard and include missives written by a Princeton freshman to his mother in the early 1900s. Nina's own son is heading off to Harvard, and she hopes that he will write to her, as the Princeton student wrote to his mother and as Nina wrote to hers. But times have changed. Before Nina can persuade her child of the value of letters, she must first understand for herself exactly what it is about letters that make them so significant--and just why she wants to receive letters from her son. Sankovitch sets off on a quest through the history of letter writing--from the ancient Egyptians to the medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise, from the letters received by President Lincoln after his son's death to the correspondence of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Sankovitch uncovers and defines the specific qualities that make letters so special, examining not only historical letters but also the letters in epistolary novels, her husband's love letters, and dozens more sources, including her son's brief reports from college on the weather and his allowance. In this beautifully written book, Nina Sankovitch reminds us that letters offer proof and legacy of what is most important in life: love and connection. In the end, she finds, the letters we write are even more important than the ones we wait for.The Struggle with the Daemon
By Eden Paul, Cedar Paul, Stefan Zweig. 1997
The Struggle with the Daemon is a brilliant analysis of the European psyche by the great novelist and biographer Stefan…
Zweig. Zweig studies three giants of German literature and thought: Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche - powerful minds whose ideas were at odds with the scientific positivism of their age; troubled spirits whose intoxicating passions drove them mad but inspired them to great works. In their struggle with their inner creative force, Zweig reflects the conflict at the heart of the European soul - between science and art, reason and inspiration.Both highly personal and philosophically wide-ranging, this is one of the most fascinating of Zweig's renowned biographical studies.From the Trade Paperback edition.The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo
By Paula Huntley. 2003
In August 2000, Paula Huntley's husband took a leave of absence from his teaching post at a law school, and…
she resigned from her marketing job of thirteen years. Huntley's husband had signed on with the American Bar Association to help rebuild Kosovo's legal system. Not quite sure how she could be of any service in a country that had suffered so much, Huntley found a position at a private school teaching English to a group of Kosovo Albanians. In this inspiring diary of her experiences in Kosovo, Huntley describes the deep friendships she formed with her students and the remarkable book club that they created . . . One day in a bookstore in Prishtina, Huntley stumbled upon a copy of Hemingway's Old Man and the Seaand-judging that it was just the right reading level and length--she made copies of it for the group. Despite lingering concerns that this quintessential American writer so notorious for his machismo might not resonate, the story of the old man's struggle to bring in his big fish touched them deeply. So deeply in fact that, though the group went on to read other great American writers, a name for their club was born: The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo. This book reveals both the fragility and strength of the human spirit. Neither a journalist nor a historian, Huntley describes her students' experiences during the war and the intimacy of the bond that she formed with them with a rare purity and directness. A vision of great hope, The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovoreveals the power of human connection to bring about healing in even the most war-torn circumstances.The Letters of Noel Coward
By Noel Coward, Barry Day. 2007
Lavishly illustrated and annotated, this first and definitive collection of letters to and from Coward provides a divine portrait of…
an age, from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond.The incomparable Noël Coward loved to correspond with friends, enemies, the famous and infamous, the talented and the powerful, including Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo, Laurence Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Lawrence of Arabia, Somerset Maugham, and many more. Granted unlimited access to the Coward archive, Barry Day presents many never-published letters and has unearthed new, startling evidence of Coward's wartime work as a spy. Along with 191 rare photographs, these letters bring to life the people and events that shaped the twentieth century--and a remarkable man who made his own indelible mark at the heart of it.From the Trade Paperback edition.Revertigo
By Floyd Skloot. 2014
One March morning, writer Floyd Skloot was inexplicably struck by an attack of unrelenting vertigo that ended 138 days later…
as suddenly as it had begun. With body and world askew, everything familiar had transformed. Nothing was ever still. Revertigo is Skloot’s account of that unceasingly vertiginous period, told in an inspired and appropriately off-kilter form. This intimate memoir#151;tenuous, shifting, sometimes humorous#151;demonstrates Skloot’s considerable literary skill honed as an award-winning essayist, memoirist, novelist, and poet. His recollections of a strange, spinning world prompt further musings on the forces of uncertainty, change, and displacement that have shaped him from childhood to late middle age, repeatedly knocking him awry, realigning his hopes and plans, even his perceptions. From the volatile forces of his mercurial, shape-shifting early years to his obsession with reading, acting, and writing, from the attack of vertigo to a trio of postvertigo (but nevertheless dizzying) journeys to Spain and England, and even to a place known only in his mother’s unhinged fantasies, Skloot makes sense of a life’s phantasmagoric unpredictability.Fear Itself
By Candida Lawrence. 2004
In light of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, the remarkable personal story that comprises…
Fear Itself becomes a cautionary tale.Unwittingly exposed to low-level radiation in the 1940s, Candida Lawrence has lived courageously with its effects throughout her life. Fear Itself traces her years struggling to have a child and her slow waking to the secrets that governments and institutions withheld from the women of her generation. The task for her-and for women who have shared her experience-has always been to believe herself into wholeness and to survive her losses and her illnesses until there is nothing left to fear. As always, Lawrence's writing is filled with smart, gentle anger, sweet sadness and the most private sense of what is vital and important.In Fear Itself, Lawrence's deeply felt remembrances grant us an honest account of what it is to live in an unstable world. It is a truly personal account that sheds wide light on the world's ongoing nuclear decisions.What personal life story could be more timely?Roughing It
By Mark Twain, Hamlin Hill. 1981
A fascinating picture of the American frontier emerges from Twain's fictionalized recollections of his experiences prospecting for gold, speculating in…
timber, and writing for a succession of small Western newspapers during the 1860s.Christmas in Plains: Memories
By Jimmy Carter, Amy Carter. 2001
Jimmy Carter remembers Christmas in Plains, Georgia, the source of spiritual strength, respite, friendship, and vacation fun in this charming…
portrait.In a beautifully rendered portrait, Jimmy Carter remembers the Christmas days of his Plains boyhood--the simplicity of family and community gift-giving, his father's eggnog, the children's house decorations, the school Nativity pageant, the fireworks, Luke's story of the birth of Christ, and the poignancy of his black neighbors' poverty. Later, away at Annapolis, he always went home to Plains, and during his Navy years, when he and Rosalynn were raising their young family, they spent their Christmases together recreating for their children the holiday festivities of their youth. Since the Carters returned home to Plains for good, they have always been there on Christmas Day, with only one exception in forty-eight years: In 1980, with Americans held hostage in Iran, Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Amy went by themselves to Camp David, where they felt lonely. Amy suggested that they invite the White House staff and their families to join them and to celebrate. Nowadays the Carters' large family is still together at Christmastime, offering each other the gifts and the lifelong rituals that mark this day for them. With the novelist's eye that enchanted readers of his memoir An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter has written another American classic, in the tradition of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory and Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.The Third Tower
By Antal Szerb, Len Rix. 1936
In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the…
coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna, to stand, fulfilling a lifelong dream, before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale.This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly, and at times painfully, up against an explosive present, producing some memorable observations on the social wonders and existential horrors of Mussolini's new Roman Imperium.From the Trade Paperback edition.Perfectly Miserable
By Sarah Payne Stuart. 2014
A wryly comic memoir that examines the pillars of New England WASP culture--class, history, family, money, envy, perfection, and, of…
course, real estate--through the lens of mothers and daughters. At eighteen, Sarah Payne Stuart fled her mother and all the other disapproving mothers of her too perfect hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, only to return years later when she had children of her own. Whether to defy the previous generation or finally earn their approval and enter their ranks, she hurled herself into upper-crust domesticity full throttle. In the twenty years Stuart spent back in her hometown--in a series of ever more magnificent houses in ever grander neighborhoods--she was forced to connect with the cultural tradition of guilt and flawed parenting of a long legacy of local, literary women from Emerson's wife, to Hawthorne's, to the most famous and imposing of them all, Louisa May Alcott's iconic, guilt-tripping Marmee. When Stuart's own mother dies, she realizes that there is no one left to approve or disapprove. And so, with her suddenly grown children fleeing as she herself once did, Stuart leaves her hometown for the final time, bidding good-bye to the cozy ideals invented for her by Louisa May Alcott so many years ago, which may or may not ever have been based in reality.A Journey Into Flaubert's Normandy
By Susannah Patton. 2006
Richly illustrated with maps, historical and contemporary photographs, and period artwork, this guidebook takes tourists and armchair travelers on a…
stimulating journey through the small towns, rolling hills, and windswept coast of Flaubert's Normandy. The novelist's homes and the locations that are prominently featured in his controversial works are the focus of this pictorial travel guide, and include the ancient town of Rouen, where Flaubert was born in 1821; the resort town of Trouville and its frequently painted beach; Croisset, where Flaubert's riverside house gave him the refuge to write; and the quiet country town of Ry, which claims to be where the real Madame Bovary lived and died.In the Hot Zone
By Kevin Sites. 2007
Kevin Sites is a man on a mission. Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a…
video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity. Personally, Sites will come to discover that the greatest danger he faces may not be from bombs and bullets, but from the unsettling power of the truth.Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century
By Hilary Fraser. 2014
This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates…
the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.Gun, Needle, Spoon
By Patrick O'Neil. 2015
This memoir follows a punk rock pioneer on his slide into drug abuse and life as an armed robber, all…
the way through life in recovery and what it's like to look back on those times, knowing all the while that he is still under the threat of three strikes, a twenty-five-to-life prison sentence waiting. He has no choice but to deal with it all drug free.During punk rock's heyday, Patrick O'Neil worked at the San Francisco's legendary Mabuhay Gardens. He went on to become the road manager for Dead Kennedys and Flipper, as well as T.S.O.L. and the Subhumans. He holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles.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.