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Showing 3181 - 3200 of 7088 items
By Nickole Brown. 2015
An "unleashed love song" to her late grandmother, Nickole Brown's collection brings her brassy, bawdy, tough-as-new-rope grandmother to life. With…
hair teased to Jesus, mile-long false eyelashes, and a white Cadillac Eldorado with atomic-red leather seats, Fanny is not your typical granny rocking in a chair. Instead, think of a character that looks a lot like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but darkened with a shadow of Flannery O'Connor. A cross-genre collection that reads like a novel, this book is both a collection of oral history and a lyrical and moving biography that wrestles with the complexities of the South, including poverty, racism, and domestic violence."Nickole Brown's unleashed love song to her grandmother is raucous and heart-rending, reflective and slap-yo-damn-knee hilarious, a heady meld of lyrical line and life lesson. Brown is blessed to be blood-linked to such a shrewd and singular soul, and the poet's mix of monologue, myth, and unbridled mayhem paints a picture of a proper Southern lady who is just--well, unforgettable." --Patricia Smith"In Fanny Says, Nickole Brown distills the whole of America into one woman: bawdy, loving, racist, battered, healed, and gorgeous with determination. Our country has no history that does not touch the South. Our divisions are our unions. Here, Brown unleashes a voice returned to teach us a lesson. Reader, fair warning: you can't hide from Fanny. You will be changed by this book." --Rebecca Gayle HowellBy Langdon Hammer. 2015
Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926-95), whose life is surely one of…
the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son's life. Wounded by his parents' bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of those powerful parents. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS. Above all, it is the story of a brilliantly gifted, fiercely dedicated poet working every day to turn his life into art. After college at Amherst and a period of adventure in Europe, Merrill returned to the New York art world of the 1950s (he was friendly with W. H. Auden, Maya Deren, Truman Capote, Larry Rivers, Elizabeth Bishop, and other midcentury luminaries) and began publishing poems, plays, and novels. In 1953, he fell in love with an aspiring writer, David Jackson. They explored "boys and bars" as they made their life together in Connecticut and later in Greece and Key West. At the same time, improbably, they carried on a forty-year conversation with spirits of the Other World by means of a Ouija board. The board became a source of poetic inspiration for Merrill, culminating in his prizewinning, uncanny, one-of-a-kind work The Changing Light at Sandover. In his virtuosic poetry and in the candid letters and diaries that enrich every page of this deliciously readable life, Merrill created a prismatic art of multiple perspectives and comic self-knowledge, expressing hope for a world threatened by nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Holding this life and art together in a complex, evolving whole, Hammer illuminates Merrill's "chronicles of love & loss" and the poignant personal journey they record.From the Hardcover edition.By Mary Meigs. 1987
The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary…
Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother's death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. In the course of reading her family's letters and her mother's early diaries, she no longer saw her parents as Mother and Father but as Margaret and Edward, young and vulnerable: Margaret who flirted, Edward who waited ten years to propose marriage. Meigs saw aspects of them that made them and their parents more fully real to her than they had been in life. She has woven the diaries and letters together with a narrative that integrates her discoveries with her memories as a daughter and granddaughter. The result is a moving portrait of a family that was protected by another kind of box closet--that of privilege and of moral certitude--with opaque walls that shut out most of the world. It was, in her father's words, "the easy sheltered life," which is so hard for "good" people to escape from.By Grant Lawrence. 2010
From Captain George Vancouver to Muriel "Curve of Time" Blanchet to Jim "Spilsbury's Coast" Spilsbury, visitors to Desolation Sound have…
left behind a trail of books endowing the area with a romantic aura that helps to make it British Columbia's most popular marine park. In this hilarious and captivating book, CBC personality Grant Lawrence adds a whole new chapter to the saga of this storied piece of BC coastline.Young Grant's father bought a piece of land next to the park in the 1970s, just in time to encounter the gun-toting cougar lady, left-over hippies, outlaw bikers and an assortment of other characters. In those years Desolation Sound was a place where going to the neighbours' potluck meant being met with hugs from portly naked hippies and where Russell the Hermit's school of life (boating, fishing, and rock 'n' roll) was Grant's personal Enlightenment-an influence that would take him away from the coast to a life of music and journalism and eventually back again.With rock band buddies and a few cases of beer in tow, an older, cooler Grant returns to regale us with tales of "going bush," the tempting dilemma of finding an unguarded grow-op, and his awkward struggle to convince a couple of visiting kayakers that he's a legit CBC radio host while sporting a wild beard and body wounds and gesticulating with a machete. With plenty of laugh-out-loud humour and inspired reverence, Adventures in Solitude delights us with the unique history of a place and the growth of a young man amidst the magic of Desolation Sound.By Herbert R. Lottman. 1997
When Albert Camus died in a car crash in January 1960 he was only 46 years old - already a…
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a world figure - author of the enigmatic The Stranger, the fable called The Plague, but also of the combative The Rebel - which attacked the 'politically correct' among his con-temporaries.Thanks to his early literary achievement, his work for the under-ground newspaper Combat and his editorship of that daily in its Post-Liberation incarnation, Camus' voice seemed the conscience of postwar France. But it was a very personal voice that rejected the conventional wisdom, rejected ideologies that called for killing in the cause of justice. His call for personal responsibility will seem equally applicable today, when Camus' voice is silent and has not been replaced. The secrecy which surrounded Algerian-born Camus' own life, public and private - a function of illness and psychological self-defense in a Paris in which he still felt himself a stranger - seemed to make the biographer's job impossible.Lottman's Albert Camus was the first and remains the definitive biography - even in France. On publication it was hailed by New York Times reviewer John Leonard: "What emerges from Mr. Lottman's tireless devotions is a portrait of the artist, the outsider, the humanist and skeptic, that breaks the heart." In The New York Times Book Review British critic John Sturrock said: "Herbert Lottman's life (of Camus) is the first to be written, either in French or English, and it is exhaustive, a labor of love and of wonderful industry." When the book appeared in London Christopher Hitchens in New Statesman told British readers: "Lottman has written a brilliant and absorbing book... The detail and the care are extra-ordinary... Now at last we have a clear voice about the importance of liberty and the importance of being concrete."The new edition by Gingko Press includes a specially written preface by the author revealing the challenges of a biographer, of some of the problems that had to be dealt with while writing the book and after it appeared.By Renee Rodin. 2010
Composed of autobiographical stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of a memoir, Subject to Change is a series…
of portraits along the road of a life well-lived. These stories are articulate, intelligent, passionate records of how encounters with others have changed and shaped the humanity, character and community - the "subject" - of the writer.By J. C. Hallman. 2015
A funny, frisky, often outrageous book about love, literature, and modern life--and a wink of the eye toU and I,…
Nicholson Baker's classic book about John Updike--by an award-winning author called "wonderfully bright" by The New York Times Book Review.Nearly twenty-five years ago, Nicholson Baker published U and I, the fretful and handwringing--but also groundbreaking--tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U and I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging, entertaining writing about reading, but what no story of this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of conception, that moment when you realize that there is a writer out there in the world that you must read--so you read them. B & Me is that story, the story of J.C. Hallman discovering and reading Nicholson Baker, and discovering himself in the process. Our relationship to books in the digital age, the role of art in an increasingly commodified world, the power great writing has to change us, these are at the core of Hallman's investigation of Baker--questions he's grappled with, values he's come to doubt. But in reading Baker's work, Hallman discovers the key to overcoming the malaise that has been plaguing him, through the books themselves and what he finds and contemplates in his attempts to understand them and their enigmatic author: sex, book jackets, an old bed and breakfast, love, Monica Lewinsky, Paris, marriage, more sex, the logistics of libraries. In the spirit of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage and Elif Batuman's The Possessed, B & Me is literary self-archaeology: a funny, irreverent, incisive story of one reader's desperate quest to restore passion to literature, and all the things he learns along the way.By Zachary Leader. 2015
For much of his adult life, Saul Bellow was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of, among other…
awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature, three National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Life of Saul Bellow, by the literary scholar and biographer Zachary Leader, marks the centenary of Bellow's birth as well as the tenth anniversary of his death. It draws on unprecedented access to Bellow's papers, including much previously restricted material, as well as interviews with more than 150 of the novelist's relatives, close friends, colleagues, and lovers, a number of whom have never spoken to researchers before. Through detailed exploration of Bellow's writings, and the private history that informed them, Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist's development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities--as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, Jew, American. The biography will be published in two volumes. The first volume, To Fame and Fortune: 1915-1964, traces Bellow's Russian roots; his birth and early childhood in Quebec; his years in Chicago; his travels in Mexico, Europe, and Israel; the first three of his five marriages; and the novels from Dangling Man and The Adventures of Augie March to the best-selling Herzog. New light is shed on Bellow's fellow writers, including Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Roth, and on his turbulent and influential life away from the desk, which was as full of incident as his fiction. Bellow emerges as a compelling character, and Leader's powerful accounts of his writings, published and unpublished, forward the case for his being, as the critic James Wood puts it, "the greatest of American prose stylists in the twentieth century."By Lynn Darling. 2014
A powerful, lyrical memoir of self-discovery full of warmth and wry humor--a book that combines the soul-baring insight of Wild,…
the profound wisdom of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the ad venturous spirit of Eat, Pray, LoveWhen her college-bound daughter leaves home, Lynn Darling, widowed more than a decade earlier, finds herself alone and utterly lost. Freed of her parental responsibilities, she has no idea what she wants or even who she is. Searching for answers, she leaves her apartment in New York City and moves to a cranky little house in the middle of the Vermont woods, her only companions, a new dog and a compass. There she hopes to develop a sense of direction--both in the woods and in her life.As she finds new ways to get lost in her own backyard, Darling meditates on her past and on the challenges that aging poses to love, work--not to mention fashion--and the way she sees herself. She has just begun to chart a new course for the future when an unexpected setback unsettles her newfound balance.With rare insight and remarkable honesty, Out of the Woods reveals how honing the skills of navigation--literal and metaphorical--smoothed one woman's path through the uneven course of life. It is a story at once universal and deeply personal--in the words of writer Geraldine Brooks, "both a compass and a manifesto for navigating the often-treacherous switchbacks of the second half of life."By Robert D. Denham. 2015
Northrop Frye's Uncollected Prose, which features twenty-one pieces in the form of notes, prefaces, reviews, and talks, is the latest…
addition to the impressive body of writing by and about Frye. Among the highlights of the collection are Frye's "Notes on Romance," written in preparation for the lectures that eventually became The Secular Scripture; a newly discovered early notebook, parts of which may date from his second year as an undergraduate at Victoria College; and a pair of previously unavailable interviews. Expertly introduced by Robert D. Denham, one of the leading editors of Frye's papers, Northrop Frye's Uncollected Prose offers valuable insight into Frye's early life, his research methodology, and thought process, and is further proof of the remarkable depth and range of his work.By Patricia Morrisroe. 2015
A funny, poignant coming-of-age memoir told through the shoes that she wore. From baby booties to orthopedic brogues (and all…
the high and low heels in between) shoes mark important rites of passage, reminding us of both the good and bad times: the road not taken, the prince that got away, the missed opportunities, the traveling, the fun. Most of all, they bring to mind the people we've loved and sometimes lost along the way.Combining tidbits of cultural history, Morrisroe chronicles her life as a bullied Catholic schoolgirl in "Moby Dick" brogues; a besotted college student in granny boots; an aspiring journalist in Annie Hall oxfords; a skeptical bride in her first Manolos; a reluctant fashionista in towering peep-toe pumps; and a concerned daughter, whose elderly mother hoped that her New Balance sneakers would help her regain her old balance. With wit and compassion, she introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters, from her grandfather, who treated the family to legendary foot rubs, to her husband, whose vast collection of vintage Puma sneakers threatened to overwhelm their apartment and derail their marriage.Morrisroe's "coming-of-age" is, at its heart, the story of a generation of women who've enjoyed a world of freedom and opportunity that was unthinkable to their mothers. Spanning five decades and countless footwear trends, 9 ½ Narrow is, like Love, Loss and What I Wore, about how we remember important events through a coat, or a dress, or in this case, a Beatle boot or Confirmation "wedgie." With her charming sense of humor and irresistible voice, Morrisroe not only recounts her own story but also everywoman's. Funny, candid and unexpectedly poignant, 9 ½ Narrow is about how we grow up, grow older, and finally grow into our own shoes.By Susan Cheever. 2014
From the author of American Bloomsbury ("Beguiling" --Publishers Weekly), Louisa May Alcott ("Fascinating . . . Another splendid piece of…
work with hidden depths by Susan Cheever"--Michael Korda), and Home Before Dark ("Moving and brilliantly restrained"--The New York Times Book Review), a major reassessment of the life and work of the novelist, painter, and playwright considered to be one of America's preeminent twentieth-century poets, our generation's beloved heretic. At the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-eight, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States. E. E. Cummings was and remains controversial. He has been called "a master" (Malcolm Cowley); "hideous" (Edmund Wilson). James Dickey called him a "daringly original poet with more vitality and more sheer uncompromising talent than any other living American writer." In Susan Cheever's rich, illuminating biography we see Cummings's idyllic childhood years in a mythic part of Cambridge, Massachusetts (the Cummings house was within calling distance of Harvard professor William James, who first introduced Cummings's parents); his Calvinist father--distinguished Harvard professor and sternly religious minister of the Cambridge Congregational Church; his mother--loving, attentive, a source of encouragement, the aristocrat of the family, from Unitarian writers, judges, and adventurers. We see Cummings--slight, agile, playful, a product of a nineteenth-century New England childhood, bred to be flinty and determined; his love of nature ("here my enormous smallness entered Her illimitable being"); his sense of fun, laughter, mimicry; his desire from the get-go to stand conventional wisdom on its head, which he himself would often do, literally, to amuse. At Harvard, he roomed with John Dos Passos; befriended Lincoln Kirstein; read Latin, Greek, and French; earned two degrees; discovered alcohol, fast cars, and burlesque at the Old Howard Theater; and raged against the school's conservative, exclusionary upper-class rule by A. Lawrence Lowell. In Cheever's book we see that beneath Cummings's blissful, golden childhood the strains of sadness and rage were already at play. He grew into a dark young man and set out on a lifelong course of rebellion against conventional authority and the critical establishment, devouring the poetry of Ezra Pound, whose radical verses pushed Cummings away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem toward a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We see that Cummings's self-imposed exile from Cambridge--a town he'd come to hate for its intellectualism, Puritan uptightness ("the Cambridge ladies," he wrote, "who live in furnished souls"), racism, and self-righteous xenophobia--seemed necessary for him as a man and a poet. Headstrong and cavalier, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, working alongside Hemingway, Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford . . . his ongoing stand against the imprisonment of his soul taking a literal turn when he was held in a makeshift prison for "undesirables and spies," an experience that became the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room, of which F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "Of all the work by young men since 1920--one book survives." We follow Cummings as he permanently flees to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day--Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas--and we see the development of both the poet and his work against the backdrop of modernism and through the influences of his contemporaries: Stein, Amy Lowell, Joyce, and Pound.Cheever's fascinating book gives us the evolution of an artist whose writing was at the forefront of what was new and daring and bold in an America in transition.(With 28 pages of black-and-white images.)From the Hardcover edition.By Brad Herzog. 2010
"Turn Left at the Trojan Horse had me howling with laughter and nodding at the razor-sharp observation." --Tahir Shah, author…
of The Caliph's House"Go away. Figure it out," she was saying. "Don't come back until you do." She looked at the calendar. "You have thirty-one days."With these words, like Helen of Troy launching a thousand ships across the Aegean, Brad Herzog's wife launched a Winnebago Aspect onto the open road.A modern-day Odysseus in Kerouac clothing, Brad Herzog plunges into a solo cross-country search for insight. With middle age bearing down on him, he takes stock: How has he measured up to his own youthful aspirations? In contemporary America, what is a life well lived? What is a heroic life? From the foothills of Washington's Mount Olympus, through the forgotten corners of America, and finally to his college reunion in Ithaca, New York, Brad shares his personal odyssey. Stopping in classically named towns, he meets everyday heroes, including a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Troy, Oregon;a modern-day hobo in Iliad, Montana;and a bomb-squad soldier in Sparta, Wisconsin. These encounters and Brad's effortlessly infused musings make for an exciting, one-of-a-kind ride. "A truly epic journey."--A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically"As we sit in Herzog's passenger seat, we cannot help but stare out the window and even see our own reflection in the glass."--Liz Robbins, author of A Race Like No OtherBrad Herzog lives on California's Monterey Peninsula with his wife and their two sons. He has been described as a "modern-day Steinbeck" and a "Picasso of the Winnebago," and Lonely Planet has ranked his travel memoirs among eight classics of the genre, along with books like Travels with Charley and On the Road. As an award-winning freelance writer, he has chronicled some of the nation's most unusual and intriguing subcultures, from nudists to North Pole explorers and from Pez collectors to pro mini golfers.By James Grissom. 2015
An extraordinary book; one that almost magically makes clear how Tennessee Williams wrote; how he came to his visions of…
Amanda Wingfield, his Blanche DuBois, Stella Kowalski, Alma Winemiller, Lady Torrance, and the other characters of his plays that transformed the American theater of the mid-twentieth century; a book that does, from the inside, the almost impossible--revealing the heart and soul of artistic inspiration and the unwitting collaboration between playwright and actress, playwright and director.At a moment in the life of Tennessee Williams when he felt he had been relegated to a "lower artery of the theatrical heart," when critics were proclaiming that his work had been overrated, he summoned to New Orleans a hopeful twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written an unsolicited letter to the great playwright asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on the playwright's behalf to find out if he, Tennessee Williams, or his work, had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him, those who had led him to what he called the blank page, "the pale judgment." Among the more than seventy giants of American theater and film Grissom sought out, chief among them the women who came to Williams out of the fog: Lillian Gish, tiny and alabaster white, with enormous, lovely, empty eyes ("When I first imagined a woman at the center of my fantasia, I . . . saw the pure and buoyant face of Lillian Gish. . . . [She] was the escort who brought me to Blanche") . . . Maureen Stapleton, his Serafina of The Rose Tattoo, a shy, fat little girl from Troy, New York, who grew up with abandoned women and sad hopes and whose job it was to cheer everyone up, goad them into going to the movies, urge them to bake a cake and have a party. ("Tennessee and I truly loved each other," said Stapleton, "we were bound by our love of the theater and movies and movie stars and comedy. And we were bound to each other particularly by our mothers: the way they raised us; the things they could never say . . . The dreaming nature, most of all") . . . Jessica Tandy ("The moment I read [Portrait of a Madonna]," said Tandy, "my life began. I was, for the first time . . . unafraid to be ruthless in order to get something I wanted") . . . Kim Stanley . . . Bette Davis . . . Katharine Hepburn . . . Jo Van Fleet . . . Rosemary Harris . . . Eva Le Gallienne ("She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper") . . . Julie Harris . . . Geraldine Page ("A titanic talent") . . . And the men who mattered and helped with his creations, including Elia Kazan, José Quintero, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud . . . James Grissom's Follies of God is a revelation, a book that moves and inspires and uncannily catches that illusive "dreaming nature."From the Hardcover edition.By Donald Hall. 2008
Donald Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where as…
the doted-upon son of dramatically thwarted parents he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious. " Hall eloquently writes of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writingan endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful, formative days at Exeter are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard and in the post-war university scene at Oxford. After a failed first marriage Hall meets and marries Jane Kenyon, and the two poets return to Eagle Pond. Fittingly, the family home that loomed large in Hall's childhood is where he grows old, and at eighty learns finally "to live in the momentas you have been told to do all your life. " Unpacking the Boxes is a revelatory and tremendously poignant memoir of one man's life in poetry.By Mike Feder. 2001
As a kid growing up in Queens, Mike Feder identified with Scheherazade of The Thousand and One Nights: "The idea…
of someone having to tell a new tale every night to prevent their head getting chopped off seemed sadly familiar to me." Back then, the author's audience was his mentally ill mother, who used to stay in the house all day with the shades drawn, and then insist that her son tell her stories so that she might vicariously experience the world outside. Eventually she committed suicide, and Feder grew up to be a relentless, comic storyteller on the radio. The Talking Cure tells the story of his ridiculous jobs, first failed marriage, the string of psychiatrists, and the misery of reluctant fatherhood; throughout he maintains a kind of bizarre balancing act--hilariousness and deep seriousness, conventionality and strangeness. An ironist and a comic, Feder looks unflinchingly at his own foibles and frailties, enabling him to connect to other people's stories. The reader emerges from this book with a sense of forgiveness for the human condition, and awe at the mystery of human life. Deeply funny, and at the same time breathtakingly dark, this is a book to provoke, amuse and, in some strange way, reassure: God loves a challenge.By Tewodros Fekadu. 2012
"An affirmation of life and the indestructibility of one man's will to make the most of it."-Ian Wynne, author of…
The Pawn and Shadows by My Side, former editor of Human Rights Defender, Amnesty InternationalBorn in the midst of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Civil War, Tewodros "Teddy" Fekadu survives abandonment and famine as his family flings him unwanted across borders and regions, into orphanages, and finally onto the streets of Addis Ababa. Spanning five countries and three continents, the Catholic Church, and Japanese detention centers, this is a tale of defiance and triumph, and also of family love-unacknowledged by his wealthy father, abandoned by his desperately poor mother, Teddy is nurtured along the way by staunch individuals despite his ambiguous place in rigid family tradition: his father's mother, a maternal aunt, a Catholic priest, and even his father's wife.In 2003, after three years in a Japanese detention center, Tewodros "Teddy" Fekadu won a hard-fought immigration battle, and his visa to Australia was approved. He now resides on the Gold Coast, where he founded an association that shares African traditions and heritage through performance and educational programs. He also works with organizations to resettle African refugees to the Gold Coast. He is an inspirational speaker, presenting to such diverse audiences as adoptive families, human rights groups, and East African immigrants. Tewodros' company, Moonface Entertainment, produces films and documentaries on East Africa. He regularly returns to Africa to shoot footage for his projects, and travels to the United States to promote his work.By Gary Cartwright. 2000
Whether the subject is Jack Ruby, Willie Nelson, or his own leukemia-stricken son Mark, when it comes to looking at…
the world through another person's eyes, nobody does it better than Gary Cartwright. For over twenty-five years, readers of Texas Monthly have relied on Cartwright to tell the stories behind the headlines with pull-no-punches honesty and wry humor. His reporting has told us not just what's happened over the last three decades in Texas, but, more importantly, what we've become as a result. This book collects seventeen of Cartwright's best Texas Monthly articles from the 1980s and 1990s, along with a new essay, "My Most Unforgettable Year," about the lasting legacy of the Kennedy assassination. He ranges widely in these pieces, from the reasons for his return to Texas after a New Mexican exile to profiles of Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. Along the way, he strolls through San Antonio's historic King William District; attends a Dallas Cowboys old-timers reunion and the Holyfield vs. Foreman fight; visits the front lines of Texas' new range wars; gets inside the heads of murderers, gamblers, and revolutionaries; and debunks Viagra miracles, psychic surgery, and Kennedy conspiracy theories. In Cartwright's words, these pieces all record "the renewal of my Texas-ness, a rediscovery of Texas after returning home. " Gary Cartwright is a Senior Editor at Texas Monthly in Austin.By Jordan Stump, Marie Ndiaye. 2014
It seems there is no genre of writing Marie NDiaye will not make her own. Asked to write a memoir,…
she turned in this paranoid fantasia of rising floodwaters, walking corpses, eerie depictions of her very own parents, and the incessant reappearance of women in green. Just who are these green women? They are powerful (one was NDiaye's disciplinarian grade-school teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost and may be visible only to the author). They are seductive (one stole a friend's husband). And they are unbearably personal (one is NDiaye's own mother). They are all, in their way, aspects of their creator, at once frightening, menacing, and revealing of everything submerged within the consciousness of this singular literary talent. A courageous, strikingly honest, and unabashedly innovative self-portrait, NDiaye's kaleidoscopic look at the women in green is a revelation to us all - about how we form our identities, how we discover those things we repress, and how our obsessions become us.By A. M. Klein, Zailig Pollock, Usher Caplan. 1994
Much of A.M. Klein's finest prose is to be found in the mass of uncompleted work that he abandoned at…
the time of his breakdown, and that became accessible only when his papers were deposited in the National Archives. Notebooks offers a generous selection of this work, revealing previously unsuspected facets of Klein's character and artistry.The fiction, criticism, and memoirs collected here focus on Klein's exploration of the role of the artist. The works illuminate crucial periods of his career, especially the early 1940s, when he was transforming himself into a modernist, and the early 1950s, when he was struggling to overcome the misgivings about his art that were to lead to his final breakdown.The semi-autobiographical text which Klein referred to as 'Raw Material' and the unfinished novel of prison life entitled 'Stranger and Afraid' cast a new light on Klein's often frustrating relationship with the Montreal Jewish community. In 'Marginalia' he discusses poetic form and technique and makes observations on the nature of poetry, thereby providing insights into his own concerns as a writer. In 'The Golem,' a profoundly ambiguous treatment of the act of creation, a self-portrait emerges of a storyteller who has lost faith in the power and value of his story. The volume includes a critical introduction, that places the material in the context of Klein's other works, as well as textual and explanatory notes.