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Montaigne: A Life
By Steven Rendall, Lisa Neal, Philippe Desan. 2017
One of the most important writers and thinkers of the Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) helped invent a literary genre…
that seemed more modern than anything that had come before. But did he do it, as he suggests in his Essays, by retreating to his chateau, turning his back on the world, and stoically detaching himself from his violent times? In this definitive biography, Philippe Desan, one of the world's leading authorities on Montaigne, overturns this longstanding myth by showing that Montaigne was constantly concerned with realizing his political ambitions—and that the literary and philosophical character of the Essays largely depends on them. The most comprehensive and authoritative biography of Montaigne yet written, this sweeping narrative offers a fascinating new picture of his life and work.As Desan shows, Montaigne always considered himself a political figure and he conceived of each edition of the Essays as an indispensable prerequisite to the next stage of his public career. He lived through eight civil wars, successfully lobbied to be raised to the nobility, and served as mayor of Bordeaux, special ambassador, and negotiator between Henry III and Henry of Navarre. It was only toward the very end of Montaigne’s life, after his political failure, that he took refuge in literature. But, even then, it was his political experience that enabled him to find the right tone for his genre.In this essential biography, we discover a new Montaigne—caught up in the events of his time, making no separation between private and public life, and guided by strategy first in his words and silences. Neither candid nor transparent, but also not yielding to the cynicism of his age, this Montaigne lends a new depth to the Montaigne of literary legend.Lydia Ginzburg's Prose
By Emily Van Buskirk. 1991
The Russian writer Lydia Ginzburg (1902-90) is best known for her Notes from the Leningrad Blockade and for influential critical…
studies, such as On Psychological Prose, investigating the problem of literary character in French and Russian novels and memoirs. Yet she viewed her most vital work to be the extensive prose fragments, composed for the desk drawer, in which she analyzed herself and other members of the Russian intelligentsia through seven traumatic decades of Soviet history. In this book, the first full-length English-language study of the writer, Emily Van Buskirk presents Ginzburg as a figure of previously unrecognized innovation and importance in the literary landscape of the twentieth century.Based on a decade's work in Ginzburg's archives, the book discusses previously unknown manuscripts and uncovers a wealth of new information about the author's life, focusing on Ginzburg's quest for a new kind of writing adequate to her times. She writes of universal experiences--frustrated love, professional failures, remorse, aging--and explores the modern fragmentation of identity in the context of war, terror, and an oppressive state. Searching for a new concept of the self, and deeming the psychological novel (a beloved academic specialty) inadequate to express this concept, Ginzburg turned to fragmentary narratives that blur the lines between history, autobiography, and fiction.This full account of Ginzburg's writing career in many genres and emotional registers enables us not only to rethink the experience of Soviet intellectuals, but to arrive at a new understanding of writing and witnessing during a horrific century.Emma Lazarus (Jewish Encounters Series)
By Esther Schor. 2006
Emma Lazarus’s most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable life has remained a…
mystery until now. She was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still scrambling to catch up with her–a feminist, a Zionist, and an internationally famous Jewish American writer before thse categories even existed. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity. Born into a wealthy Sephardic family in 1849, Lazarus published her first volume of verse at seventeen and gained entrée into New York’s elite literary circles. Although she once referred to her family as “outlaw” Jews, she felt a deep attachment to Jewish history and peoplehood. Her compassion for the downtrodden Jews of Eastern Europe–refugees whose lives had little in common with her own–helped redefine the meaning of America itself. In this groundbreaking biography, Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus’s place in history as a poet, an activist, and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today–a world that she helped to invent. From the Hardcover edition.The Woman Who Could Not Forget: Iris Chang Before and Beyond The Rape of Nanking
By Richard Rhodes, Ying-Ying Chang. 2011
The poignant story of the life and death of world-famous author and historian Iris Chang, as told by her mother.…
Iris Chang's best-selling book The Rape of Nanking forever changed the way we view the Second World War in Asia. It all began with a photo of a river choked with the bodies of hundreds of Chinese civilians that shook Iris to her core. Who were these people? Why had this happened and how could their story have been lost to history? She could not shake that image from her head. She could not forget what she had seen. A few short years later, Chang revealed this "second Holocaust" to the world. The Japanese atrocities against the people of Nanking were so extreme that a Nazi party leader based in China actually petitioned Hitler to ask the Japanese government to stop the massacre. But who was this woman that single-handedly swept away years of silence, secrecy and shame? Her mother, Ying-Ying, provides an enlightened and nuanced look at her daughter, from Iris' home-made childhood newspaper, to her early years as a journalist and later, as a promising young historian, her struggles with her son's autism and her tragic suicide. The Woman Who Could Not Forget cements Iris' legacy as one of the most extraordinary minds of her generation and reveals the depth and beauty of the bond between a mother and daughter.Writers on the Spectrum
By Julie Brown. 2010
From Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale characters to Lewis Carroll's Wonderland and Emily Dickinson's poetic imagery, the writings and lives of…
some of the world's most celebrated authors indicate signs of autism and Asperger's Syndrome. Through analysis of biographies, autobiographies, letters and diaries, Professor Julie Brown identifies literary talents who display characteristics of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and uncovers the similarities in their writing that suggest atypical, autistic brains. Providing close readings of authors' works, Brown explores writing processes, content, theme, structure and writing style to reveal the underlying autistic traits that have influenced their writing. The book provides an overview of ASD and common threads in autistic writing followed by an illuminating exploration of how these threads are evident in the literature of both well-known and lesser known authors. This groundbreaking study of autism in literature will be of interest to anyone with a professional or personal interest in literature or the autistic mind.Journey with No Maps
By Sandra Djwa. 2012
Journey with No Maps is the first biography of P.K. Page, a brilliant twentieth-century poet and a fine artist. The…
product of over a decade's research and writing, the book follows Page as she becomes one of Canada's best-loved and most influential writers. "A borderline being," as she called herself, she recognized the new choices offered to women by modern life but followed only those related to her quest for self-discovery. Tracing Page's life through two wars, world travels, the rise of modernist and Canadian cultures, and later Sufi study, biographer Sandra Djwa details the people and events that inspired her work. Page's independent spirit propelled her from Canada to England, from work as a radio actress to a scriptwriter for the National Film Board, from an affair with poet F.R. Scott to an enduring marriage with diplomat Arthur Irwin. Page wrote her story in poems, fiction, diaries, librettos, and her visual art. Journey with No Maps reads like a novel, drawing on the poet's voice from interviews, diaries, letters, and writings as well as the voices of her contemporaries. With the vividness of a work of fiction and the thoroughness of scholarly dedication, Djwa illustrates the complexities of Page's private experience while also documenting her public emergence as an internationally known poet. It is both the captivating story of a remarkable woman and a major contribution to the study of Canada's literary and artistic history.Faces of Displacement
By Mykola Soroka. 2012
"Whom do our people read? Vynnychenko. Whom do people talk about if it concerns literature? Vynnychenko. Whom do they buy?…
Again, Vynnychenko." So wrote Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky about the young Volodymyr Vynnychenko. An innovative and provocative writer, Vynnychenko was also a charismatic revolutionary and politician who responded to the dramatic upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century by challenging old values and bringing forward new ideas about human relationships. Despite his inseparable association with Ukraine, what is often overlooked is the fact that Vynnychenko wrote the majority of his works outside his native land following his flight from Tsarist and Soviet tyranny. In this ground-breaking study, Mykola Soroka draws on contemporary theories of displacement to show how Vynnychenko's expatriate status determined his worldview, his choice of literary devices, and his attitudes toward his homeland and hostlands. Soroka considers concepts of identity to study the intertwined experiences of the writer - as an exile, émigré, expatriate, traveler, and nomad - and to demonstrate how these experiences invigorated his art and left a lasting impact on his work. The first book-length study in English on Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Faces of Displacement is an insightful examination of an exiled writer that sheds new light on the challenges faced by the displaced.Kazantzakis, Volume 2: Politics of the Spirit
By Peter Bien. 2007
Putting Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis's vast output into the context of his lifelong spiritual quest and the turbulent politics of…
twentieth-century Greece, Peter Bien argues that Kazantzakis was a deeply flawed genius--not always artistically successful, but a remarkable figure by any standard. This is the second and final volume of Bien's definitive and monumental biography of Kazantzakis (1883-1957). It covers his life after 1938, the period in which he wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, the novels that brought him his greatest fame. A demonically productive novelist, poet, playwright, travel writer, autobiographer, and translator, Kazantzakis was one of the most important Greek writers of the twentieth century and the only one to achieve international recognition as a novelist. But Kazantzakis's writings were just one aspect of an obsessive struggle with religious, political, and intellectual problems. In the 1940s and 1950s, a period that included the Greek civil war and its aftermath, Kazantzakis continued this engagement with undiminished energy, despite every obstacle, producing in his final years novels that have become world classics.Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters
By Lou Andreas-Salom, Michael Winkler, Edward Snow, Rainer Maria Rilke. 2006
"Immensely readable...a significant piece of scholarship."--Fred Volkmer, New York Sun He would become one of the most important poets of…
the twentieth century; she a muse of Europe's fin-de-siecle thinkers and artists. In this collection of letters, a finalist for the PEN USA translation award, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, a writer and intellectual fourteen years his senior, pen a relationship that spans thirty years and shifting boundaries: as lovers, as mentor and protégé, and as deep personal and literary allies.Chaucer's Tale
By Paul Strohm. 2014
A lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The…
Canterbury TalesIn 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer endured his worst year, but began his best poem. The father of English literature did not enjoy in his lifetime the literary celebrity that hehas today--far from it. The middle-aged Chaucer was living in London, working as a midlevel bureaucrat and sometime poet, until a personal and professionalcrisis set him down the road leading to The Canterbury Tales.In the politically and economically fraught London of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer was swept up against his will in a series of disastrous events that would ultimately leave him jobless, homeless, separated from his wife, exiled from his city, and isolated in the countryside of Kent--with no more audience to hear thepoetry he labored over.At the loneliest time of his life, Chaucer made the revolutionary decision to keep writing, and to write for a national audience, for posterity, and for fame.Brought expertly to life by Paul Strohm, this is the eye-opening story of the birth one of the most celebrated literary creations of the English language.Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure
By Arthur Conan Doyle. 2012
In 1880 a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle embarked upon the "first real outstanding adventure" of his life,…
taking a berth as ship's surgeon on an Arctic whaler, the Hope. The voyage took him to unknown regions, showered him with dramatic and unexpected experiences, and plunged him into dangerous work on the ice floes of the Arctic seas. He tested himself, overcame the hardships, and, as he wrote later, "came of age at 80 degrees north latitude. " Conan Doyle's time in the Arctic provided powerful fuel for his growing ambitions as a writer. With a ghost story set in the Arctic wastes that he wrote shortly after his return, he established himself as a promising young writer. A subsequent magazine article laying out possible routes to the North Pole won him the respect of Arctic explorers. And he would call upon his shipboard experiences many times in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, who was introduced in 1887's A Study in Scarlet. Out of sight for more than a century was a diary that Conan Doyle kept while aboard the whaler. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure makes this account available for the first time. With humor and grace, Conan Doyle provides a vivid account of a long-vanished way of life at sea. His careful detailing of the experience of arctic whaling is equal parts fascinating and alarming, revealing the dark workings of the later days of the British whaling industry. In addition to the transcript of the diary, the e-book contains two nonfiction pieces by Doyle about his experiences; and two of his tales inspired by the journey. To the end of his life, Conan Doyle would look back on this experience with awe: "You stand on the very brink of the unknown," he declared, "and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not. It was a strange and fascinating chapter of my life. " Only now can the legion of Conan Doyle fans read and enjoy that chapter.The Farthest Home Is in an Empire of Fire: A Tejano Elegy
By John Phillip Santos. 2010
"Wonderful...a book that connects us to the global story of ourselves." -Sandra Cisneros In this beautifully written, highly original work,…
John Phillip Santos- the author of Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation-creates a virtuosic meditation on ancestry and origins. Weaving together a poetic mix of family remembrance, personal odyssey, conquest history, and magical realism, Santos recounts his quest to find the missing chronicle of his mother's family, who arrived in southern Texas in the 1620s. As Santos traces their roots to northern Spain, he re-imagines the way we think about identity. The result is a uniquely engaging adventure in the frontier between self and family, past and present, at a time when breakthroughs in genetics are changing our window on history.Flyover Lives
By Diane Johnson. 2014
From the New York Times bestselling author of Le Divorce, a dazzling meditation on the mysteries of the wispy but…
material” family ghosts who shape us Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of floating down the Mississippi and off to see the world. Years later, at home in France, a French friend teases her: Indifference to historythat’s why you Americans seem so naïve and don’t really know where you’re from. ” The j’accuse stayed with Johnson. Were Americans indifferent to history? Her own family seemed always to have been in the Midwest. Surely they had got there from somewhere? In digging around, she discovers letters and memoirs written by generations of stalwart pioneer ancestors that testify to more complex times than the derisive nickname The Flyover” gives the region credit for. With the acuity and sympathy that her novels are known for, she captures the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention. This spellbinding memoir will appeal to fans of Bill Bryson, Patricia Hampl, and Annie Dillard. .Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986
By Reeve Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. 2012
Why, as an eager and talented writer, has Anne Morrow Lindbergh published so relatively little in forty years of marriage?"…
asked reviewer John Barkham in 1970. "After a promising start with those first books on flying, she tapered off into long silences broken by an infrequent volume of verse or prose." Many years later, Lindbergh replied with a quote from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who claimed that writing, for a wife and mother, is "rowing against wind and tide." In this sixth and final collection of Lindbergh's diaries and letters, taking us from 1947 to 1986, we mark her progress as she navigated a remarkable life and a remarkable century with enthusiasm and delight, humor and wit, sorrow and bewilderment, but above all devoted to finding the essential truth in life's experiences through a hard-won spirituality and a passion for literature. Between the inevitable squalls of life with her beloved but elusive husband, the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, she shepherded their five children through whooping cough, horned toads, fiancés, the Vietnam War, and their own personal tragedies. She researched and wrote many books and articles on issues ranging from the condition of Europe after World War II to the meaning of marriage to the launch of Apollo 8. She published one of the most beloved books of inspiration of all time, Gift from the Sea. She left penetrating accounts of meetings with such luminaries as John and Jacqueline Kennedy, Thornton Wilder, Enrico Fermi, Leland and Slim Hayward, and the Frank Lloyd Wrights. And she found time to compose extraordinarily insightful and moving letters of consolation to friends and to others whose losses touched her deeply. More than any previous books by or about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Against Wind and Tide makes us privy to the demons that plagued this fairy-tale bride, and introduces us to some of the people--men as well as women--who provided solace as she braved the tides of time and aging, war and politics, birth and death. Here is an eloquent and often startling collection of writings from one of the most admired women of our time.Shelley Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein's True Creator
By Joseph P. Farrell, Scott D. de Hart. 2013
Frankenstein was first released in 1818 anonymously.The credit for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's authorship first occurred in 1823 when a French…
edition was published. A year earlier, Mary's revolutionary husband, the influential poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist Percy Bysshe Shelley, died.The same year Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (its full title) was first published, so was another work by Mary's husband that shares use of the word Prometheus. The drama Prometheus Unbound was indeed credited to Percy Shelley.The secret admission of many experts in English literature is that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley did not write a good portion of Frankenstein. In Shelley Unbound, Oxford scholar Scott D. de Hart examines the critical information about Percy Shelley's scientific avocations, his disputes against church and state, and his connection to the illegal and infamous anti-Catholic organization, the Illuminati.Scott D. de Hart's fascinating investigation into Frankenstein and the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley results in an inconvenient truth regarding what we have long believed to be a great early example of the feminist canon.Scott D. de Hart was born and raised in Southern California. He graduated from Oxford University with a PhD specializing in nineteenth-century English literature and legal controversies.As For Sinclair Ross
By David Stouck. 2005
Sinclair Ross (1908-1996), best known for his canonical novel As for Me and My House (1941), and for such familiar…
short stories as "The Lamp at Noon" and "The Painted Door," is an elusive figure in Canadian literature. A master at portraying the hardships and harsh beauty of the Prairies during the Great Depression, Ross nevertheless received only modest attention from the public during his lifetime. His reluctance to give readings or interviews further contributed to this faint public perception of the man. In As for Sinclair Ross, David Stouck tells the story of a lonely childhood in rural Saskatchewan, of a long and unrewarding career in a bank, and of many failed attempts to be published and to find an audience. The book also tells the story of a man who fell in love with both men and women and who wrote from a position outside any single definition of gender and sexuality. Stouck's biography draws on archival records and on insights gathered during an acquaintance late in Ross's life to illuminate this difficult author, describing in detail the struggles of a gifted artist living in an inhospitable time and place. Stouck argues that when Ross was writing about prairie farmers and small towns, he wanted his readers to see the kind of society they were creating, to feel uncomfortable with religion as coercive rhetoric, prejudices based on race and ethnicity, and rigid notions of gender. As for Sinclair Ross is the story of a remarkable writer whose works continue to challenge us and are rightly considered classics of Canadian literature.Women's Lives
By Carolyn G. Heilbrun. 1997
Eve has been supposed to have remarked to Adam as they left the garden, my dear, we are in a…
state of transition, and of course they were. It is no coincidence that Eve delivers this line. While humanity in every era and stage in history has been marked by a strong sense of itself as being in a state of transition, women have always had a particularly close relationship to changeable terrain. In their quest for self knowledge, boundaries, and names, women have found themselves between varying cultural demands. In one view, perhaps the dominant one, the only way to gain positive status is to fit appropriately into approved categories: appropriately beautiful, appropriately young, appropriately thin, appropriately successful. In another view, the view compellingly expressed by Carolyn Heilbrun, women must abandon the appropriate and seek out the liminel. The word limen means threshold. To be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, on the brink of leaving one condition or country or self to enter upon another. When recognized, liminality offers women freedom to be or become themselves.In Women's Lives: The View from the Threshold Carolyn Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of women who have wrestled with their own betwixt and betweenness (in the process altering the face of literature, and the world): George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Gloria Steinem. She reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of these lives. Surprising explorations of the positions which launch women into uncertain ground extend these lectures outside the academic purview.Each year the Alexander lectureship invites a distinguished scholar to the University of Toronto to give a course of public lectures on the subject of English Literature. These four lectures from the 1997 series put Carolyn Heilbrun in a line of distinguished scholarly work with such previous lecturers as Walter Ong, Robertson Davies, and Northrop Frye. But Heilbrun, within this distinguished genealogy, reworks the very notion of the line, creating a new pattern of writing and approaching literary culture, just as the women whose lives she examines have done. The reader will come out of this experience moved, refreshed, and inspired to create rather than take a position. Disclaimer: Excerpt from the poem "Where Did I Leave Off" by Virginia Hamilton Adair on pages 65-66 removed at the request of the rights holderSlip of the Tongue: Talking About Language (Real World Ser.)
By Katie Haegele. 2014
Slip of the Tongue explores a wide range of topics in linguistics through reflecting on the author's life and surroundings.…
Author Katie Haegele is a respected memoirist who makes sense of the world around her by looking at the ways we use language: to communicate, to make art, and simply to survive. She takes us through her life by describing her family's rich linguistic history and her own coming of age as a feminist and an artist, and introduces us to her hometown of Philadelphia, a city lively with graffiti, poetry, and the remnants of its colonial heritage. She connects history to the present with research, interviews, and musings on digital technology and the contemporary state of the English language. If language is what makes us human, Slip of the Tongue, a book as brainy as it is heart-warming, is a celebration of that humanity in all its complicated beauty. More than a clever language book, Haegele is personal and conversational-able to explore her subjects with both intellectual vigor and a lot of heart. A memoir that takes a niche subject outside of academia.James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook
By James A. Michener, Steve Berry. 1992
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener has written about everything from the pristine islands of the South Pacific and the…
endless wilds of Africa to Spanish bullfighters, American revolutionaries, and pirates of the Caribbean. Now Michener turns to his favorite and most personal subject: the written word. Reproducing pages from his own handwritten rough drafts and working manuscripts, Michener walks the reader through a step-by-step guide to the entire process of writing, editing, revising, and publishing. Addressing challenges specific to both fiction and nonfiction, all the while providing thoughtful and useful solutions, James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook is an invaluable resource for book lovers, editors, and, of course, writers--aspiring and accomplished alike.Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story
By Anzia Yezierska. 1950
The autobiography of the important Jewish immigrant novelist. Here is Anzia Yezierska's life story, from the Polish ghetto to the…
sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side, from success as a writer in Hollywood in the 1920s to disillusionment and a return to poverty. With courage and emotion, Yezierska reveals what success and failure felt like and what they meant to her, as a woman and as an artist.