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Eudora Welty: A Biography (Southern Literary Studies)
By Suzanne Marrs. 2006
Eudora Welty's works are treasures of American literature. When her first short-story collection was published in 1941, it heralded the…
arrival of a genuinely original writer who over the decades wrote hugely popular novels, novellas, essays, and a memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, that became a national bestseller. By the end of her life, Welty (who died in 2001) had been given nearly every literary award there was and was all but shrouded in admiration. In this definitive and authoritative account, Suzanne Marrs restores Welty's story to human proportions, tracing Welty's life from her roots in Jackson, Mississippi, to her rise to international stature. Making generous use of Welty's correspondence-particularly with contemporaries and admirers, including Katherine Anne Porter, E. M. Forster, and Elizabeth Bowen-Marrs has provided a fitting and fascinating tribute to one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.In the Land of Men: A Memoir
By Adrienne Miller. 2020
One of Vogue’s Best Books of the YearOne of Esquire’s Best Books of the YearOne of the Wall Street Journal’s…
Favorite Books of the YearOne of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: Vogue, Parade, Esquire, Bitch, and Maclean’s A New York Times and Washington Post Book to Watch A fiercely personal memoir about coming of age in the male-dominated literary world of the nineties, becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire, and Miller's personal and working relationship with David Foster WallaceA naive and idealistic twenty-two-year-old from the Midwest, Adrienne Miller got her lucky break when she was hired as an editorial assistant at GQ magazine in the mid-nineties. Even if its sensibilities were manifestly mid-century—the martinis, powerful male egos, and unquestioned authority of kings—GQ still seemed the red-hot center of the literary world. It was there that Miller began learning how to survive in a man’s world. Three years later, she forged her own path, becoming the first woman to take on the role of literary editor of Esquire, home to the male writers who had defined manhood itself— Hemingway, Mailer, and Carver. Up against this old world, she would soon discover that it wanted nothing to do with a “mere girl.” But this was also a unique moment in history that saw the rise of a new literary movement, as exemplified by McSweeney’s and the work of David Foster Wallace. A decade older than Miller, the mercurial Wallace would become the defining voice of a generation and the fiction writer she would work with most. He was her closest friend, confidant—and antagonist. Their intellectual and artistic exchange grew into a highly charged professional and personal relationship between the most prominent male writer of the era and a young woman still finding her voice. This memoir—a rich, dazzling story of power, ambition, and identity—ultimately asks the question “How does a young woman fit into this male culture and at what cost?” With great wit and deep intelligence, Miller presents an inspiring and moving portrayal of a young woman’s education in a land of men.“The memoir I’ve been waiting for: a bold, incisive, and illuminating story of a woman whose devotion to language and literature comes at a hideous cost. It’s Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year updated for the age of She Said: a literary New York now long past; an intimate, fiercely realist portrait of a mythic literary figure; and now, a tender reckoning with possession, power, and what Jia Tolentino called the ‘Important, Inappropriate Literary Man.’ A poised and superbly perceptive narration of the problems of working with men, and of loving them.”— Eleanor Henderson, author of 10,000 SaintsMockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee
By Wayne Flynt. 2017
An indelible portrait of one of the most famous and beloved authors in the canon of American literature—a collection of…
letters between Harper Lee and one of her closest friends that reveals the famously private writer as never before, in her own words.The violent racism of the American South drove Wayne Flynt away from his home state of Alabama, but the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s classic novel about courage, community, and equality, inspired him to return in the early 1960s and craft a career documenting and teaching Alabama history. His writing resonated with many Alabamians, in particular three sisters: Louise, Alice, and Nelle Harper Lee. Beginning with their first meeting in 1983, a mutual respect and affection for the state’s history and literature matured into a deep friendship between two families who can trace their roots there back more than five generations. Flynt and Nelle Harper Lee began writing to one other while she was living in New York—heartfelt, insightful, and humorous letters in which they swapped stories, information, and opinions on topics both personal and professional: their families, books, Alabama history and social values, health concerns, and even their fears and accomplishments. Though their earliest missives began formally—"Dear Dr. Flynt"—as the years passed and their mutual admiration grew, their exchanges became more intimate and emotional, opening with "Dear Friend" and closing with "I love you, Nelle." Through their enduring correspondence, the Lees and the Flynts became completely immersed in each other’s lives.Beautifully written, intelligent, and telling, this remarkable compendium of their letters—a correspondence that lasted for a quarter century, from 1992 until Harper Lee’s death in February 2016—offers an incisive and compelling look into the mind, heart, and work of one of the most beloved authors in modern literary history.Among The Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom
By Deborah Yaffe. 2013
For anyone who has ever loved a Jane Austen novel, a warm and witty look at the passionate, thriving world…
of Austen fandomThey walk among us in their bonnets and Empire-waist gowns, clutching their souvenir tote bags and battered paperbacks: the Janeites, Jane Austen’s legion of devoted fans. Who are these obsessed admirers, whose passion has transformed Austen from classic novelist to pop-culture phenomenon? Deborah Yaffe, journalist and Janeite, sets out to answer this question, exploring the remarkable endurance of Austen’s stories, the unusual zeal that their author inspires, and the striking cross-section of lives she has touched. Along the way, Yaffe meets a Florida lawyer with a byzantine theory about hidden subtexts in the novels, a writer of Austen fan fiction who found her own Mr. Darcy while reimagining Pride and Prejudice, and a lit professor whose roller-derby nom de skate is Stone Cold Jane Austen. Yaffe goes where Janeites gather, joining a pilgrimage to historic sites in Britain, chatting online with fellow fans, and attending the annual ball of the Jane Austen Society of North America—in period costume. Part chronicle of a vibrant literary community, part memoir of a lifelong love, Among the Janeites is a funny, touching meditation on the nature of fandom.Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened By The Moon
By Leonard Marcus. 1999
"Leonard S. Marcus... has masterfully written about a fascinating woman who in her short life changed literature for the very…
young. I was throroughly enchanted."--Eric CarleNearly fifty years after her sudden death at the age of forty-two, Margaret Wise Brown remains a legend and an enigma. Author of Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, and dozens of other children's classics, Brown all but invented the picture book as we know it today. Combining poetic instinct with a profound empathy for small children, she understood a child's need for security, love, and a sense of being at home in the world. Yet, these were comforts that had eluded her. Her sparkling presence and her unparalleled success as a legendary children's book author masked an insecurity that left her restless and vulnerable.In this authoritative and moving biography, Leonard S. Marcus, who had access to never-before-published letters and family papers, portrays Brown's complex character and her tragic, seesaw life. Colorful, thoughtful, and insightful, Margaret Wise Brown is both a portrayal of a woman whose stories still speak to millions and a portrait of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when the literary world blossomed and made history.Working as a correspondent for 20/20 and Good Morning America, John Stossel confronted dozens of scam artists: from hacks who…
worked out of their basements to some of America's most powerful executives and leading politicians. His efforts shut down countless crooks -- both famous and obscure. Then he realized what the real problem was.In Give Me a Break, Stossel takes on the regulators, lawyers, and politicians who thrive on our hysteria about risk and deceive the public in the name of safety. Drawing on his vast professional experience (as well as some personal ones), Stossel presents an engaging, witty, and thought-provoking argument about the beneficial powers of the free market and free speech.The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth
By Natalie Goldberg. 2004
One of America's favorite teachers, Natalie Goldberg has inspired millions to write as a way to develop an intimate relationship…
with their minds and a greater understanding of the world in which they live. Now, through this honest and wry exploration of her own life, Goldberg puts her teachings to work.A Walker in the City
By Alfred Kazin. 1969
A literary icon&’s &“singular and beautiful&” memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn (The New…
Yorker). A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new. With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to &“the city,&” the mysterious, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned. Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer. &“The whole texture, color, and sound of life in this tenement realm . . . is revealed as tapestried, as dazzling, as full of lush and varied richness as an Arabian bazaar.&” —The New York TimesThe Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
By Philip Dick. 2011
A glimpse into the mind of the bestselling science fiction author through a collection of his personal, metaphysical, religious, visionary…
writings.Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick&’s brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called &“2-3-74,&” a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe &“transformed into information.&” In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick&’s life and work.The e-book includes a sample chapter from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. &“A dyspeptic dystopian&’s mad secret notebooks, imposing order—at least of a kind—on a chaotic world…Fascinating and unsettling.&”—Kirkus ReviewsA Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller: 1932–1953
By Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin. 1989
A &“lyrical, impassioned&” document of the intimate relationship between the two authors that was first disclosed in Henry and June…
(Booklist). This exchange of letters between the two controversial writers—Anaïs Nin, renowned for her candid and personal diaries, and Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer—paints a portrait of more than two decades in their complex relationship as it moves through periods of passion, friendship, estrangement, and reconciliation. &“The letters may disturb some with their intimacy, but they will impress others with their fragrant expression of devotion to art.&” —Booklist &“A portrait of Miller and Nin more rounded than any previously provided by critics, friends, and biographers.&” —Chicago Tribune Edited and with an introduction by Gunther StuhlmannThis bestseller covers a single momentous year during Nin’s life in Paris, when she met Henry Miller and his wife,…
June. “Closer to what many sexually adventuresome women experience than almost anything I’ve ever read....I found it a very erotic book and profoundly liberating” (Alice Walker). The source of a major motion picture from Universal. Preface by Rupert Pole; Index.Updike
By Adam Begley. 2014
Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author…
John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.In a Dark Wood: A Memoir
By Joseph Luzzi. 2015
When you lose your whole world in a moment, where do you turn?On a cold November morning, Joseph Luzzi, a…
Dante scholar and professor at Bard College, found himself racing to the hospital—his wife, Katherine, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car accident. In one terrible instant, Luzzi became both a widower and a first-time father. In the aftermath of unthinkable tragedy, Luzzi relied on the support of his Italian immigrant family, returning to his childhood home to grieve and care for his infant daughter. But it wasn't until he turned to The Divine Comedy—a poem he had devoted his life to studying and teaching—that he learned how to resurrect his life. Following the same structure as Dante's epic poem, Luzzi is shepherded out of his own "dark wood," passing through the grief-stricken Inferno, the Purgatory of healing, and ultimately stepping into the Paradise of rediscovered love. Beautifully written, poignant, insightful, and unflinchingly honest, In a Dark Wood is a hybrid of heartrending memoir and a meditation on the power of great art to give us strength in our darkest moments. Drawing us into hell and back, it is Dante's journey, Joseph Luzzi's, and our very own.Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Leo Tolstoy, Diaries And Letters Ser. #2)
By Rosamund Bartlett. 2011
This biography of the brilliant author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina &“should become the first resort for everyone…
drawn to its titanic subject&” (Booklist, starred review). In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. At the time of his death, he was the most famous man in Russia, more revered than the tsar, with a growing international following. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy spent his existence rebelling against not only conventional ideas about literature and art but also traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state. In &“an epic biography that does justice to an epic figure,&” Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including fascinating material that has only become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union (Library Journal, starred review). She sheds light on Tolstoy&’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved and the turbulent times in which he lived.Let Me Finish
By Roger Angell. 2006
Essays from the award-winning New Yorker writer and author of This Old Man: &“Witty, worldly, deeply elegiac, and…heartbreaking.&”—The Boston Globe…
For more than fifty years, as both editor of and contributor for The New Yorker, Roger Angell has honed a reputation as a master of the autobiographic essay—sharp-witted, plucky, and at once nostalgic and unsentimental. In Let Me Finish, Angell reflects on a remarkable life (while admitting to not really remembering the essentials) and on its influences large and small—from growing up in Prohibition-era New York, to his boyhood romance with baseball, to crossing paths with such twentieth-century luminaries as Babe Ruth, John Updike, Joe DiMaggio, S.J. Perelman, and W. Somerset Maugham. He discusses his dread of Christmas, a revealing recurring dream, and his stepfather, E.B. White. He recalls glorious images from the movies he saw as a child (for which Angell has a nearly encyclopedic memory), the sheer bliss of sailing off the coast of Maine, and the even greater pleasure of heading home to the perfect 6 p.m. vodka martini. Personal, reflective, funny, delightfully random, and disarming, this is a unique collection of scenes from a life by the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Game, &“one of the most entertaining and gracious prose stylists of his…generation&” (Time). &“A lovely book and an honest one…about loyalty and love, about work and play, about getting on with the cards that life deals you. It's also a genuinely grown-up book, a rare gem indeed in our pubescent age.&”—The Washington PostJoy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis
By Abigail Santamaria. 2012
&“A lush Narnia tale for grownups&”: The first comprehensive biography of the rebel thinker who married C. S. Lewis (Megan Marshall,…
Pulitzer Prize winner). If Joy Davidman is known at all, it&’s as the wife of C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia. On her own, she was a poet and radical, a contributor to the communist journal New Masses, and an active member of New York literary circles of the 1930s and &’40s. Growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, she became an atheist, then a practitioner of Dianetics, and finally a Christian convert after experiencing a moment of transcendent grace. She was also a mother, a novelist, a screenwriter, and an intelligent, difficult, and determined woman. In 1952 she set off for England to pursue C. S. Lewis, the man she considered her spiritual guide and her intellectual mentor. Out of a deep friendship grounded in faith, poetry, and a passion for writing grew a timeless love story, and an unforgettable marriage of equals—one that would be immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis&’s memoir, A Grief Observed. &“Plumbing the depths of unpublished documents, Santamaria reveals the vision and writing of a young woman whose coming of age in the turbulent thirties is both distinctive and emblematic of her time&” (Susan Hertog, author of Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life). Finally, Joy Davidman is brought out of her husband&’s shadow to secure a place in literary history that is both a long-time coming and well-deserved. &“This book gives Davidman her life back. . . . Ms. Santamaria succeeds in de-mythologizing Davidman&’s story.&” —The Wall Street Journal &“Compelling . . . clear, unsentimental.&” — The New York Times Book ReviewVirginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World
By Gillian Gill. 2019
An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline…
Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies—of strength, style, and creativity—shaped Woolf&’s path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf&’s French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L&’Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf&’s aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sisters Stella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.Former Boston Globe reporter Tina Cassidy delivers a remarkable account of one year in the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,…
America’s favorite first lady and an international icon. 1975 was a year of monumental changes for Jackie: it was the year she lost her second husband, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, saved one of New York City’s cultural landmarks at Grand Central Station, and found her true calling—not as a powerful man’s wife or the mother of future leaders, but as a woman of the workforce with a keen mind and a dedication to excellence. Readers of Christopher Andersen’s Jackie After Jack and Pamela Clarke Keogh’s Jackie Style will find no better look at the intimate world of America’s Queen of Camelot than Tina Cassidy’s Jackie After O.The Good Life According to Hemingway
By A. Hotchner. 2008
In the fourteen years that A. E. Hotchner traveled with Ernest Hemingway, he collected a lifetime's worth of Hemingway's experiences,…
anecdotes, and observations on the backs of matchbooks, napkins, and slips of paper. Speaking on everything from war to women to writing, Hemingway's words are at turns funny and poignant, revealing a rich portrait of the American literary giant and the world he took by storm.Complete with black-and-white photographs that cover nearly two decades of Hemingway's life, The Good Life According to Hemingway is an exuberant celebration of his remarkable genius and the chaotic adventure of his life.Wild Heart: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris
By Suzanne Rodriguez. 2002
Born in 1876, Natalie Barney-beautiful, charismatic, brilliant and wealthy-was expected to marry well and lead the conventional life of a…
privileged society woman. But Natalie had no interest in marriage and made no secret of the fact that she was attracted to women. Brought up by a talented and rebellious mother-the painter Alice Barney-Natalie cultivated an interest in poetry and the arts. When she moved to Paris in the early 1900s, she plunged into the city's literary scene, opening a famed Left Bank literary salon and engaging in a string of scandalous affairs with courtesan Liane de Pougy, poet Renee Vivien, and painter Romaine Brooks, among others. For the rest of her long and controversial life Natalie Barney was revered by writers for her generous, eccentric spirit and reviled by high society for her sexual appetite. In the end, she served as an inspiration and came to know many of the greatest names of 20th century arts and letters-including Proust, Colette, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Truman Capote.A dazzling literary biography, Wild Heart: A Life is a story of a woman who has been an icon to many. Set against the backdrop of two different societies-Victorian America and Belle Epoque Europe—Wild Heart: A Life beautifully captures the richness of their lore.