Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 30510 items
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art (Routledge Literature Companions)
By Neil Murphy. 2024
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art explores the links between literature and visual art from classical ekphrasis through to…
contemporary experimental forms. The collection’s engagement with diverse literary and cultural artifacts offers a comprehensive survey of the vibrant interrelationships that currently inform literary studies and the arts.Featuring four sections, the first part provides an overview of theoretical approaches to art and literature from philosophy and aesthetics through to cognitive neuroscience. Part two examines one of the most important intersections between text and image: the workings of ekphrasis across poetry, fiction, drama, comics, life and travel writing, and architectural treatises. Parts three and four consider intermedial crossings from antiquity to the present. The contributors examine the rich intermedial experiments that range from manuscript studies to infographics in graphic narratives, illuminating the vibrant ways in which texts have intersected with illustration, music, dance, architecture, painting, photography, media installations, and television.Throughout this dynamic collection of 37 chapters, the contributors evolve existing critical debates in innovative new directions. The volume will be a critical resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as specialist scholars working in literary studies, philosophy of art, text and image studies, and visual culture.The Introduction and Chapters 10, 14 and 37 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.Now a Peacock Original TV seriesSecret societies. Forgotten history. Conspiracies. Now you can unlock the mysteries of Dan Brown&’s The…
Lost Symbol with this definitive and bestselling guide to the facts behind the fiction featuring Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon—from Simon Cox, author of Cracking the Da Vinci Code and Illuminating Angels and Demons.Dan Brown&’s thrilling novel The Lost Symbol againfeatures Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, this time in the US racing to uncover clues and crack codes involving secrets that are perpetuated to this day. But how much of the novel is true and what is pure fiction? Simon Cox, bestselling Dan Brown expert offers this definitive guide to all the mysteries featured in The Lost Symbol.Based on extensive research, this A-to-Z guide lists the real people, organizations, and themes featured in Dan Brown&’s novel, explains their histories and their meanings, reproduces and analyzes the symbols themselves, and provides insider knowledge gleaned from years of exhaustive study. From the monuments of Washington, DC, to the secrets of Salt Lake City and the hidden enclaves in Langley, Virginia, Cox knows where the facts are hidden about the Freemasons, Albert Pike, the Rosicrucians, the Founding Fathers, and more.This is the only resource you&’ll need to understand and enjoy the fascinating and mysterious world of The Lost Symbol.Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories
By Angus Fletcher. 2021
This &“fascinating&” (Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author of Outliers) examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient…
Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature&’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most significant developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui, while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found throughout literature—from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare&’s plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.A &“refreshing and remarkable&” (Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter) exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class, and &“contains many instances of critical insight....What&’s most interesting about this compendium is its understanding of imaginative representation as a technology&” (The New York Times).Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times
By Andrew D. Kaufman. 2014
“This lively appreciation of one of the most intimidating and massive novels ever written should persuade many hesitant readers to…
try scaling the heights of War and Peace sooner rather than later” (Publishers Weekly).Considered by many critics the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is also one of the most feared. And at 1,500 pages, it’s no wonder why. Still, in July 2009 Newsweek put War and Peace at the top of its list of 100 great novels and a 2007 edition of the AARP Bulletin included the novel in their list of the top four books everybody should read by the age of fifty. A New York Times survey from 2009 identified Warand Peace as the world classic you’re most likely to find people reading on their subway commute to work. What might all those Newsweek devotees, senior citizens, and harried commuters see in a book about the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s? War and Peace is many things. It is a love story, a family saga, a war novel. But at its core it’s a novel about human beings attempting to create a meaningful life for themselves in a country torn apart by war, social change, political intrigue, and spiritual confusion. It is a mirror of our times.Give War and Peace a Chance takes readers on a journey through War and Peace that reframes their very understanding of what it means to live through troubled times and survive them. Touching on a broad range of topics, from courage to romance, parenting to death, Kaufman demonstrates how Tolstoy’s wisdom can help us live fuller, more meaningful lives. The ideal companion to War and Peace, this book “makes Tolstoy’s characters lively and palpable…and may well persuade readers to finally dive into one of the world’s most acclaimed—and daunting—novels” (Kirkus Reviews).Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West, 1950 to the Present
By Larry McMurtry. 2000
Larry McMurtry, the preeminent chronicler of the American West, celebrates the best of contemporary Western short fiction, introducing a stellar…
collection of twenty stories that represent, in various ways, the coming-of-age of the legendary American frontier.Featuring a veritable Who's Who of the century's most distinctive writers, this collection effectively departs from the standard superstars of the Western genre. McMurtry has chosen a refreshing range of work that, when taken as a whole, depicts the evolution and maturation of Western writing over several decades. The featured tales are not so concerned with the American West of history and geography as they are with the American West of the imagination—one that is alternately comic, gritty, individual, searing, and complex. Including authors such as Jack Kerouac, Wallace Stegner, Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, and Diana Ossana, this collection captures the real Western canon like no other.Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End
By Alua Arthur. 2024
A deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more…
fulfilling and authentic lives, from America’s most visible death doula."A truly unique, inspiring perspective on the time we have, what we do with it, and how we let go of this world.... There is no one I'd trust more to guide me through an understanding of death, and how it informs life." — Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Mad Honey and The Book of Two Ways"Briefly Perfectly Human is a beautiful, raw, light-bringing experience. Alua's voice is shimmering, singular, and pulses with humor, vulnerability, insight, and refreshing candor.... Be prepared for it to grab you, hold you tight, and raise the roof on the power of human connection." — Tembi Locke, author of From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding HomeFor her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls “death embrace.” Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,” Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”Beckett Ongoing: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)
By Michael Krimper, Gabriel Quigley. 2024
“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” These are some of the most quoted lines written…
by Samuel Beckett, which speak to the impulse of persevering in times of crisis and impossibility. Yet few readers of Beckett agree about what this paradoxical formula could mean, let alone what mode of engagement it would seem to indicate, be it committed, autonomous, or something else entirely. This volume of essays explores what that mode of engagement could be, all the while elucidating the ethical and political stakes of the “ongoing” in both Beckett’s life and work. Across multiple disciplines in the humanities, the authors delve into questions of political subjectivity and representation, the ethics of powerlessness and refusal, the aesthetics of syncopation and destitution, multimedia experiments between genre, as well as Beckett’s wider impact on transnational itineraries of modernism and philosophy up to the contemporary.Tiff: A life of timothy findley
By Sherrill Grace. 2021
Timothy Findley (1930-2002) was one of Canada's foremost writers—an award-winning novelist, playwright, and short-story writer who began his career as…
an actor in London, England. Findley was instrumental in the development of Canadian literature and publishing in the 1970s and 80s . During those years, he became a vocal advocate for human rights and the anti-war movement. His writing and interviews reveal a man concerned with the state of the world, a man who believed in the importance of not giving in to despair, despite his constant struggle with depression. Findley believed in the power of imagination and creativity to save us. Tiff: A Life of Timothy Findley is the first full biography of this eminent Canadian writer. Sherrill Grace provides insight into Findley's life and struggles through an exploration of his private journals and his relationships with family, his beloved partner, Bill Whitehead, and his close friends, including Alec Guinness, William Hutt, and Margaret Laurence. Based on many interviews and exhaustive archival research, this biography explores Findley's life and work, the issues that consumed him, and his often profound depression over the evils of the twentieth-century. Shining through his darkness are Findley's generous humour, his unforgettable characters, and his hope for the future. These qualities inform canonic works like The Wars (1977), Famous Last Words (1981), Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), and The Piano Man's Daughter (1995)On browsing
By Jason Guriel. 2023
A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoon—and gaining new appreciation—amidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops.…
Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and consigned to scrolling screens, On Browsing 's essays chronicle what we've lost through online shopping, streaming, and the relentless digitization of culture. The latest in the Field Notes series, On Browsing is an elegy for physical media, a polemic in defense of perusing the world in person, and a love letter to the dying practice of scanning bookshelves, combing CD bins, and losing yourself in the stacksThe Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks
By Robin Romm. 2009
When Robin Romm's The Mother Garden was published, The New York Times Book Review called her "a close-up magician," saying,…
"hers is the oldest kind [of magic] we know: the ordinary incantation of words and stories to help us navigate the darkness and finally to hold the end at bay." In her searing memoir The Mercy Papers, Romm uses this magic to expand the weeks before her mother's death into a story about a daughter in the moments before and after loss. With a striking mix of humor and honesty, Romm ushers us into a world where an obstinate hospice nurse tries to heal through pamphlets and a yelping grandfather squirrels away money in a shoe-shine kit. Untrained dogs scamper about as strangers and friends rally around death, offering sympathy as they clamor for attention. The pillbox turns quickly into a metaphor for order; questions about medication turn to musings about God. The mundane and spiritual melt together as Romm reveals the sharp truths that lurk around every corner and captures, with great passion, the awe, fear, and fury of a daughter losing her mother. The Mercy Papers was started in the midst of heartbreak, and not originally intended for an audience. The result is a raw, unsentimental book that reverberates with humanity. Robin Romm has created a tribute to family and an indelible portrait that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost.The Removers: A Memoir
By Andrew Meredith. 2014
“A darkly funny memoir about family reckonings” (O, The Oprah Magazine)—the story of a young man who, by handling the…
dead, makes peace with the living.Andrew Meredith’s father, a literature professor at La Salle University, was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It’s a transgression that resulted in such long-lasting familial despair that Andrew cannot forgive him. In the wake of the scandal, he frantically treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence—falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next. When Andrew is forced to move back home to his childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia and take a job alongside his father as a “remover,” the name for those unseen, unsung men whose charge it is to take away the dead from their last rooms, he begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but through that of a sympathetic, imperfect man.Called “artful” and “compelling” by Thomas Lynch in The Wall Street Journal, Meredith’s poetic voice is as unforgettable as his story, and “he tucks his bittersweet childhood memories between tales of removals as carefully as the death certificates he slips between the bodies he picks up and the stretcher-like contraption that transports each body to the waiting vehicle” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “Potent” (Publishers Weekly), and “ultimately rewarding” (The Boston Globe), The Removers is a searing, coming-of-age memoir with “lyrical language and strong sense of place” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution
By David Austin. 2018
Since the 1970s, poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has been putting pen to paper to refute W.H. Auden’s claim that “poetry…
makes nothing happen.” For Johnson, only the second living poet to have been published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, writing has always been “a political act” and poetry “a cultural weapon.” In Dread Poetry and Freedom David Austin explores the themes of poetry, political consciousness, and social transformation through the prism of Johnson’s work. Drawing from the Bible, reggae and Rastafari, and surrealism, socialism, and feminism, and in dialogue with Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney, W.E.B. Du Bois and the poetry of d’bi young anitafrika, Johnson’s work becomes a crucial point of reflection on the meaning of freedom in this masterful and rich study.This Part Is Silent: A Life Between Cultures
By Sj Kim. 2024
A searing essay collection that explores displacement and loss, creativity and change, institutional power and progress. Born in Korea, raised…
in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, a scholar, and a daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations—especially within the Asian diaspora in the West—as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers across cultures who sustain her. As borders close in and nations enter lockdown, the journey that Kim traces is fraught—and at once illuminates that the act of remaining present has its own power, allowing boundless hope.Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe's Novels (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)
By Amechi Nicholas Akwanya. 2024
This book is a new study of Chinua Achebe’s novels in which they are read as works of literary art,…
as literary works are studied and discussed within the discipline of literary studies and criticism. A central concept, care, which is a humane value, is found to run in the texts, and is the crux of the test that the major characters are subjected to. What challenges them as things to be taken care of through concern may be a human being in a dire circumstance, as with Ikemefuna (Things Fall Apart), the human group itself exposed to famine in what should be harvest time (Arrow of God), or the state which needs to be brought to its proper being, as Heidegger would say (No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People), or human suffering calling to be relieved (Anthills of the Savannah). The novels are all in the tragic mode, because intervention is under some kind of interdiction.During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history…
of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history.Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Laura E. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets
By Michael Korda. 2024
The First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets in Michael Korda’s epic…
Muse of Fire. Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Hero and Alone, tells the story of the First World War not in any conventional way but through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets who came to describe it best, and indeed to symbolize the war’s tragic arc and lethal fury. His epic narrative begins with Rupert Brooke, “the handsomest young man in England” and perhaps its most famous young poet in the halcyon days of the Edwardian Age, and ends five years later with Wilfred Owen, killed in action at twenty-five, only one week before the armistice. With bitter irony, Owen’s mother received the telegram informing her of his death on November 11, just as church bells tolled to celebrate the war’s end. Korda’s dramatic account, which includes anecdotes from his own family history, not only brings to life the soldier poets but paints an unforgettable picture of life and death in the trenches, and the sacrifice of an entire generation. His cast of characters includes the young American poet Alan Seeger, who was killed in action as a private in the French Foreign Legion; Isaac Rosenberg, whose parents had fled czarist anti-Semitic persecution and who was killed in action at the age of twenty-eight before his fame as a poet and a painter was recognized; Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, whose friendship and friendly rivalry endured through long, complicated private lives; and, finally, Owen, whose fame came only posthumously and whose poetry remains some of the most savage and heartbreaking to emerge from the cataclysmic war. As Korda demonstrates, the poets of the First World War were soldiers, heroes, martyrs, victims, their lives and loves endlessly fascinating—that of Rupert Brooke alone reads like a novel, with his journey to Polynesia in pursuit of a life like Gauguin’s and some of his finest poetry written only a year before his tragic death. Muse of Fire is at once a portrait of their lives and a narrative of a civilization destroying itself, among the rubble, shadows, and the unresolved problems of which we still live, from the revival of brutal trench warfare in Ukraine and in the Middle East.The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination
By Eileen M. Hunt. 2024
Beyond her most famous creation—the nightmarish vision of Frankenstein’s Creature—Mary Shelley’s most enduring influence on politics, literature, and art perhaps…
stems from the legacy of her lesser-known novel about the near-extinction of the human species through war, disease, and corruption. This novel, The Last Man (1826), gives us the iconic image of a heroic survivor who narrates the history of an apocalyptic disaster in order to save humanity—if not as a species, then at least as the practice of compassion or humaneness. In visual and musical arts from 1826 to the present, this postapocalyptic figure has transmogrified from the “last man” into the globally familiar filmic images of the “invisible man” and the “final girl.”Reading Shelley’s work against the background of epidemic literature and political thought from ancient Greece to Covid-19, Eileen M. Hunt reveals how Shelley’s postapocalyptic imagination has shaped science fiction and dystopian writing from H. G. Wells, M. P. Shiel, and George Orwell to Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel. Through archival research into Shelley’s personal journals and other writings, Hunt unearths Shelley’s ruminations on her own personal experiences of loss, including the death of young children in her family to disease and the drowning of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s grief drove her to intensive study of Greek tragedy, through which she developed the thinking about plague, conflict, and collective responsibility that later emerges in her fiction. From her readings of classic works of plague literature to her own translation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and from her authorship of the first major modern pandemic novel to her continued influence on contemporary popular culture, Shelley gave rise to a tradition of postapocalyptic thought that asks a question that the Covid-19 pandemic has made newly urgent for many: What do humans do after disaster?Philosophizing the Americas
By Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Jacoby Adeshei Carter, Nadia Celis, Tommy J. Curry, Hernando Arturo Estévez, Daniel Fryer, James B. Haile III, Chike Jeffers, Lee A. McBride III, Michael J. Monahan, Adriana Novoa, Susana Nuccetelli, Andrea Pitts, Dwayne A. Tunstall, Alejandro Vallega. 2024
Philosophizing the Americas establishes the field of inter-American philosophy. Bringing together contributors who work in Africana Philosophy, Afro-Caribbean philosophy, Latin…
American philosophy, Afro-Latin philosophy, decolonial theory, and African American philosophy, the volume examines the full range of traditions that have, separately and in conversation with each other, worked through how philosophy in both establishes itself in the Americas and engages with the world from which it emerges.The book traces a range of questions, from the history of philosophy in the Americas to philosophical questions of race, feminism, racial eliminativism, creolization, epistemology, coloniality, aesthetics, and literature. The essays place an impressive range of philosophical traditions and figures into dialogue with one another: some familiar, such as José Martí, Sylvia Wynter, Martin R. Delany, José Vasconcelos, Alain Locke, as well as such less familiar thinkers as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Hilda Hilst, and George Lamming. In each chapter, the contributors find fascinating and productive matrices of tension or convergence in works throughout the Americas. The result is an original and important contribution to knowledge that introduces readers from various disciplines to unfamiliar yet compelling ideas and considers familiar texts from novel and prescient perspectives. Philosophizing the Americas stands alone as a representation of current scholarly debates in the field of inter-American philosophy.Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen
By Suzanne Scanlon. 2024
A raw and masterful memoir about becoming a woman and going mad—and doing both at once. When Suzanne Scanlon…
was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute. After nearly three years and countless experimental treatments, Suzanne left the ward on shaky legs. In the decades it took her to recover from the experience, Suzanne came to understand her suffering as part of something larger: a long tradition of women whose complicated and compromised stories of self-actualization are reduced to &“crazy chick&” and &“madwoman&” narratives. It was a thrilling discovery, and she searched for more books, more woman writers, as the journey of her life converged with her journey through the literature that shaped her. Transporting, honest, and graceful, Committed is a story of discovery and recovery, reclaiming the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence through the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, and others.Did I Ever Tell You?: A Memoir
By Genevieve Kingston. 2024
THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY, LIFE-AFFIRMING MEMOIR YOU WILL EVER READ ABOUT THE POWER OF LOVE.Did I Ever Tell You? reads like…
a novel but is an unforgettable true story. Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston was just eleven years old when her mother passed away, leaving behind a chest filled with gifts and letters to celebrate the milestones of Gwen&’s life and each of her birthdays until age thirty. When Did I Ever Tell You? opens, just three packages remain: engagement, marriage, and first baby. Tracing Gwen&’s coming-of-age, the book reveals a treasure hunt, with each gift and letter unveiling more about her mother, her family, and—ultimately—herself. Like Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, Did I Ever Tell You? is a riveting book filled with unexpected twists and powerful life lessons. Through her mother&’s fierce and courageous love, Gwen was granted the tools not only to move through grief but to cherish life. For as her mother says in one of her letters: &“love is stronger than death.&”