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Biography, Literature biography, Journals and memoirs, Asian history
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From the Franz Kafka Prize–winning author. “Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness . . . a deeply heartfelt account of his family in…
the 1960s and 70s.” —Xiaolu Guo, award-winning author of Nine ContinentsWith lyricism and deep emotion, Yan Lianke chronicles the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own during the Cultural Revolution. Living in a remote village, Yan’s parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and festival days, and while Yan dreams of fried scallion buns, and even steals from his father to buy sesame seed cakes. He yearns to leave the village, however he can, and soon novels become an escape. He resolves to become a writer himself after reading on the back of a novel that its author was given leave to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her book. In the evenings, after finishing back-breaking shifts hauling stones at a cement factory, sometimes sixteen hours long, he sets to work writing. He is ultimately delivered from the drudgery and danger of manual labor by a career in the Army, but he is filled with regrets as he recalls these years of scarcity, turmoil, and poverty.A philosophical portrait of grief, death, home, and fate that gleams with Yan’s quick wit and gift for imagery, Three Brothers is a personal portrait of a politically devastating period, and a celebration of the power of the family to hold together even in the harshest circumstances.“This engaging book asks readers to consider the nature of life and death, city versus country, and the impact generations can have on each other.” —Winnipeg Free Press
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Literature biography
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"Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences offers young Stephen King fans a thrilling journey through the writer's personal story and its impact on his work"-- Provided by publisher
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Biography, United States history, Journals and memoirs, Social issues, Literature biography
Human-narrated audio
A funny and insightful coming-of-age memoir that traces the author's childhood and adolescent challenges fitting into American society in rural…
Pennsylvania after his family fled Saigon in 1975. Some descriptions of sex. Some violence. Strong language
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Literature biography, Science and technology, Criticism
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is a new biography of writer Edgar Allen Poe, revealing his obsession…
with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge Unrated
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Biography, Self help, Psychology, Literature biography, Death and bereavement, Family and relationships
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In The Burn Journals, Runyon describes that devastating suicide attempt and his recovery over the following year. He takes us…
into the Burn Unit in a children's hospital and through painful burn care and skin-grafting procedures. Then to a rehabilitation hospital, for intensive physical, occupational, and psychological therapy. And then finally back home, to the frightening prospect of entering high school. Adult. Some descriptions of sex. Some violence. Strong language
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Literature biography, Social issues, Journals and memoirs, Biography
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Hailed on its original publication as "eloquent testimony to the engaging power of art in a man's life" ( Washington…
Post ), this deeply moving memoir, long out of print, is reissued with an illuminating new afterword. When acclaimed poet Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. From the immediate aftermath, a period of shock, sadness, and isolation it quickly became clear that support and guidance would not be coming from his distant mother. Nor would it come from his father, a philandering country doctor addicted to amphetamines. Left to his own devices, the boy suffered. Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. As a young man, his feelings and a growing sense of idealism prompted him to activism in the civil rights movement, where he marched and was imprisoned, and then scarred again by a terrifying abduction. Eventually, Orr's experiences led him to understand that art, particularly poetry, could work as a powerful source of healing and meaning to combat the trauma he carried. Throughout The Blessing , Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art. Adult. Strong language
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History, Literature biography, Social issues, European history
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"The never-before-told story of how the makers of The First Folio created Shakespeare as we know him today"-- Provided by publisher
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Serious and literary fictionLiterature biography, Philosophy
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Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright…
Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University’s Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual’s first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same. Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous’s fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the “omnipotence-other” seductions of literature; a family’s flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius.
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Literature biography, Criticism, Psychology
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WINNER, 2024 BEAT STUDIES ASSOCIATION AWARDSA revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed experiences of mental illness and madness…
into some of the most powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century.Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl” opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness.In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother’s devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them.Though madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsberg’s showed how it could also lead to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social changes. Through his revolutionary poetry and social advocacy, Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of being human and easing pain. Throughout his celebrated career Ginsberg made us feel as though we knew everything there was to know about him. However, much has been left out about his experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother, his visions, and his psychiatric hospitalization.In Best Minds, with a forty-year career studying and addressing trauma, Weine provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process especially in relation to madness.Best Minds examines the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy—using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer new, lively, and indispensable insights into an American icon. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s.In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achievements, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.
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Literature biography, History, Criticism
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Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism,…
and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century.As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May ’68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the ’30s.Now translated into English, Christophe Bident’s magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident’s book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy.The book is also a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident’s extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot’s work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot’s life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot’s life itself becomes an oeuvre—becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident’s sophisticated reading of Blanchot’s life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot’s detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized.This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.
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Literature biography, United States history, Travel and geography
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This book offers a unique twist to the Who’s Who of midcentury writers, editors, and artistsMuch is made of Flannery…
O’Connor’s life on the Georgia dairy farm, Andalusia—a rural setting that clearly influenced her writing. But before she lived on that farm, before she showed signs of having lupus, before she became dependent on her mother and then succumbed to the disease at thirty-nine, O’Connor lived in the northeast. She stayed at the artists’ colony Yaddo in 1948 and early 1949 and lived in Connecticut with good friends from fall of 1949 through all of 1950. But in between those experiences, and perhaps more importantly, O’Connor lived in Manhattan.In her biographies, little is said of her time in Gotham; in some sources, this period gets no more than one sentence. But little is said because little has been known. In Flannery O’Connor’s Manhattan, the author’s goal is to explore New York City from O’Connor’s point of view. To do this, the author consults not just letters (both unpublished and published) and biography, but five personal address books housed in Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and, Rare Book Library. The result is a book of interest to both the O’Connor fan and the O’Connor scholar, not to mention those interested in midcentury Manhattan.Flannery O’Connor’s Manhattan is part guide to the who-was-who and who-lived-where of New York from roughly 1948 to 1964, at least those as they mattered to O’Connor. It also acts as a window to the writer’s experiences in the city, whether she was coming into town for a series of meetings or strolling down Broadway on her way to lunch. In the end, it is the combination of the who-she-knew and the what-she-did that formed O’Connor’s personal view of what is arguably the most famous of American cities.
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Literature biography
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Available in a new digital edition with reflowable text suitable for e-readersWilliam Wordsworth: A Poetic Life is a new biography…
of the great father of British Romanticism. It is new in several ways, most notably in the way it approaches the life of the poet. Paying its proper respect to the classic lives of Wordsworth by Mary Moorman and Stephen Gill, it attempts to tell the story of the life through a more rigorous reading of key and representative works of the poet, through careful blending of life and poetry. Wordsworth offers the story of the literariness of the poet's life - childhood and adolescence in the Lake District, education at Cambridge, love and political radicalism in France, the long period of residence in Grasmere and Rydal, celebrity, and national and international recognition. Its reading of the poems, in tune with current theoretical practice, offers a sense of the continuities in Wordsworth's career as it moves away from familiar theories of a Golden Decade of creativity and a period of long decline. The book also works closely and rigorously with Wordsworth's poetry as a method of dramatizing the essentially poetic character of the poet's life.
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Literature biography, Literature
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"An essential new translation of Franz Kafka's complete, uncensored diaries-a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of…
the twentieth century's most important, influential, and visionary writers. Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka's handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications-notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones. By faithfully reproducing the diaries' distinctive- and often surprisingly unpolished-writing as it appeared in Kafka's notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author's use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves." -- Provided by publisher
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Literature biography, Biography
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Hunter recreates the sights, sounds and flavors of his family's rural life on the banks of the Yazoo River and…
recounts the factors that led his family to relocate in the industrial midwest. Adult. Some violence. Strong language
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Literature biography
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"Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's tight North Philly…
kitchen. She was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories--but first she'd have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She'd have to find her language. Weaving together Hudes's love of books with the stories of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is an inspired exploration of home, memory, and belonging--narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty." -- Provided by publisher
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Literature biography, Arts and entertainment, Criticism, Reference, Actors biography, Customs and cultures
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"Earl Hamner was the creator and producer of the television series, The Waltons, about a family living in the Blue…
Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The series was essentially about Hamner's own family, and, in this book, he tells that story. He begins with his childhood and about his desire from a very early age to be a writer. The success of his first novel, Spencer's Mountain, which was built on his family's experiences in the Depression, confirmed his calling as a writer. Eventually, his story developed into the production of the much-loved television series. The book contains many photos, a guide to resources about the Waltons, including fan clubs and internet sites. In addition, there are personal stories and remembrances from many who were connected to the show." -- OCLC
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Family and relationships, Drama, Literature biography, Actors biography, Literature
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"An award-winning author presents the history and impact of both the theatrical and cinematic versions of Who's Afraid of Virginia…
Woolf? and how it forced audiences to confront deeply-held concepts about relationships, sex, and family"--OCLC
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Literature biography, Frontier and pioneer life
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Benjamin Capps has been said to write "not better Westerns but better fiction about the West." Fascinated by more than…
a century and a half of the mixing and mingling of various peoples, Capps finds this cultural ferment a rich vein to mine as a basis for his writing. For instance, his novel "The Brothers of Uterica" is based on events surrounding the French socialist utopian community of La Reunion --settled near Dallas in 1848
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Biography, Literature biography, Women biography
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NPR SPRING PICKAn insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural…
icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison's remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms.Toni Morrison herself had great enthusiasm about Dana Williams's work on this story, generously sharing memories and thoughts with the author over the years, even giving her the book's title. From the manuscripts she molded, the authors she nurtured, and the readers she inspired, Toni at Random demonstrates how Toni Morrison has influenced American culture beyond the individual titles or authors she published. Morrison’s contribution as an editor transformed the broader literary landscape and deepened the cultural conversation. With unparalleled insight and sensitivity, Toni at Random charts this editorial odyssey.
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Literature biography
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Elmer Kelton has had three careers as an author--as an author of popular westerns, as a journalist and as an…
author of literary merit. His most recent six novels, his literary works, are placed in a western background--which Kelton defends as being of equal value as a setting, providing that the stories themselves are worthy. His biography offers a look at the relationship between his work and his experiences as a native of West Texas