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Memos from Purgatory: An Autobiography
By Harlan Ellison. 1975
Hemingway said, "A man should never write what he doesn't know." In the mid-fifties, Harlan Ellison--kicked out of college and…
hungry to write--went to New York to start his career. It was a time of street gangs, rumbles, kids with switchblades, and zip guns made from car radio antennas. Ellison was barely out of his teens himself, but he took a phony name, moved into Brooklyn's dangerous Red Hook section, and managed to con his way into a "bopping club." What he experienced (and the time he spent in jail as a result) was the basis for the violent story that Alfred Hitchcock filmed as the first of his hour-long TV dramas. This autobiography is a book whose message you will not be able to ignore or forget.Ernest's Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway's Life
By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes. 2019
Follow the path of one of America's finest novelists—and one of history's greatest adventurers—from Paris to Havana, from Madrid to…
Idaho, with his great-granddaughter. Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning author, was known as much for his prose as for his travels to exotic locales, his gusto and charm created excitement wherever he went. In Ernest's Way, we follow Cristen around the globe to the places he lived, wrote, fought, drank, fished, ran with the bulls and held court with T.S. Elliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and many other influential writers, artists and intellectuals of the 20th century. In fresh and lively prose, Cristen brings to life atmosphere of La Closerie des Lilas, the Parisian cafe where Hemingway penned The Sun Also Rises. Or to dine on suckling pig at the oldest restaurant in the world, Sobrino de Botín in Madrid, as Hemingway did while writing and drinking three bottles of rioja alta in one sitting. We can follow his path through Northern Italy, where he served as an ambulance driver and was seriously wounded in the First World War, or trek through the locations described in A Farewell to Arms. Ernest's Way is a map to Hemingway’s creative and psychic history—they made him who he was and shaped his life and his work. Ernest’s Way is a guide and literary exploration in to the cities Hemingway visited and lived in, both as they are now and as they were when he graced them. Cristen brings these places to life for the modern reader, allowing all who admire Hemingway's life and literature to enjoy his legacy in a new and vibrant way.A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love, and Faith
By Lori Smith. 2007
At thirty-three, Lori Smith found herself falling short of her expectations: single, facing a difficult job, and sinking fast into…
something like depression. She needed a change. So, instead of waiting for her Darcy to present himself, she makes the long-awaited leap, leaving her job and country to travel through Jane Austen's England. On an adventure of multi-layered discovery, Lori leads readers through Jane's life and the landscapes she knew and loved - from Oxford to Bath, to London and the Hampshire countryside - and through her own emotional landscapes, in which grace and hope take the place of stagnation and despair. Along the way, we explore the small things and the great things, both meanness and goodness in relationships, to discover what Austen herself knew: the joy of life, however ordinary or unexpected.Life Among the Savages
By Shirley Jackson. 1981
In a hilariously charming domestic memoir, America’s celebrated master of terror turns to a different kind of fright: raising children.…
In her celebrated fiction, Shirley Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But in Life Among the Savages, she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family’s life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist’s gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments In The Making Of Emily Dickinson
By Martha Ackmann. 2020
An engaging, intimate portrait of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s greatest and most-mythologized poets, that sheds new light on her…
groundbreaking poetry. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, “All things are ready” and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely “at home” (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson’s interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson’s life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness. Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render a concise and vivid portrait of American literature’s most enigmatic figure.The Train Before Dawn
By Janice Huszar. 2020
No one seemed to notice. Or if they did, it was the cuteness: bangs and big brown eyes speckled with…
gold when the sun hit. Johnny wasn’t very tall at age 5 when his life on the streets began, so crowds, sometimes reckless, passed without even seeing the child. They couldn’t know he was an orphan, hungry, living alone, frightened, feeling physical pain from his loss and abandonment; that he slept on a cot in a fetal position covered only by sheets. They were his shield against evil, and he managed heroically to endure daily misery with its terrifying bedtime. The last time he saw his mother she was sleeping in a box by the window in the parlor with tape across her mouth. When Johnny understood it was forever, he relied on happy memories to help his sadness; an outdoor birthday party, mama swirling around with flowers in her hair like a princess in a book, dancing, playing with the little children, pouring lemonade. Oh, how he adored his sweet mother. He loved his backyard too; the grapevines so good for hide and seek, the honeysuckle, the apple tree, even though mama said it was sick and don’t eat any. Then papa, whom he also revered, stole him away from his bed just before dawn so his aunts wouldn’t see, and hurried along the river toward the train, mostly with Johnny in his arms. Where better to hide his child than behind the fun and fantasy of Coney Island? It promised a new life of joy and healing of sorrow. But Johnny longed for the familial embrace. “Try a little mustard on it,” says Abe, the gray-bearded hot dog vendor, to the boy he had seen walking wearily the streets and midways of the famous amusement park. Mr. Abe becomes Johnny’s best friend on the street, sage with a soft heart. Truant but innocent, the child is eager for knowledge: first learning to read from discarded newspapers and comic books. Eating from generosity and sleeping in fear, Johnny exists with unusual dignity. His friends, carnival workers and a neighbor family, and of course, Abe, are reticent to report the extended absences of the father, afraid Johnny will be taken into custody. Suffering is a way of life for Johnny, even when living in the thought-to-be safety of the boys’ orphanage in upstate New York. He would spend years from age 8 to high school graduation but not without harm. Yet John forgave the headmaster and his wife as he’d been taught by his true Master. As God watched over John, seeing him become a righteous young man, surely, he remembered crafting Eve for lonely Adam. Might it now be time for a comforting romantic intervention?Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy
By Guy P. Raffa. 2020
A richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the…
Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint’s relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished. In Dante’s Bones, Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet’s hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante’s posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today.Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures
By Leona Toker. 2016
Vladimir Nabokov described the literature course he taught at Cornell as "a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of…
literary structures." Leona Toker here pursues a similar investigation of the enigmatic structures of Nabokov's own fiction. According to Toker, most previous critics stressed either Nabokov’s concern with form or the humanistic side of his works, but rarely if ever the two together. In sensitive and revealing readings of ten novels, Toker demonstrates that the need to reconcile the human element with aesthetic or metaphysical pursuits is a constant theme of Nabokov’s and that the tension between technique and content is itself a key to his fiction. Written with verve and precision, Toker’s book begins with Pnin and follows the circular pattern that is one of her subject’s own favored devices.Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Reading Women Writing)
By Françoise Lionnet. 1991
Adopting a boldly innovative approach to women’s autobiographical writing, Françoise Lionnet here examines the rhetoric of self-portraiture in works by…
authors who are bilingual or multilingual or of mixed races or cultures. Autobiographical Voices offers incisive readings of texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Marie Cardinal, Maryse Condé, Marie-Thérèse Humbert, Augustine, and Nietzsche.Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters
By Tobias Boes. 1982
In Thomas Mann's War, Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists…
and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted.Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly global publishing industry to refute Nazi propaganda. As Boes shows, Mann undertook successful lecture tours of the country and penned widely-read articles that alerted US audiences and readers to the dangers of complacency in the face of Nazism's existential threat. Spanning four decades, from the eve of World War I, when Mann was first translated into English, to 1952, the year in which he left an America increasingly disfigured by McCarthyism, Boes establishes Mann as a significant figure in the wartime global republic of letters.The One, Other, and Only Dickens
By Garrett Stewart. 2018
In The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are…
one of the chief pleasures of Dickens’s novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader’s shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens’s early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author’s verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a verbal alter ego identified as the Other, whose volatile and intensively linguistic, even sub-lexical presence is felt throughout Dickens’s fiction. Across examples by turns comic, lyric, satiric, and melodramatic from the whole span of Dickens’s fiction, the famously recognizable style is heard ghosted in a kind of running counterpoint ranging from obstreperous puns to the most elusive of internal echoes: effects not strictly channeled into the service of overall narrative drive, but instead generating verbal microplots all their own. One result is a new, ear-opening sense of what it means to take seriously Graham Greene’s famous passing mention of Dickens’s "secret prose."One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir
By David Lehman. 2019
In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with…
a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story. One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens…
was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable's protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholars—Malcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracy—suggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian.Albert Camus: Elements of a Life
By Robert D. Zaretsky. 2013
Like many others of my generation, I first read Camus in high school. I carried him in my backpack while…
traveling across Europe, I carried him into (and out of) relationships, and I carried him into (and out of) difficult periods of my life. More recently, I have carried him into university classes that I have taught, coming out of them with a renewed appreciation of his art. To be sure, my idea of Camus thirty years ago scarcely resembles my idea of him today. While my admiration and attachment to his writings remain as great as they were long ago, the reasons are more complicated and critical.—Robert Zaretsky On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was dining in a small restaurant on Paris's Left Bank when a waiter approached him with news: the radio had just announced that Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus insisted that a mistake had been made and that others were far more deserving of the honor than he. Yet Camus was already recognized around the world as the voice of a generation—a status he had achieved with dizzying speed. He published his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942 and emerged from the war as the spokesperson for the Resistance and, although he consistently rejected the label, for existentialism. Subsequent works of fiction (including the novels The Plague and The Fall), philosophy (notably, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), drama, and social criticism secured his literary and intellectual reputation. And then on January 4, 1960, three years after accepting the Nobel Prize, he was killed in a car accident. In a book distinguished by clarity and passion, Robert Zaretsky considers why Albert Camus mattered in his own lifetime and continues to matter today, focusing on key moments that shaped Camus's development as a writer, a public intellectual, and a man. Each chapter is devoted to a specific event: Camus's visit to Kabylia in 1939 to report on the conditions of the local Berber tribes; his decision in 1945 to sign a petition to commute the death sentence of collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach; his famous quarrel with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the nature of communism; and his silence about the war in Algeria in 1956. Both engaged and engaging, Albert Camus: Elements of a Life is a searching companion to a profoundly moral and lucid writer whose works provide a guide for those perplexed by the absurdity of the human condition and the world's resistance to meaning.The Perraults: A Family of Letters in Early Modern France
By Oded Rabinovitch. 2018
In The Perraults, Oded Rabinovitch takes the fascinating eponymous literary and scientific family as an entry point into the complex…
and rapidly changing world of early modern France. Today, the Perraults are best remembered for their canonical fairy tales, such as "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots," most often attributed to Charles Perrault, one of the brothers. While the writing of fairy tales may seem a frivolous enterprise, it was, in fact, linked to the cultural revolution of the seventeenth century, which paved the way for the scientific revolution, the rise of "national literatures," and the early Enlightenment. Rabinovitch argues that kinship networks played a crucial, yet unexamined, role in shaping the cultural and intellectual ferment of the day, which in turn shaped kinship and the social history of the family.Through skillful reconstruction of the Perraults’ careers and networks, Rabinovitch portrays the world of letters as a means of social mobility. He complicates our understanding of prominent institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences, Versailles, and the salons, as well as the very notions of authorship and court capitalism. The Perraults shows us that institutions were not simply rigid entities, embodying or defining intellectual or literary styles such as Cartesianism, empiricism, or the purity of the French language. Rather, they emerge as nodes that connect actors, intellectual projects, family strategies, and practices of writing.The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910
By William S. Nickell. 2011
In the middle of the night of October 28, 1910, Leo Tolstoy, the most famous man in Russia, vanished. A…
secular saint revered for his literary genius, pacificism, and dedication to the earth and the poor, Tolstoy had left his home in secret to embark on a final journey. His disappearance immediately became a national sensation. Two days later he was located at a monastery, but was soon gone again. When he turned up next at Astapovo, a small, remote railway station, all of Russia was following the story. As he lay dying of pneumonia, he became the hero of a national narrative of immense significance. In The Death of Tolstoy, William Nickell describes a Russia engaged in a war of words over how this story should be told. The Orthodox Church, which had excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901, first argued that he had returned to the fold and then came out against his beliefs more vehemently than ever. Police spies sent by the state tracked his every move, fearing that his death would embolden his millions of supporters among the young, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia. Representatives of the press converged on the stationhouse at Astapovo where Tolstoy lay ill, turning his death into a feverish media event that strikingly anticipated today's no-limits coverage of celebrity lives—and deaths. Drawing on newspaper accounts, personal correspondence, police reports, secret circulars, telegrams, letters, and memoirs, Nickell shows the public spectacle of Tolstoy's last days to be a vivid reflection of a fragile, anxious empire on the eve of war and revolution.For more on Tolstoy's death, see the companion website created by the author at http://humweb.ucsc.edu/bnickell/tolstoy/.Bad Boy: A Memoir (Amistad Ser.)
By Walter Dean Myers. 2001
Into a memoir that is gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and unforgettable, Walter Dean Myers richly weaves the details of his Harlem…
childhood in the 1940s and 1950s: a loving home life with his adopted parents, Bible school, street games, and the vitality of his neighborhood. Although Walter spent much of his time either getting into trouble or on the basketball court, secretly he was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer. But as his prospects for a successful future diminished, the values he had been taught at home, in school, and in his community seemed worthless, and he turned to the streets and his books for comfort. Here in his own words is the story of one of the strongest voices in children's and young adult literature today.Um livro engraçado e inspirado sobre como construir uma marca O autor mais vendido do New York Times, Scott Dikkers, conta a história…
hilária, ultrajante e profundamente pessoal de como ele construiu a fonte de notícias mais confiável da América, The Onion . Claro, todas as histórias de The Onion são falsas , e quem as leva a sério é o verdadeiro alvo da piada. Mas o marketing ultrajante conta a história real e sem censura de The Onion . O Onion começou como um pequeno jornal de humor da faculdade em 1988. Como se tornou uma marca de comédia mundial com milhões de seguidores nas redes sociais e fãs raivosos hoje? Hoje, as marcas tendem a seguir o rebanho no que diz respeito ao marketing e à marca, mas muitas vezes estão seguindo uma direção diferente do rebanho que faz com que você seja notado. A Onion fez o oposto do que as marcas deveriam fazer. A Onion não ouviu seus clientes. Não lhes deu o que eles queriam. Não se envolveu com eles. Nunca foi "autêntico". De fato, tudo o que The Onion imprimiu foi fabricado, falado através de uma fachada falsa. Isso não foi por acaso. Foi calculado e executado com precisão. O que há dentro… • Como cortejar, cortejar e seduzir as pessoas a se apaixonarem por sua marca! • Como recrutar as melhores e mais brilhantes mentes do seu setor para trabalhar para você! • A melhor maneira de gerenciar pessoas criativas em sua equipe e liberar todo o seu potencial! • O segredo para tornar cada dia de trabalho tão suave e agradável quanto o esqui alpino! • A única coisa que todo criador de marca DEVE focar (dica: não é lucro)! • Como alcançar mais pessoas e criar mais fãs usando um princípio supersimples (dica: foi isso que tornou The Onion mundialmente famoso)! • O caminho mais rápido e eficaz para a inovação - no trabalhoAgatha Christie: A Mysterious Life
By Laura Thompson. 2018
'Laura Thompson's outstanding biography . . . is a pretty much perfect capturing of a life' - Kate MosseIt has…
been 100 years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. In this biography, Laura Thompson describes the Edwardian world in which she grew up, explores the relationships she had, including those with her two husbands and daughter, and investigates the mysteries still surrounding Christie's life - including her disappearance in 1926. Agatha Christie is a mystery and writing about her is a detection job in itself. But, with access to all of Christie's letters, papers and writing notebooks, as well as interviews with her grandson, daughter, son-in-law and their living relations, Thompson is able to unravel not only the detailed workings of Christie's detective fiction, but the truth behind her private life as well.First published in 2007 as 'Agatha Christie: An English Mystery', this is a fully updated edition with a new introduction by the authorSurvival Lessons
By Alice Hoffman. 2014
One of America's most beloved writers shares her suggestions for finding beauty in the world even during the toughest times.Survival…
Lessons provides a road map of how to reclaim your life from this day forward, with ways to reenvision everything—from relationships with friends and family to the way you see yourself. As Alice Hoffman says, “In many ways I wrote Survival Lessons to remind myself of the beauty of life, something that’s all too easy to overlook during the crisis of illness or loss. I forgot that our lives are made up of equal parts of sorrow and joy, and that it is impossible to have one without the other. I wrote to remind myself that despite everything that was happening to me, there were still choices I could make.”Wise, gentle, and wry, Alice Hoffman teaches all of us how to choose what matters most.