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Singapore Dream and Other Adventures: Travel Writings from an Asian Journey
Par Hermann Hesse, Sherab Chodzin Kohn. 2018
Hermann Hesse's voyage to the East Indies, recorded in journal entries and other writings translated into English for the first…
time, describes the experiences that influenced his greatest works. “I knew but few of the trees and animals that I saw around me by name, I was unable to read the Chinese inscriptions, and could exchange only a few words with the children, but nowhere in foreign lands have I felt so little like a foreigner and so completely enfolded by the self-existing naturalness of life’s clear river as I did here.” In 1911, Hermann Hesse sailed through southeastern Asian waters on a trip that would define much of his later writing. Hesse brings his unique eye to scenes such as adventures in a rickshaw, watching foreign theater performances, exploring strange floating cities on stilts, and luxuriating in the simple beauty of the lush natural landscape. Even in the doldrums of travel, he records his experience with faithful humor, wit, and sharp observation, offering a broad vision of travel in the early 1900s. With a glimpse into the workings of his mind through the pages of his journals, poems, and a short story—all translated into English for the first time—these writings describe the real-life experiences that inspired Hesse to pen his most famous works.The Parable Book
Par Per Olov Enquist, Deborah Bragan-Turner. 2013
"The love that dare not speak its name . . ." Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15, cutting across a…
garden, chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of. Can it never be spoken of?Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, has decided to "come out" - but in ways entirely novel and unexpected. He has written the book that smoldered unwritten within him his entire life. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write.This poignant memoir of love as a religious experience - as a modern form of the Resurrection - is also a deeply felt reflection on the transitoriness of friendship, the fraught nature of family relationships, and the importance of giving voice to what cannot be forgotten. A parable as hauntingly intense as any Bergman film.Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-TurnerFrom the Left: A Life in the Crossfire
Par Bill Press. 2018
"Bill Press has done it all. He was the Chair of the California Democratic Party, he has been involved in…
numerous campaigns, he has been a prolific writer, and has worked as a host and commentator on radio and TV. In other words, he knows politics inside and out. This is the tale of an engaged and often outraged citizen who loves his country and wants to see it move forward in a progressive direction." —Senator Bernie SandersA memoir of talk radio host and political commentator Bill Press.The name Bill Press is synonymous with honest journalism, intelligent commentary, and progressive politics.But based on where he came from, it's a wonder he didn't end up a Trump voter. He grew up in a blue-collar family in a small town in Delaware south of the Mason-Dixon line, where segregation was the rule. As a Catholic, he was taught that abortion, divorce, sex outside of marriage, and homosexuality were morally wrong: beliefs later reinforced in ten years of seminary studies for the priesthood. He was on his way to be a rock-ribbed conservative.So what went right for him that he swerved so far to the left? In From the Left, Press shows this gradual transformation, starting with two years of studies in Europe and a providential escape to California. From Sacramento he made his way to Southern California television and talk radio as a political commentator and liberal talk show host. Jumping to Washington and national cable TV, Press hosted Crossfire and The Spin Room on CNN, and Buchanan and Press on MSNBC. A member of the White House Press Corps and columnist for Tribune Media Services and The Hill, Press was an early supporter of Bernie Sanders and hosted two of the Senator's first presidential strategy sessions in his living room.If you're already on the left, you'll cheer a fellow traveler. If not yet there, you soon will be.Dirty Wars and Polished Silver: The Life and Times of a War Correspondent Turned Ambassatrix
Par Lynda Schuster. 2017
From a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, an exuberant memoir of life, love, and transformation on the frontlines of…
conflicts around the worldGrowing up in 1970s Detroit, Lynda Schuster felt certain life was happening elsewhere. And as soon as she graduated from high school, she set out to find it. Dirty Wars and Polished Silver is Schuster’s story of her life abroad as a foreign correspondent in war-torn countries, and, later, as the wife of a U.S. Ambassador. It chronicles her time working on a kibbutz in Israel, reporting on uprisings in Central America and a financial crisis in Mexico, dodging rocket fire in Lebanon, and grieving the loss of her first husband, a fellow reporter, who was killed only ten months after their wedding.But even after her second marriage, to a U.S. diplomat, all the black-tie parties and personal staff and genteel “Ambassatrix School” grooming in the world could not protect her from the violence of war.Equal parts gripping and charming, Dirty Wars and Polished Silver is a story about one woman’s quest for self-discovery—only to find herself, unexpectedly, more or less back where she started: wiser, saner, more resolved. And with all her limbs intact.A Life with Words: A Writer's Memoir
Par Richard Wright. 2015
From the acclaimed writer of the beloved Clara Callan comes a beautifully crafted, charming portrait of the writing life. Combining…
his characteristic wit and self-deprecation with his extraordinary imagination and insight, Richard B. Wright has created a deeply affecting memoir that reads like a novel.As a small, watchful boy growing up in a working class family in Midland, Ontario, during the Second World War, Wright gradually discovered that he saw the world through different eyes. His intellectual and sexual awakenings, his exploits as a young salesman in Canadian publishing, his painful struggles to become a writer--all of this is balanced against the extraordinary reception that in the 1970s greeted his first novel, The Weekend Man, which was published around the world to great acclaim. In spite of the sometimes crippling depression that haunted him and the ups and downs of the mid-life writer, he would finally achieve overwhelming success with Clara Callan, the Giller-winning work that swept every award in Canada and revitalized his career. Lovers of Wright's work will appreciate behind-the-scenes glimpses of his craft in individual novels and his exploration of how a writer transmutes experience into art. And readers will enjoy his thoughtful exploration of the essential role of storytelling in our lives. A Life with Words is both a celebration of the writing life and a deeply personal--at times revelatory--invitation into the world of the imagination.The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography
Par Rosemary Ashton, Claude Rawson. 1996
Vertigo
Par Michael Hulse, W G Sebald. 2001
The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. Vertigo,…
W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald--the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness--takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts--Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life
Par Jeffrey Mehlman. 2010
Mehlman (French literature, Boston University) deconstructs and recreates his intellectual and, at times, personal life in this freewheeling memoir. His…
fascination with French authors and literary theorists, such as Derrida, Mauron and Lacan, along with a desire to understand the love/hate relationship of Jewish intellectuals with France are recurrent riffs in the story. However, Mehlman's memories skip about, as they do in reality, one recalling another, leaping back and forth in time, occasionally repeating themselves in slightly different ways. It does not surprise that Mehlman is a devotée of Proust. The memories are compelling in themselves. One doesn't need to have read Mehlman's other works to enjoy his ramblings through life. It does help if one is a Francophile with a sense of humor. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)Ghost Songs
Par Regina Mcbride. 2016
Eighteen-year-old Regina McBride is haunted by the ghosts of her parents. Her father visits her--he is desperate, but she doesn't…
know how to help him. Her mother is a quiet figure, obscured by light--a flash at the foot of the bed. Regina, raised Irish Catholic and with the ironclad belief that some sins are unforgivable, fears her parents are trapped between worlds, forever punished after they committed suicide within a few months of each other. Terrorized by these visitations and flattened by grief, Regina slowly begins her hazardous journey to recovery. Lyrical and lovely, harrowing and haunting, Ghost Songs charts her struggle to separate madness from imagination and sorrow from devastation. From New York to the desert of New Mexico to the shores of Ireland, Regina searches for herself, her home, and a way to return to the family that remains. Ghost Songs is an exploration of memory, a meditation on love and loss, and, in the end, a celebration of life and the living.Virginia Woolf
Par Alexandra Harris. 2011
An ideal introduction to the life and work of Virginia Woolf by an award-winning author: the story of a life…
lived with intensity from moment to moment and shaped into the lasting patterns of art. In 1907, when she was twenty-five and not yet a published novelist, Virginia Stephen had everything still to prove. She felt herself to be at a crossroads: "I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages." Today her prose is still blazing; perhaps it burns brighter than ever. This is the story of how a determined young woman with a notebook became one of the greatest writers of all time. It is a story that sparkles with wit and friendship, language and love, wicked jokes and passionate appreciation of ordinary things. In this illuminating new account, Alexandra Harris uses vivid flashes of detail to evoke Woolf's changing backgrounds and preoccupations. We move from the close-packed rhythms of a Victorian childhood to the experiments of Bloomsbury and Woolf's trial-and-error answers to the pressing question of how to live. We see her tackling challenging forms of writing, trying out different voices, following flights of fancy, and returning to earth. Above all, we see her making conscious decisions about what to do next. The book considers each of the novels in context, gives due prominence to a range of Woolf's dazzlingly inventive essays, traces the contentious course of her "afterlife," and shows why, seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf continues to haunt and inspire us.Hemingway: The Paris Years
Par Michael Reynolds. 1989
The 1920s in Paris are the pivotal years in Hemingway's apprenticeship as a writer, whether sitting in cafés or at…
the feet of Gertrude Stein. These are the heady times of the Nick Adams short stories, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the writing of The Sun Also Rises. These are also the years of Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson, the birth of his first son, and his discovery of the bullfights at Pamplona.William Wells Brown: An African American Life
Par Ezra Greenspan. 2014
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist 'Biography' A groundbreaking biography of the most pioneering and accomplished African-American writer of…
the nineteenth century. Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone's, "rented" out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as "Sandy" reinvented himself as "William Wells" Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres: travelogue, novel (the now canonized Clotel), printed play, and history. He also practiced medicine, ran for office, and campaigned for black uplift, temperance, and civil rights. Ezra Greenspan's masterful work, elegantly written and rigorously researched, sets Brown's life in the richly rendered context of his times, creating a fascinating portrait of an inventive writer who dared to challenge the racial orthodoxies and explore the racial complexities of nineteenth-century America.The Young Hemingway
Par Michael Reynolds. 1986
"The Young Hemingway will entertain and surprise. Not only is it a significant contribution to Hemingway critical biography, but it…
should rank as one of the best nonfiction books of the year."--Los Angeles Times Michael Reynolds recreates the milieu that forged one of America's greatest and most influential writers. He reveals the fraught foundations of Hemingway's persona: his father's self-destructive battle with depression and his mother's fierce independence and spiritualism. He brings Hemingway through World War I, where he was frustrated by being too far away from the action and glory, despite his being wounded and nursed to health by Agnes Von Kurowsky--the older woman with whom he fell terribly in love.First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg
Par Michael Schumacher. 2017
“The way to point to the existence of the universe is to see one thing directly and clearly and describe…
it. . . . If you see something as a symbol of something else, then you don't experience the object itself, but you're always referring it to something else in your mind. It's like making out with one person and thinking about another.” —Ginsberg speaking to his writing class at Naropa Institute, 1985With “Howl” Allen Ginsberg became the voice of the Beat Generation. It was a voice heard in some of the best-known poetry of our time—but also in Ginsberg’s eloquent and extensive commentary on literature, consciousness, and politics, as well as his own work. Much of what he had to say, he said in interviews, and many of the best of these are collected for the first time in this book. Here we encounter Ginsberg elaborating on how speech, as much as writing and reading, and even poetry, is an act of art.Testifying before a Senate subcommittee on LSD in 1966; gently pressing an emotionally broken Ezra Pound in a Venice pensione in 1967; taking questions in a U.C. Davis dormitory lobby after a visit to Vacaville State Prison in 1974; speaking at length on poetics, and in detail about his “Blake Visions,” with his father Louis (also a poet); engaging William Burroughs and Norman Mailer during a writing class: Ginsberg speaks with remarkable candor, insight, and erudition about reading and writing, music and fame, literary friendships and influences, and, of course, the culture (or counterculture) and politics of his generation. Revealing, enlightening, and often just plain entertaining, Allen Ginsberg in conversation is the quintessential twentieth-century American poet as we have never before encountered him: fully present, in pitch-perfect detail.Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books
Par Lynne Sharon Schwartz. 1997
Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers deeply felt insight into why people read and how what they read shapes their lives. By…
interweaving the story of her Brooklyn childhood with vivid memories of particular books, she has created an enchanting celebration of the printed word.Kid Authors: True Tales of Childhood from Famous Writers
Par Doogie Horner, David Stabler. 2017
Funny and totally true childhood biographies and full-color illustrations tell the tales from the challenging yet defining growing-up years of…
J. K. Rowling, Beverly Cleary, J. R. R. Tolkien, and 12 other great writers. Every great author started out as a kid. Before the best sellers, fan clubs, and beloved stories we know today, the world's most celebrated writers had regular-kid problems just like you. Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) loved to skip school and make mischief, with his best friend Tom, of course! A young J. R. R. Tolkien was bitten by a huge tarantula—or as he called it, “a spider as big as a dragon.” Toddler Zora Neale Hurston took her first steps when a wild hog entered her house and started chasing her! Kid Artists tells their stories and more—the diverse and inclusive cast that includes Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, J. K. Rowling, Sherman Alexie, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Stan Lee—through kid-friendly texts and full-color cartoon illustrations on nearly every page.So They Call You Pisher!: A Memoir
Par Michael Rosen. 2017
The brilliant family memoir of the much-beloved poet and political campaignerIn this hilarious, moving memoir, much-loved children’s poet and political…
campaigner Michael Rosen recalls the first twenty-three years of his life. He was born in the North London suburbs, and his parents, Harold and Connie, both teachers, first met as teenage Communists in the Jewish East End of the 1930s. The family home was filled with stories of relatives in London, the United States and France and of those who had disappeared in Europe. Different from other children, Rosen and his brother, Brian, grew up dreaming of a socialist revolution. Party meetings were held in the front room. Summers were for communist camping holidays. But it all changed after a trip to East Germany when, in 1957, his parents decided to leave ‘the Party’. From that point, Michael followed his own journey of radical self-discovery: running away to Aldermaston to march against the bomb; writing and performing in experimental political theatre at Oxford; getting arrested during the 1968 movements. The book ends with a letter to his father, and the revelation of a heartbreaking family secret.The previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the…
familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration.In 1929, the Soviet Union declared the area of Birobidzhan a homeland for Jews. It was championed by a group of intellectuals who envisioned a place of post-oppression Jewish culture, and by the early 1930s, tens of thousands of Jews had moved there from the shtetls. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges of the Communist Party and cultural elite, but after the Second World War, the newly named "Jewish Autonomous Region" received an influx of Jews dispossessed from what had once been the Pale, most of whom had lost families in the Holocaust. In the late 1940s, another wave of arrests swept through Birobidzhan, traumatizing the Jews into silence, and effectively making them invisible. Now Masha Gessen gives us a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan--and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia.(Part of the Jewish Encounters series)Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years
Par Nicholas Frankel. 2017
Nicholas Frankel presents a revisionary account of Oscar Wilde’s final years, spent in poverty and exile in Europe following his…
release from an English prison for the crime of gross indecency between men. Despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde—unapologetic and even defiant—attempted to rebuild himself as a man, and a man of letters.Difficult Women
Par Scott Spencer, David Plante. 2017
David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time…
in decades.Difficult Women presents portraits of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and, in their own way, difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself. The book begins with David Plante’s portrait of Jean Rhys in her old age, when the publication of The Wide Sargasso Sea, after years of silence that had made Rhys’s great novels of the 1920s and ’30s as good as unknown, had at last gained genuine recognition for her. Rhys, however, can hardly be said to be enjoying her new fame. A terminal alcoholic, she curses and staggers and rants like King Lear on the heath in the hotel room that she has made her home, while Plante looks impassively on. Sonia Orwell is his second subject, a suave exploiter and hapless victim of her beauty and social prowess, while the unflappable, brilliant, and impossibly opinionated Germaine Greer sails through the final pages, ever ready to set the world, and any erring companion, right.