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books tagged “essays”
books tagged “essays”
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Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Moviesby James AgeeISBN 0375755292 (0-375-75529-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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All the Myriad Waysby Larry NivenISBN 0345334167 (0-345-33416-7)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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A Barthes Readerby Roland Barthes, Susan SontagISBN 0374521441 (0-374-52144-1)
Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Barthes Reader'Book summary:A Barthes Reader gives one the image of Barthes as one of the great public teachers of our time, someone who thought out, argued for, and made available several steps in a penetrating reflection on language sign systems, texts- and what they have to tell us about the concept of being human. Susan Sontag's prefatory essay is one of her finest acts of criticism, informed by intellectual sympathy and a sure sense of the contours of the mind she is describing.[via]More editions of A Barthes Reader:
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The Best of Outside: The First 20 Yearsby Edward Abbey, OutsideISBN 0375703136 (0-375-70313-6)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years'Book summary:For two decades Outside magazine has remained committed to good writing, publishing feature articles from well-known authors on a variety of topics connected (in sometimes obscure yet fascinating ways) to the outdoors, adventure, travel, and just about anything else that happens beyond the confines of the mall. The most memorableof these pieces are collected in a single anthology, The Best of Outside: Tom McGuane offers compelling reasons to hunt; Jonathan Raban discusses life on the open ocean; Barry Lopez considers the graceful and beleaguered flocks of snow geese that once filled the skies. Also included are the original articles from Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger that would expand into their bestselling books Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, respectively. [via]
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The Best of Outside : The First 20 Yearsby Outside Magazine Editors, Edward AbbeyISBN 0375500642 (0-375-50064-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best of Outside : The First 20 Years'Book summary:For two decades Outside magazine has remained committed to good writing, publishing feature articles from well-known authors on a variety of topics connected (in sometimes obscure yet fascinating ways) to the outdoors, adventure, travel, and just about anything else that happens beyond the confines of the mall. The most memorableof these pieces are collected in a single anthology, The Best of Outside: Tom McGuane offers compelling reasons to hunt; Jonathan Raban discusses life on the open ocean; Barry Lopez considers the graceful and beleaguered flocks of snow geese that once filled the skies. Also included are the original articles from Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger that would expand into their bestselling books Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, respectively. [via]
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The Collected Proseby Robert LowellISBN 0374522677 (0-374-52267-7)
Softcover, Noonday Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Collected Prose'Book summary:This vast collection of Robert Lowell's uniformly vigorous and well-written essays, which first appeared in 1987, was edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, his longtime editor and friend. Ranging chronologically from a student paper on the Iliad that Lowell composed in 1935 to the unfinished essay, "New England and Further," on which he was working when he died in 1977, Collected Prose is a telling and fascinating compendium of the ideas, arguments, and opinions of one of modernity's most important poets. With many critical writings and book reviews concerning all manner of poets old and new (from Vergil and Ovid to Frost and Stevens, from Hopkins and "Epics" to Bishop and Plath) as well as recently discovered autobiograpical writings, two extended interviews, and learned yet approachable musings on everything from the Gettyburg Address to the art and craft of translation, this prose ominbus is must-reading for all students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature.[via]
Comfort Me with Apples : More Adventures at the Tableby Ruth ReichlISBN 0375501959 (0-375-50195-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Compleat Angler: Or the Contemplative Man's Recreationby Izaak Walton, Charles CottonISBN 0375751483 (0-375-75148-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donneby John Donne, Charles M. CoffinISBN 0375757341 (0-375-75734-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donne's great metaphysical love poetry. Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Extasie," and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie," "His Parting From Her," and "To His Mistris Going to Bed." Presented as well are Donne's satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries. In addition, there is a generous sampling of Donne's prose, including many of his private letters; Ignatius His Conclave, a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from Biathanatos, his celebrated defense of suicide; and his most famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death's Duell." "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time." [via]More editions of The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne:
Complete Works of Lewis Carrollby John TennielISBN 0370005074 (0-370-00507-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explainedby August KleinzahlerISBN 0374530181 (0-374-53018-1)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters And Strange Places, Gently Explained'Book summary:Cutty, One Rock takes the reader on a wild journey by airplane, bus, ferry, and foot from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place.[via]
These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.More editions of Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained:
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Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down!by Dave Barry, Jeff MacNellyISBN 0345444108 (0-345-44410-8)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down!'Book summary:Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry is a pretty amiable guy. But lately, hes been getting a little worked up. What could make a mild-mannered man of words so hot under the collar? Well, a lot of thingslike bad public art, Internet millionaires, SUVs, Regis Philbin . . . and even bigger problems, like
" The slower-than-deceased-livestock left-lane drivers who apparently believe that the right lane is sacred and must never come in direct contact with tires
" The parent-misery quotient of last-minute school science fair projects
" Day trading and other careers that never require you to take off your bathrobe
" The plague of the low-flow toilets, which is so bad that even in Miami, where you can buy drugs just by opening your front door and yelling Hey! I want some crack, you cant even sell your first born to get a normal-flushing toilet
Dave Barry is not taking any of this sitting down. Hes going to stand up for the rights of all Americans against ridiculously named specialty chino coffees and the IRS. Just as soon as he gets the darn toilet flushed. [via]More editions of Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down!:
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Dave Barry Slept Hereby Dave BarryISBN 0345416600 (0-345-41660-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dave Barry Slept Here'Book summary:Dave runs American history through the wringer, and comes up with some wonderfully warped formulations. (The Vikings, for example, "were extremely rugged individuals whose idea of a fun time was to sail over and set fire to England, which in those days was fairly easy to ignite because it had a very high level of thatch, this being the kind of roof favored by the local tribespeople...") Covering pre-Columbian days through the dawn of the Bush administration, Dave Barry Slept Here is the funniest thing to hit this great nation since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. [via]
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Dave Barry Turns 50by Dave BarryISBN 0345431693 (0-345-43169-3)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guysby Dave BarryISBN 0345440633 (0-345-44063-3)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys'Book summary:For thousands of years, women have asked themselves: What is the deal with guys, anyway? What are they thinking? The answer, of course, is: virtually nothing. But that has not stopped Dave Barry from writing an entire book about them, dealing frankly and semi-thoroughly with such important guy issues as:
- Scratching
- Why the average guy can remember who won the 1960 World Series but
not necessarily the names of all his children
- Why guys cannot simultaneously think and look at breasts
- Secret guy orgasm-delaying techniques, including the Margaret Thatcher
Method
- Why guys prefer to believe that there is no such thing as a "prostate" [via]More editions of Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys:
A Defense of Ardor: Essaysby Clare CavanaghISBN 0374529884 (0-374-52988-4)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Deltoid Pumpkin Seedby John A. McPheeISBN 0374516359 (0-374-51635-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed'Book summary:Since the explosion of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey, energy-efficient, lighter-than-air ships have given way to gas-guzzling jet aircraft. But in the 1960s, an unusual band of inventors, engineers and investors, again in New Jersey, created the Aereon, a strange, wingless hybrid airplane/dirigible. The Aereon--the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed-- promised to be a safe workhorse of the skies, capable of carrying the payload of entire freight trains with minimal cost.
In this exquisitely crafted tale of back-to-the-drawing-board perseverance, McPhee tells the story not only of the Aereon, but of any product development team. He astutely delineates the team members' personalities and interactions, delves back in time to the origins of lighter-than-air craft and the history of propellers, and in the end, makes us wonder why this promising technology hasn't been perfected. Like Aramis: Or the Love of Technology, this is a splendid book about a potentially superior aircraft which has yet to be adopted. [via]
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Dragons of Eden: Specutaltions on the Evolution of Human Intelligenceby Carl SaganISBN 0345346297 (0-345-34629-7)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence'Book summary:Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
"A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day before yesterday...It's a delight."
THE NEW YORK TIMES [via]More editions of Dragons of Eden: Specutaltions on the Evolution of Human Intelligence:
Ecology of Fearby Mike DavisISBN 0375706070 (0-375-70607-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinionby David BrinkleyISBN 0345409523 (0-345-40952-3)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion'Book summary:This is a selection of Mr. Brinkley's favorite short commentaries, compiled from those he delivered over the last 15 years as host of "This Week With David Brinkley." Brinkley brings his weighty bearing, rich tones, dark humor, and acerbic wit to bear on the problems of the day and editorializes on the political questions of Washington. He is often funny in his irreverent dismissal of politicians and his world-weary resigned attitude to intractable issues both large and small is curiously appealing. [via]
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Family Manby Calvin TrillinISBN 0374525838 (0-374-52583-8)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerabilityby Laura KipnisISBN 0375424172 (0-375-42417-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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The Founding Fishby John A. McPheeISBN 0374528837 (0-374-52883-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Founding Fish'Book summary:A long-awaited new book by the nonfiction master, winner of the Pulitzer Prize[via]
Few fish are as beloved-or as obsessed over-as the American shad. Although shad spend most of their lives in salt water, they enter rivers by the hundreds of thousands in the spring and swim upstream heroic distances in order to spawn, then return to the ocean.
John McPhee is a shad fisherman, and his passion for the annual shad run has led him, over the years, to learn much of what there is to know about the fish known as Alosa sapidissima, or "most savory." In The Founding Fish McPhee makes of his obsession a work of literary art. In characteristically bold and spirited prose-inflected, here and there, with wry humor-McPhee places the fish within natural history and American history. He explores the fish's cameo role in the lives of William Penn, Washington, Jefferson, Thoreau, Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth. He travels with various ichthyologists, including a fish behaviorist and an anatomist of fishes; takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and cooks shad and shad roe a variety of ways (delectably explained at the end of the book). Mostly, though, McPhee goes fishing for shad-standing for hours in the Delaware River in stocking waders and cleated boots, or gently bumping over rapids in a chocolate-colored Kevlar canoe. His adventures in the pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing, at once expert and ardent, in which he has no equal. -
The Fun of It: Stories from the Talk of the Townby Lillian RossISBN 0375756493 (0-375-75649-3)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fun of It: Stories from the Talk of the Town'Book summary:William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.
The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine's life. Edited by Lillian Ross, the longtime Talk reporter and New Yorker staff writer, the book brings together pieces by the section's most original writers. Only in a collection of Talk stories will you find E. B. White visiting a potter's field; James Thurber following Gertrude Stein at Brentano's; Geoffrey Hellman with Cole Porter at the Waldorf Towers; A. J. Liebling on a book tour with Albert Camus; Maeve Brennan ventriloquizing the long-winded lady; John Updike navigating the passageways of midtown; Calvin Trillin marching on Washington in 1963; Jacqueline Onassis chatting with Cornell Capa; Ian Frazier at the Monster Truck and Mud Bog Fall Nationals; John McPhee in virgin forest; Mark Singer with sixth-graders adopting Hudson River striped bass; Adam Gopnik in Flatbush visiting the ìgrandest theatre devoted exclusively to the movies; Hendrik Hertzberg pinning down a Sulzberger on how the Times got colorized; George Plimpton on the tennis court with Boris Yeltsin; and Lillian Ross reporting good little stories for more than forty-five years. They and dozens of other Talk contributors provide an entertaining tour of the most famous section of the most famous magazine in the world. [via]More editions of The Fun of It: Stories from the Talk of the Town:
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The Great Plainsby Ian FrazierISBN 0374217238 (0-374-21723-8)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Plains'Book summary:With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier captures the essence of the Great Plains, driving 25,000 miles up and down and across this section of the country which most travelers fly over. [via]
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Heirs of General Practiceby John McPheeISBN 0374519749 (0-374-51974-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990sby Timothy Garton AshISBN 0375727620 (0-375-72762-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s'Book summary:The 1990s. An extraordinary decade in Europe. At its beginning, the old order collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone hailed a brave new Europe. But no one knew what this new Europe would look like. Now we know. Most of Western Europe has launched into the unprecedented gamble of monetary union, though Britain stands aside. Germany, peacefully united, with its capital in Berlin, is again the most powerful country in Europe. The Central EuropeansPoles, Czechs, Hungarianshave made successful transitions from communism to capitalism and have joined NATO. But farther east and south, in the territories of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, the continent has descended into a bloody swamp of poverty, corruption, criminality, war, and bestial atrocities such as we never thought would be seen again in Europe.
Timothy Garton Ash chronicles this formative decade through a glittering collection of essays, sketches, and dispatches written as history was being made. He joins the East Germans for their decisive vote for unification and visits their former leader in prison. He accompanies the Poles on their roller-coaster ride from dictatorship to democracy. He uncovers the motives for monetary union in Paris and Bonn. He walks in mass demonstrations in Belgrade and travels through the killing fields of Kosovo. Occasionally, he even becomes an actor in a drama he describes: debating Germany with Margaret Thatcher or the role of the intellectual with Václav Havel in Prague. Ranging from Vienna to Saint Petersburg, from Britain to Ruthenia, Garton Ash reflects on how "the single great conflict" of the cold war has been replaced by many smaller ones. And he asks what part the United States still has to play. Sometimes he takes an eagle's-eye view, considering the present attempt to unite Europe against the background of a thousand years of such efforts. But often he swoops to seize one telling human story: that of a wiry old farmer in Croatia, a newspaper editor in Warsaw, or a bitter, beautiful survivor from Sarajevo.
His eye is sharp and ironic but always compassionate. History of the Present continues the work that Garton Ash began with his trilogy of books about Central Europe in the 1980s, combining the crafts of journalism and history. In his Introduction, he argues that we should not wait until the archives are opened before starting to write the history of our own times. Then he shows how it can be done.
From the Hardcover edition. [via]More editions of History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s:
Human Provinceby Elias CanettiISBN 0374518904 (0-374-51890-4)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Singsby Maya AngelouISBN 0375507892 (0-375-50789-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'Book summary:In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant." [via]
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Illness As Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphorsby Susan SontagISBN 0374102570 (0-374-10257-0)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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In Suspect Terrainby John McPheeISBN 0374517940 (0-374-51794-0)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Suspect Terrain'Book summary:From the outwash plains of Brooklyn to Indiana's drifted diamonds and gold, John McPhee's In Suspect Terrain is a narrative of the earth, told in four sections of equal length, each in a different way reflecting the three others-- a biography; a set piece about a fragment of Appalachian landscape in illuminating counterpoint to the human history there; a modern collision of ideas about the origins of the mountain range; and, in contrast, a century-old collision of ideas about the existence of the Ice Age. The central figure is Anita Harris, an internationally celebrated geologist who went into her profession to get out of a Brooklyn ghetto. The unifying theme is plate tectonics-- here concentrating on the acceptance that all aspects of the theory do not universally enjoy. As such, In Suspect Terrain is a report from the rough spots at the front edge of a science.[via]
In Suspect Terrain is the second book in a series on geology and geologists, presenting a cross section of North America along the fortieth parallel, and gathered under the overall title Annals of the Former World. The other books in the series are Basin and Range, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California. 
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, from Henry David Thoreauby Henry David Thoreau, Eliot Porter, Sierra ClubISBN 0345243137 (0-345-24313-7)
Hardcover, Ballantine Books
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The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island: And, Cycad Islandby Oliver W. SacksISBN 0375700730 (0-375-70073-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island: And, Cycad Island'Book summary:In his books An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks details the lives of patients isolated by neurological disorders, shedding light on our common humanity and the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Now he looks at the effects of physical isolation in The Island of the Colorblind. On this journey, he carried with him the intellectual curiousity, kind understanding, and unique vision he has so consistently demonstrated.
Drawn to the Micronesian island of Pingelap by reports of a community of people born totally colorblind, Dr. Sacks set up a clinic in a one-room dispensary. There he listened to patients describe their colorless world in terms rich with pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. Then, in Guam, he investigated a puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis, making housecalls amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture. The experience affords Sacks an opportunity to elaborate on such personal passions as botany and history and to explore the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the birth of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time. [via]
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Just As I Thoughtby Grace PaleyISBN 0374525854 (0-374-52585-4)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Just As I Thought'Book summary:With their loopy sense of humor, pervasive sorrow, and Lower East Side vernacular, Grace Paley's stories have earned her a permanent place in American literature. Now her publisher has collected almost three decades of essays, reviews, and lectures, which amount to cumulative, if oblique, self-portrait. "This is not an autobiographical collection," she writes in her introduction, "but it is about my life." Since Paley's life has encompassed not only literature but a long involvement in politics, there are pungent takes on the women's movement, anti-nuke protests, and Vietnam. Yet she's too hard-headed to write even a single sentence of polemical drivel; her political prose is always personal. Here, for example, she attends a Quaker sit-in at the Seabrook nuclear site: "I'm not very good at Friends meetings. My mind refuses to prevent my eyes from looking at the folks around me, and I'm often annoyed because I can't get the drift of the murmur of private witness. I did hear one young man near me say, 'May your intercession here today be the fruit of our action.' I think this means 'God helps those that help themselves,' a proverb that sounds meaner than it really is." And when it comes to literature and writing, Paley is tremendous. Her short essays on Isaac Babel and Donald Barthelme are themselves worth the price ofpurchase. In Just As I Thought, the author accomplishes exactly what she ascribes to Babel, producing "clarity, presentness, tension, and a model of how always, though with great difficulty, to proceed." [via]
Kipling, Auden and Company: Essays and Reviews, 1935-1964by Randall JarrellISBN 0374181535 (0-374-18153-5)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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The Land of Ulroby Czeslaw Milosz, Louis IribarneISBN 0374519374 (0-374-51937-4)
Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Land of Ulro'Book summary:This major prose work, originally published in English in 1985, is both a moving spiritual self-portrait and an unflinching inquiry into the genesis of our modern afflictions. A man who was raised a Catholic in rural Lithuania, lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, and emerged, first in Europe and then in America, as one of our most important men of letters, speaks here of the inherited dilemmas of our civilization in a voice recognizable for its honesty and passion.[via]
Life Stories: Profiles from the New Yorkerby David RemnickISBN 0375503552 (0-375-50355-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Light Elements: Essays in Science from Gravity to Levityby Judith StoneISBN 0345366085 (0-345-36608-5)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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Lover's Discourse: Fragmentsby Roland BarthesISBN 0374521611 (0-374-52161-1)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lover's Discourse: Fragments'Book summary:"Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is A Lover's Discourse, a writing out of the discourse of love. This languageprimarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partneris unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in A Lover's Discourse by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest."Jonathan Culler[via]More editions of Lover's Discourse: Fragments:
Murray Kash's Book of Countryby Murray KashISBN 035230443X (0-352-30443-X)
Softcover, Star
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Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughtsby Alfred BrendelISBN 0374522782 (0-374-52278-2)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts'Book summary:Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts [Paperback] [via]
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My Ears Are Bentby Joseph MitchellISBN 0375421033 (0-375-42103-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Loveby Jamaica KincaidISBN 0374281939 (0-374-28193-9)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Nonviolent Alternativeby Thomas MertonISBN 0374515751 (0-374-51575-1)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actorsby Luc Sante, Melissa Holbrook PiersonISBN 0375700927 (0-375-70092-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors'Book summary:O.K. You Mugs is an unusual collection of essays--a book full of writers writing about actors without once making cracks about their relative intelligence. It is a wildly varied collection that jams deadly serious film critiques up against swoops of poetry, but all the pieces are united by a genuine love of cinema--be it Dave Hickey's ode to Robert Mitchum's eternal cool or Manny Farber's bracingly crabby essay on the death of real acting in movies. In a refreshing change of pace, character actors are given just as much space as leads, if not more. Homage is paid to both to Thelma Ritter's solid but always welcome screen persona and the quiet genius of Margaret Dumont, the remarkably dignified dowager in the Marx Brothers movies. The best pieces will send you straight to the video store--Greil Marcus's essay on the chameleonic evil of J.T. Walsh will have you eagerly rewatching a half-dozen terrific oh-he-was-THAT-guy! performances with renewed appreciation. John Updike's "Suzie Creamcheese Speaks" is also a revelation, exploring the surprisingly tough and pragmatic private persona of screen good girl Doris Day. An entertaining and thought-provoking collection for actors and movie fans alike. --Ali Davis [via]
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On the Rezby Ian FrazierISBN 0374226385 (0-374-22638-5)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Rez'Book summary:Given that the Great Plains long functioned as a stomping ground for the Oglala Sioux, it was inevitable that Ian Frazier would cross paths with them when he wrote his 1989 chronicle of that sublime flatland. But the encounter between the self-confessed "chintzy middle-class white guy" and his Native American counterparts went so swimmingly that Crazy Horse assumed a starring role in the book. Now Frazier continues his cross-cultural romance in On the Rez. This account of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is as touching, funny, and maniacally digressive as anything he's written. What's more, he manages to avoid most of the politically correct potholes along the way, producing a vivid, ambivalent (i.e., honest) portrait of a community where the very "landscape is dense with stories."
Much of On the Rez revolves around Le War Lance, whom Frazier first met in Great Plains. This yarn-spinning, beer-swilling figure serves the author as a kind of Native American Virgil, introducing him to the hard facts of reservation life. In fact, their friendship, with its accents of deep affection and dependency, anchors the entire narrative and elicits some typically top-drawer prose:
Le's eyes can be merry and flat as a smile button, or deep and glittering with malice or slyness or something he knows and I never will. He is fifty-seven years old. I have seen his hair, which is black streaked with gray, when it was over two feet long and held with beaded ponytail holders a foot or so apart, and I have seen it much shorter, after he had shaved his head in mourning for a friend who had died.
On the Rez delivers a history of the Oglala nation that spotlights our paleface population in some of its most shameful, backstabbing moments, as well as a quick tour through Indian America. The latter, to be honest, seems a little too conscientiously cooked up from primary sources and news clippings. But elsewhere Frazier is in superb form, reporting everything he sees and hears with enviable clarity and promptly pulling the rug out from under himself whenever he seems too omniscient. Few accounts of reservation life have been this comical; even fewer have moved beyond the poverty and pandemic drunk driving to discern actual, theological wickedness on the premises: "At such moments a sense of compound evil--the evil of the human heart, in league with the original darkness of this wild continent--curls around me like shoots of a fast-growing vine." In the hands of many a writer, the previous sentence might resemble a rhetorical firecracker. In Frazier's, it comes off as a statement of fact--which is only one of the reasons why every American, Native or not, should take a look at this sad, splendid, and surprisingly hopeful book. --James Marcus [via]More editions of On the Rez:
Once More Around the Parkby Roger AngellISBN 0345379608 (0-345-37960-8)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Readerby Roger AngellISBN 0345367375 (0-345-36737-5)
Hardcover, Ballantine Books
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Outlaw Cookby John Thorne, Matt Lewis ThorneISBN 0374228361 (0-374-22836-1)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Outlaw Cook'Book summary:An iconoclastic eater encourages readers to listen to their thoughts and create their own recipes and shares his essays about his earliest cooking lessons and his opinions on the food writers of the past ten years. [via]
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The Painted Wordby Tom WolfeISBN 0374228787 (0-374-22878-7)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Painted Word'Book summary:In 1975, after having put radical chic and '60s counterculture to the satirical torch, Tom Wolfe turned his attention to the contemporary art world. The patron saint (and resident imp) of New Journalism couldn't have asked for a better subject. Here was a hotbed of pretension, nitwit theorizing, social climbing, and money, money, money--all Wolfe had to do was sharpen his tools and get to work. He did! Much of The Painted Word is a superb burlesque on that modern mating ritual whereby artists get to despise their middle-class audience and accommodate it at the same time. The painter, Wolfe writes, "had to dedicate himself to the quirky god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one devout eye peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of the head on the latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this fall's avant-garde Breakthrough of the Century.... At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to see if anyone in le monde was watching."
The other bone Wolfe has to pick is with the proliferation of art theory, particularly the sort purveyed by postwar colossi like Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Decades after the heyday of abstract expressionism, these guys make pretty easy targets. What could be more absurd, after all, than endless Jesuitical disputes about the flatness of the picture plane? So most of them get a highly comical spanking from the author. It's worth pointing out, of course, that Wolfe paints with a broad (as it were) brush. If he's skewering the entire army of artistic pretenders in a single go, there's no room to admit that Jasper Johns or Willem DeKooning might actually have some talent. But as he would no doubt admit, The Painted Word isn't about the history of art. It's about the history of taste and middlebrow acquisition--and nobody has chronicled these two topics as hilariously or accurately as Tom Wolfe. --James Marcus [via]
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Philip Yancey Recommends: Orthodoxyby G. K. ChestertonISBN 0340746386 (0-340-74638-6)
Softcover, Trafalgar Square
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Philip Yancey Recommends: Orthodoxy'Book summary:If G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith is, as he called it, a "slovenly autobiography," then we need more slobs in the world. This quirky, slender book describes how Chesterton came to view orthodox Catholic Christianity as the way to satisfy his personal emotional needs, in a way that would also allow him to live happily in society. Chesterton argues that people in western society need a life of "practical romance, the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." Drawing on such figures as Fra Angelico, George Bernard Shaw, and St. Paul to make his points, Chesterton argues that submission to ecclesiastical authority is the way to achieve a good and balanced life. The whole book is written in a style that is as majestic and down-to-earth as C.S. Lewis at his best. The final chapter, called "Authority and the Adventurer," is especially persuasive. It's hard to imagine a reader who will not close the book believing, at least for the moment, that the Church will make you free. --Michael Joseph Gross [via]
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The Proust Projectby Andre AcimanISBN 0374238324 (0-374-23832-4)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Proust Project'Book summary:"Discovering Proust is like wandering through a totally unfamiliar land and finding it peopled with kindred spirits and sister souls and fellow countrymen . . . They speak our language, our dialect, share our blind-spots and are awkward in exactly the same way we are, just as their manner of lacing every access of sorrow with slapstick reminds us so much of how we do it when we are sad and wish to hide it, that surely we are not alone and not as strange as we feared we were. And here lies the paradox. So long as a writer tells us what he and only he can see, then surely he speaks our language." --from the preface by André Aciman
For The Proust Project, editor André Aciman asked twenty-eight writers--Shirley Hazzard, Lydia Davis, Richard Howard, Alain de Botton, Diane Johnson, Edmund White, and others--to choose a favorite passage from In Search of Lost Time and introduce it in a brief essay. Gathered together, along with the passages themselves (and a synopsis that guides the reader from one passage to the next), these essays form the perfect introduction to the greatest novel of the last century, and the perfect gift for any Proustian.
FSG will co-publish The Proust Project in a deluxe edition with Turtle Point Press, Books & Co., and Helen Marx Books.André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt and False Papers. He is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Aciman teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.For The Proust Project, editor André Aciman asked twenty-eight writersamong them Shirley Hazzard, Lydia Davis, Richard Howard, Alain de Botton, Diane Johnson, Edmund White, Geoffrey O'Brien, Wayne Koestenbaum, Susan Minot, Andrew Solomon, and Louis Auchinclossto choose a favorite passage from In Search of Lost Time and introduce it in a brief essay.
As gathered togethered here, along with the translated passages themselves (and a synopsis that guides the reader from one passage to the next), these essays form the perfect introduction to the greatest novel of the last century."Discovering Proust is like wandering through a totally unfamiliar land and finding it peopled with kindred spirits and sister souls and fellow countrymen . . . They speak our language, our dialect, share our blind-spots, and are awkward in exactly the same way we are, just as their manner of lacing every access of sorrow with slapstick reminds us so much of how we do it when we are sad and wish to hide it, that surely we are not alone and not as strange as we feared we were. And here lies the paradox. So long as a writer tells us what he and only he can see, then surely he speaks our language."André Aciman, from his Preface[via]
"Editor Andre Aciman's introductory essays gracefully place the individual passages in the larger context of the multivolume novel with great skill. He also provides the most penetrating essay on In Search of Lost Time in his preface."Barbara Fisher, The Boston GlobeMore editions of The Proust Project:
The Ransom of Russian Artby John A. McPheeISBN 0374524505 (0-374-52450-5)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ransom of Russian Art'Book summary:In the 1960's and 1970's, American professor Norton Dodge forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of underground "unofficial" artists, and brought it out himself or arranged to have it shipped illegally to the United States. John McPhee investigates Dodge's clandestine activities in the service of dissident Soviet art, his motives for his work, and the fates of several of the artists whose lives he touched. The Ransom of Russian Art is a suspenseful, chilling, and fascinating report on a covert operation like no other.[via]
A Reading Diaryby Alberto ManguelISBN 0374247420 (0-374-24742-0)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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A Roadside Dogby Robert Hass, Czeslaw MiloszISBN 0374526230 (0-374-52623-0)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Roadside Dog'Book summary:A moving miscellany of poems, parables, essays, and epigrams from the Nobel Prize winner.
I went on a journey to acquaint myself with my province, in a two-horse wagon with a lot of fodder and a tin bucket rattling in the back. The bucket was required for the horses to drink from. I traveled through a country of hills and pine groves that gave way to stretches of forest, where tangles of smoke hovered over the roofs of houses, as if they were on fire, for they were chimneyless cabins; I crossed districts of fields and lakes. It was so interesting to be moving, to give the horses their reins, and wait till, in the next valley, a village slowly appeared, or a park with the white spot of a manor inside it. And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its end. I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night--I don't know where it came from--in a predawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog. -from Road-Side Dog [via]
Rocks of Agesby Stephen Jay GouldISBN 034545040X (0-345-45040-X)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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Rocks of Ages : Science and Religion in the Fullness of Lifeby Stephen Jay GouldISBN 0345430093 (0-345-43009-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rocks of Ages : Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life'Book summary:Revered and eminently readable essayist Stephen Jay Gould has once again rendered the complex simple, this time mending the seeming split between the two "Rocks of Ages," science and religion. He quickly, and rightfully, admits that his thesis is not new, but one broadly accepted by many scientists and theologians. Gould begins by suggesting that Darwin has been misconstrued--that while some religious thinkers have used divinity to prove the impossibility of evolution, Darwin would have never done the reverse.
Gould eloquently lays out not "a merely diplomatic solution" to rectify the physical and metaphysical, but "a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds," central to which is the elegant concept of "non-overlapping magisteria." (Gould defines magisteria as a "four-bit" word meaning domain of authority in teaching.) Essentially, science and religion can't be unified, but neither should they be in conflict; each has its own discrete magisteria, the natural world belonging exclusively to science and the moral to religion.
Gould's argument is both lucid and convincing as he cites past religious and scientific greats (including a particularly touching section on Darwin himself). Regardless of your persuasions, religious or scientific, Gould holds up his end of the conversation with characteristic respect and intelligence. --Paul Hughes [via]
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The Shape of a Pocketby John BergerISBN 0375718885 (0-375-71888-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shape of a Pocket'Book summary:The Shape of a Pocket [Paperback] by Berger, John [via]
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The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrativeby Vivian GornickISBN 0374528586 (0-374-52858-6)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative'Book summary:A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love[via]
All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.More editions of The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative:
A Small Placeby Jamaica KincaidISBN 0374527075 (0-374-52707-5)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Some Horses: Essaysby Thomas McGuaneISBN 0375724524 (0-375-72452-4)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Some Horses: Essays'Book summary:Since his arrival as a novelist and essayist in the late 1960s, Thomas McGuane's elegant and muscular prose has left its print on the trail of American letters, exploring the American landscape and exposing the American heart. In the nine finely tooled essays that make up Some Horses, McGuane explores and exposes his own passionately layered relationship to the cutting horses he rides and works on his Montana ranch. The author's admiration for his four-legged characters is displayed with perceptive wit and clear affection: "If a horse were a Ford," he suggests, "the species would vanish beneath lawsuits engendered by consumer-protection laws." As both participant and observer, McGuane makes sure his readers feel the unique intimacy of the man-horse relationship. "We have saturated the horse with our emotions," he writes. "Yet, a lover of horses has nothing to prove and no expertise to reveal. It is important that we find animals to love, and that is the end of the story."
Actually, for McGuane it's just the beginning. Moving with introspection and grace, he kicks up plenty of dust, description, and insight in essays that probe the intricacies of riding horses, working horses, caring for horses, breeding horses, and competing on them in the roping and displays he so loves. In the magical "A Foal," he contrasts the anxiety of a favorite mare's overdue pregnancy with the joy that finally attends the successful introduction of a healthy newborn into the fold. Also scattered through the collection are marvelous insights into the writer's life--and, in one particular passage, the hands that have produced his life's work: "I looked at my hand, crooked thumb, rope burns, enlarged knuckles, and I felt good because I'd always been afraid that, as a writer, I would always have these Ivory Snow hands." But it's the bigger picture that ultimately interests McGuane: "The open range, the open sea, the open sky, the open wounds of the heart, that's where writers shine." McGuane shines on every page. --Jeff Silverman [via]
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Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Braggby Rick BraggISBN 0375725520 (0-375-72552-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Churchby Philip YanceyISBN 0375431284 (0-375-43128-4)
Hardcover, Ballantine Books
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The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lecturesby James FentonISBN 0374528489 (0-374-52848-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lectures'Book summary:Sharp-eyed critiques and appreciations of the essential poets of our time.
James Fenton is unique among contemporary writers in having achieved equal distinction as a poet and -- in his reportage and criticism -- as a master of trenchant prose. What is more, he has shown himself a devoted critic of both American and British modern poetry, an explainer of each tradition to the other and to itself. In these lectures, delivered at Oxford (where he succeeded Seamus Heaney as Professor of Poetry from 1994 to 1999), Fenton moves easily from Philip Larkin's laments for the British Empire, to Heaney's uneasy rebellion against it, to Robert Frost's celebrations of American conquest; from W. H. Auden on Shakespeare's homoeroticism to the vexed "feminism" of Elizabeth Bishop; from Wilfred Owen's juvenilia to Marianne Moore's youthful agitation for women's suffrage.
In these lectures -- many of which appeared in The New York Review of Books -- Fenton makes sense of the last century in poetry, and explores its antecedents and its legacies, with the lucidity, wit, and gusto that have made his criticism famous. [via]
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The Survival of the Bark Canoeby John A. McPheeISBN 0374516936 (0-374-51693-6)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Survival of the Bark Canoe'Book summary:In an age of mass-produced and disposable objects, traditional crafts are becoming extinct, and appreciation for craftsmanship has become a hobby for the wealthy dilettante. But here and there, a few stalwart individuals carry on the old traditions. Henri Vaillancourt of Greenville, New Hampshire is in large part responsible for the continuing survival of the birch bark canoe. McPhee tells the story not only of Vaillancourt and his work, but of the canoe's role in American history. Many McPhee fans consider this lovely and lucid book one of his finest works. [via]
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Thoughts in Solitudeby Thomas MertonISBN 0374513252 (0-374-51325-2)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Thoughts in Solitude'Book summary:The renowned Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote Thoughts in Solitude in 1953 and 1954, when his superiors allowed him extended periods of seclusion and meditation. This elegant gift book, with clean, spare type and graphics, does justice to a 20th-classic (this is its 25th printing). What has made this book such an enduring and popular work is that it recognizes how important solitude is to our morality, integrity, and ability to love. One does not have to be a monk to find solitude, notes Merton; solitude can be found in the act of contemplation and silent reflection in everyday life. Also, this is not a pious book that assumes that a relationship with the divine can be obtained only by denying our humanity and striving for saintliness. Instead, Merton asserts that connection with God can most easily be made through "respect for temperament, character, and emotion and for everything that makes us human." --Gail Hudson [via]
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Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Dramaby David MametISBN 037570423X (0-375-70423-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama'Book summary:Playwright David Mamet's three lectures at Columbia University are ostensibly about issues of dramatic structure, but as they unfold, and Mamet continually explores the relationship between dramatic structure and the lives we live, much broader concerns are revealed. Here, for example, is Mamet on political propaganda:
It is ... essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic--i.e., non-quantifiable. Peace With Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride--these are the stuff of pageant. They are not social goals; they are, as Alfred Hitchcock told us, the MacGuffin.... The less specific the qualities of the MacGuffin are, the more interested the audience will be.... A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.
Although occasionally academic, the overall tone of the lectures is consistent with Mamet's no-nonsense manner of speech. He has no time for obfuscation and little time for repetition, save when he must absolutely employ it for emphasis. He is passionate about good theater, and passionate about the truth. 3 Uses of the Knife makes an excellent companion piece to his True and False, which addressed similar philosophical matters in the form of advice on the actor's craft. [via]
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Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Ringsby Lin CarterISBN 034527539X (0-345-27539-X)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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Twenty-eight Artists And Two Saints: Essaysby Joan AcocellaISBN 0375424164 (0-375-42416-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriageby Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0374280207 (0-374-28020-7)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage'Book summary:This moving memoir documents a marriage of more than forty years between two gifted people, a long term marriage that was: "full of wonderful things, terrible things, joyous things, grievous things, but ours."[via]More editions of Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage:
A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Societyby Elizabeth HardwickISBN 0374936617 (0-374-93661-7)
Hardcover, Octagon Books
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Wandering: Notes and Sketchesby Hermann HesseISBN 0374509751 (0-374-50975-1)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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What's Not to Love: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writerby Jonathan AmesISBN 0375726497 (0-375-72649-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'What's Not to Love: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer'Book summary:Perhaps all of Jonathan Ames problemsand the genesis of this hilarious bookcan be traced back to the late onset of his puberty. After all it cant be easy to be sixteen with a hairless undistinguishable from that of a five year olds.
This wonderfully entertaining memoir is a touching and humorous look at life in New York City. But this is life for an author who can proclaim my first sexual experience was rather old-fashioned: it was with a prostitute an author who can talk about his desire to be a model for the Hair Club for Men and about meeting his son for the first time.
Often insightful, sometimes tender, always witty and self-deprecating, Whats Not to Love? is an engaging memoir from one of our most funny, most daring writers. [via]More editions of What's Not to Love: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer:
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faithby Studs TerkelISBN 0345451201 (0-345-45120-1)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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Workingby Studs TerkelISBN 0345325699 (0-345-32569-9)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Working'Book summary:Studs Turkel records the voices of America. Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Turkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.... [via]
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Writing a Woman's Lifeby Carolyn G. HeilbrunISBN 034536256X (0-345-36256-X)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Writing a Woman's Life'Book summary:With subtlety and great eloquence, Carolyn Heilbrun shows how, throughout the centuries, those who write about women's lives--biographers andautobiographers--have suppressed the truth of the female experience, in order to make the "written life" conform to the expectations of what that life should be. Heilbrun also examines literature's silence on such vital topics as friendship between women, the female physical experience, and the richness that often imbues a women's later years. Recommended reading for everyone, especially women and writers. [via]
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