Download or read book Chasing Bright Medusas written by Benjamin Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Chasing Bright Medusas should appeal to anyone — novice or expert — ready to explore Cather’s life and work in the company of a critic so alert to the shimmering subtlety of her style and the hard years of effort that went into crystallizing it.” —The Washington Post A tender biography of one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century and an elegant exploration of artistic endurance, as told by a lifelong lover of Willa Cather’s work The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite—she took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal—literary immortality. Unlike Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, her idealism was unironic, and she stood alone among the great modern authors—at odds with the fashionable attitudes of her time. Combining intricate analysis with an empathetic, lyrical voice, Benjamin Taylor uncovers the reality of Cather’s artistic development, from modest beginnings to the triumphs of her mature years. His book is simultaneously an homage to her character, a warm consideration of her work, and a case being made to read Cather with renewed vigor.
Download or read book Chasing Bright Medusas written by Benjamin Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tender biography of one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century and an elegant exploration of artistic endurance, as told by a lifelong lover of Willa Cather’s work The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite—she took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal—literary immortality. Unlike Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, her idealism was unironic, and she stood alone among the great modern authors—at odds with the fashionable attitudes of her time. Combining intricate analysis with an empathetic, lyrical voice, Benjamin Taylor uncovers the reality of Cather’s artistic development, from modest beginnings to the triumphs of her mature years. His book is simultaneously an homage to her character, a warm consideration of her work, and a case being made to read Cather with renewed vigor.
Download or read book Willa Cather written by Hermione Lee and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1991 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cather is usually read as a nostalgic celebrator of the American past. Lee explores a stranger and more complex Cather, whose life and work are rife with split identities, sexual conflicts and stoic fatalism. Illustrated.
Download or read book Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism written by Joan Ross Acocella and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defending Willa Cather against historical and critical distortions, the author argues that Cather's central vision was a tragic vision of the human condition rather than a firm political agenda.
Download or read book Willa Cather Living written by Edith Lewis and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willa Cather's close friend and travelling campanion presents a portrait of the well-known author, describing her personality, appearance, relationships, and response to life's hardships and triumphs.
Download or read book Here We Are written by Benjamin Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend. I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement. So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend. Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.
Download or read book The Only Wonderful Things written by Melissa J. Homestead and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on newly uncovered archives, The Only Wonderful Things offers a groundbreaking look at American novelist Willa Cather's creative process by arguing that the writer's life partner, magazine editor Edith Lewis, had a crucial impact on Cather's literary work.
Download or read book The Lost Book of Adana Moreau written by Michael Zapata and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction* A Heartland Booksellers Award Nominee An NPR Best Book of the Year A BookPage Best Book of the Year A Library Journal Best Winter/Spring Debut of 2020 A Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from the Boston Globe and The Millions A Best Book of February 2020 at Salon, The Millions, LitHub and Vol 1. Brooklyn “A stunner—equal parts epic and intimate, thrilling and elegiac.”—Laura Van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel The mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript. Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers a mysterious manuscript written by none other than Adana Moreau. With the help of his friend Javier, Saul tracks down an address for Adana’s son in New Orleans, but as Hurricane Katrina strikes they must head to the storm-ravaged city for answers. What results is a brilliantly layered masterpiece—an ode to home, storytelling and the possibility of parallel worlds.
Download or read book Cather s Kitchens written by Roger L. Welsch and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2002-04-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger and Linda Welsch matched references from Willa Cather's writing with recipes they collected from Cather family recipe files, from other period cookbooks, and from old-time ethnic cooks still living in the Bohemian tradition. Cather's Kitchens comes as close as possible to the precise recipes Cather had in mind and memory as she wrote.
Download or read book Willa Cather written by Hermione Lee and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hermione Lee’s provocative and influential biography provides a sensitive reappraisal of a marvelous and often underrated writer. The Willa Cather she reveals here was a Nebraskan who spent much of her life in self-imposed exile from the prairies she celebrated in O Pioneers! and My Antonia, a woman whose life was riddled with the tension between masculine and feminine, and a writer whose naturalness of style disguised exquisite artistry. By exposing the contradictions that lie at the heart of much of Cather’s life and work, Lee locates new layers of meaning and places her firmly at the forefront of the modern literary tradition that was taking shape in her time.
Download or read book Willa Cather and the American Southwest written by John N. Swift and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Southwest was arguably as formative a landscape for Willa Cather?s aesthetic vision as was her beloved Nebraska. Both landscapes elicited in her a sense of raw incompleteness. They seemed not so much finished places as things unassembled, more like countries ?still waiting to be made into [a] landscape.? Cather?s fascination with the Southwest led to its presence as a significant setting in three of her most ambitious novels: The Song of the Lark, The Professor?s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This volume focuses a sharp eye on how the landscape of the American Southwest served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity. No single scholarly methodology prevails in the essays gathered here, giving the volume rare depth and complexity.
Download or read book Naples Declared written by Benjamin Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-05-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a city of seemingly irreconcilable opposites, simultaneously glorious and ghastly. And it is Ben Taylor’s remarkable ability to meld these contradictions into a whole that makes this the exciting and original book it is. He takes his stroll around the bay with the acute sensitivity of a lover, the good humor of a friend, and the wisdom of a seeker who has immersed himself in all aspects of this contrapuntal culture. His curiosity leads him to many byways, both real and metaphoric, and his passion for this ancient city and its people becomes, in his graceful prose and amusing anecdotes, irresistibly contagious.
Download or read book The Hue and Cry at Our House written by Benjamin Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning memoir of one tumultuous year of boyhood in Fort Worth, Texas, opening with a handshake with JFK, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed. Winner of the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and a New York Times Editor's Choice. “A marvel of a book—elegant, touching, singular.” —Mary Karr “Brief and moving . . . An elegantly written book, erudite, perceptive and at times painfully candid.”—Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal After John F. Kennedy’s speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor’s teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president’s assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex. Looking back on the love and tension within his family, the childhood friendships that lasted and those that didn’t, his memories of summer camp and family trips, he reflects upon the outsized impact our larger American story had on his own. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today. In lyrical, translucent prose, he thoughtfully extends the story of twelve months into the years before and after, painting a portrait of the artist not simply as a young man, but across his whole life. As he writes, “[A]ny twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough . . . Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at eleven and twelve.”
Download or read book On writing written by Willa Cather and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Selected Letters of Willa Cather written by Willa Cather and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time Magazine's 10 Top Nonfiction Books of the Year • Willa Cather’s letters—withheld from publication for more than six decades—are finally available to the public in this fascinating selection. The hundreds collected here range from witty reports of life as a teenager in Red Cloud in the 1880s through her college years at the University of Nebraska, her time as a journalist in Pittsburgh and New York, and her growing eminence as a novelist. They describe her many travels and record her last years, when the loss of loved ones and the disasters of World War II brought her near to despair. Above all, they reveal her passionate interest in people, literature, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from her fiction: confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted, concerned with profound ideas, but also at times sentimental, sarcastic, and funny. A deep pleasure to read, this volume reveals the intimate joys and sorrows of one of America’s most admired writers.
Download or read book The Selected Letters of Willa Cather written by Willa Cather and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time Magazine's 10 Top Nonfiction Books of the Year • Willa Cather’s letters—withheld from publication for more than six decades—are finally available to the public in this fascinating selection. The hundreds collected here range from witty reports of life as a teenager in Red Cloud in the 1880s through her college years at the University of Nebraska, her time as a journalist in Pittsburgh and New York, and her growing eminence as a novelist. They describe her many travels and record her last years, when the loss of loved ones and the disasters of World War II brought her near to despair. Above all, they reveal her passionate interest in people, literature, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from her fiction: confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted, concerned with profound ideas, but also at times sentimental, sarcastic, and funny. A deep pleasure to read, this volume reveals the intimate joys and sorrows of one of America’s most admired writers.
Download or read book Invention written by James Dyson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-02 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dyson has become a byword for high performing products, technology, design and invention. Now, James Dyson, the inventor and entrepreneur who made it all happen, tells his remarkable and inspirational story in Invention: A Life. Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out ofmany failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. His products - including vacuum cleaners, hair dryers and hair stylers, and fans and purifiers - are not only revolutionary technologies, but design classics. This was a legacy of his time studying at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, when he was inspired by some of the most famous artists, designers and inventors of the era, as well as his engineering heroes such as Frank Whittle and Alec Issigonis. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome. Dyson has always looked to the future, even setting up his own university to help provide the next generation of engineers and designers. For, as he says, 'everything changes all the time, so experience is of little use'. Whether you are someone who has an idea for a better product, an aspiring entrepreneur, whether you appreciate great design or a page-turning read, Invention: A Life offers you inspiration, hope and much more.
