Download or read book How to Be a Man Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood written by Thomas Beller and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-03-19 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From strip clubs to the Academy Awards to the basketball court—a ride through the landscape of guyhood. Acclaimed fiction writer Thomas Beller digs deep into his own history in this humorous and insightful collection about the state of masculinity. With sharp and engaging eloquence he discourses on T-shirts; being your mother's date at the Academy Awards; life at a bagel factory; the irrational pleasures of old American cars—and the mysterious disappearance of the author's own particular vehicle from a street in downtown Manhattan; love, sex, and breakups in an office environment; the social ecology of street basketball—including the sudden peril befalling a particular court in Manhattan and the heartwarming efforts of previously disparate community members to save it; coaches; the death of a parent; getting over J. D. Salinger; and an attempt to build a complicated piece of furniture for a beloved. Through stints as a bike messenger, a drummer, a boyfriend and—possibly, potentially, finally—a husband, Beller writes about the life-changing effects of love and marriage—past, present, and future.
Download or read book The Show I ll Never Forget written by Sean Manning and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-02-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Show I'll Never Forget, writer Sean Manning has gathered an amazing array of unforgettable concert memories from a veritable A-list of acclaimed novelists, poets, biographers, cultural critics, and songwriters. Their candid, first-person recollections reveal as much about the writers' lives at the time as they do about the venues where the shows occurred or the artists onstage. Ishmael Reed on Miles Davis Luc Sante on Public Image Ltd. Heidi Julavits on Rush Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer on Metric Diana Ossana on Led Zeppelin Maggie Estep on Einsturzende Neubauten Dani Shapiro on Bruce Springsteen Gary Giddins on Titans of the Tenor! Nick Flynn on Mink DeVille Susan Straight on The Funk Festival Rick Moody on the The Lounge Lizards Jennifer Egan on Patti Smith Harvey Pekar on Joe Maneri Thurston Moore on Glen Branca, Rudolph Grey, and Wharton Tiers Chuck Klosterman on Prince Sigrid Nunez on Woodstock Jerry Stahl on David Bowie Charles R. Cross on Nirvana Marc Nesbitt on The Beastie Boys And many more . . . No matter where your musical taste falls, these often funny, occasionally sad, always thought-provoking essays-all written especially for The Show I'll Never Forget-are sure to connect with anyone who loves, or has ever loved, live music.
Download or read book Lost in the Game written by Thomas Beller and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-07 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment, and a way of interacting with the world. In Lost in the Game Thomas Beller entwines these threads with his lifetime's experience as a player and journalist, roaming NBA locker rooms and city parks as a basketball flaneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories from the courts, meditating on basketball’s role in city life and its impact on the athlete’s psyche as he moves from youth to middle age. Part journalistic account, part memoir of a slightly talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.
Download or read book True Story written by Ty Montague and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is your company a storyteller—or a storydoer? The old way to market a business was storytelling. But in today’s world, simply communicating your brand’s story in the hope that customers will listen is no longer enough. Instead, your authentic brand must be evident in every action the organization undertakes. Today’s most successful businesses are storydoers. These companies create products and services that, from the very beginning, are manifestations of an authentic and meaningful story—one told primarily through action, not advertising. In True Story, creative executive Ty Montague argues that any business, regardless of size or industry, can embrace the principles of storydoing. Indeed, our best-run companies—from small start-ups to global conglomerates—organize around a coherent narrative that is then broadcast through every action they take (from product design to customer service to marketing). Montague shows why storydoing firms are nimble, more adaptive to change, and more efficiently run businesses. Montague is a founder of the growth consultancy co:collective and the former president and CCO of J. Walter Thompson, the largest advertising agency in North America. He brings his depth of creative business experience to the book and provides a clear framework and proven process for bringing you and your customers together in the creation of your brand story. Montague introduces five critical elements—what he calls the “the four truths and the action map”—that are the foundation of storydoing: • the participants (your customers, partners, and employees) • the protagonist (your company today) • the stage (the world around your business) • the quest (your driving ambition and contribution to the world) • your action map (the actions that will make your story real for participants) The book is filled with examples of how forward-thinking organizations—including Red Bull, Shaklee, Grind, TOMS Shoes, and News Corporation—are effectively using storydoing to transform their organizations and drive extraordinary results.
Download or read book J D Salinger written by Thomas Beller and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spirited, deeply personal inquiry into the near-mythic life and canonical work of J. D. Salinger by a writer known for his sensitivity to the Manhattan culture that was Salinger's great theme.
Download or read book The Contemporary American Essay written by Phillip Lopate and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century—from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate. The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing. Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang An Anchor Original.
Download or read book Harper s Bazaar written by and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Norton Sampler written by Thomas Cooley and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2010 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An outstanding collection of brief essays providing high-interest models of the rhetorical modes, along with beautifully written instruction that demonstrates its own lessons about good writing.
Download or read book Run Brother Run written by David Berg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing family memoir, hailed as “remarkable” (The New York Times), “compelling” (People), and “engrossing” (Kirkus Reviews), of a trial lawyer’s tempestuous boyhood in Texas that led to the vicious murder of his brother by the father of actor Woody Harrelson. In 1968, David Berg’s brother, Alan, was murdered by Charles Harrelson, a notorious hit man and father of Woody Harrelson. Alan was only thirty-one when he disappeared (David was twenty-six) and for more than six months his family did not know what had happened to him—until his remains were found in a ditch in Texas. There was an eyewitness to the murder: Charles Harrelson’s girlfriend, who agreed to testify. For his defense, Harrelson hired Percy Foreman, then the most famous criminal lawyer in America. Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Harrelson was acquitted. After burying his brother all those years ago, David Berg rarely talked about him. Yet in 2008 he began to remember and research Alan’s life and death. The result is Run, Brother, Run: part memoir—about growing up Jewish in 1950s Texas and Arkansas—and part legal story, informed by Berg’s experience as a seasoned lawyer. Writing with cold-eyed grief and a wild, lacerating humor, Berg tells us first about the striving Jewish family that created Alan Berg and set him on a course for self-destruction, and then about the miscarriage of justice when Berg’s murderer was acquitted. David Berg brings us a painful family history, a portrait of an iconic American place, and a true-crime courtroom murder drama that “elegantly brings to life the rough-and-tumble boomtown that was 1960s-era Houston, and conveys with unflinching force the emotional damage his brother’s death did to his family” (The New York Times).
Download or read book The Sleep Over Artist Fiction written by Thomas Beller and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-05-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the same way Salinger carved out the niche of male adolescence ....Beller approaches that mutable boy-to-man territory."—San Francisco Chronicle Writing with the sparkling wit and insight of his highly praised debut, Seduction Theory ("Brilliantly captures the great expectations and recurring ambivalence of youth."—The New York Times), Thomas Beller continues to plumb the adventures of his hero, Alex Fader, a youthful existentialist and sensualist with an insatiable appetite for trouble. The Sleep-Over Artist is an account of critical stages in Alex's life, mapping his progress from youthful delinquent to filmmaker whose career begins when he makes a documentary film exposing the prep school from which he has been expelled. Alex longs for the taste of family life that the early death of his father has denied him. As a young boy he sleeps over at his friends' houses and ingratiates himself with their families; as a young man he extends his sleep-overs to the lives of women, culminating in the ultimate sleep-over—an affair in England with a glamorous, slightly older woman, the mother of a young boy. Beller has a pitch-perfect ear for emotional nuance and a microscopic eye for rendering the wordless moments when a relationship catches fire and all too often begins to falter. The high-wire tension that electrifies The Sleep-Over Artist is Beller's ingenious portrait of a young man who longs to disappear and belong all at the same time. "Hilarious....captures perfectly the myriad stages of fear, discovery and elation that mark one's first sexual experience."—The New York Times Book Review, Katherine Dieckmann, 16 July 2000 "[W]ell-crafted stories recall the witty phrasing of Updike, the poignant nostalgia of Cheever, the earnest but confused innocence of Salinger."—Library Journal "Featuring a New York that, like Kundera's Prague, is a vast hive of seductions....A moving portrait."—Publishers Weekly, 17 April 2000 "The gentle humor and delicacy of Sleep-Over Artist remind me of the stories of another young cosmopolite, F. Scott Fitzgerald."—Stewart O'Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying "Fresh, sophisticated and most of all utterly readable...strikes a perfect balance between timely ironies and perennial emotional truths."—Eva Hoffman "Tom Beller is gifted with a wry, dry appreciation of life's sweet and unlikely subtleties."—Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation and Bitch "A fine novel of Manhattan manners."—New York Observer
Download or read book Allure written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Personals written by Thomas Beller and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A smart, sexy anthology for literary twentysomethings, this book of essays and stories is a culmination of work by, not about, a generation. A gritty mix of candor, longing, and desire, this collection lays bare life's highs, lows, and in-betweens for a stunningly gifted and eclectic group.
Download or read book Library Journal written by Melvil Dewey and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.
Download or read book Goya written by Robert Hughes and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns. With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life. In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work. Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.
Download or read book Library Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 974 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Before And After written by Thomas Beller and published by Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. This book was released on 2002-06-04 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays concerned with New York City before and after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.
Download or read book Mommy Deadliest written by Michael Benson and published by Pinnacle Books . This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true crime story of a New York mother who killed and a daughter who wouldn’t die, from the author of A Killer’s Touch and Watch Mommy Die. Anti-Freeze For A Husband It looked like a suicide. A man’s corpse on the bathroom floor—next to a half-empty glass of anti-freeze. But fingerprints on the glass belonged to the deceased’s wife, Stacey Castor. And a turkey baster in the garbage had police wondering if she force-fed the toxic fluid down her husband’s throat. Pills For A Daughter In desperation, Stacey concocted a devious plan. She mixed a deadly cocktail of vodka and pills, then served it to her twenty-year-old daughter Ashley. The authorities would find Ashley with a suicide note, confessing to the anti-freeze murder. But Stacey’s plan backfired—because Ashley refused to die . . . A Killer For A Mother Charged with murdering her second husband—and attempting to kill her oldest daughter—Stacey Castor sparked a media frenzy. But when police dug up her first husband’s grave—and found anti-freeze in his body, too—this New York housewife earned a nickname that would follow her all the way to prison. They called her “The Black Widow.” And with good reason. The story that inspired the Lifetime film, Poisoned Love: The Stacey Castor Story, starring Nia Vardalos. Case Featured On 20/20 Includes Sixteen Pages of Shocking Photos