Download or read book Marjorie Morningstar written by Herman Wouk and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now hailed as a "proto-feminist classic" (Vulture), Pulitzer Prize winner Herman Wouk's powerful coming-of-age novel about an ambitious young woman pursuing her artistic dreams in New York City has been a perennial favorite since it was first a bestseller in the 1950s. A starry-eyed young beauty, Marjorie Morgenstern is nineteen years old when she leaves home to accept the job of her dreams--working in a summer-stock company for Noel Airman, its talented and intensely charismatic director. Released from the social constraints of her traditional Jewish family, and thrown into the glorious, colorful world of theater, Marjorie finds herself entangled in a powerful affair with the man destined to become the greatest--and the most destructive--love of her life. Rich with humor and poignancy, Marjorie Morningstar is a classic love story, one that spans two continents and two decades in the life of its heroine. "I read it and I thought, 'Oh, God, this is me.'" --Scarlet Johansson

Download or read book The Lawgiver written by Herman Wouk and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A lighthearted and delightful tour de force" (The Washington Times). A romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day, The Lawgiver is a story that emerges from letters, memos, e-mails, journals, news articles, Skype transcripts, and text messages. At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father’s strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multibillionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including reunite with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business. Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than sixty years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the movie. As Wouk and his characters contend with Moses and marriage, the force of tradition, rebellion and reunion, The Lawgiver reflects the wisdom of a lifetime. Inspired by the great nineteenth-century novelists, one of America’s most beloved twentieth-century authors has now written a remarkable twenty-first-century work of fiction.

Download or read book Morningstar written by Ann Hood and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] enchanting journey through Ann Hood’s early fascination with reading.… Book lovers will find Morningstar irresistible.”—Lynn Sharon Schwartz, author of Ruined by Reading Growing up in a mill town in Rhode Island, in a household that didn’t foster a love of reading, novelist Ann Hood discovered nonetheless the transformative power of literature. She learned to channel her imagination, ambitions, and curiosity by devouring ever-growing stacks of books. In Morningstar, Hood recollects with warmth and honesty how The Bell Jar, Marjorie Morningstar, The Harrad Experiment, and The Outsiders influenced her teen psyche and introduced her to topics that could not be discussed at home: desire, fear, sexuality, and madness. Later, Johnny Got His Gun and Grapes of Wrath dramatically influenced her political thinking while the Vietnam War and Kent State shootings became headline news, and classics such as Dr. Zhivago and Les Misérables stoked her ambitions to travel the world. With characteristic insight and charm, Hood showcases the ways in which books gave her life and can transform—even save—our own lives.

Download or read book A Feeling for Books written by Janice A. Radway and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.

Download or read book City Boy written by Herman Wouk and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2009-06-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An "enormously entertaining" portrait of "a Bronx Tom Sawyer" (San Francisco Chronicle), City Boy is a sharp and moving novel of boyhood from Pulitzer Prize winner Herman Wouk. A hilarious and often touching tale of an urban kid's adventures and misadventures on the street, in school, in the countryside, always in pursuit of Lucille, a heartless redhead personifying all the girls who torment and fascinate pubescent lads of eleven.

Download or read book Lady in the Lake written by Laura Lippman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SOON TO BE A SERIES FROM APPLE TV! A New York Times Bestseller The revered New York Times bestselling author returns with a novel set in 1960s Baltimore that combines modern psychological insights with elements of classic noir, about a middle-aged housewife turned aspiring reporter who pursues the murder of a forgotten young woman. In 1966, Baltimore is a city of secrets that everyone seems to know—everyone, that is, except Madeline “Maddie” Schwartz. Last year, she was a happy, even pampered housewife. This year, she’s bolted from her marriage of almost twenty years, determined to make good on her youthful ambitions to live a passionate, meaningful life. Maddie wants to matter, to leave her mark on a swiftly changing world. Drawing on her own secrets, she helps Baltimore police find a murdered girl—assistance that leads to a job at the city’s afternoon newspaper, the Star. Working at the newspaper offers Maddie the opportunity to make her name, and she has found just the story to do it: Cleo Sherwood, a missing woman whose body was discovered in the fountain of a city park lake. If Cleo were white, every reporter in Baltimore would be clamoring to tell her story. Instead, her mysterious death receives only cursory mention in the daily newspapers, and no one cares when Maddie starts poking around in a young Black woman's life—except for Cleo's ghost, who is determined to keep her secrets and her dignity. Cleo scolds the ambitious Maddie: You're interested in my death, not my life. They're not the same thing. Maddie’s investigation brings her into contact with people that used to be on the periphery of her life—a jewelry store clerk, a waitress, a rising star on the Baltimore Orioles, a patrol cop, a hardened female reporter, a lonely man in a movie theater. But for all her ambition and drive, Maddie often fails to see the people right in front of her. Her inability to look beyond her own needs will lead to tragedy and turmoil for all sorts of people—including Ferdie, the man who shares her bed, a police officer who is risking far more than Maddie can understand.

Download or read book Youngblood Hawke written by Herman Wouk and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 1192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A writer finds wealth, fame, and sorrow in midcentury Manhattan in “a tremendous novel . . . full of wisdom and pain” by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author (Los Angeles Times). Arthur Youngblood Hawke, an ex-Navy man, moves from hardscrabble rural Kentucky to New York, hoping to make his mark on the literary world. His first novel becomes an instant hit, and he is toasted by critics and swept along on a tide of celebrity. But as Hawke gives himself over to the lush life that gilds artistic success—indulging in an affair with an older married woman and a flirtation with his editor, dabbling in real estate developments as his second novel brings him massive wealth and even bigger opportunities—he soon finds himself in a self-destructive downward spiral. Inspired by the life of Thomas Wolfe, and spanning from the Manhattan publishing world to Hollywood to Europe, Youngblood Hawke is both a riveting saga of postwar glamor and a poignant tale of one man’s rise and fall. “A big, powerful, exciting novel . . . Wouk has a tremendous narrative gift.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As searing and accurate a picture of New York in the late 1940s and 1950s as Bonfire of the Vanities was of its period. . . . And icing the cake are some marvelous Hollywood sections, including the best agent-in-action-on-two-telephones scenes ever captured in print.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Not as a Stranger written by Morton Thompson and published by Rare Treasure Editions. This book was released on 2024-07-18T00:00:00Z with total page 1394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Powerful novel about a young doctor who lives for medicine and sacrifices everything for his career. Describes his years at medical school, his practice in a small town and his devoted self-sacrificing wife who works to make their marriage a success.

Download or read book Sailor and Fiddler written by Herman Wouk and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A sparkling memoir of a well-lived life of literature, fame, and love” (Booklist) by one of America’s most beloved authors, as he looks back over his 100 years. In this remarkable memoir “full of adventure, wit, color, and detail” (Jewish Journal), Herman Wouk finally reflects on the life experiences that inspired his most enduring novels. With a tone that is “generous and warm” (The Boston Globe), he tells of his days writing for comedian Fred Allen’s radio show, one of the most popular shows in the history of the medium; enlisting in the US Navy during World War II; falling in love with Betty Sarah Brown, the woman who would become his wife (and literary agent) for sixty-three years; writing his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Caine Mutiny; as well as a big hit Broadway play and an equally big Broadway flop; and the surprising inspirations and people behind such masterpieces as The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, Marjorie Morningstar, and Youngblood Hawke. Written with the wisdom of a “trailblazing centenarian charmer” (Buffalo News) and the wit of someone who began his career as professional comedy writer, Sailor and Fiddler is an unprecedented reflection on writing and faith—“a lovely coda to the career of a man who made American literature a kinder, smarter, better place” (NPR).

Download or read book This Is My God written by Herman Wouk and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2008-12-05 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Valuable, wise, and quietly moving" (Chicago Tribune), This Is My God is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Herman Wouk's famous introduction to Judaism. A miracle of brevity, This Is My God guides readers through the world's oldest practicing religion with all the power, clarity, and wit of Wouk's celebrated novels. "Anyone who wants to know what orthodox Judaism means to an informed and intelligent orthodox Jew, who is at the same time thoroughly American in outlook and culture, will do well to study this work." --New York Times Book Review

Download or read book The Likely World written by Melanie Conroy-Goldman and published by Red Hen Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[T]hemes of motherhood, love, and addiction collide in heartbreaking and dangerous ways” in this provocative and fascinating debut novel (Publishers Weekly). After twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user’s short-term memory, Mellie’s mind is a messy collection of fragments. Now a single mother, she has decided to get clean with the help of a tough-minded sponsor. She desperately clings to her fragile sobriety, but on the evening of her twenty-ninth day sober, a stranger pulls into Mellie’s driveway—and her heart surges. To protect her new life and her two-year-old daughter, Mellie must now piece together the shards of her traumatic past. Shifting between 1988 and 2010, Melanie Conroy-Goldman’s debut novel is “bizarre and beautiful, equal parts brainy lit and gut-bucket pulp” (Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior).

Download or read book Antkind written by Charlie Kaufman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • “A dyspeptic satire that owes much to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon . . . propelled by Kaufman’s deep imagination, considerable writing ability and bull’s-eye wit."—The Washington Post “An astonishing creation . . . riotously funny . . . an exceptionally good [book].”—The New York Times Book Review • “Kaufman is a master of language . . . a sight to behold.”—NPR NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND MEN’S HEALTH B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film made by an enigmatic outsider—a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made—a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete—B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius. All that’s left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likes” and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d’être. A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself—the grain of truth at the heart of every joke.

Download or read book Don t Stop the Carnival written by Herman Wouk and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's everyone's dream: to leave behind the rat-race of the working world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colours, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise. This is the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk, who himself lived on an island in the sun for seven years, draws on his own experiences to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving about a man's search for happiness, and for himself.

Download or read book A Hole in Texas written by Herman Wouk and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2004-04-13 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this rollicking novel hailed equally for its satiric bite, its lightly borne scientific savvy, and its tender compassion for foible-prone humanity, one of America's preeminent storytellers returns to fiction. Guy Carpenter is a regular guy, a family man, an obscure NASA scientist, when he is jolted out of his quiet life and summoned to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Through a turn of events as unlikely as it is inevitable, Guy finds himself compromised by scandal and romance, hounded by Hollywood, and agonizingly alone at the white-hot center of a firestorm ignited as three potent forces of American culture -- politics, big science, and the media -- spectacularly collide.

Download or read book The Caine Mutiny written by Herman Wouk and published by Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday 1951.. This book was released on 1951 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each decade new readers discover the characters and curious activities aboard the U.S.S. "Caine in this classic tale of pathos, humor, and scope.

Download or read book A Jewish Feminine Mystique written by Hasia R. Diner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shira Kohn and Rachel Kranson are doctoral candidates in New York University's joint Ph. D. program in history and Hebrew and Judaic studies --Book Jacket.

Download or read book The Winds of War written by Herman Wouk and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 1071 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II, which begins with THE WINDS OF WAR and continues in WAR AND REMEMBRANCE, stands as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers. Like no other books about the war, Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events - the drama, the romance, the heroism and the tragedy of World War II - as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very centre of the maelstrom. "First-rate storytelling." - New York Times "Compelling . . . A panoramic, engrossing story." - Atlantic Monthly "The depth of the detail Wouk brought to bear on his subjects was impressive" - Financial Times "Wouk is a matchless storyteller with a gift for characterization, an ear for convincing dialogue, and a masterful grasp of what was at stake in World War II." - San Francisco Chronicle