Download or read book Memories of a Catholic Girlhood written by Mary McCarthy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVTracing her moral struggles to the day she accidentally took a sip of water before her Communion—a mortal sin—Mary McCarthy gives us eight funny and heartrending essays about the illusive and redemptive nature of memory/divDIV “During the course of writing this, I’ve often wished that I were writing fiction.”/divDIV Originally published in large part as standalone essays in the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, Mary McCarthy’s acclaimed memoir begins with her recollections of a happy childhood cut tragically short by the death of her parents during the influenza epidemic of 1918./divDIV Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much of her childhood shuttled between two sets of grandparents and three religions—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. One of four children, she suffered abuse at the hands of her great-aunt and uncle until she moved to Seattle to be raised by her maternal grandparents. Early on, McCarthy lets the reader in on her secret: The chapter you just read may not be wholly reliable—facts have been distilled through the hazy lens of time and distance./divDIV In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy pays homage to the past and creates hope for the future. Reminiscent of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, this is a funny, honest, and unsparing account blessed with the holy sacraments of forgiveness, love, and redemption./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div
Download or read book Mary McCarthy s Collected Memoirs written by Mary McCarthy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three candid, affecting memoirs by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Group, including a National Book Award finalist. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy begins with her recollections of a happy childhood cut tragically short by the death of her parents during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much of her childhood shuttled between two sets of grandparents and three religions—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. Early on, McCarthy lets the reader in on her secret: The chapter you just read may not be wholly reliable—facts have been distilled through the hazy lens of time and distance. How I Grew is McCarthy’s intensely personal autobiography of her life from age thirteen to twenty-one. With detail driven by an almost astonishing memory recall, the author gives us a masterful account of these formative years. From her wild adolescence—including losing her virginity at fourteen—through her eventual escape to Vassar, the bestselling novelist, essayist, and critic chronicles her relationships with family, friends, lovers, and the teachers who would influence her writing career. And Intellectual Memoirs opens with McCarthy as a married twenty-four-year-old Communist and critic. She’s disciplined, dedicated, and sexually experimental: At one point she realizes that in twenty-four hours she “had slept with three different men.” Over the course of three years, she will have had two husbands, the second being the esteemed, much older critic Edmund Wilson. It is Wilson who becomes McCarthy’s mentor and muse, urging her to try her hand at fiction. Intellectual Memoirs is a vivid snapshot of a distinctive place and time—New York in the late 1930s—and the forces that shaped Mary McCarthy’s life as a woman and a writer.
Download or read book Intellectual Memoirs written by Mary McCarthy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVIn this no-holds-barred memoir with a foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick, the bestselling author of The Group recalls her early life in New York, revealing the genesis of and genius behind her groundbreaking fiction /divDIV Mary McCarthy is a married twenty-four-year-old Communist and critic when this memoir begins. She’s disciplined, dedicated, and sexually experimental: At one point she realizes that in twenty-four hours she “had slept with three different men.” But she believes in the institution of marriage. Over the course of three years, she will have had two husbands, the second being the esteemed, much older critic Edmund Wilson. It is Wilson who becomes McCarthy’s mentor and muse, urging her to try her hand at fiction./divDIV McCarthy’s powers of observation are on witty display here, as the seventy-something writer recalls events that took place half a century earlier. Her eye for the revealing detail will be recognized by readers of her novels as she describes marching in May Day parades, attending parties for the Scottsboro Boys, and witnessing firsthand the American left wing’s response to the Moscow trials and the Spanish Civil War./divDIV Picking up where How I Grew left off and unfinished at the time of her death in 1989, Intellectual Memoirs is a vivid snapshot of a distinctive place and time—New York in the late 1930s—and the forces that shaped Mary McCarthy’s life as a woman and a writer./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div
Download or read book Venice Observed written by Mary McCarthy and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1963 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A penetrating work of reportage on Venice. "Searching observations and astonishing comprehension of the Venetian taste and character" (New York Herald Tribune).
Download or read book The Group written by Mary McCarthy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This smash bestseller about privileged Vassar classmates shocked America in the sixties and remains “juicy . . . witty . . . brilliant” (Cosmopolitan). At Vassar, they were known as “the group”—eight young women of privilege, the closest of friends, an eclectic mix of vibrant personalities. A week after graduation in 1933, they all gather for the wedding of Kay Strong, one of their own, before going their separate ways in the world. In the years that follow, they will each know accomplishment and loss in equal measure, pursuing careers and marriage, experiencing the joys and traumas of sexual awakening and motherhood, all while suffering through betrayals, infidelities, and sometimes madness. Some of them will drift apart. Some will play important roles in the personal dramas of others. But it is tragedy that will ultimately unite the group once again. A novel that stunned the world when it was first published in 1963, Mary McCarthy’s The Group found acclaim, controversy, and a place atop the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years for its frank and controversial exploration of women’s issues, social concerns, and sexuality. A blistering satire of the mores of an emergent generation of women, The Group is McCarthy’s enduring masterpiece, still as relevant, powerful, and wonderfully entertaining fifty years on. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.
Download or read book Seeing Mary Plain A Life of Mary McCarthy written by Frances Kiernan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002-05-17 with total page 846 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing portrait of the dramatic life of writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy. From her Partisan Review days to her controversial success as the author of The Group, to an epic libel battle with Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy brought a nineteenth-century scope and drama to her emblematic twentieth-century life. Dubbed by Time as "quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced," McCarthy moved in a circle of ferociously sharp-tongued intellectuals—all of whom had plenty to say about this diamond in their midst. Frances Kiernan's biography does justice to one of the most controversial American intellectuals of the twentieth century. With interviews from dozens of McCarthy's friends, former lovers, literary and political comrades-in-arms, awestruck admirers, amused observers, and bitter adversaries, Seeing Mary Plain is rich in ironic judgment and eloquent testimony. A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2000 and a Washington Post Book World "Rave".
Download or read book Conversations with Mary Mccarthy written by Carol Gelderman and published by . This book was released on 2011-01-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary McCarthy says: In general I would say that men actually have more feeling, and women perhaps more intelligence. I do seem to have some confessional impulse, and it may have to do with my Catholic training. The writer, if he has any ability, is looking for the revealing detail that will sum up the picture for the reader, in a flash of recognition. Ethics came to me in the frame of Christian teaching, and even though I don't believe in afterlife, I'm still concerned with the salvation of my soul. If you don't learn something from what you write, you might as well not write.
Download or read book Cast a Cold Eye written by Mary McCarthy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven “remarkable” stories from the bestselling author of The Group (The New York Times). Two American tourists find themselves seriously befuddled by their unorthodox Italian guide. A hospitalized graduate student turns the sounds of pain and despair into music. A family is tragically taken apart, and then reformed, by a deadly outbreak of influenza. The short fiction in this collection, some of it autobiographical in inspiration, reflects both the adept, witty storytelling and the insightful social commentary of New York Times–bestselling author Mary McCarthy. A National Book Award finalist known for such novels as Birds in America and The Groves of Academe—as well as memoir (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood) and travel writing (Venice Observed)—McCarthy shows in Cast a Cold Eye why she has been called “a brilliant writer with a rare talent for corrosive satire” (The Atlantic Monthly). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.
Download or read book The Company She Keeps written by Mary McCarthy and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the author's first novel, which relates the experiences of a young bohemian intellectual. The six episodes create a fascinating portrait of a New York social circle of the 1930s. McCarthy's bold insight and virtuoso style won her immediate recognition as one of the most accomplished, versatile, and penetrating writers in americanca.
Download or read book How I Grew written by Mary McCarthy and published by . This book was released on 1992-12-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mary McCarthy s Theatre Chronicles 1937 1962 written by Mary McCarthy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVThe American theatre comes alive in Mary McCarthy’s provocative anthology of essays/divDIV Her literary writings and dramatic criticism have appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles gathers together a wide-ranging collection featuring a cast of playwrights, actors, and directors that reads like a “who’s who” of American theatre. /divDIV With chapters ranging from “The Unimportance of Being Oscar” to “Odets Deplored,” this lively and witty volume opens a revealing window onto every aspect of theatre. McCarthy brings singular productions of the world’s most famous plays to vivid dramatic life while dissecting literary giants like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. She offers her controversial opinion on everything from the American school of realism as epitomized by Brando to what creates a great actress to how a badly written play can still make for good theatre./divDIV With passages on theatre figures from Shakespeare to Shaw to Ibsen and O’Neill, this is a must-have for theatre lovers and armchair critics everywhere./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div
Download or read book Mary McCarthy Novels Stories 1942 1963 LOA 290 written by Mary McCarthy and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 994 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first volume of the definitive edition of her fiction includes four novels and eight classic stories by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation In 1942, Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps, announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature—“mutual plagiarism,” she called it—became the hallmark of McCarthy's fiction, which the Library of America now presents in full for the first time in deluxe collector's edition. The Oasis (1949), a wicked satire about a failed utopian community, and The Groves of Academe (1952), a pioneering campus novel depicting the insular and often absurd world of academia, burnished her reputation as an acerbic truth-teller, but it was with A Charmed Life (1955), a searing story of small-town infidelity, that McCarthy fully embraced the frank and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality that would inspire generations of readers and writers. Also included are all eight of McCarthy's short stories, four from her collection Cast a Cold Eye (1950), and four collected here for the first time. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Download or read book Fire Year written by Jason Friedman and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gay and Jewish men struggle to navigate conservative communities in Georgia and the Deep South.
Download or read book How I Grew written by Mary McCarthy and published by San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This book was released on 1987 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary McCarthy's memoir of her adolescence, highlighting her experiences in education as she recalls in intimate narrative the eight years before her marriage at age 21. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.
Download or read book The Oasis written by Mary McCarthy and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vicious and brilliant satire of human vanity from the author of the classic bestseller The Group Long out of print, Mary McCarthy's second novel is a bitingly funny satire set in the early years of the Cold War about a group of writers, editors, and intellectuals who retreat to rural New England to found a hilltop utopia. With this group loosely divided into two factions—purists, led by the libertarian editor Macdougal Macdermott, and the realists, skeptics led by the smug Will Taub—the situation is ripe not only for disaster but for comedy, as reality clashes with their dreams of a perfect society. Though written as a roman à clef, McCarthy barely disguised her characters, including using her former lover Philip Rahv, founder of Partisan Review, as the model for Will Taub. As a result, the novel caused an absolute explosion of outrage among the literary elite of the day, who clearly recognized themselves among her all-too-accurate portraits. Rahv threatened a lawsuit to stop publication. Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling's wife, called McCarthy a "thug." McCarthy's friend Dwight McDonald (Macdougal Macdermott) called it "vicious, malicious, and nasty." Never one to shy away from controversy, McCarthy's portrait of her generation had indeed drawn blood. But the brilliance of the novel has outlasted its first detonation and can now be enjoyed for its aphoritic, fearless dissection of the vanities of human endeavor. In an added bonus, the renowned essayist Vivian Gornick details in a moving introduction the importance of McCarthy's intellectual and artistic bravery, and how she influenced a generation of young writers and thinkers.
Download or read book An Enlarged Heart written by Cynthia Zarin and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Enlarged Heart, the exquisitely written prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin, is a poignantly understated exploration of the author’s experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time’s passage. In these intertwined episodes from her New York world and beyond, she charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman, navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments and the rapidly fading New York of people like Mr. Ferri, the Upper East Side tailor (“a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth”). By the end, whether Zarin is writing about vanished restaurants, her decades-long love affair with her collection of coats, a newlywed journey to Italy, a child’s illness, Mary McCarthy’s file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff she knew as a young woman, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons, and that there are some truths not even a tailor can alter.
Download or read book The Company They Kept written by Robert B. Silvers and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 27 contributors to The New York Review of Books tell of their deep and abiding friendships with other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature.
