Download or read book Marya A Life written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deeply intimate psychological portrait of a young woman's tragic childhood, her reinvention as a successful young artist in the literary circles of 1950s New York City, and her struggle to understand and overcome the trauma of her past. Growing up in the confines of Innisfail, a bleak town in upstate New York, bright and curious Marya endures abandonment, betrayal, and loneliness. A college scholarship offers escape, taking her to New York City, where she makes a name for herself in academic and literary circles. But success cannot overcome the damage of her childhood, pain that haunts Marya’s personal, professional, and romantic relationships, and has left her unmoored. Psychologically nuanced, rich in insight and emotional complexity, told with the unsettling power of Joyce Carol Oates’s gothic novels, Marya: A Life is an intense look into the psyche of a young woman and an illuminating exploration of how the past reverberates throughout our lives.
Download or read book Half Life written by Jillian Cantor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant sliding-doors reimagining of the passionate life of the first woman to win a Nobel Prize – and the life Marie Curie might have led if she had chosen love over science. Poland, 1891. Marie Curie (then Marya Sklodowska) was engaged to a budding mathematician, Kazimierz Zorawski. But when his mother insisted Marya was not good enough, he broke off the engagement. A heartbroken Marya left Poland for Paris to study chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne. Marie would go on to change the course of science forever and become the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. But what if Marie had made a different choice? What if she had stayed in Poland, married Kazimierz, and never attended the Sorbonne or discovered radium? What if Marie had chosen her first love and a life of domesticity, still ravenous for knowledge in Russian Poland where education for women was restricted, instead of studying science in Paris and meeting Pierre Curie? Seamlessly entwining the lives of Marya and Marie, Half Life is a powerful story of love and friendship, motherhood and sisterhood, fame and anonymity – and a woman destined to change the world.
Download or read book Wasted written by Marya Hornbacher and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and all sense of what it means to be "normal," Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia -- until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. A vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side -- and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.
Download or read book Staying Alive written by Marya Schechtman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the 'Person Life View', sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.
Download or read book Madness written by Marya Hornbacher and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2008 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the author's memoir of how she suffered from bipolar disorder and the journey she took to get to where she is today.
Download or read book Waiting written by Marya Hornbacher and published by Hazelden Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Waiting
Download or read book The Center of Winter written by Marya Hornbacher and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the center of winter, in Motley, Minnesota, Arnold Schiller gives in to the oppressive season that reigns outside and also to his own inner demons -- he commits suicide, leaving a devastated family in his wake. Claire Schiller, wife and mother, takes shelter from the emotional storm with her husband's parents but must ultimately emerge from her grief and help her two young children to recover. Esau, her oldest, is haunted by the same darkness that plagued his father. At twelve years old, he has already been in and out of state psychiatric hospitals, and now, with the help of his mother and sister, he must overcome the forces that drive him deep into himself. But as the youngest, perhaps it is Katie who carries the heaviest burden. A precocious six-year-old who desperately wants to help her mother hold the family together, she will have to come to terms with the memory of her father, who was at once loving and cruel. Narrated alternately by Claire, Katie, and Esau, this powerful and passionate novel explores the ways in which both children and adults experience tragic events, discover solace and hope in one another, and survive. The Center of Winter finds humor in unlikely places and evokes the north -- its people and landscape -- with warmth, sensitivity, and insight. The story of three people who, against all odds, find their way out of the center of winter, Marya Hornbacher's debut novel will leave you breathless, tearful, and ultimately inspired.
Download or read book Deathless written by Catherynne M. Valente and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glorious retelling of the Russian folktale Marya Morevna and Koschei the Deathless from Catherynne M. Valente, set in a mysterious version of St. Petersburg during the first half of the 20th century Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century. Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei's beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new incarnation. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Diaries of Marya Zaturenska 1938 1944 written by Mary Beth Hinton and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At age thirty-six, acclaimed poet Marya Zaturenska's work reached its full potential even as she battled emotional and physical illness. Recently rediscovered diaries, published here for the first time, reflect that crucial period in the poet's life. Born in Kiev, Russia, Marya Zaturenska moved to New York City at the age of eight. To help support her family, she dropped out of public high school and held various jobs in a factory, a publishing house, and bookstore. By taking night courses she managed to complete high school. Meanwhile, she wrote poetry, some of which appeared in national magazines. In time, Zaturenska would publish eight books of poetry and a biography of Christina Rossetti for which she won critical acclaim. With her husband, Horace Gregory, she wrote A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940—and counted among her literary contemporaries Willa Cather, Theodore Raethke, May Sarton, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Padraic and Mary Colum, and Malcolm Cowley. Significantly, these papers reveal a woman whose life brimmed with creativity, love of family, and good humor in the face of despair. Her keen poet's eye offers biting commentary on New York's literary scene. Furthermore, she not only chronicles the onset of World War II but also observes how the war reshaped American literary tastes and attitudes.
Download or read book My Heart Laid Bare written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestselling Author Finally returned to print in a beautiful trade paperback edition, a haunting gothic tale that illuminates the fortunes and misfortunes of a 19th-century immigrant family of confidence artists—a story of morality, duplicity, and retribution that explores the depths of human manipulation and vulnerability “Oates . . . rarely falters throughout this epic. . . . An American tragedy.”—People “My Heart Laid Bare shows Oates at her most playful, extravagant and inventive.”—The San Francisco Chronicle The patriarch of the Licht family, Abraham has raised a brood of talented con artists, children molded in his image, and experts in The Game, his calling and philosophy of life. Traveling from one small town to the next across the continent, from the Northeast to the frontier West, they skillfully swindle unsuspecting victims, playing on their greed, lust, pride, and small-mindedness. Despite their success, Abraham cannot banish a past that haunts him: the ghost of his ancestor Sarah Licht, a former con woman who met with a gruesome fate. As Abraham moves his family from town to town, involving them in more and more complex and impressive schemes, he finds himself caught between the specter of Sarah and the growing terrors of his present. As his carefully crafted lies and schemes begin to fracture and disintegrate before his eyes, Abraham discovers that the bond of family is as tenuous and treacherous as the tricks he perpetrates upon unsuspecting strangers.
Download or read book That Time of Year written by Garrison Keillor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the warmth and humor we've come to know, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion shares his own remarkable story. In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures. PHC lasted forty-two years, 1,557 shows, and enjoyed the freedom to do as it pleased for three or four million listeners every Saturday at 5 p.m. Central. He got to sing with Emmylou Harris and Renée Fleming and once sang two songs to the U.S. Supreme Court. He played a private eye and a cowboy, gave the news from his hometown, Lake Wobegon, and met Somali cabdrivers who’d learned English from listening to the show. He wrote bestselling novels, won a Grammy and a National Humanities Medal, and made a movie with Robert Altman with an alarming amount of improvisation. He says, “I was unemployable and managed to invent work for myself that I loved all my life, and on top of that I married well. That’s the secret, work and love. And I chose the right ancestors, impoverished Scots and Yorkshire farmers, good workers. I’m heading for eighty, and I still get up to write before dawn every day.”
Download or read book Half Life written by Jillian Cantor and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The USA Today bestselling author of In Another Time reimagines the pioneering, passionate life of Marie Curie using a parallel structure to create two alternative timelines, one that mirrors her real life, one that explores the consequences for Marie and for science if she’d made a different choice. In Poland in 1891, Marie Curie (then Marya Sklodowska) was engaged to a budding mathematician, Kazimierz Zorawski. But when his mother insisted she was too poor and not good enough, he broke off the engagement. A heartbroken Marya left Poland for Paris, where she would attend the Sorbonne to study chemistry and physics. Eventually Marie Curie would go on to change the course of science forever and be the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.But what if she had made a different choice? What if she had stayed in Poland, married Kazimierz at the age of twenty-four, and never attended the Sorbonne or discovered radium? What if she had chosen a life of domesticity with a constant hunger for knowledge in Russian Poland where education for women was restricted, instead of studying science in Paris and meeting Pierre Curie? Entwining Marie Curie’s real story with Marya Zorawska’s fictional one, Half Life explores loves lost and destinies unfulfilled—and probes issues of loyalty and identity, gender and class, motherhood and sisterhood, fame and anonymity, scholarship and knowledge. Through parallel contrasting versions of Marya’s life, Jillian Cantor’s unique historical novel asks what would have happened if a great scientific mind was denied opportunity and access to education. It examines how the lives of one remarkable woman and the people she loved – as well as the world at large and course of science and history—might have been irrevocably changed in ways both great and small.
Download or read book Tolstoy written by Rosamund Bartlett and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of the brilliant author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina “should become the first resort for everyone drawn to its titanic subject” (Booklist, starred review). In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. At the time of his death, he was the most famous man in Russia, more revered than the tsar, with a growing international following. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy spent his existence rebelling against not only conventional ideas about literature and art but also traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state. In “an epic biography that does justice to an epic figure,” Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including fascinating material that has only become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union (Library Journal, starred review). She sheds light on Tolstoy’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved and the turbulent times in which he lived.
Download or read book Food and Loathing written by Betsy Lerner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003-02-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never before Food and Loathing has the intimate relationship between mood swings and food swings been so honestly chronicled. As a bright but chubby girl, Betsy Lerner believed that thinness was the key to success with friends and boys. By junior high, she had precisely divided the world of food into two camps: the dietetic and the forbidden. Becoming a member of the then-fledgling Overeaters Anonymous, she formed a cult-like devotion to the program and lost fifty pounds in a matter of months, only to gain it all back and more. "I am powerless over Hostess cakes," she writes, "and my life has become unmanageable." Her twenties are marked by yo-yo dieting, depressive episodes, and a sadistic shrink who dubs her "the boy who cried wolf." Then, just as Lerner begins to realize her dream of becoming a writer, entering Columbia's prestigious MFA program, she spirals into a suicidal depression and lands at New York State Psychiatric Institute. There, a young doctor helps her take her first steps toward selfhood and unraveling the dual legacy of compulsion and depression. A powerfully rendered story for anyone who has every wielded a fork in despair or calculated her worth on the morning scale.
Download or read book Life Without Ed Tenth Anniversary Edition DIGITAL AUDIO written by Jenni Schaefer and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2014-01-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 10th Anniversary Edition of the book that has given hope and inspiration to thousands who are dealing with eating disorders "If you or someone you love has an eating disorder, this is the book to read." —Dr. Phil Jenni had been in an abusive relationship with Ed for far too long. He controlled Jenni’s life, distorted her self-image, and tried to physically harm her throughout their long affair. Then, in therapy, Jenni learned to treat her eating disorder as a relationship, not a condition. By thinking of her eating disorder as a unique personality separate from her own, Jenni was able to break up with Ed once and for all. Inspiring, compassionate, and filled with practical exercises to help you break up with your own personal E.D., Life Without Ed provides hope to the millions of people plagued by eating disorders. Beginning with Jenni’s “divorce” from Ed, this supportive, lifesaving book combines a patient’s insights and experiences with a therapist’s prescriptions for success to help you live a healthier, happier life without Ed. This 10th anniversary edition features a new afterword as well as sections devoted to family, friends, and supporters; how treatment professionals can use the book with their patients; and men with eating disorders. "Of all the great books written on eating disorders, none has had a wider reach than Life Without Ed. Those suffering have found connection and hope, family members have found understanding and empathy, professionals have learned from it and praised it. It will remain a classic for decades to come." —Michael E. Berrett, PhD, psychologist; CEO and cofounder of the Center for Change; coauthor of Spiritual Approaches in the Treatment of Women with Eating Disorders "[Life Without Ed] was the first [book] to teach readers that they can not only separate from their eating disorder, but also disagree with and disobey it. I wholeheartedly recommend this witty, hopeful guide to patients, carers, professionals, and anyone else who wants to understand what it's really like to live with an eating disorder and ultimately triumph over it." —Jennifer J. Thomas, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School; co-director of the Eating Disorders Clinical and Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital "This uplifting book’s intimate inner dialogue has energized countless young women—and men—in their own recoveries from eating disorders." —Leigh Cohn, MAT, CEDS, coauthor of Making Weight: Men’s Conflicts with Food, Weight, Shape & Recovery "Jenni is truly a remarkable woman. She unselfishly shares her struggles and triumphs in something that will probably affect all of us in one way or another in our lifetime. Her candid and inspiring story will truly help those suffering from their own "Ed." I feel privileged to know her and her story." —Jamie-Lynn Sigler, actress
Download or read book Quartet written by Jean Rhys and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hunger for Life written by Andy Marr and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the day of his graduation, James says goodbye to the future and moves back to his parents' house in Myreton, the sleepy village of his childhood. He's not happy, but the thought of continuing his life anywhere else seems unthinkable while his sister, Emma, continues to suffer with the illness that's plagued her, and her entire family, since she was a child. For six months, James's life spirals more and more out of control as the walls of small-town life - and of his sister's devastating disease - close in on him. But then he meets Hannah, a free-spirited and fun-loving Austrian student, and suddenly it seems there might be more to his existence than a sense of fear and trepidation. Hunger for Life is the story of a young man's struggle to find the courage and humour to live through life's hazards - and to find his place in an uncertain and fractious modern world. 'A remarkable novel, with vibrant and deeply developed characters, taut and nuanced relationships, and simply lovely prose. Tightly paced and psychologically complex, Marr's exquisite debut is a life-affirming and powerful read.' Marya Hornbacher, bestselling author of Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia.
