Download or read book McSorley s Wonderful Saloon written by Joseph Mitchell and published by Harlequin Books. This book was released on 1953 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book McSorley s Wonderful Saloon written by Joseph Mitchell and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2001 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Yorker essayist Mitchell likes to start with an unimportant hero, but collects all the facts, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of a community. The subject of one portrait "is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself." Mitchell doesn't present him as anything more than a barroom scrounger; but in telling his story, he also gives a picture of New York sporting life. "King of the Gypsies" sets out to describe the spokesman of 38 gypsy families, but it soon becomes a Gibbon's decline and fall of the American gypsies; and it ends with an apocalyptic vision that is not only comic but also more imaginative than recent novels. Reading some of his portraits a second time, you catch an emotion beneath them that resembles Dickens'.--From Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic.
Download or read book Up in the Old Hotel written by Joseph Mitchell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style. These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.
Download or read book Joe Gould s Secret written by Joseph Mitchell and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a notorious New York eccentric and the journalist who chronicled his life: “A little masterpiece of observation and storytelling” (Ian McEwan). Joseph Mitchell was a cornerstone of the New Yorker staff for decades, but his prolific career was shattered by an extraordinary case of writer’s block. For the final thirty-two years of his life, Mitchell published nothing. And the key to his silence may lie in his last major work: the biography of a supposed Harvard grad turned Greenwich Village tramp named Joe Gould. Gould was, in Mitchell’s words, “an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to this city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years.” As Mitchell learns more about Gould’s epic Oral History—a reputedly nine-million-word collection of philosophizing, wanderings, and hearsay—he eventually uncovers a secret that adds even more intrigue to the already unusual story of the local legend. Originally written as two separate pieces (“Professor Sea Gull” in 1942 and then “Joe Gould’s Secret” twenty-two years later), this magnum opus captures Mitchell at his peak. As the reader comes to understand Gould’s secret, Mitchell’s words become all the more haunting. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joseph Mitchell including rare images from the author’s estate.
Download or read book The Bottom of the Harbor written by Joseph Mitchell and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the centennial of Joseph Mitchell's birth, here is a new edition of the classic collection containing his most celebrated pieces about New York City. Fifty years after its original publication, The Bottom of the Harbor is still considered a fundamental New York book. Every story Mitchell tells, every person he introduces, every scene he describes is illuminated by his passion for the eccentrics and eccentricities of his beloved adopted city. All of the pieces here are connected in one way or another--some directly, some with a kind of mysterious circuitousness--to New York's fabled waterfront, the terrain that Mitchell brilliantly made his own. They tell of a life that has passed--of vacant hotel rooms, deserted communities, once-thriving fishing areas that are now polluted and studded with wrecks. Included are "Up in the Old Hotel," a portrait of Louis Morino, the proprietor of a restaurant called (to his disgust) Sloppy Louie's; "The Rats on the Waterfront," which has inspired countless writers to attempt portraits of these most demonized New Yorkers; and "Mr. Hunter's Grave," widely considered to be the finest single piece of nonfiction to have ever appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. Here is the essential work of a legendary writer.
Download or read book Drinking with Men written by Rosie Schaap and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NPR “Best Books of 2013” BookPage Best Books of 2013 Library Journal Best Books of 2013: Memoir Flavorwire 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2013 A vivid, funny, and poignant memoir that celebrates the distinct lure of the camaraderie and community one finds drinking in bars. Rosie Schaap has always loved bars: the wood and brass and jukeboxes, the knowing bartenders, and especially the sometimes surprising but always comforting company of regulars. Starting with her misspent youth in the bar car of a regional railroad, where at fifteen she told commuters’ fortunes in exchange for beer, and continuing today as she slings cocktails at a neighborhood joint in Brooklyn, Schaap has learned her way around both sides of a bar and come to realize how powerful the fellowship among regular patrons can be. In Drinking with Men, Schaap shares her unending quest for the perfect local haunt, which takes her from a dive outside Los Angeles to a Dublin pub full of poets, and from small-town New England taverns to a character-filled bar in Manhattan’s TriBeCa. Drinking alongside artists and expats, ironworkers and soccer fanatics, she finds these places offer a safe haven, a respite, and a place to feel most like herself. In rich, colorful prose, Schaap brings to life these seedy, warm, and wonderful rooms. Drinking with Men is a love letter to the bars, pubs, and taverns that have been Schaap’s refuge, and a celebration of the uniquely civilizing source of community that is bar culture at its best.
Download or read book Man in Profile written by Thomas Kunkel and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE SPERBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • This fascinating biography reveals the untold story of the legendary New Yorker profile writer—author of Joe Gould’s Secret and Up in the Old Hotel—and unravels the mystery behind one of literary history’s greatest disappearing acts. Born and raised in North Carolina, Joseph Mitchell was Southern to the core. But from the 1930s to the 1960s, he was the voice of New York City. Readers of The New Yorker cherished his intimate sketches of the people who made the city tick—from Mohawk steelworkers to Staten Island oystermen, from homeless intellectual Joe Gould to Old John McSorley, founder of the city’s most famous saloon. Mitchell’s literary sensibility combined with a journalistic eye for detail produced a writing style that would inspire New Journalism luminaries such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion. Then, all of a sudden, his stories stopped appearing. For thirty years, Mitchell showed up for work at The New Yorker, but he produced . . . nothing. Did he have something new and exciting in store? Was he working on a major project? Or was he bedeviled by an epic case of writer’s block? The first full-length biography of Joseph Mitchell, based on the thousands of archival pages he left behind and dozens of interviews, Man in Profile pieces together the life of this beloved and enigmatic literary legend and answers the question that has plagued readers and critics for decades: What was Joe Mitchell doing all those years? By the time of his death in 1996, Mitchell was less well known for his elegant writing than for his J. D. Salinger–like retreat from the public eye. For thirty years, Mitchell had wandered the streets of New York, chronicling the lives of everyday people and publishing them in the most prestigious publication in town. But by the 1970s, crime, homelessness, and a crumbling infrastructure had transformed the city Mitchell understood so well and spoke for so articulately. He could barely recognize it. As he said to a friend late in life, “I’m living in a state of confusion.” Fifty years after his last story appeared, and almost two decades after his death, Joseph Mitchell still has legions of fans, and his story—especially the mystery of his “disappearance”—continues to fascinate. With a colorful cast of characters that includes Harold Ross, A. J. Liebling, Tina Brown, James Thurber, and William Shawn, Man in Profile goes a long way to solving that mystery—and bringing this lion of American journalism out of the shadows that once threatened to swallow him. Praise for Man in Profile “[An] authoritative new biography [about] our greatest literary journalist . . . Kunkel is the ideal biographer of Joseph Mitchell: As . . . a writer and craftsman worthy of his subject.”—Blake Bailey, The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice) “A richly persuasive portrait of a man who cared about everybody and everything.”—London Review of Books “Mitchell’s life and achievements are brought vividly alive in [this] splendid book.”—Chicago Tribune “A thoughtful and sympathetic new biography.”—Ruth Franklin, The Atlantic “Excellent . . . A first-rate Mitchell biography was very much in order.”—The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book Over P J Clarke s Bar written by Helen Marie Clarke and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2012-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the history of the New York City saloon, from its founding in 1884 to the present day.
Download or read book Sunny s Nights written by Tim Sultan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront. Inside, he found a dimly lit room crammed with maritime artifacts, a dozen well-seasoned drinkers, and, strangely, a projector playing a classic Martha Graham dance performance. Sultan knew he had stumbled upon someplace special. What he didn’t know was that he had just found his new home. Soon enough, Sultan has quit his office job to bartend full-time for Sunny Balzano, the bar’s owner. A wild-haired Tony Bennett lookalike with a fondness for quoting Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, Sunny is truly one of a kind. Born next to the saloon that has been in his family for one hundred years, Sunny has over the years partied with Andy Warhol, spent time in India at the feet of a guru, and painted abstract expressionist originals. But his masterpiece is the bar itself, a place where a sublime mix of artists, mobsters, honky-tonk musicians, neighborhood drunks, nuns, longshoremen, and assorted eccentrics rub elbows. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming city, Sunny’s Nights is a loving and singular portrait of the dream experience we’re all searching for every time we walk into a bar, and an enchanting memoir of an unlikely and abiding friendship. Praise for Sunny’s Nights “Fantastic . . . [Sultan takes] material that might seem familiar and [mixes] a perfect, insightful cocktail: full-bodied, multitextured and delicious. . . . Simply beautiful.”—The New York Times Book Review “Sultan’s love of Red Hook shines through, and it’s hard not to be swept along on the ebb and flow of his emotions. . . . Sultan’s book is, among other things, a meditation on the fragility of the moment and the passage of time. . . . Wistful, funny and biting, Sunny’s Nights rewards you with its evocation of a certain place in time and, as Sultan calls him, ‘the most original man I have ever met.’”—Newsday “An affectionate portrait of the idiosyncratic Sunny’s Bar.”—USA Today “Sultan finds Sunny . . . a real character, a poet, a cinephile, a philosopher, bluegrass maestro and (Rheingold) beer server.”—New York Post (“Required Reading”) “Captivating . . . a classic story about a local bar.”—The Buffalo News “An enchanting memoir, a profound meditation on place and a beautiful story of an unlikely and abiding friendship.”—Brooklyn Daily Eagle “[A] polished, affecting look at remarkable barkeep Sunny Balzano . . . In elegant prose, Sultan deploys laconic humor, an instinct for telling details, a taste for eccentricity, and above all, clear-eyed compassion for our all-too-human failings.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Beautifully wrought . . . an indelible portrait of an unusual man and a nearly forgotten part of NYC.”—Booklist “More than an elegy for a bar and a neighborhood—it’s also a vivid and loving portrait of the larger-than-life eccentric who gave the bar its name and its spirit.”—Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers
Download or read book yes I said yes I will Yes written by Nola Tully and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-05-19 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the fictional morning of June 16, 1904—Bloomsday, as it has come to be known—Mr. Leopold Bloom set out from his home at 7 Eccles Street and began his day’s journey through Dublin life in the pages of James Joyce’s novel of the century, Ulysses. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes offers a priceless gathering of what’s been said about Ulysses since the extravagant praise and withering condemnation that first greeted it upon its initial publication. From the varied appraisals of such Joyce contemporaries as William Butler Yeats (“It is an entirely new thing. . . . He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time”) and Virginia Woolf (“Never did I read such tosh”), to excerpts from Tennessee Williams’ term paper “Why Ulysses is Boring” and assorted wit, praise, parody, caricature, photographs, anecdotes, bon mots, and reminiscence, this treasury of Bloomsiana is a lively and winning tribute to the most famous day in literature.
Download or read book Old Mr Flood written by Joseph Mitchell and published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Retired house wrecker Hugh G. Flood who plans to live to 115 years old on a diet of fresh seafood, harbor air and the occasional Scotch whiskey in famed New Yorker scribe Joseph Mitchell's fictional portrait of quintessential old-time New Yorker". --Back cover.
Download or read book This Place on Third Avenue written by John Mcnulty and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2002-05-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of hilarious, poignant, and eternal stories by the acclaimed New Yorker writer captures the off-beat, quirky, and amusing characters that he encountered at Tim and Joe Costello's Irish Saloon, from cab drivers, horseplayers, and glamour girls, to has-beens, never-weres, and dreamers. From 1937 until his death in 1956, John McNulty walked many beats for The New Yorker, but his favorite--and the one he made famous--was Tim and Joe Costello's a bustling Irish saloon at Third Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. The place is gone now, it was leveled and replaced by the lobby of a skyscraper in 1973, but it and its hard-drinking mid-century patrons live on in these funny, poignant, immortal sketches and stories. McNulty's people are drawn from life, and draw the breath of life. "What a marvelous writer McNulty was!" said Brendan Gill when they tore down Costello's. "His stories will survive . . . and perhaps seem all the more remarkable to a later generation for the reason that both the time and the place they celebrated have disappeared without a trace--brick and stone as thoroughly ground to dust as man". There is a short shelf of American classics born in the talk of ordinary folk--Mark Twain's sketches, Ring Lardner's baseball yarns, Studs Terkel's Chicago, and Joseph Mitchell's reports from the waterfront. With This Place on Third Avenue, that shelf grows one book longer.
Download or read book Cutty One Rock written by August Kleinzahler and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2005-12-13 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutty, One Rock takes the reader on a wild journey by airplane, bus, ferry, and foot from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place. These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.
Download or read book When Books Went to War written by Molly Guptill Manning and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This New York Times bestselling account of books parachuted to soldiers during WWII is a “cultural history that does much to explain modern America” (USA Today). When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops, gathering 20 million hardcover donations. Two years later, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million specially printed paperbacks designed for troops to carry in their pockets and rucksacks in every theater of war. These small, lightweight Armed Services Editions were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals, and on long bombing flights. This pioneering project not only listed soldiers’ spirits, but also helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity and made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. “A thoroughly engaging, enlightening, and often uplifting account . . . I was enthralled and moved.” — Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried “Whether or not you’re a book lover, you’ll be moved.” — Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book Irish American Autobiography written by James Silas Rogers and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there still a distinct Irish identity in America? This highly original survey says yes, though it's often an indirect one. Opening a new window on the meanings of Irishness over the twentieth century, this work also reveals how Catholicism, so key to the identity of earlier generations of Irish Americans, has also evolved.
Download or read book America Walks into a Bar written by Christine Sismondo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When George Washington bade farewell to his officers, he did so in New York's Fraunces Tavern. When Andrew Jackson planned his defense of New Orleans against the British in 1815, he met Jean Lafitte in a grog shop. And when John Wilkes Booth plotted with his accomplices to carry out an assassination, they gathered in Surratt Tavern. In America Walks into a Bar, Christine Sismondo recounts the rich and fascinating history of an institution often reviled, yet always central to American life. She traces the tavern from England to New England, showing how even the Puritans valued "a good Beere." With fast-paced narration and lively characters, she carries the story through the twentieth century and beyond, from repeated struggles over licensing and Sunday liquor sales, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the temperance movement, from attempts to ban "treating" to Prohibition and repeal. As the cockpit of organized crime, politics, and everyday social life, the bar has remained vital--and controversial--down to the present. In 2006, when the Hurricane Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act was passed, a rider excluded bars from applying for aid or tax breaks on the grounds that they contributed nothing to the community. Sismondo proves otherwise: the bar has contributed everything to the American story. Now in paperback, Sismondo's heady cocktail of agile prose and telling anecdotes offers a resounding toast to taprooms, taverns, saloons, speakeasies, and the local hangout where everybody knows your name.
Download or read book The Last Cattle Drive written by Robert Day and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Thirtieth anniversary edition of THE Kansas cult novel--a wild romp across 1970s Kansas--with a new foreword by Howard Lamar, new afterword by the author, and a reprinted essay, "The Last Cattle Drive Stampede," that is a send-up of some of Hollywood's feckless attempts to make a move based on the popular novel.
