Download or read book Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All written by Allan Gurganus and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-10-16 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.
Download or read book Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All written by Allan Gurganus and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-08 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.
Download or read book Local Souls written by Allan Gurganus and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his first work of fiction in a decade, Allan Gurganus returns to the mythic site of his immortal novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Time has passed; the Internet has arrived; but the daily human dramas in Falls, North Carolina prove that old habits die hard. A banker's daughter seeks the child she was forced to relinquish at birth . . . The disappearance of a star high school student sends ripples through the town, creating a cult led by her stricken mother . . . The friendship between two married men is tested by a devastating flood. Local Souls is a universal tale of gigantic hopes battling small-town conventions - a dark comedy of adultery, obsession and incest, told with affection and piercing insight.
Download or read book Plays Well with Others written by Allan Gurganus and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1999-02-02 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists--refugees from the middle class--hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher's son whose good looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina "Alabama" Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each other's work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this circle grows up fast, somehow finding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family. Funny and heartbreaking, as eventful as Dickens and as atmospheric as one of Fitzgerald's parties, Plays Well with Others combines a fable's high-noon energy with an elegy's evening grace. Allan Gurganus's celebrated new novel is a lovesong to imperishable friendship, a hymn to a brilliant and now-vanished world.
Download or read book White People written by Allan Gurganus and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book In eleven glorious stories, Allan Gurganus, author of the highly acclaimed Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, gives heart-breaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires, and triumphs of Americans—black and white, gay and straight, old and young, Northern and especially Southern. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, vacationing senior citizens confronted by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time. The title novella of White People won the National Magazine Prize
Download or read book The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus written by Allan Gurganus and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of “the best writers of our time” (Ann Patchett) offers this hilarious yet haunting cycle of stories—all previously uncollected. Since the explosive publication of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus has dazzled readers as “the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation” (John Cheever). He has been praised as "one of America’s preeminent novelists, our prime conductor of electric sentences" (William Giraldi). Above all, Allan Gurganus is a seriously funny writer, an expert at evoking humor, especially in our troubled times. Now he offers nine classic tales—never before between covers. They attest to his mastery of the short story and the growing depth of his genius. Offering characters antic and tragic, Gurganus charts the human condition—masked and unmasked—as we live it now. “Once upon a time” collides with the everyday. We meet a mortician whose dedication to his departed clients exceeds all legal limits. We encounter a seaside couple fighting to save their family dog from Maine’s fierce undertow. A virginal seventy-eight-year-old grammar school librarian has her sole erotic experience with a polyamorous snake farmer. A vicious tornado sends twin boys aloft, leaving only one of them alive. And, in an eerily prescient story, cholera strikes a rural village in 1849 and citizens come to blame their doomed young doctor who saved hundreds. These meticulously crafted parables recall William Faulkner’s scope and Flannery O’Connor’s corrosive wit. Imbuing each story with charged drama, Gurganus, a sublime ventriloquist, again proves himself among our funniest writers and our wisest.
Download or read book Oldest Living Confederate Widow written by Allan Gurganus and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucy Marsden, 99 years old, scares and charms us as the widow of the American Civil War¿s last surviving soldier. His child bride and the mother of his nine children, she now lives alone, the survivor of the survivor. A born storyteller, a woman of passion and compassion, she finally confesses her own marriage as the secret history of War itself. The role of Lucy¿funny, irreverent, candid, and heartfelt¿offers the actress of any age a sampler for her every emotion and available skill. By the time her telling is complete, we feel the full terror and pity of the domestic life and the Civil War combined. Based on the classic best-selling novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, this one-woman aria for stage constitutes a new work of art¿fresh, humorous and terrifying. Oscar- and Tony-winner Ellen Burstyn created the role on Broadway.
Download or read book The Practical Heart written by Allan Gurganus and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A luminous quartet, five years in the writing, reveals even more fully the breathtaking range of "a storyteller in the grand tradition" (New York Times). Allan Gurganus's voice--by turn bawdy and serene, folkloric and profane--deepens as it soars into this quiet masterwork. Four new fables--rich in event, comedy, experience--surge with the force of history's headlines versus sidestreet human fortitude. Improbable heroes and heroines spiral outward from Gurganus's familiar Carolina terrain. Each fires into a wild and differing direction, all in quest of some fantasy that's practically impossible: --An impoverished immigrant has her portrait painted (or not) by John Singer Sargent. --A young man's devotion to saving eighteenth-century homes—and their odd lingering ghosts—helps him find unlikely ways to renovate his own mortality. --A pillar of the community becomes, over the course of one cartoon matinee, its pariah. --A beloved, transfixingly homely father shows his village and his only son a decency stronger than race, humiliation, or even death itself. These characters' quixotic missions prove mysterious, often even to themselves. Their legacies are not easily deciphered. And yet, their most impractical wishes soon become the heartiest facts about each. They manage to wrest battle-courage from everyday indecision. Out of superstition and convention, they lift certainty. They each find a wealth of consoling truths banked--immortal--in the all-too-human heart. Allan Gurganus's great powers--announced more than a decade ago by Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All--here achieve a yearning exuberance worthy of a new Whitman. These leaps of sexual longing, empathy, and faith become a major new gift from this essential fablemaker.
Download or read book Boys Like Us written by Patrick Merla and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1997-10-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In stunning essays written especially for this collection, twenty-nine noted gay writers recount their true "coming out" stories, intensely personal histories of that primal process by which men come to terms with their desire for other men. Here are accounts of revealing one's sexual identity to parents, siblings, friends, co-workers and, in one notable instance, to a stockbroker. Men tell of their first sexual encounters from their preteens to their thirties, with childhood friends who rejected or tenderly embraced them, with professors, with neighbors, with a Broadway star. These are poignant, sometimes unexpectedly funny tales of romance and heartbreak, repression and liberation, rape and first love defining moments that shaped their authors' lives. Arranged chronologically from Manhattan in the Forties to San Francisco in the Nineties, these essays ultimately form a documentary of changing social and sexual mores in the United States--a literary, biographical, sociological and historical tour de force.
Download or read book A Long and Happy Life written by Reynolds Price and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1962 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The troubled love story of Rosacoke (Rosa) Mustian and Wesley Beavers in rural North Carolina.
Download or read book Blessed Assurance written by Allan Gurganus and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrator reflects on his experiences collecting funeral insurance premiums from poor blacks in North Carolina.
Download or read book War Trash written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, War Trash is Ha Jin’s most ambitious book to date.
Download or read book These is My Words written by Nancy Turner and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Agnes Prine begins her diary in 1881 when her father decides to move the whole family - and their horse ranch - from Arizona Territory to Texas, where life will be easier. Sarah, at seventeen, is a tomboy though she longs to be educated, gracious and beautiful like other women. But when the family sets out on the wagon trail and disasters strike in rapid succession, Sarah turns out to be the only thing that keeps them from certain death. Sarah stays brave, strong and determined through everything that befalls her. But she longs to be loved, like any other woman, and she is to meet her destiny in Captain Jack Elliot.
Download or read book The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All written by Joseph Duncan and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-03-25 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My legal name where I currently reside in the city of Liege, Belgium, in the year 2010 A.D., is Gaspar Valessi, but that is not my real name. The name I was given some 30,000 years ago, when I was born in a Paleolithic settlement in the region that is now called Germany-- the name my father gave me shortly after I was voided, bloody and howling, from my mother's womb-- is Gon." So begins the saga of the immortal Gon, a 30,000 year old vampire. This, the first volume of his memoirs, recounts his mortal life in prehistoric Germany alongside his male companion Brulde and his two wives, the Neanderthal Eyya and his Cro-Magnon mate Nyala, and details the fearsome events that lead to his transformation from man to undying monster. This Revised and Expanded Edition includes more than 30,000 words of new material, adding depth to much loved characters and more fully realizing the author's vision of the Oldest Living Vampire and the prehistoric world that gave birth to him. By turns beautiful and subversive, poetic and seductive, the Oldest Living Vampire Saga is like no other vampire series you've ever read! Readers Rave About The Oldest Living Vampire Saga "Sensual and exciting.."."Had me on the edge of my seat.."."Anyone who enjoys Anne Rice's Lestat stories will find this a great read..."."The story of Gon is incredible.."."This author has tremendous talent.."."Not your run of the mill vampire.."."BRAVO!.."."I'm an Anne Rice fan but decided to dive in to what I hoped would be a good read. I was not disappointed!" What The Critics Say "In the competitive literary world of glittery immortals and undead enchantresses, [Mr. Duncan] has successfully created a unique vampire with an extensive historical background that has been embraced by multitudes of fans."--Examiner.com..."I wasn't expecting much. But again, my initial impression was proved wrong. It's an interesting book with a very unique main character."--Uwanted2C.com The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All has been a Kindle best-seller since its debut in 2010... find out for yourself what all the rave reviews are about! The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Chronology: Volume I: The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All Side Story: Nyal's Story Volume II: The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl Volume III: The Oldest Living Vampire In Love Side Story: Apollonius Volume IV: The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed
Download or read book Eminent Outlaws written by Christopher Bram and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.
Download or read book Slavery by Another Name written by Douglas A. Blackmon and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
Download or read book The River Between Us written by Richard Peck and published by Puffin Books. This book was released on 2005-06-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the early days of the Civil War, the Pruitt family takes in two mysterious young ladies who have fled New Orleans to come north to Illinois.
