Download or read book Owning Jolene written by Shelby Hearon and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the time she was seven, Jolene Temple has been a pawn between her feuding parents, each of whom has become practiced in kidnapping her from the other. She has been left emotionally suspended between two philosophies of life: that of her stolid, conventional father, "always saving for a rainy day," and of her recklessly adventurous mother, "always saying she enjoyed a little shower." Having adopted a different disguise each time her mother stole her away, at 19 Jolene is still unsure of her real identity; she is at ease only in acting a role. When she meets bland L. W. Dawson, she thinks he holds the answers to her quest to be "normal." Meanwhile, however, she has been posing for, and has become the mistress of, middle-aged, twice-divorced artist Henry Wozencrantz, who has much to teach her about facing life without running away. Set in present-day Texas of oil-bust hard times ("the whole state is claiming Chapter Eleven"), the novel delivers wickedly funny, incisive social commentary as well as vivid, quirky characters as outsized as the Lone Star State.
Download or read book Adventures with a Texas Humanist written by James Ward Lee and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author discusses the writers and trends in Texas literature beginning with early twentieth-century writer J. Frank Dobie and Larry McMurtry during the 1960s and places writers, politicians, and cultural leaders in the context of each age.
Download or read book Life Estates written by Shelby Hearon and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Her Most Searching and most accomplished novel to date, the author of Owning Jolene and Hug Dancing explores friendship and loss -- and what binds two women together and what separates them. Sarah and Harriet, now in their mid-fifties, have been friends since boarding school. Their lives -- Sarah in the Blue Ridge mountains of South Carolina and Harriet in the piney woods of East Texas -- have run parallel courses: marriage, babies, even opting for separate bedrooms from their husbands at about the same time. Or are their paths really so similar? Now they find themselves, within the same year, widowed -- and deep-rooted differences surface. For Sarah, marriage was a destructive snare; she finds freedom in nature, reward in a wallpaper business she has created (so women can make rooms of their own), and sexual satisfaction with a man in his late sixties who understands her needs. Harriet is lost, no longer employed as a wife; to protect herself she gets a gun; to bolster herself, a young man's attention. A life-and-death crisis brings the two women together. In the course of their visit the disharmonies they have never before acknowledged are revealed and their friendship is profoundly changed. Telling Sarah and Harriet's story, Shelby Hearon has given us a witty, disturbing, and moving novel about the way we see -- and fail to see -- our friends and ourselves.
Download or read book Footprints written by Shelby Hearon and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-11-02 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shelby Hearon's 14th novel opens at a reception for the loved ones of deceased heart donors where, for the first time, Nan and Douglas Mayhall come face to face with the aging preacher who is the recipient of their twenty-two year old daughter's heart. Their very different reactions to this disturbing encounter sets them off on separate paths. Something is eroding under the surface of their marriage. Hoping for some peace of mind, Nan goes to Sanibel Island to step back and reassess her life. But it takes another real scare to allow her to slip out of her own footprints for a moment, to see that a world exists outside her pain.
Download or read book A Prince of a Fellow written by Shelby Hearon and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Letters to a Fiction Writer written by Frederick Busch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors include Lee K. Abbott, Charles Baxter, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Carver, Shelby Foote, John Gardner, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Tobias Wolff, and Flannery O'Connor, among others.
Download or read book Hug Dancing written by Shelby Hearon and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With wit and feeling Shelby Hearon takes us into the life and world of Cile Tait, age thirty-nine, of Waco, Texas. A woman of charm and integrity, she summons up the courage to burn her bridges and defect from her marriage to the Grace Presbyterian Church’s minister, only to be stunned by the complete lack of flame, smoke or hubbub of any kind that follows. Here is an inner-directed, sensuous, self-liberated woman impelled to make a place for herself in a society where church-centered propriety (embodied in her preacher-husband, whose constricting bed and board she leaves) mingles with country-style macho (in the person of Andy, her long-lost high school sweetheart and hug-dancing partner, who resurfaces and reclaims her)… and with the eternal Dallas dash (Andy’s bandbox-stylish wife). It is a new world where superconducting supercolliders, threatening famlands, have brought into the area a global mix of superscientists (including the beautiful Korean who may be moving toward the marriage Cile has vacated), where the rumble of money appears to underlie almost every mysterious action and where Cile’s two daughters, young Amazons with a passion to save the world from exological disaster, are already charting their own independent courses. Yet the more things change, the more they are destined to repeat the past. So it goes in Shelby Hearon’s wickedly observant novel, whose convolutions, through three months from Wind Day to Earth Day, trace the amazing course of true love à la 1990s.
Download or read book The Alcalde written by and published by . This book was released on 1989-07 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the magazine of the Texas Exes, The Alcalde has united alumni and friends of The University of Texas at Austin for nearly 100 years. The Alcalde serves as an intellectual crossroads where UT's luminaries - artists, engineers, executives, musicians, attorneys, journalists, lawmakers, and professors among them - meet bimonthly to exchange ideas. Its pages also offer a place for Texas Exes to swap stories and share memories of Austin and their alma mater. The magazine's unique name is Spanish for "mayor" or "chief magistrate"; the nickname of the governor who signed UT into existence was "The Old Alcalde."
Download or read book Culture in the American Southwest written by Keith L. Bryant and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the Southwest is known for its distinctive regional culture, it is not only the indigenous influences that make it so. As Anglo Americans moved into the territories of the greater Southwest, they brought with them a desire to reestablish the highest culture of their former homes: opera, painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature. But their inherited culture was altered, challenged, and reshaped by Native American and Hispanic peoples, and a new, vibrant cultural life resulted. From Houston to Los Angeles, from Tulsa to Tucson, Keith L. Bryant traces the development of "high culture" in the Southwest. Humans create culture, but in the Southwest, Bryant argues, the land itself has also influenced that creation. "Incredible light, natural grandeur, . . . and a geography at once beautiful and yet brutal molded societies that sprang from unique cultural sources." The peoples of the American Southwest share a regional consciousness—an experience of place—that has helped to create a unified, but not homogenized, Southwestern culture. Bryant also examines a paradox of Southwestern cultural life. Southwesterners take pride in their cultural distinctiveness, yet they struggled to win recognition for their achievements in "high culture." A dynamic tension between those seeking to re-create a Western European culture and those desiring one based on regional themes and resources continues to stimulate creativity. Decade by decade and city by city, Bryant charts the growth of cultural institutions and patronage as he describes the contributions of artists and performers and of the elites who support them. Bryant focuses on the significant role women played as leaders in the formation of cultural institutions and as writers, artists, and musicians. The text is enhanced by more than fifty photographs depicting the interplay between the people and the land and the culture that has resulted.
Download or read book Best Stories written by Hugh Garner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1971 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Kentucky Encyclopedia written by John E. Kleber and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 1082 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kentucky Encyclopedia's 2,000-plus entries are the work of more than five hundred writers. Their subjects reflect all areas of the commonwealth and span the time from prehistoric settlement to today's headlines, recording Kentuckians' achievements in art, architecture, business, education, politics, religion, science, and sports. Biographical sketches portray all of Kentucky's governors and U.S. senators, as well as note congressmen and state and local politicians. Kentucky's impact on the national scene is registered in the lives of such figures as Carry Nation, Henry Clay, Louis Brandeis, and Alben Barkley. The commonwealth's high range from writers Harriette Arnow and Jesse Stuart, reformers Laura Clay and Mary Breckinridge, and civil rights leaders Whitney Young, Jr., and Georgia Powers, to sports figures Muhammad Ali and Adolph Rupp and entertainers Loretta Lynn, Merle Travis, and the Everly Brothers. Entries describe each county and county seat and each community with a population above 2,500. Broad overview articles examine such topics as agriculture, segregation, transportation, literature, and folklife. Frequently misunderstood aspects of Kentucky's history and culture are clarified and popular misconceptions corrected. The facts on such subjects as mint juleps, Fort Knox, Boone's coonskin cap, the Kentucky hot brown, and Morgan's Raiders will settle many an argument. For both the researcher and the more casual reader, this collection of facts and fancies about Kentucky and Kentuckians will be an invaluable resource.
Download or read book The Alcalde written by and published by . This book was released on 1989-09 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the magazine of the Texas Exes, The Alcalde has united alumni and friends of The University of Texas at Austin for nearly 100 years. The Alcalde serves as an intellectual crossroads where UT's luminaries - artists, engineers, executives, musicians, attorneys, journalists, lawmakers, and professors among them - meet bimonthly to exchange ideas. Its pages also offer a place for Texas Exes to swap stories and share memories of Austin and their alma mater. The magazine's unique name is Spanish for "mayor" or "chief magistrate"; the nickname of the governor who signed UT into existence was "The Old Alcalde."
Download or read book The New York Times Book Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents extended reviews of noteworthy books, short reviews, essays and articles on topics and trends in publishing, literature, culture and the arts. Includes lists of best sellers (hardcover and paperback).
Download or read book Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers written by Laurie Champion and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-11-30 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes:^L^DBLA brief biography^L^DBLA discussion of major works and themes^^DBLA survey of the writer's critical reception^L^DBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sources
Download or read book Domestication written by Shannon Knight and published by Winter Moon Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an eat or be eaten world, domestication is a death sentence. When Janie chose the isolated sheep farm, she knew her husband would hunt her down. What she didn’t expect was Rob and Howard. Rob rules the farm with the same domination tactics she uses to train dogs, while Howard believes only human supremacists think humans should be treated any differently than other animals. Janie inadvertently jumps out of the frying pan and into the fire. She wishes to leave her old self behind. She wants to transform. Will she devolve into meat, metamorphose into a monster, or transcend beyond her domesticated limitations?
Download or read book Updating the Literary West written by and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 1072 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Western writers," says Thomas J. Lyon in his epilogue to Updating the Literary West, "have grown up with the frontier myth but now find themselves in the early stages of creating a new western myth." The editors of the Literary History of the American West (TCU Press, 1987) hoped that the first volume would begin, not conclude, their exploration of the West's literary heritage. Out of this hope comes Updating the Literary West, a comprehensive reference anthology including essays by over one hundred scholars. A selected bibliography is included with each piece. In the ten years since publication of LHAW, western writing has developed a significantly larger presence in the national literary stream. A variety of cultural viewpoints have developed, along with new tactics for literary study. New authors have risen to prominence, and the range of subjects has changed and widened. Updating the Literary West looks at topics ranging from western classics to cowboys and Cadillacs and considers children's literature, ethnicity, environmental writing, gender issues and other topics in which change has been rapid since publication of LHAW. This volume again affirms the West's literary legitimacy--status hard earned by the Western Literary Association--and the lasting place of popular western writing as part of the growing and changing literary--and American--experience. An excellent reference for a wide range of readers and an invaluable resource for scholars and libraries. Selected list of contributors: James Maguire Fred Erisman Susan J. Rosowski Gerald Haslam Tom Pilkington A. Carl Bredahl Richard Slotkin John G. Cawelti Robert F. Gish Ann Ronald Mick McAllister
Download or read book Texas Women Writers written by Sylvia Ann Grider and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical survey of over 150 years of Texas women writers, including fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, and dramatists.
