Download or read book Quintana Friends written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dunne has a wicked eye for the telling details, an uncanny ear for the revealing phrase.”—The New York Times. Quintana & Friends gathers thirty-three brilliant essays written by a pioneer of New Journalism between 1963 and 1978. John Gregory Dunne's gifts for keen reportage, subtle storytelling, and articulate opinion on full display, he covers topics ranging from the Hollywood machine to America’s last fight club to departure day for young soldiers shipping out to Viet Nam. In a celebrated baseball essay, he follows San Francisco Giant outfielder Willie Mays as the slugger seeks to break the National League career home-run record, his portrait capturing a prickly veteran not shy, in an age before PR handlers for athletes, of expressing his annoyance with reporters. In “Sneak,” Dunne brings us inside Twentieth-Century Fox’s Minneapolis advance screening of the movie Dr. Doolittle. In “Quebec Zero,” he spends 24 hours underground with a crew of four young men manning nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, Dunne’s goal “to see how it worked on the mind, to have World War III only an arm’s length away.” In the title essay, Dunne writes of raising his adopted daughter Quintana with wife Joan Didion, speculating about the day the girl might wish to seek out her birth mother. In “Friends,” he writes movingly of a best friend, screenwriter Josh Greenfield, father to an autistic son. “Eureka” celebrates Los Angeles. “Pauline” famously takes down revered New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael. And in the much-discussed essay “Gone Hollywood,” Dunne blasts the notion that the movie business is a destroyer of writing talent. “The ecology of Hollywood eludes them,” he writes of those who bemoan the studio system’s effects on writers. Echoing this point in the Kael essay, occasional screenwriter Dunne, making reference to an Upper West Side of Manhattan grocery store, famously declares: “The writers who fell apart in Hollywood would have fallen apart in Zabar's.” Download this first-ever digital edition of Quintana & Friends and enjoy John Gregory Dunne at his wittiest, most observant, and powerfully eloquent best.
Download or read book The Year of Magical Thinking written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-02-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
Download or read book Finnikin of the Rock written by Melina Marchetta and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2008 Printz Award Winner Melina Marchetta crafts an epic fantasy of ancient magic, exile, feudal intrigue, and romance that rivets from the first page. (Age 14 and up) Finnikin was only a child during the five days of the unspeakable, when the royal family of Lumatere were brutally murdered, and an imposter seized the throne. Now a curse binds all who remain inside Lumatere’s walls, and those who escaped roam the surrounding lands as exiles, persecuted and despairing, dying by the thousands in fever camps. In a narrative crackling with the tension of an imminent storm, Finnikin, now on the cusp of manhood, is compelled to join forces with an arrogant and enigmatic young novice named Evanjalin, who claims that her dark dreams will lead the exiles to a surviving royal child and a way to pierce the cursed barrier and regain the land of Lumatere. But Evanjalin’s unpredictable behavior suggests that she is not what she seems -- and the startling truth will test Finnikin’s faith not only in her, but in all he knows to be true about himself and his destiny.
Download or read book Blue Nights written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean Richly textured with memories from her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion is an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness and growing old. As she reflects on her daughter’s life and on her role as a parent, Didion grapples with the candid questions that all parents face, and contemplates her age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profound.
Download or read book Crooning written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Funny, outrageous, cynical, and spellbinding.”—People magazine. In this first-ever digital edition of John Gregory Dunne’s acclaimed collection Crooning, readers find evidence from the get-go confirming the writer’s reputation as one of the most clear-seeing, incisive observers of the American cultural and political scene. In sixteen sharp, distinctively voiced essays, Dunne profiles a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who three decades later passed himself off as a young Chicano novelist; considers the Kennedy men and conservative William F. Buckley, takes us inside California’s labyrinthine water politics and criminal justice system, details the workings of the Los Angeles county morgue, and is on the ground observing in Jerusalem just weeks before the intifada enveloped the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1987. Here, too, are superbly entertaining accounts of the Hollywood star system and studio machine, Dunne drawing on two decades of experience as an L.A.-based journalist and fiction-writer with regular forays into screenwriting. He is candid and insightful about the business of writing and life of the dedicated writer as well. In “Laying Pipe,” Dunne chronicles the five-year experience of writing his epic novel The Red White and Blue. And in “Critical,” he focuses on book reviews and reviewers from his perspective as an author who, along with manifold strong notices, also received the occasional critical knock. He names names, and takes the opportunity to fire back at one of his critics. Early in Crooning, Dunne tells us that when he tires of the writing grind, he fantasizes about being a Johnny Mercer-like crooner, then reveals a moment later that he is tone deaf. The title, then, is playful - and in more than one way. Instead of writing sweet narrative melodies, Dunne built his career through work that exposes, challenges, thrums with opinion, and bristles with spiky, knowing humor. Download Crooning and dive into a book of provocative reportage, great stories, and witty, vigorous prose.
Download or read book Family and Friends Readers 6 The Secret Garden written by Clare West and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-01-14 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe written by Benjamin Alire Sáenz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-02-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.
Download or read book How It Feels to Be Adopted written by Jill Krementz and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these wonderfully straightforward accounts of what it means to children to be adopted, nineteen boys and girls, from eight to sixteen years old—and from every social background—confide their feelings about this crucial fact of their lives. It is deeply affecting to listen to these children as they reveal their questions, frustrations, difficulties, and joys with an honesty that is immediate, convincing, and stirring. Their generosity will provide solace and strength for thousands of other children who share with them the experience of being adopted—and who will be helped to understand that their own emotions are normal and appropriate.
Download or read book The Studio written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1998-04-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1967, John Gregory Dunne asked for unlimited access to the inner workings of Twentieth Century Fox. Miraculously, he got it. For one year Dunne went everywhere there was to go and talked to everyone worth talking to within the studio. He tracked every step of the creation of pictures like "Dr. Dolittle," "Planet of the Apes," and "The Boston Strangler." The result is a work of reportage that, thirty years later, may still be our most minutely observed and therefore most uproariously funny portrait of the motion picture business. Whether he is recounting a showdown between Fox's studio head and two suave shark-like agents, watching a producer's girlfriend steal a silver plate from a restaurant, or shielding his eyes against the glare of a Hollywood premiere where the guests include a chimp in a white tie and tails, Dunne captures his subject in all its showmanship, savvy, vulgarity, and hype. Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West has anyone done Hollywood better. "Reads as racily as a novel...(Dunne) has a novelist's ear for speech and eye for revealing detail...Anyone who has tiptoed along those corridors of power is bound to say that Dunne's impressionism rings true."--Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Regards written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of key nonfiction works includes the writer's frank observations on the film industry, politics, sports, and other topics; his reflections on raising an adopted daughter; and depictions of Las Vegas and a Hollywood film studio. Original.
Download or read book The Year of Magical Thinking written by Joan Didion and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [In this book, the author] explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve - the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This ... book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Last Tree written by María Quintana Silva and published by Cuento de Luz. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner at the 2019 Independent Press Awards. A beautiful story, printed on stone paper, about the importance, care, and preservation of trees, and the small steps we can all take to care for the planet. One night, the trees in the forest decided it’s time to uproot and leave. They yanked out their roots and dragged themselves off across the fields. On his way to school, Goran soon realized what is happening... All the trees had disappeared and holes could be seen where they used to be. Bewildered, he rushed home to find if the tree in his garden had vanished as well. He loved that tree, it used to be his friend during springtime when he swung from his branches, and also in summer when its leaves protected him from the hot sun. Understanding the consequences this would have for animals, humans, and the environment, he set off to counteract the damage that had already been done.
Download or read book The Last Love Song written by Tracy Daugherty and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography of the American novelist, Joan Didion (1934).
Download or read book Dutch Shea Jr written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dunne’s bravura plotting asserts an exhilarating mastery.” —The New York Times Book Review. In John Gregory Dunne’s celebrated third novel, Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney Dutch Shea, Jr. struggles to keep from falling apart after an act of terrorist violence strikes his family, the loss pushing him towards a confrontation with his past and into a mystery involving the death of his father, a felon who died in prison. Set in L.A. and Dunne’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, the novel follows Shea into a labyrinth of deception, corruption, and criminal malice. Fighting to keep a host of disturbing memories tamped down, Shea plunges into his legal work, one embedding him in a world of scammers and burglars, pimps and prostitutes, corrupt cops and shady private eyes. With unrivaled detail and pitch-black humor, Dunne takes us into police precincts and criminal courtrooms, judge’s chambers and city morgues. The novel’s deft noir touches will remind readers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, while Dunne’s command of legal dynamics and police procedures anticipates fiction by Scott Turow, John Grisham and Michael Connelly. Introducing a sweeping cast of two dozen vivid characters, including Shea’s sometime girlfriend, a judge who packs a pistol under her robe, Dutch Shea, Jr. - a Zola e-book exclusive - is a gripping, bleakly funny exploration of a fallen world through which its past-haunted hero weaves, beset from within and without, for a series of fraught days.
Download or read book Scissoring written by Christina Quintana and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Abigail Bauer takes a job as a teacher at a conservative Catholic school, she is forced to step back into the closet against the wishes of her long-term girlfriend. As she struggles to reconcile her professional ambitions, personal relationships, religious beliefs, and internalized shame, Abigail receives guidance from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Eleanor’s devoted friend and lover, Lorena Hickok. Through it all, Abigail must find the courage to be unabashedly herself.
Download or read book The Missing Girl written by Jenny Quintana and published by Mantle. This book was released on 2017-12-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A gripping debut from a serious new talent . . .' Erin Kelly on Jenny Quintana’s The Missing Girl When Anna Flores' adored older sister goes missing as a teenager, Anna copes by disappearing too, just as soon as she can: running as far away from her family as possible, and eventually building a life for herself abroad. Thirty years later, the death of her mother finally forces Anna to return home. Tasked with sorting through her mother's possessions, she begins to confront not just her mother's death, but also the huge hole Gabriella's disappearance left in her life – and finds herself asking a question she's not allowed herself to ask for years: what really happened to her sister? With that question comes the revelation that her biggest fear isn't discovering the worst; it's never knowing the answer. But is it too late for Anna to uncover the truth about Gabriella's disappearance?
Download or read book Vegas written by John Gregory Dunne and published by . This book was released on 2025-06-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne's] grotesqueries aren't drug-induced, they're very real. His is the genuine Vegas." (Esquire) "In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada." So begins John Gregory Dunne's neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage. Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife, Joan Didion, and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. His plan: to write a book about the city he describes as a "prison of yesterdays." In his desperation, he connects with a remarkable trio of characters: Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a "semi-name." Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had "spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby"--these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie; and, for a dark season, their world becomes Dunne's. Vegas captures a low point in American culture and in one American life with rare vitality, honesty, and perception. Sad, powerful, wildly funny, Vegas is like no memoir before or since.
