Download or read book The Blue Touch Paper A Memoir written by David Hare and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Extraordinary. . . . This is no butterfly-watching stroll through a life.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times David Hare has long been one of Britain’s best-known screenwriters and dramatists. He’s the author of more than thirty acclaimed plays that have appeared on Broadway, in the West End, and at the National Theatre. He wrote the screenplays for the hugely successful films The Hours, Plenty, and The Reader. Most recently, his play Skylight won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival on Broadway. Now, in his debut work of autobiography, “Britain’s leading contemporary playwright” (Sunday Times) offers a vibrant and affecting account of becoming a writer amid the enormous flux of postwar England. In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humor, he takes us from his university days at Cambridge to the swinging 1960s, when he cofounded the influential Portable Theatre in London and took a memorable road trip across America, to his breakthrough successes as a playwright amid the political ferment of the ’70s and the moment when Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of the decade. Through it all, Hare sets the progress of his own life against the dramatic changes in postwar England, in which faith in hierarchy, religion, empire, and the public good all withered away. Filled with indelible glimpses of such figures as Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, Helen Mirren, and Joseph Papp, The Blue Touch Paper is a powerful evocation of a society in transition and a writer in the making.
Download or read book Locating Imagination in Popular Culture written by Nicky van Es and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people’s favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.
Download or read book Musical Theatre written by David Henson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and engaging second workbook on musical theatre, presenting students with the next steps for extending their skills in acting, dancing and singing. Filled with imaginative practical and theoretical exercises, this workbook reveals the anatomy of musical theatre and offers inspiration, challenges and companionship along the path to successful performance. In so doing, it enables students to structure their time and hone their abilities, so that they can achieve their full potential in what is seen as an exciting but intimidating field. Through this interactive approach, students are challenged to take responsibility for their own learning and development, by closely examining the acting, singing and choreographic demands of musical theatre. This is an ideal text for undergraduate students on musical theatre degree programmes, and general theatre and performance programmes where optional modules on Musical Theatre are offered. In addition, this resource is well suited to students taking accredited and non-accredited Diploma courses in musical theatre.
Download or read book We Travelled written by David Hare and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'David Hare's great quality has always been his refusal to accept the division between fact and imagination. His creative invention is fired by public realities and in turn he makes those realities feel deeply personal. That same quality is wonderfully at work in his essays and poems. Whether he is writing about Tony Blair or Joan Didion, whether he is writing out of love or rage, evoking the intimate moments of his own life or the great moral questions of our times, he brings his subjects to life with an irresistible immediacy. All the wit, combativeness, energy and edge he has brought to the stage are present here on the page.' Fintan O'Toole I can't remember if I had any plans for the twenty-first century. I was already 52 when it arrived. But events raced off in such unexpected directions that any possible ideas must have gone out the window. Many of us shared the sensation that history was speeding up. Recording dizzying changes in culture and politics, these elegant essays range in subject from the photographer Lee Miller to the Archbishop of Canterbury, from the actress Sarah Bernhardt to the rapist Jimmy Saville, from a celebration of Mad Men to a diagnosis of the incoherence of Conservatism in the new century. The poems, in contrast, are private: tender meditations, filled with love, memory, vulnerability and the melancholy of ageing. This is a powerful compilation of prose and poetry by one of the distinctive thinkers of our time.
Download or read book Buzz Books 2015 Fall Winter written by and published by Publishers Lunch. This book was released on 2015-05-13 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventh edition of Buzz Books is a treasure-trove of substantial excerpts from dozens of the most highly-touted books to be published this fall/winter. Our “digital convention” features such major authors as Geraldine Brooks, Lauren Groff, Alice Hoffman, Janice Lee, Ron Rash, and Adriana Trigiani. We showcase debut novelists you’ve already heard of—Sloane Crosley, Jesse Eisenberg, and Amy Stewart—and anticipated new voices such as Virginia Baily (Early One Morning) and Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold, Fame, Citrus). Our nonfiction selections range from Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir to revelations on aging by Dick Van Dyke; new work from New York Times bestselling authors Jane McGonigal and Eric Weiner; and a memoir by Dan Marshall that will be featured at this year’s Book Expo America convention on the Editors Buzz panel: Home is Burning. Many of our Buzz Books authors also will be in attendance at BEA. We’ve grouped titles into sections for fiction, debut fiction, and nonfiction titles. If these great samples aren’t enough to fill your fall reading lists, we start with an extensive report on the entire fall/winter publishing season, with over 100 notable forthcoming books in all that you will find covered and promoted in the months ahead. Start reading some of the best future books right now, and invite your friends and book groups to download their own free copy of the ebook from any major ebookstore or at buzz.publishersmarketplace.com. And for the best in children’s literature, be sure to look for Buzz Books 2015: Young Adult Fall/Winter (9780990835363), also available now.
Download or read book Fifty Playwrights on their Craft written by Caroline Jester and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a series of interviews with fifty playwrights from the US and UK, this book offers a fascinating study of the voices, thoughts, and opinions of today's most important dramatists. Filled with probing questions, Fifty Playwrights on their Craft explores ideas such as how does playwriting help a global dialogue; where do dramatists find the ideas that become the stories and narratives within their plays; how can the stage inform the writer's creative process; how does crossing boundaries between art forms push the living art form of theatre-making forward; and will there be playwrights in another 50 years? Through these interrogating interviews we come to understand how and why playwrights write what they do and gain insight into their processes and motivations. Together, the interviews provide an inter-generational dialogue between dramatists whose work spans over six decades. Featuring interviews with playwrights such as Edward Bond, Katori Hall, Chris Goode, David Greig, Willy Russell, David Henry Hwang, Alecky Blythe, Anne Washburn and Simon Stephens, Jester and Svich offer an unprecedented view into the multiple perspectives and approaches of key playwrights on both sides of the Atlantic.
Download or read book I M written by Isaac Mizrahi and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Honest, insightful, and thoroughly entertaining...Mizrahi comes off in writing just like his onscreen persona: warm, witty, humble—and ready to dish.” —Booklist, starred review Isaac Mizrahi is sui generis: designer, cabaret performer, talk-show host, a TV celebrity. Yet ever since he shot to fame in the late 1980s, the private Isaac Mizrahi has remained under wraps. Until now. In I.M., Isaac Mizrahi offers a poignant, candid, and touching look back on his life so far. Growing up gay in a sheltered Syrian Jewish Orthodox family, Isaac had unique talents that ultimately drew him into fashion and later into celebrity circles that read like a who’s who of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Wintour, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Meryl Streep, and Oprah Winfrey, to name only a few. In his elegant memoir, Isaac delves into his lifelong battles with weight, insomnia, and depression. He tells what it was like to be an out gay man in a homophobic age and to witness the ravaging effects of the AIDS epidemic. Brimming with intimate details and inimitable wit, Isaac's narrative reveals not just the glamour of his years, but the grit beneath the glitz. Rich with memorable stories from in and out of the spotlight, I.M. illuminates deep emotional truths.
Download or read book Life written by Keith Richards and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2010-11-12 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited autobiography of Keith Richards, guitarist, songwriter, singer, and founding member of the Rolling Stones. With The Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the songs that roused the world, and he lived the original rock and roll life. Now, at last, the man himself tells his story of life in the crossfire hurricane. Listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records, learning guitar and forming a band with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. The Rolling Stones's first fame and the notorious drug busts that led to his enduring image as an outlaw folk hero. Creating immortal riffs like the ones in "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Honky Tonk Women." His relationship with Anita Pallenberg and the death of Brian Jones. Tax exile in France, wildfire tours of the U.S., isolation and addiction. Falling in love with Patti Hansen. Estrangement from Jagger and subsequent reconciliation. Marriage, family, solo albums and Xpensive Winos, and the road that goes on forever. With his trademark disarming honesty, Keith Richard brings us the story of a life we have all longed to know more of, unfettered, fearless, and true.
Download or read book The Upstairs Delicatessen written by Dwight Garner and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and eating in this comic, personal classic. Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together. The book you’re holding is a product of these combined gluttonies. Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner’s Quotations, serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and of this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner. Through his lifelong infatuation with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (and about his father’s famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family (“Cree grew up taking leftover frog legs to school in her lunch box”), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.
Download or read book What Was Neoliberalism written by Neil Davidson and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eminent scholar-activist Neil Davidson’s brilliance is on full display in this posthumous work, a timely and prescient introduction to the neoliberal era. While it is widely agreed that neoliberalism arose in the wake of the global economic crisis of the 1970s, there remains much debate about how to understand its significance and even how to define it. Is it best seen as an ideology of free market fundamentalism, a series of policy decisions gutting the public sector and breaking unions, or as an era of capitalist development with its own logic Bringing his considerable intellectual breadth and characteristic generosity to bear on this question, Neil Davidson shows that to truly appreciate what is unique about neoliberalism, and what marks it out as a continuation of capitalism more generally, it is necessary to examine its social dimensions. What Was Neoliberalism? holds fast to Davidson’s conviction that thoroughly understanding the past means being better prepared for the struggles of the future.
Download or read book My Mother was Nuts written by Penny Marshall and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From her humble roots in the Bronx to Laverne and Shirley and her unlikely ascent in Hollywood, the beloved actor and director tells the story of her incredible life.
Download or read book Marginal Comment written by K. J. Dover and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marginal Comment, which attracted keen and widespread interest on its original publication in 1994, is the remarkable memoir of one of the most distinguished classical scholars of the modern era. Its author, Sir Kenneth Dover, whose academic publications included the pathbreaking book Greek Homosexuality (1978, reissued by Bloomsbury in 2016), conceived of it as an 'experimental' autobiography – ruthlessly candid in retracing the full range of the author's experiences, both private and public, and unflinching in its attempt to analyse the entanglements between the life of the mind and the life of the body. Dover's distinguished career involved not only an influential series of writings about the ancient Greeks but also a number of prominent positions of leadership, including the presidencies of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the British Academy. It was in those positions that he became involved in several high-profile controversies, including the blocking of an honorary degree for Margaret Thatcher from Oxford University, and a bitter debate in the British Academy over the fellowship of Anthony Blunt after his exposure as a former Soviet spy. This edition of Marginal Comment is much more than a reissue: it includes an introduction which frames the book in relation to its author's life and work, as well as annotations based in part on materials originally excluded by Dover but left in his personal papers on this death. Now newly available, the memoir provides not only the self-portrait of an exceptional individual but a rich case-study in the intersections between an intellectual life and its social contexts.
Download or read book The Knitter written by John Mallaghan and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It was as if the wool had become all of the strands of his life, and those lifelines, not amounting to much but full of potential, were forming into something much more worthwhile, and much more beautiful, after they had been given a new form with the knitting needles." Inspired by the poems written by his coal miner father, and taking its name and theme from one of them, “The Knitter” is a celebration of one man’s wisdom, talent and influence. The book should be considered a “fictionalised” memoir – some parts are literally true, some are a close cousin of real events and some have been imagined from stories told, or from the poems written by the author's father. In trying to remain true to the spirit and feeling of what it describes rather than the bare facts, The Knitter succeeds in getting closer to some real and more lasting truths than many biographies manage to achieve. It shows us the importance of the people around us in helping make sense of our lives and how we can all make a real, lasting difference. It is in the connected strands running through the book that “The Knitter” becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Funny, sad and wise, the book works as a collection of short stories. However, it’s real impact lies in being a memoir that may just leave you wanting to be a better person for having read it. Find out more about The Knitter, and the poems that inspired it, at www.theknitterbook.com
Download or read book Lafayette in the Somewhat United States written by Sarah Vowell and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Assassination Vacation and Unfamiliar Fishes, a humorous and insightful account of the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette - the one Frenchman we could all agree on - and an insightful portrait of a nation's idealism and its reality.
Download or read book The Blue Line written by Ingrid Betancourt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the extraordinary Colombian French politician and activist Ingrid Betancourt, a stunning debut novel about freedom and fate Set against the backdrop of Argentina’s Dirty War and infused with magical realism, The Blue Line is a breathtaking story of love and betrayal by one of the world’s most renowned writers and activists. Ingrid Betancourt, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Even Silence Has an End, draws on history and personal experience in this deeply felt portrait of a woman coming of age as her country falls deeper and deeper into chaos. Buenos Aires, the 1970s. Julia inherits from her grandmother a gift, precious and burdensome. Sometimes visions appear before her eyes, mysterious and terrible apparitions from the future, seen from the perspective of others. From the age of five, Julia must intervene to prevent horrific events. In fact, as her grandmother tells her, it is her duty to do so—otherwise she will lose her gift. At fifteen, Julia falls in love with Theo, a handsome revolutionary four years her senior. Their lives are turned upside down when Juan Perón, the former president and military dictator, returns to Argentina. Confronted by the realities of military dictatorship, Julia and Theo become Montoneros sympathizers and radical idealists, equally fascinated by Jesus Christ and Che Guevara. Captured by death squadrons, they somehow manage to escape. . . . In this remarkable novel, Betancourt, an activist who spent more than six years held hostage by the FARC in the depths of Colombian jungle, returns to many of the themes of Even Silence Has an End. The Blue Line is a story centered on the consequences of oppression, collective subservience, and individual courage, and, most of all, the notion that belief in the future of humanity is an act of faith most beautiful and deserving.
Download or read book No Touch Monkey written by Ayun Halliday and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ayun Halliday may not make for the most sensible travel companion, but she is certainly one of the most outrageous, with a knack for inserting herself (and her unwitting cohorts) into bizarre situations around the globe. Curator of kitsch and unabashed aficionada of pop culture, Halliday offers bemused, self-deprecating narration of events from guerilla theater in Romania to drug-induced Apocalypse Now reenactments in Vietnam to a perhaps even more surreal collagen-implant demonstration at a Paris fashion show emceed by Lauren Bacall. On layover in Amsterdam, Halliday finds unlikely trouble in the red-light district—eliciting the ire of a tiny, violent madam, and is forced to explain tampons to luggage-searching soldiers in Kashmir: "They're for ladies. Bleeding ladies." A self-admittedly bumbling tourist, Halliday shares—with razor-sharp wit and to hilarious effect—the travel stories most are too self-conscious to tell. This second edition includes an updated foreword.
Download or read book Happy written by Alex Lemon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His freshman year of college, Alex Lemon was supposed to be the star catcher on the Macalester College baseball team. He was the boy getting every girl, the hard-partying kid everyone called Happy. In the spring of 1997, he had his first stroke. For two years Lemon coped with his deteriorating health by sinking deeper into alcohol and drug abuse. His charming and carefree exterior masked his self-destructive and sometimes cruel behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds and a crippling depression. After undergoing brain surgery, he is nursed back to health by his free-spirited artist mother, who once again teaches him to stand on his own. Alive with unexpected humor and sensuality, Happy is a hypnotic self-portrait of a young man confronting the wreckage of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother’s redemptive and healing powers. Alex Lemon’s Technicolor sentences pop and sing as he writes about survival—of the body and of the human spirit.
