Download or read book The Invention of Solitude written by Paul Auster and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.' So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.
Download or read book Knocked Down written by Aileen Weintraub and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids. Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying “I do” she’s pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months. As her husband’s bucolic (and possibly haunted) farmhouse begins to collapse and her marriage starts to do the same, Weintraub finally confronts her grief for her father while fighting for the survival of her unborn baby. In her precarious situation, will she stay or will she once again run away from it all? Knocked Down is an emotionally charged, laugh-out-loud roller-coaster ride of survival and growth. It is a story about marriage, motherhood, and the risks we take.
Download or read book A History of Solitude written by David Vincent and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perceived renunciation of the world, which could lead to psychological disorder and anti-social behaviour. Vincent explores the successive attempts of religious authorities and political institutions to manage solitude, taking readers from the monastery to the prisoner’s cell, and explains how western society’s increasing secularism, urbanization and prosperity led to the development of new solitary pastimes at the same time as it made traditional forms of solitary communion, with God and with a pristine nature, impossible. At the dawn of the digital age, solitude has taken on new meanings, as physical isolation and intense sociability have become possible as never before. With the advent of a so-called loneliness epidemic, a proper historical understanding of the natural human desire to disengage from the world is more important than ever. The first full-length account of its subject, A History of Solitude will appeal to a wide general readership.
Download or read book The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry written by Paul Auster and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1984-01-12 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 20th Century, France was home to many of the world’s greatest poets. This collection highlights some of the very best verse that came out of a country and century defined by war and liberation. Let Paul Auster guide you through some of the best poetry that 20th century France has to offer. “Indispensable . . . a book that everyone interested in modern poetry should have close to hand, a source of renewable delights and discoveries, a book that will long claim our attention . . . To my knowledge, no current anthology is as full and as deftly edited.”—Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review “One of the freshest and most exciting books of poetry to appear in a long while . . . Paul Auster has provided the best possible point of entry into this century's most influential body of poetry.”—Geoffrey O'Brien, The Village Voice
Download or read book Hand to Mouth written by Paul Auster and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of a young man's struggle to stay afloat. By turns poignant and comic, Paul Auster's memoir is essentially an autobiographical essay about money--and what it means not to have it. From one odd job to the next, from one failed scheme to another, Auster investigates his own stubborn compulsion to make art and describes his ingenious, often far-fetched attempts to survive on next to nothing. From the streets of New York City and Paris to the rural roads of upstate New York, the author treats us to a series of remarkable adventures and unforgettable encounters and, in several elaborate appixes, to previously unknown work from these years.
Download or read book The Book of Illusions written by Paul Auster and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man's obsession with a silent-film star sends him on a journey into a shadow world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer's interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929 and has been presumed dead for sixty years. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer's mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico-supposedly written by Hector's wife. "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. This stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. With The Book of Illusions, one of America's most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet.
Download or read book The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book written by Logan Smalley and published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of My Ideal Bookshelf and Bibliophile, The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book is the perfect gift for book lovers everywhere: a quirky and entertaining interactive guide to reading, featuring voicemails, literary Easter eggs, checklists, and more, from the creators of the popular multimedia project. The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book is an interactive illustrated homage to the beautiful ways in which books bring meaning to our lives and how our lives bring meaning to books. Carefully crafted in the style of a retro telephone directory, this guide offers you a variety of unique ways to connect with readers, writers, bookshops, and life-changing stories. In it, you’ll discover... -Heartfelt, anonymous voicemail messages and transcripts from real-life readers sharing unforgettable stories about their most beloved books. You’ll hear how a mother and daughter formed a bond over their love for Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, or how a reader finally felt represented after reading Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, or how two friends performed Mary Oliver’s Thirst to a grove of trees, or how Anne Frank inspired a young writer to continue journaling. -Hidden references inside fictional literary adverts like Ahab’s Whale Tours and Miss Ophelia’s Psychic Readings, and real-life literary landmarks like Maya Angelou City Park and the Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum. -Lists of bookstores across the USA, state by state, plus interviews with the book lovers who run them. -Various invitations to become a part of this book by calling and leaving a bookish voicemail of your own. -And more! Quirky, nostalgic, and full of heart, The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book is a love letter to the stories that change us, connect us, and make us human.
Download or read book A Life in Words written by Paul Auster and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside look into Paul Auster's art and craft, the inspirations and obsessions, mesmerizing and dramatic in turn. A remarkably candid, and often surprisingly dramatic, investigation into one writer's art, craft, and life, A Life in Words is rooted in three years of dialogue between Auster and Professor I. B. Siegumfeldt, starting in 2011, while Siegumfeldt was in the process of launching the Center for Paul Auster Studies at the University of Copenhagen. It includes a number of surprising disclosures, both concerning Auster's work and about the art of writing generally. It is a book that's full of surprises, unscripted yet amounting to a sharply focused portrait of the inner workings of one of America's most productive and successful writers, through all twenty-one of Auster's narrative works and the themes and obsessions that drive them.
Download or read book Design written by Jessica Helfand and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling defense for the importance of design and how it shapes our behavior, our emotions, and our lives Design has always prided itself on being relevant to the world it serves, but interest in design was once limited to a small community of design professionals. Today, books on "design thinking" are best sellers, and computer and Web-based tools have expanded the definition of who practices design. Looking at objects, letterforms, experiences, and even theatrical performances, award-winning author Jessica Helfand asserts that understanding design's purpose is more crucial than ever. Design is meaningful not because it is pretty but because it is an intrinsically humanist discipline, tethered to the very core of why we exist. For example, as designers collaborate with developing nations on everything from more affordable lawn mowers to cleaner drinking water, they must take into consideration the full range of a given community's complex social needs. Advancing a conversation that is unfolding around the globe, Helfand offers an eye-opening look at how designed things make us feel as well as how--and why--they motivate our behavior.
Download or read book Collected Prose written by Paul Auster and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-03 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The celebrated author of "The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions" and "Oracle Night" now offers an essential collection of essays, prefaces, true stories, autobiographical writings, and collaborations with artists.
Download or read book Literary Rooms written by Katharina Christ-Pielensticker and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-26 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four prose texts discussed in Literary Rooms position themselves in a literary tradition which highlights the manifold purposes the private room may serve: it is a mirror of the inhabitant, a context in which to position the self, a place of and motor for identity quests, a rich metaphor, and a second skin around the inhabitant’s physical body. Even in times of increasing globalization and urbanization, the room continues to root the inhabitant; it serves as a retreat from the world and as a place in which to (re)negotiate questions of belonging, gender, class, and ethnicity. At the same time, the room is inevitably porous and constantly oscillates between inclusion and exclusion. The literary texts examined in this book are each highly fragmented and gesture towards a fragmentation of the contemporary world out of which they have grown as well as towards an abundance of fragmented self-images. Linking the approaches of narratology, globalization, and spatial criticism, Literary Rooms argues that in order to account for the spatial properties of the room, discourses developed during the spatial turn need to be extended and reevaluated.
Download or read book Too Loud a Solitude written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by HMH. This book was released on 1992-04-27 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this “irresistibly eccentric romp,” the author Milan Kundera has called “our very best writer today” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word (The New York Times Book Review).
Download or read book Invisible written by Paul Auster and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally bestselling author of The New York Trilogy and 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster "One of America's greatest novelists" dazzlingly reinvents the coming-of-age story with Invisible. Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster's fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girlfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers."
Download or read book Timbuktu written by Paul Auster and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Mr. Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster's remarkable new novel, Timbuktu. Mr. Bones is the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, the brilliant, troubled, and altogether original poet-saint from Brooklyn. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza before them, they sally forth on a last great adventure, heading for Baltimore, Maryland in search of Willy's high school teacher, Bea Swanson. Years have passed since Willy last saw his beloved mentor, who knew him in his previous incarnation as William Gurevitch, the son of Polish war refugees. But is Mrs. Swanson still alive? And if she isn't, what will prevent Willy from vanishing into that other world known as Timbuktu? Mr. Bones is our witness. Although he walks on four legs and cannot speak, he can think, and out of his thoughts Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in recent American fiction. By turns comic, poignant, and tragic, Timbuktu is above all a love story. Written with a scintillating verbal energy, it takes us into the heart of a singularly pure and passionate character, an unforgettable dog who has much to teach us about our own humanity.
Download or read book Moon Palace written by Paul Auster and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened when I got there.'So begins the mesmerising narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the 1960s, a quester by nature. Moon Palace is his story - a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West. Filled with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies and marvellous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the reader effortlessly along with Marco's search - for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his origins and his fate. 'Clever: very. Surprising: always - Auster is a master.' The Times
Download or read book Bell written by Robert V. Bruce and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reprint of the 1973 biography of the American inventor. Divided into pre-telephone, telephone, and post-telephone sections, also covers his work with the Smithsonian, the deaf, the National Geographic Society, and Science magazine. Paper edition ($12.95) not seen. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Beyond the Red Notebook written by Dennis Barone and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novels of Paul Auster—finely wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences, and mysteries—have captured the imagination of readers and the admiration of many critics of contemporary literature. In Beyond the Red Notebook, the first book devoted to the works of Auster, Dennis Barone has assembled an international group of scholars who present twelve essays that provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's writings. The authors explore connections between Auster's poetry and fiction, the philosophical underpinnings of his writing, its relation to detective fiction, and its unique embodiment of the postmodern sublime. Their essays provide the fullest analysis available of Auster's themes of solitude, chance, and paternity found in works such as The Invention of Solitude, City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan. This volume includes contributions from Pascal Bruckner, Marc Chenetier, Norman Finkelstein, Derek Rubin, Madeleine Sorapure, Stephen Bernstein, Tim Woods, Steven Weisenburger, Arthur Saltzman, Eric Wirth, and Motoyuki Shibata. The extensive bibliography, prepared by William Drenttel, will greatly benefit both scholars and general readers.
