Download or read book Lyrics Prose written by Ric Ocasek and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging from the New Wave music scene of the late ‘70s, The Cars catapulted to success with the very first single—“Just What I Needed”—off of their debut album. Led by Ric Ocasek, the lead vocalist (along with Benjamin Orr), rhythm guitarist, and songwriter, The Cars became one of the most successful bands of the ‘80s—and their songs are just as beloved by fans today. Ocasek himself has had an illustrious career beyond The Cars, from writing and performing solo work, publishing poetry in Granta and elsewhere, and producing albums by musical artists like Weezer, Hole, Guided By Voices, and Jonathan Richman. In Lyrics & Prose, Ocasek collects his lyrics together for the first time—and included throughout are Ocasek’s early handwritten notes and set lists, doodles and all. His work spans from The Cars’ self titled debut album in 1978 to Move Like This, released in 2011, as well as Ocasek’s six solo albums. This is not merely a songbook for fans of The Cars, however: Ocasek is a versatile and affecting poet as well as songwriter, and his original verses—interspersed with album artwork and more than twenty-five beautiful black and white photographs—round out this beguiling book.

Download or read book Mr West written by Sarah Blake and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-09 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

Download or read book Sorry I Was Gone written by Martha Grover and published by . This book was released on 2021-11 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sorry I Was Gone by Martha Grover is an illustrated lyric memoir that maps the narratives and myths of womanhood, chronic illness, and reality-TV depictions of The American Dream. Through short, incisive pieces, Grover hangs diet culture, classism, and ableism out to dry. Original illustrations visually traverse the lyric, the myth, the joke, the medical pro/con list, and the survival kit with Grover's signature folk flare. Sorry I Was Gone exposes to absurdity the arbitrary metrics by which we judge our lives. Revealing the cracks and failures of systems created by humans, Sorry I Was Gone also grounds us all in our humanity.

Download or read book We Are Bridges written by Cassandra Lane and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this evocative memoir, Cassandra Lane deftly uses the act of imagination to reclaim her ancestors’ story as a backdrop for telling her own. The tradition of Black women’s storytelling leaps forward within these pages—into fresh, daring, and excitingly new territory." —Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According to Fannie Davis When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town. We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family—and considers how to take back one’s American story.

Download or read book All the Lives We Ever Lived written by Katharine Smyth and published by Crown. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most. “Transcendent.”—The Washington Post • “You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”—The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TOWN & COUNTRY Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death—a calamity that claimed her favorite person—she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Smyth’s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf’s Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel—and crafts an elegant reminder of literature’s ability to clarify and console. Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author. Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived “This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer. . . . Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive.”—The New Yorker “Like H Is for Hawk, Smyth’s book is a memoir that’s not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her father’s vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer. . . . An experiment in twenty-first century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.”—Vogue “Deeply moving – part memoir, part literary criticism, part outpouring of longing and grief… This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art.”—The Times Literary Supplement “Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story... gently entwining observations from Woolf's classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her love for her father, his profound alcoholism and the unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life.”—Time

Download or read book Citizen written by Claudia Rankine and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . . A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Download or read book The Boys of My Youth written by Jo Ann Beard and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2009-11-11 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation. Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men who replace them -- are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death. The Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an immensely gifted and influential writer and its essays remain surprising, original, and affecting today. "A luminous, funny, heartbreaking book of essays about life and its defining moments." --Harper's Bazaar

Download or read book The Lyrics 1956 to the Present written by Paul McCartney and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A Washington Post Notable Book Excerpted in The New Yorker A work of unparalleled candor and splendorous beauty, The Lyrics celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of Paul McCartney through his most meaningful songs. Finally in paperback and featuring seven new song commentaries, the #1 New York Times bestseller celebrates the creative life and unparalleled musical genius of Paul McCartney. Spanning sixty-four years—from his early days in Liverpool, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo career—Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics revolutionized the way artists write about music. An unprecedented “triumph” (Times UK), this handsomely designed volume pairs the definitive texts of over 160 songs with first-person commentaries on McCartney’s life, revealing the diverse circumstances in which songs were written; how they ultimately came to be; and the remarkable, yet often delightfully ordinary, people and places that inspired them. The Lyrics also includes: · A personal foreword by McCartney · An unprecedented range of songs, from beloved standards like “Band on the Run” to new additions “Day Tripper” and “Magical Mystery Tour” · Over 160 images from McCartney’s own archives Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, The Lyrics is the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

Download or read book No Walls and the Recurring Dream written by Ani DiFranco and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A memoir as fierce, freewheeling, and passionate as her music." --O, the Oprah magazine A memoir by the celebrated singer-songwriter and social activist Ani DiFranco In her new memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, Ani DiFranco recounts her early life from a place of hard-won wisdom, combining personal expression, the power of music, feminism, political activism, storytelling, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and much more into an inspiring whole. In these frank, honest, passionate, and often funny pages is the tale of one woman's eventful and radical journey to the age of thirty. Ani's coming of age story is defined by her ethos of fierce independence--from being an emancipated minor sleeping in a Buffalo bus station, to unwaveringly building a career through appearances at small clubs and festivals, to releasing her first album at the age of 18, to consciously rejecting the mainstream recording industry and creating her own label, Righteous Babe Records. In these pages, as in life, she never hesitates to question established rules and expectations, maintaining a level of artistic integrity that has inspired and challenged more than a few. Ani continues to be a major touring and recording artist as well as a celebrated activist and feminist, standing as living proof that you can overcome all personal and societal obstacles to be who you are and to follow your dreams.

Download or read book A Cup of Water Under My Bed written by Daisy Hernández and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The PEN Literary Award–winning author “writes with honesty, intelligence, tenderness, and love” about her Colombian-Cuban heritage and queer identity in this poignant coming-of-age memoir (Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street). In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be “una india” instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy’s father is not godless. He’s simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa. These lessons—rooted in women’s experiences of migration, colonization, y cariño—define in evocative detail what it means to grow up female in an immigrant home. In one story, Daisy sets out to defy the dictates of race and class that preoccupy her mother and tías, but dating women and transmen, and coming to identify as bisexual, leads her to unexpected questions. In another piece, NAFTA shuts local factories in her hometown on the outskirts of New York City, and she begins translating unemployment forms for her parents, moving between English and Spanish, as well as private and collective fears. In prose that is both memoir and commentary, Daisy reflects on reporting for the New York Times as the paper is rocked by the biggest plagiarism scandal in its history and plunged into debates about the role of race in the newsroom. A heartfelt exploration of family, identity, and language, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter’s story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.

Download or read book Descanso for My Father written by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When his father died, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher wasn’t quite two. His mother packed up his father’s belongings, put the boxes in a hall closet, and closed the door. The “man in a box” remained a mystery, hardly mentioned, and making only rare appearances in stories when Fletcher or his siblings inquired. Meanwhile, his young Hispanic mother transformed herself into an artist, scouting the back roads and secondhand shops of New Mexico for relics and unlikely treasures to add to her “little shrines,” or descansos. “Look closely,” she’d say to her son. “Everything tells a story.” This book is Fletcher’s literary descanso, a piecing together—from moments and objects and words—of a father’s life, of the life lived without that father, and of his own mixed-race identity. Fletcher’s reflections unfold like a collage, offering a rich array of images and stories of life with his single mother, organizing weekend family car trips to explore graveyards and adobe ruins; of growing up on the fault lines of class and culture; of being a father who never had one of his own to learn from. From incidents and observations, Fletcher assembles a beautifully crafted portrait of his family’s unspoken affliction with loss over the decades, a portrait that finally evokes the father at its heart.

Download or read book Because A Lyric Memoir written by Joshua Mensch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A small but monumental classic.… Because is a triumph.” —Rumpus A “disturbing, memorably and superbly handled book-length narrative poem” (Stephanie Burt), Because offers a compassionate and wrenching account of the author’s experience of childhood sexual abuse. It tells the story of Don, the charming, enigmatic director of a youth wilderness camp who befriends, and preys on, the young boys in his care. Unfolding through a series of jewel-like scenes, Because renders the shifting landscapes of childhood memory with a swift and convincing music, building a tale that is powerful, complex, and heartbreaking.

Download or read book Bluets written by Maggie Nelson and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Download or read book Dolly Parton Songteller written by Dolly Parton and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics is a landmark celebration of the remarkable life and career of a country music and pop culture legend. As told by Dolly Parton in her own inimitable words, explore the songs that have defined her journey. Illustrated throughout with previously unpublished images from Dolly Parton's personal and business archives. Mining over 60 years of songwriting, Dolly Parton highlights 175 of her songs and brings readers behind the lyrics. • Packed with never-before-seen photographs and classic memorabilia • Explores personal stories, candid insights, and myriad memories behind the songs Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics reveals the stories and memories that have made Dolly a beloved icon across generations, genders, and social and international boundaries. Containing rare photos and memorabilia from Parton's archives, this book is a show-stopping must-have for every Dolly Parton fan. • Learn the history behind classic Parton songs like "Jolene," "9 to 5," "I Will Always Love You," and more. • The perfect gift for Dolly Parton fans (everyone loves Dolly!) as well as lovers of music history and country Add it to the shelf with books like Coat of Many Colors by Dolly Parton, The Beatles Anthology by The Beatles, and Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen.

Download or read book Where the Past Begins written by Amy Tan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author Amy Tan, a memoir about finding meaning in life through acts of creativity and imagination. As seen on PBS American Masters "Unintended Memoir." In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan reveals the ways that our memories and personal experiences can inform our creative work. Drawing on her vivid impressions of her upbringing, Tan investigates the truths and inspirations behind her writing while illuminating how we all explore, confront, and process complex memories, especially half-forgotten ones from childhood. With candor, empathy, and humor, Tan sheds light on her own writing process, sharing her hard-won insights on the nature of creativity and inspiration while exploring the universal urge to examine truth through the workings of imagination—and what that imaginative world tells us about our own lives. Where the Past Begins is both a unique look into the mind of an extraordinary storyteller and an indispensable guide for writers, artists, and other creative thinkers.

Download or read book Mosaic written by Amy Grant and published by WaterBrook. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's most popular music artists bares her heart and soul in her first autobiographical work. With honesty and depth, Grant offers poignant and often startling insights on motherhood, marriage, forgiveness, and faith--revealing a life blessed with jagged edges as well as vivid colors.

Download or read book Recovering Spirituality written by Ingrid Clayton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guides those in recovery in developing the awareness and skills to deal with life's issues by practicing authentic spirituality and emotional sobriety. Spirituality is a critical aspect of the Twelve Steps and other recovery programs. Yet, for those of us disposed to addiction, it can be easy to get so caught up in the idea of our Higher Power and the abundant joys of a spiritual life that we experience "spiritual bypass"--the use of spirituality to avoid dealing with ourselves, our emotions, and our unfinished business.In Recovering Spirituality, researcher and clinical psychologist Ingrid Mathieu uses personal stories and practical advice to teach us how to grow up emotionally and take responsibility for ourselves. Without turning away from the true benefits of an active spiritual program, she shows us how to work through life's challenges and periods of pain while evolving and maintaining an authentic relationship with our Higher Power.