Download or read book Collected Novels and Plays of James Merrill written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-03-09 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the widely celebrated Collected Poems, this second volume in the series of James Merrill’s works brings us Merrill as novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form. Merrill’s first novel, The Seraglio, is a daring roman à clef derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles Merrill, one of America’s most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find The (Diblos) Notebook, an experimental novel in which a young American’s adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. Merrill’s plays, including the one-act comedy of manners The Bait and the Chekhovian The Immortal Husband—a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth—are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is Merrill’s short play The Birthday, a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic, The Changing Light at Sandover.
Download or read book A Whole World written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The selected correspondence of the brilliant poet, one of the twentieth century's last great letter writers. "I don't keep a journal, not after the first week," James Merrill asserted in a letter while on a trip around the world. "Letters have got to bear all the burden." A vivacious correspondent, whether abroad, where avid curiosity and fond memory frequently took him, or at home, he wrote eagerly and often, to family and lifelong friends, American and Greek lovers, confidants in literature and art about everything that mattered—aesthetics, opera and painting, housekeeping and cooking, the comedy of social life, the mysteries of the Ouija board and the spirit world, and psychological and moral dilemmas—in funny, dashing, unrevised missives, composed to entertain himself as well as his recipients. On a personal nemesis: "the ambivalence I live with. It worries me less and less. It becomes the very stuff of my art"; on a lunch for Wallace Stevens given by Blanche Knopf: "It had been decided by one and all that nothing but small talk would be allowed"; on romance in his late fifties: "I must stop acting like an orphan gobbling cookies in fear of the plate's being taken away"; on great books: "they burn us like radium, with their decisiveness, their terrible understanding of what happens." Merrill's daily chronicle of love and loss is unfettered, self-critical, full of good gossip, and attuned to the wicked irony, the poignant detail—a natural extension of the great poet's voice.
Download or read book Collected Poems written by James Merrill and published by Knopf Publishing Group. This book was released on 2001 with total page 918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential addition to every shelf of 20-century poetry.
Download or read book The Book of Ephraim written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in a stand-alone edition, the acclaimed poet's classic poem about his communication with Ephraim, a guiding spirit in the Other World, is here introduced and annotated by poet and Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser. "The Book of Ephraim," which first appeared as the final poem in James Merrill's Pulitzer-winning volume Divine Comedies (1976), tells the story of how he and his partner David Jackson (JM and DJ as they came to be known) embarked on their experiments with the Ouija board and how they conversed after a fashion with great writers and thinkers of the past, especially in regard to the state of the increasingly imperiled planet Earth. One of the most ambitious long poems in in English in the twentieth century, originally conceived as complete in itself, it was to become the first part of Merrill's epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), the multiple prize-winning volume still in print. Merrill's "supreme tribute to the web of the world and the convergence of means and meanings everywhere within it" is introduced and annotated by one of his literary executors, Stephen Yenser, in a volume that will gratify veteran readers and entice new ones.
Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by Scribner. This book was released on 1982 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystical poems explore the author's experiences communicating with a spirit named Ephraim through an Ouija board
Download or read book James Merrill written by Langdon Hammer and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2015 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--
Download or read book Familiar Spirits written by Alison Lurie and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-02-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alison Lurie, one of America's greatest novelists, has written a loving memoir of world-famous poet James Merrill and his longtime partner David Jackson. Drawing on her forty-year friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie reveals the couple's deep involvement with ghosts, gods, and spirits, with whom they communicated through a Ouija board. Among the results of their intense twenty-year preoccupation with the occult is the brilliant book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover", which Merrill called his "chronicles of love and loss." Recalling Merrill and Jackson's life together in New York, Athens, and Key West, Familiar Spirits is a poignant memoir infused with great affection and generous amounts of Lurie's signature wit.
Download or read book Collected Novels and Plays written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2002 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the widely celebrated "Collected Poems," this second volume in the series of James Merrill's works brings us Merrill as novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form. Merrill's first novel, "The Seraglio," is a daring "roman a clef" derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles Merrill, one of America's most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find "The (Diblos) Notebook," an experimental novel in which a young American's adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. Merrill's plays, including the one-act comedy of manners "The Bait" and the Chekhovian" The Immortal Husband"--a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth--are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is Merrill's short play "The Birthday," a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic," The Changing Light atSandover."
Download or read book The Furies written by Janet Hobhouse and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SELECTION OF THE LOST BOOKS CLUB An exhilarating, fiercely honest, ultimately devastating book, The Furies confronts the claims of family and the lure of desire, the difficulties of independence, and the approach of death. Janet Hobhouse's final testament is beautifully written, deeply felt, and above all utterly alive.
Download or read book The Inner Room written by James Merrill and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ernestine Catastrophe Queen written by Merrill Wyatt and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this tantalizing mystery that's "filled with laugh out loud moments" and "reads like a middle-grade version of the movie Clue", Ernestine is the smart, spunky, and fearless Nancy Drew for today's young readers! We all know and love Ramona, Matilda, and Harriet the Spy. Now meet Ernestine. When a series of suspicious accidents befalls the wealthy residents of the retired artists' home where she works, Ernestine is determined to piece together clues to find the real culprit. She suspects it might be a zombie, but maybe greedy relatives can be just as scary! Catastrophe has never been so much fun!
Download or read book The Pushcart War written by Jean Merrill and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best book about politics ever written for children." —The Washington Post 50th Anniversary Edition, now in paperback DO YOU KNOW THE HISTORY OF THE PUSHCART WAR? THE REAL HISTORY? It’s a story of how regular people banded together and, armed with little more than their brains and good aim, defeated a mighty foe. Not long ago the streets of New York City were smelly, smoggy, sooty, and loud. There were so many trucks making deliveries that it might take an hour for a car to travel a few blocks. People blamed the truck owners and the truck owners blamed the little wooden pushcarts that traveled the city selling everything from flowers to hot dogs. Behind closed doors the truck owners declared war on the pushcart peddlers. Carts were smashed from Chinatown to Chelsea. The peddlers didn’t have money or the mayor on their side, but that didn’t stop them from fighting back. They used pea shooters to blow tacks into the tires of trucks, they outwitted the police, and they marched right up to the grilles of those giant trucks and dared them to drive down their streets. Today, thanks to the ingenuity of the pushcart peddlers, the streets belong to the people—and to the pushcarts. The Pushcart War was first published more than fifty years ago. It has inspired generations of children and been adapted for television, radio, and the stage around the world. It was included on School Library Journal’s list of One Hundred Books That Shaped the Twentieth Century, and its assertion that a committed group of men and women can prevail against a powerful force is as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was in 1964.
Download or read book A Scattering of Salts written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 1995 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of poetry in which the author transforms autobiographical insights and experiences into profound meditations on life and the world around him.
Download or read book Mute Objects of Expression written by Francis Ponge and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2008-06-02 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francis Ponge boldly proclaims his poetic goal in Mute Objects of Expression: "To accept the challenge that objects offer to language." These objects—less chosen than received spontaneously—are perceived with inimitable Pongean humor and rendered into glimmering still lifes. He gives voice to the often unnoticed aspects of natural objects and beings. Shunning familiar poetic modes, Ponge forges new visions, images drawn from nature, from mythology and the classics. In this volume, springing from the Loire countryside in the early 1940s, Ponge’s "prôems" recall the violent perfume of the mimosa, the cries of carnations, and the flirtations of wasps. From a small note- book, his sole supply of paper withinthe wartime deprivations, he composes repeated drafts of an innovative form combining poetry with analysis and impish play. Despite the demoralizing clouds of Occupation, Ponge wrests a soaring paean to his beloved sliver of Provence.
Download or read book Song of the Closing Doors written by Patrick Phillips and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York City subway encounters to memories of pickup basketball games on Fourth Street, a love letter to the past, and to all the relationships and memories our homeplaces hold, from the National Book Award finalist. “I will consider a slice of pizza," opens Phillips's poem "Jubilate Civitas." "For rare among pleasures in Gotham, it is both / exquisite and blessedly cheap." Thus, as throughout this collection, he celebrates a simple pleasure that "in a time of deceit . . . is honest and upright, steadfast and good"; even the busted buttons we press when waiting to cross the street make for elegy in a collection that brings us this poet at his burnished best. Phillips finds his love of a complex, vibrant city extends to his dearest people—he writes for his friend Paul, dying of cancer; for his wife’s stormy eyes when they fight; for the baby boy he once woke at night to feed and change. All these and more pass through Phillips's elegant yet colloquial lines, in a book that shines with love and honesty on every page. As he writes, "If you're reading this / we were once friends."
Download or read book Collected Novels and Plays of James Merrill written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2005-10-18 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the widely celebrated Collected Poems, this second volume in the series of James Merrill’s works brings us Merrill as novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form. Merrill’s first novel, The Seraglio, is a daring roman à clef derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles Merrill, one of America’s most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find The (Diblos) Notebook, an experimental novel in which a young American’s adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. Merrill’s plays, including the one-act comedy of manners The Bait and the Chekhovian The Immortal Husband—a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth—are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is Merrill’s short play The Birthday, a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic, The Changing Light at Sandover.
Download or read book Christian Reading Companion for 50 Classics written by James P. Stobaugh and published by New Leaf Publishing Group. This book was released on 2013-01-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading and understanding the classics is important for college preparation, as well as for personal enjoyment. With the Christian Reading Companion for 50 Classics you can gain a deeper understanding of them from a Christian perspective. Selections include books and plays for both middle school and high school levels.
