Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York written by Cyrus R. K. Patell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, to its unique appeal to artists and writers in the twentieth, New York has given its writers a unique perspective on American culture. This Companion explores the range of writing and performance in the city, celebrating Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Eugene O'Neill, and Allen Ginsberg among a host of authors who have contributed to the city's rich literary and cultural history. Illustrated and featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is the ideal guide for students of American literature as well as for all who love New York and its writers.

Download or read book The New York Public Library Literature Companion written by Staff of The New York Public Library and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-11-06 with total page 2188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pick up The New York Public Library Literature Companion to check the dates of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or to find out how James Joyce's Ulysses changed U.S. obscenity laws, and you may find yourself hours later absorbed in the imaginary worlds of Camelot and The Matrix or sidetracked by the fascinating history of The New Yorker. Designed to satisfy the curious browser as well as the serious researcher, this exciting new resource offers the most up-to-date information on literature available in English from around the world, from the invention of writing to the age of the computer. Interwoven throughout the more than 2,500 succinct and insightful entries on Creators, Works of Literature, and Literary Facts and Resources are the fascinating facts and quirky biographical details that make literature come alive. Readers will discover, for instance, that Walt Whitman was fired from his government job after his personal copy of Leaves of Grass was discovered in his desk by the Secretary of the Interior, who was scandalized by it; that James Baldwin remembered listening to blues singer Bessie Smith ("playing her till I fell asleep") when he was writing his first book; and that a publisher turned down the serialization rights to Gone with the Wind, saying, "Who needs the Civil War now -- who cares?" Looking for information about book burning or how many Nobel laureates have come from Japan? You'll find it here. Trying to remember the name of that movie based on a favorite book? Read the "Variations" section -- you'll be amazed at the pervasive presence of great literature in today's entertainment. From Aristophanes to Allende, from Bergson to Bloom, the biographical entries will inform readers about the men and women who have shaped -- and are shaping -- the literary world. Look into "Works of Literature" to discover the significance of Beowulf, The Fountainhead, Doctor Zhivago, and nearly 1,000 other titles. Check the "Dictionary of Literature" to find out what the critics and theorists are talking about. And if you wish to delve even deeper, "Websites for Literature" and "Literary Factbooks and Handbooks" are just two of the bibliographies that will point readers in the right direction. Unique in scope and design and easy to use, The New York Public Library Literature Companion will be at home on every reader's shelf. Whether you are immersed in Stephen King or King Lear, this book has the insights, facts, and fascinating stories that will enrich your reading forever. With four major research centers and 85 branch libraries, The New York Public Library is internationally recognized as one of the greatest institutions of its kind. Founded in 1895, the library now holds more than 50 million items, including several world-renowned collections of literary manuscripts and rare books. Among the books published from the library in recent years are The New York Public Library Desk Reference (1998); The Hand of the Poet (1997); Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss (1999); A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (1998); and Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (2000).

Download or read book Children s Literature and New York City written by Padraic Whyte and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the significance of New York City in children’s literature, stressing literary, political, and societal influences on writing for young people from the twentieth century to the present day. Contextualized in light of contemporary critical and cultural theory, the chapters examine the varying ways in which children’s literature has engaged with New York City as a city space, both in terms of (urban) realism and as an ‘idea’, such as the fantasy of the city as a place of opportunity, or other associations. The collection visits not only dominant themes, motifs, and tropes, but also the different narrative methods employed to tell readers about the history, function, physical structure, and conceptualization of New York City, acknowledging the shared or symbiotic relationship between literature and the city: just as literature can give imaginative ‘reality’ to the city, the city has the potential to shape the literary text. This book critically engages with most of the major forms and genres for children/young adults that dialogue with New York City, and considers such authors as Margaret Wise Brown, Felice Holman, E. L. Konigsburg, Maurice Sendak, J. D. Salinger, John Donovan, Shaun Tan, Elizabeth Enright, and Patti Smith.

Download or read book New York Stories written by Bob Blaisdell and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compilation of classic short fiction presents stories inspired by life in the great metropolis. Contributors include O. Henry, Melville, Cather, Wharton, Wodehouse, Langston Hughes, Junot Díaz, and others.

Download or read book New York Nocturne written by William Sharpe and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As early as the 1850s, gaslight tempted New Yorkers out into a burgeoning nightlife filled with shopping, dining, and dancing. Electricity later turned the city at night into an even more stunning spectacle of brilliantly lit streets and glittering skyscrapers. The advent of artificial lighting revolutionized the urban night, creating not only new forms of life and leisure, but also new ways of perceiving the nocturnal experience. New York Nocturne is the first book to examine how the art of the gaslit and electrified city evolved, and how representations of nighttime New York expanded the boundaries of modern painting, literature, and photography. Exploring the myriad images of Manhattan after dark, New York Nocturne shows how writers and artists took on the city's nocturnal blaze and transformed the scintillating landscape into an icon of modernity. The book traces key metaphors of the nighttime city: a seductive Babylon in the mid-1850s, a misty fairyland colonized by an empire of light in the early twentieth century, and a skyscraper-studded land of desire that became a stage for the voyeurism and violence of the 1940s and 1950s. The epilogue suggests how these themes have continued to shape our vision of nighttime New York ever since. Abundantly illustrated, New York Nocturne includes original readings of works by Whitman, Poe, Whistler, Riis, Stieglitz, Abbott, O'Keeffe, Stella, Hopper, Weegee, Ellison, Jacquette, and many others. Collectively, they tell a fascinating story about the relationship between night, art, and modern urban life.

Download or read book Though I Get Home written by YZ Chin and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A welcome read in American contemporary literature. Though I Get Home is an intimate and complex look into Malaysian culture and politics, and a reminder of the importance of art in the struggle for social justice.” —Ana Castillo, author of So Far from God and prize judge In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: A grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains; a consort finds herself a new assignment; a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a small-town girl—and frustrated writer—transformed into a prisoner of conscience in Malaysia’s most notorious detention camp. Winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, YZ Chin’s debut reexamines the relationship between the global and the intimate. Against a backdrop of globalization, individuals buck at what seems inevitable—seeking to stake out space for the inner motivations that shift, but still persist, in the face of changing and challenging circumstances. YZ Chin was born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia. She now lives in New York, working as a software engineer by day and a writer by night.

Download or read book By the Book written by Pamela Paul and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 643 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixty-five of the world's leading writers open up about the books and authors that have meant the most to them Every Sunday, readers of The New York Times Book Review turn with anticipation to see which novelist, historian, short story writer, or artist will be the subject of the popular By the Book feature. These wide-ranging interviews are conducted by Pamela Paul, the editor of the Book Review, and here she brings together sixty-five of the most intriguing and fascinating exchanges, featuring personalities as varied as David Sedaris, Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Lamott, and James Patterson. The questions and answers admit us into the private worlds of these authors, as they reflect on their work habits, reading preferences, inspirations, pet peeves, and recommendations. By the Book contains the full uncut interviews, offering a range of experiences and observations that deepens readers' understanding of the literary sensibility and the writing process. It also features dozens of sidebars that reveal the commonalities and conflicts among the participants, underscoring those influences that are truly universal and those that remain matters of individual taste. For the devoted reader, By the Book is a way to invite sixty-five of the most interesting guests into your world. It's a book party not to be missed.

Download or read book Rescuing Socrates written by Roosevelt Montas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.

Download or read book Books of the Century written by Charles McGrath and published by Three Rivers Press (CA). This book was released on 2000 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasure-house of literary entertainment, featuring a century's worth of the best reviews, essays, and interviews ever published in "The New York Times Book Review. With more than 250 selections, Books of the Century -- now updated for this paperback edition -- sheds light on some of our greatest writers and how their books were received when first reviewed in "The New York Times Book Review, America's most widely read journal of the literary arts. Arranged chronologically, here are reviews of Franz Kafka's "The Trial, Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl, E. M. Forster's "A Passage to India, and Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls. Also selected from the Book Review's pages are letters to the editor from Jack London and Joseph Conrad, interviews with Emile Zola and Vladimir Nabokov, essays by Saul Bellow and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the "Oops!" feature, which humbly presents reviews of classics such as Catch-22 and The Catcher in the Rye that the Book Review initially panned. A time line runs throughout, highlighting the century's literary landmarks. Bringing together classic reviews and writings, "The New York Times Book Review has created a resource to be read and cherished for years to come.

Download or read book Seduction and Betrayal written by Elizabeth Hardwick and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid and provocative literary criticism of famous women writers from Virginia Woolf to Zelda Fitzgerald by a “gifted miniaturist biographer” (Joyce Carol Oates) The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America’s most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits—of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle—as well as a provocative reading of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer’s reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

Download or read book Project for a Revolution in New York written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and alcohol, Project for a Revolution in New York is a Sadean reverie that bears an alarming resemblance to the New York, and the United States, that have actually come into being.

Download or read book The New York Times Book Review written by The New York Times and published by Clarkson Potter. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “delightful” (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years. Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered the classics that have enriched their lives. Now the editors have curated the Book Review’s dynamic 125-year history, which is essentially the story of modern American letters. Brimming with remarkable reportage and photography, this beautiful book collects interesting reviews, never-before-heard anecdotes about famous writers, and spicy letter exchanges. Here are the first takes on novels we now consider masterpieces, including a long-forgotten pan of Anne of Green Gables and a rave of Mrs. Dalloway, along with reviews and essays by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, and more. With scores of stunning vintage photographs, many of them sourced from the Times’s own archive, readers will discover how literary tastes have shifted through the years—and how the Book Review’s coverage has shaped so much of what we read today.

Download or read book The Strudlhof Steps written by Heimito von Doderer and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English translation of an essential Austrian novel about life in early-twentieth-century Vienna, as seen through a wide and varied cast of characters. The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the early twentieth century, a vast novel crowded with characters ranging from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat to an innocent ingenue to “respectable” shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is Vienna, which Heimito von Doderer renders as distinctly as James Joyce does Dublin or Alfred Döblin does Berlin. Interweaving two time periods, 1908 to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, the novel takes the monumental eponymous outdoor double staircase as a governing metaphor for its characters’ intersecting and diverging fates. The Strudlhof Steps is an experimental tour de force with the suspense and surprise of a soap opera. Here Doderer illuminates the darkness of passing years with the dazzling extravagance that is uniquely his.

Download or read book The Liberal Imagination written by Lionel Trilling and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

Download or read book Written on Water written by Eileen Chang and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now back in print, these witty, insightful ssays on fashion, cinema, wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature. Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor, conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday life. In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, and fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.

Download or read book The Negro Motorist Green Book written by Victor H. Green and published by Colchis Books. This book was released on with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

Download or read book Winter Recipes from the Collective written by Louise Glück and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A haunting book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes Louise Glück’s thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister’s death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts. “Some of you will know what I mean,” the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, “all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last.” This magnificent book couldn’t have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life.