Download or read book The Joyce Girls of Brooklyn written by Jim Farrell and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Rebecca, Ruth, Deborah, and me, Rachel: the Joyce girls. No, we are not Jewish, but rather Irish. Our Mom, yes, Sarah—what else?—was the oldest offspring of a stern fundamentalist Presbyterian preacher, our grandfather, Isaiah Cummings.” So opens this wonderful family saga. Narrated by the youngest, Rachel, the writer, this is the story of the four daughters of Irish Catholic Judge Joyce, a very influential man in Brooklyn, set in the middle of the twentieth century. What a problem their father’s Catholicism created in the Cummings household. Rebecca, the corporate attorney, Ruth, the teacher and homemaker, Deborah, the singer, and Rachel, the author. All successful, all beautiful, but all so different. Grow with them, laugh with them, cry with them, love with them as they mature from little girls, to young ladies, to mature women. Experience their joys, their pains, their lives and relationships with all the highs and lows. You will love returning to an idyllic time, a time gone by, but very much alive in our memories.
Download or read book Leaving Brooklyn written by Lynne Sharon Schwartz and published by Hawthorne Books. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An injury at birth left Audrey with a wandering eye. Though flawed, the bad eye functions well enough to permit her an idiosyncratic view of the world, one she welcomes in the stifling postwar Brooklyn of the 1950s. During a journey to Manhattan to see a doctor about her sight, she begins to explore the sexual rites of adulthood. But can her romance last? In this beautifully observed novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz raises themes of innocence and escape while illuminating the rich inner life of a singular girl.
Download or read book My Life as a Rat written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?” --Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one’s family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement. Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life of banishment from a family—banishment from parents, siblings, and the Church—that forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell of family, and to emerge from her long exile as a “rat” into a transformed life.
Download or read book Brooklyn written by Colm Toibin and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Colm Tóibín's internationally bestselling novel is a story of devastating emotional power. At the centre of Colm Tóibín's internationally celebrated novel is Eilis Lacey, one among many of her generation who has come of age in 1950s Ireland but cannot find work at home. When she receives a job offer in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country behind, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, however, the pain of parting and a longing for home are buried beneath the rhythms of her new life—until she begins to realize that she has found a sort of happiness. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, tragic news summons her back to Ireland, where she unexpectedly finds herself facing an impossible decision.
Download or read book Betty Smith Life of the Author of a Tree Grows in Brooklyn written by Valerie Raleigh Yow and published by Independent Author. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" captured the imagination of readers in 1943. In the first published biography of Smith, the real-life stories behind the heroes in her novel are told.
Download or read book The Mermaid of Brooklyn written by Amy Shearn and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Shearn has written a fierce and vivacious book about motherhood, astounding in its honesty, fearless in its humor and exploding with love. THE MERMAID OF BROOKLYN is a joyful and exhilarating read' Maria Semple, author of the New York Times bestselling WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE? Jenny Lipkin, former up-and-coming magazine editor and current stressed-out mother of two, is struggling. With two demanding children, she is adjusting to life as an average mother, drinking coffee in the playground and complaining about breastfeeding, sleepless nights and how to get the buggy on the subway. And then, one summer evening, her husband Harry goes out to buy cigarettes and doesn’t return. Jenny reaches breaking point. She is contemplating ending it all, but when she falls off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River, she finds a surprising ally – and a magical way to rethink her ideas about success, motherhood and relationships. But confronting her inner demons is no easy task . . .
Download or read book The Artificial Silk Girl written by Irmgard Keun and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1931, a young woman writer living in Germany was inspired by Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war. Today, more than seven decades later, the story of this quintessential "material girl" remains as relevant as ever, as an accessible new translation brings this lost classic to light once more. Other Press is pleased to announce the republication of The Artificial Silk Girl, elegantly translated by noted Germanist Kathie von Ankum, and with a new introduction by Harvard professor Maria Tatar.
Download or read book Girl in Landscape written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.
Download or read book Motherless Brooklyn written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A complusively readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most inventive novelist. "A half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette's syndrome.... The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.... Unexpectedly moving." —The Boston Globe Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original, captivating homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.
Download or read book Brooklyn Bridge written by Karen Hesse and published by Feiwel & Friends. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karen Hesse has achieved many honors for her more than twenty books over the course of her award-winning career: the Newbery Medal, the Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award, the MacArthur Fellowship "Genius" Award, and the Christopher Medal. Her novels burn with intensity, and keenly felt, deeply researched, and are memorable for their imagination and intelligence. So it is with great pride and excitement that we present Karen Hesse's first novel in over five years: Brooklyn Bridge. It's the summer of 1903 in Brooklyn and all fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom wants is to experience the thrill, the grandeur, and the electricity of the new amusement park at Coney Island. But that doesn't seem likely. Ever since his parents—Russian immigrants—invented the stuffed Teddy Bear five months ago, Joseph's life has turned upside down. No longer do the Michtom's gather family and friends around the kitchen table to talk. No longer is Joseph at leisure to play stickball with the guys. Now, Joseph works. And complains. And falls in love. And argues with Mama and Papa. And falls out of love. And hopes. Joseph hopes he'll see Coney Island soon. He hopes that everything will turn right-side up again. He hopes his luck hasn't run out—because you never know. Through all the warmth, the sadness, the frustration, and the laughter of one big, colorful family, Newbery Medalist Karen Hesse builds a stunning story of the lucky, the unlucky, and those in between, and reminds us that our lives—all our lives—are fragile, precious, and connected. Brooklyn Bridge is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Download or read book The New Kitten written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From acclaimed author (and cat lover!) Joyce Carol Oates comes a charming, heartwarming picture book. As the only cat in her house, Cherie is accustomed to being showered with treats and affection. So when her family brings home a new kitten named Cleopatra, Cherie resents that she’s no longer the center of attention—and she can’t believe all the trouble that the kitten gets away with! Is one home big enough for two kitties? Beautifully illustrated by Dave Mottram, this picture book will resonate for any reader who has—eventually!—found the joy in sharing the spotlight with a new family addition.
Download or read book Breaking Open the Head written by Daniel Pinchbeck and published by Crown. This book was released on 2003-08-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe. Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival. Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.
Download or read book The Voice Is All written by Joyce Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking portrait of Kerouac as a young artist—from the award-winning author of Minor Characters In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac’s French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider’s vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody. By illuminating Kerouac’s early choice to sacrifice everything to his work, The Voice Is All deals with him on his own terms and puts the tragic contradictions of his nature and his complex relationships into perspective.
Download or read book Born to Ride written by Larissa Theule and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louise Belinda Bellflower lives in Rochester, New York, in 1896. She spends her days playing with her brother, Joe. But Joe gets to ride a bicycle, and Louise Belinda doesn’t. In fact, Joe issues a solemn warning: If girls ride bikes, their faces will get so scrunched up, eyes bulging from the effort of balancing, that they’ll get stuck that way FOREVER! Louise Belinda is appalled by this nonsense, so she strikes out to discover the truth about this so-called “bicycle face.” Set against the backdrop of the women’s suffrage movement, Born to Ride is the story of one girl’s courageous quest to prove that she can do everything the boys can do, while capturing the universal freedom and accomplishment children experience when riding a bike.
Download or read book The Recreation of 864 High School Girls in Brooklyn written by Sarah Rothman and published by . This book was released on 1931 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Friend of My Youth written by Jim Farrell and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2023-06-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Penn Warren in his masterpiece All the King’s Men said you never forget the friend of your youth. No matter how he changes, he is always the same to you. This is a story of two such friends. How their lives go down separate paths, but their friendship remains. Even though they change, they are always the same to each other.
Download or read book Door Wide Open written by Jack Kerouac and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-06-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous, independent-minded twenty-one-year-old; Kerouac was already running on empty at thirty-five. This unique book, containing the many letters the two of them wrote to each other, reveals a surprisingly tender side of Kerouac. It also shares the vivid and unusual perspective of what it meant to be young, Beat, and a woman in the Cold War fifties. Reflecting on those tumultuous years, Johnson seamlessly interweaves letters and commentary, bringing to life her love affair with one of American letters' most fascinating and enigmatic figures.
