Download or read book Yossarian Slept Here written by Erica Heller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THROUGHOUT ERICA HELLER’S LIFE, when people learned that Joseph Heller was her father, they often remarked, “How terrific!” But was there a catch? Like his most famous work, her father was a study in contradictions: eccentric, brilliant, and voracious, but also mercurial, competitive, and stubborn, with a love of mischief that sometimes cut too close to the bone. Being raised by such a larger than- life personality could be claustrophobic, even at the sprawling Upper West Side apartments of the Apthorp, which the Hellers called home—in one way or another—for forty-five years. Yossarian Slept Here is Erica Heller’s wickedly funny but also poignant and incisive memoir about growing up in a family—her iconic father; her wry, beautiful mother, Shirley; her younger brother, Ted; her relentlessly inventive grandmother Dottie—that could be by turns caring, infuriating, and exasperating, though anything but dull. From the forbidden pleasures of ordering shrimp cocktail when it was beyond the family’s budget to spending a summer, as her father’s fame grew, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Erica details the Hellers’ charmed—and charmingly turbulent— trajectory. She offers a rare glimpse of meetings with the Gourmet Club, where her father would dine weekly with Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, and Mario Puzo, among others (and from which all wives and children were strictly verboten). She introduces us to many extraordinary residents of the Apthorp, some famous—George Balanchine, Sidney Poitier, and Lena Horne, to name a few—and some not famous, but all quite memorable. Yet she also manages to limn the complex bonds of loyalty and guilt, hurt and healing, that define every family. Erica was among those present at her father’s bedside as he struggled to recover from Guillain-Barré syndrome and then cared for her mother when Shirley was diagnosed with terminal cancer after the thirty-eight-year marriage and intensely passionate partnership with Joe had ended. Witty and perceptive, and displaying the descriptive gifts of a born storyteller, this authentic and colorful portrait of life in the Heller household unfolds alongside the saga of the family’s moves into four distinctive apartments within the Apthorp, each representing a different phase of their lives together—and apart. It is a story about achieving a dream; about fame and its aftermath; about lasting love, squandered opportunities, and how to have the best meal in Chinatown.
Download or read book Just One Catch written by Tracy Daugherty and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling writer Tracy Daugherty illuminates his most vital subject yet in this first biography of the Catch-22 author Joseph Heller Joseph Heller was a Coney Island kid, the son of Russian immigrants, who went on to great fame and fortune. His most memorable novel took its inspiration from a mission he flew over France in WWII (his plane was filled with so much shrapnel it was a wonder it stayed in the air). Heller wrote seven novels, all of which remain in print. Something Happened and Good as Gold, to name two, are still considered the epitome of satire. His life was filled with women and romantic indiscretions, but he was perhaps more famous for his friendships—he counted Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Carl Reiner, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, and many others among his confidantes. In 1981 Heller was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a debilitating syndrome that could have cost him his life. Miraculously, he recovered. When he passed away in 1999 from natural causes, he left behind a body of work that continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Just One Catch is the first biography of Yossarian's creator.
Download or read book One Last Lunch written by Erica Heller and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this heartwarming essay collection, dozens of authors, actors, artists and others imagine one last lunch with someone they cherished. A few years ago, Erica Heller realized how universal the longing is for one more moment with a lost loved one. It could be a parent, a sibling, a mentor, or a friend, but who wouldn’t love the opportunity to sit down, break bread, and just talk? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to ask those unasked questions, or share those unvoiced feelings? In One Last Lunch, Heller has asked friends and family of authors, artists, musicians, comedians, actors, and others, to recount one such fantastic repast. Muffie Meyer and her documentary subject Little Edie Beale go to a deli in Montreal. Kirk Douglas asks his father what he thought of him becoming an actor. Sara Moulton dines with her friend Julia Child. The Anglican priest George Pitcher has lunch with Jesus. And Heller herself connects with her father, the renowned author Joseph Heller. These richly imagined stories are endlessly revealing, about the subject, the writer, the passage of time, regret, gratitude, and the power of enduring love.
Download or read book Avid Reader written by Robert Gottlieb and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Anne M. Sperber Prize A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time. After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton--not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it--editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing. But this account of a life founded upon reading is about more than the arc of a singular career--one that also includes a lifelong involvement with the world of dance. It's about transcendent friendships and collaborations, "elective affinities" and family, psychoanalysis and Bakelite purses, the alchemical relationship between writer and editor, the glory days of publishing, and--always--the sheer exhilaration of work. Photograph of Bob Gottlieb © by Jill Krementz
Download or read book Yossarian Slept Here written by Erica Heller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Catch-22" author Joseph Heller's daughter, who grew up in New York's posh Apthorp apartment building, here recalls a childhood that felt charmed despite her parents' over-the-top divorce.
Download or read book Shelf Monkey written by Corey Redekop and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2007-04 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Friesen has three goals in life: get a job, make friends, and find a good book to curl up with. After landing a job at READ, the newest hypermegabookstore, he feels he may have accomplished all three. All is not peaceable within the stacks, however, as discontent steadily rises, aimed squarely at talk show host Munroe Purvis, whose wildly popular book club is progressively lowering the IQ of North America. But the bookworms have a plan?plots are being hatched and the destruction of Munroe is all but assured. As Thomas finds himself swept along in the malstrom of insanity, he wonders if reading a book is all it's cracked up to be.
Download or read book Reading My Father written by Alexandra Styron and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, READING MY FATHER IS THE STORY OF A DAUGHTER COMING TO KNOW HER FATHER AT LAST— A GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE. In Reading My Father, William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem. From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.
Download or read book Hey Kids Comics written by Howard Chaykin and published by Image Comics. This book was released on 2019-02-13 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HEY KIDS! COMICS! takes its cue from nearly a century of turbulence and triumph, despair and drama in the comics racket. Artists and writers, con men and clowns, ganefs and gangsters create the foundations of today's biggest entertainment businessÑor at least the tail that wags the dog. Some of it really happened, and the names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty Éalthough in the end, everyone was guilty of something. Collects HEY KIDS! COMICS! #1-5
Download or read book Shatterpoint Star Wars Legends written by Matthew Stover and published by Random House Worlds. This book was released on 2005-12-06 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this essential Star Wars Legends novel, Mace Windu must journey to his long-forgotten homeworld to confront a terrifying mystery with dire personal consequences. The jungle planet of Haruun Kal, homeworld of the legendary Jedi Master Mace Windu, has become a battleground in the increasing hostilities between the Republic and the renegade Separatist movement. The Jedi Council has sent Depa Billaba—Mace’s former Padawan and fellow Council member—to Haruun Kal to train the local tribesmen as a guerrilla resistance force. But now the Separatists have pulled back, and Depa has not returned. The only clue to her disappearance is a cryptic recording left at the scene of a brutal massacre: a recording that hints of madness and murder, and the darkness in the jungle . . . a recording in Depa’s own voice. Mace Windu trained Depa. Only he can find her. Only he can learn what has changed her. Only he can stop her. He will leave behind the Republic he serves, the civilization he believes in, everything but his passion for peace and his devotion to his former Padawan. And he will learn the terrible price that must be paid when keepers of the peace are forced to make war. . . .
Download or read book The Drive written by Yair Assulin and published by New Vessel Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This acclaimed debut novel takes readers inside the mind of a young and deeply conflicted Israeli soldier: “Israel’s own The Catcher in the Rye”(The Los Angeles Review of Books). The Drive follows the emotional and psychological journey of a young Israeli soldier who is unable to carry out his military service yet terrified of the consequences of leaving the army. As the unnamed soldier and his father drive along the Coastal Highway to meet with a military psychiatrist, Yair Assulin offers a penetrating view of Israeli society, a young man in crisis, and the universal urge to resist regimentation and violence. Weary of being forced to join a larger collective, the soldier yearns for an existence free of politics, the news cycle, and perpetual battle-readiness. But to seek such a life would mean risking the respect of those he loves most. The Drive is a compelling story of an urgent personal quest to reconcile duty, expectations and individual instinct.
Download or read book No Laughing Matter written by Joseph Heller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-12-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An uproarious and frank memoir of illness and recovery, No Laughing Matter is a story of friendship and recuperation from the author of the classic Catch-22. It all began one typical day in the life of Joe Heller. He was jogging four miles at a clip these days, working on his novel God Knows, coping with the complications of an unpleasant divorce, and pigging out once or twice a week on Chinese food with cronies like Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo, and his buddy of more than twenty years, Speed Vogel. He was feeling perfectly fine that day—but within twenty-four hours he would be in intensive care at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital. He would remain hospitalized for nearly six months and leave in a wheelchair. Joseph Heller had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a debilitating, sometimes fatal condition that can leave its victims paralyzed from head to toe. The clan gathered immediately. Speed—sometime artist, sometime businessman, sometime herring taster, and now a coauthor—moved into Joe's apartment as messenger, servant, and shaman. Mel Brooks, arch-hypochondriac of the Western world, knew as much about Heller's condition as the doctors. Mario Puzo, author of the preeminent gangster novel of our time, proved to be the most reluctant man ever to be dragged along on a hospital visit. These and lots of others rallied around the sickbed in a show of loyalty and friendship that not only built a wild and spirited camaraderie but helped bring Joe Heller, writer and buddy extraordinaire, through his greatest crisis. This book is an inspiring, hilarious memoir of a calamitous illness and the rocky road to recuperation—as only the author of Catch-22 and the friend who helped him back to health could tell it. No Laughing Matter is as wacky, terrifying, and greathearted as any fiction Joseph Heller ever wrote.
Download or read book God Knows written by Joseph Heller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-11-12 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Biblical David lies on his death-bed he looks back on his own, crowded life and tells all.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Satire written by Jonathan Greenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.
Download or read book Why Zebras Don t Get Ulcers written by Robert M. Sapolsky and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2004-09-15 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned primatologist Robert Sapolsky offers a completely revised and updated edition of his most popular work, with over 225,000 copies in print Now in a third edition, Robert M. Sapolsky's acclaimed and successful Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers features new chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction, as well as new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress. As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear-and the ones that plague us now-are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage, such as heart disease and cancer. When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal's does, but we do not resolve conflict in the same way-through fighting or fleeing. Over time, this activation of a stress response makes us literally sick. Combining cutting-edge research with a healthy dose of good humor and practical advice, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers explains how prolonged stress causes or intensifies a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. It also provides essential guidance to controlling our stress responses. This new edition promises to be the most comprehensive and engaging one yet.
Download or read book For Paris with Love Squalor written by Mj Moore and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Floating in time between 2015 and 1944, this novel both celebrates and laments exalted hopes and broken dreams. The narrator is a sentient, unique, dying woman in hospice who "talks out" her memories via the cassette tapes that her favorite caregiver loyally provides. The heart of her tale revolves around being in the Women's Army Corps (the WACs) between 1943-1945, when she had two life-transforming encounters with a soldier named Jerry. They're both products of their time, in love with MGM musicals and the great Swing Bands, and also much influenced by the best writers of their epoch. We know "Jerry," of course, as J. D. Salinger. But in this novel, we're presented with a wartime, uniformed, pre-fame, pre-"Catcher" G. I. Salinger. And from their chance meeting in the fall of 1943 (when they witness a final stateside performance by Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band in New York) to a brief reunion in Liberated Paris in the waning days of August 1944 (where an older, exhausted Hemingway blesses the young, aspiring Salinger), our narrator conjures up the echoes of an era. With her own life winding down during one season in hospice, the war years (and so much more) are always on her mind. This narrative is her testimonial, on behalf of her generation. "We share not only the narrator's memories, but also her passion for literature, for music, and for film; plus her insightful zest for life that leads to a love affair with one of the great authors of the 20th century. A smart and poignant journey through a life well-lived...at once lighthearted and bittersweet." --Kenneth Slawenski, International bestselling author of J. D. Salinger: A Life "The plucky heroine of this inventive novel may be paralyzed and dying, but her vibrant mind is a treasury of her generation's politics and culture, especially its popular music. I found myself singing along with her on every page." --Hilma Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of An Available Man, Summer Reading, The Doctor's Daughter, In the Flesh, and other novels "M. J. Moore proves that not all compelling, worthwhile stories about WWII have yet been told or imagined..."--Erica Heller, author of Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, The Apthorp was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22
Download or read book 30 Days of Night Volume 3 written by Steve Niles and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the death of his beloved Stella, Eben Olemaun has embraced the dark side of vampirism. Armies are being raised and targets being set. All that stands between life and chaos are Alice Blood and a handful of unsuspecting federal agents. The war between the living and the undead has begun!
Download or read book Indiana Jones Omnibus written by Walter Simonson and published by Titan Publishing Company. This book was released on 2009 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects comic books featuring archaeologist Indiana Jones and his adventures around the world.
