Literary Memoir

Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world's best-loved female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Coauthors and real-life friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their discovery of a wealth of surprising collaborations.

"Over the last few years I've started writing a number of stories that, for various reasons, I never finished writing..." So begins Special Problems, the comic tale of Christie Hodges, a writer who can't seem to finish a story. The problem isn't that Hodges has nothing to write about - there's her recent divorce, her paralyzed foot, trouble with her daughter and job - it's that once she starts writing, she can't stop. One problem leads to another, and another.

26th June,1963; President Kennedy arrives in Dublin. Nearby in Kildare, trouble brews at The Hall as Justin Montague, a handsome teenager, is forbidden by his wealthy father from seeing the charming daughter of a Montague estate worker, the one person who really loves him.

James Tully's father is dead, like "Jesus dead and door nailed". His fiancée has moved out, and his world is as rootless as a fallen tree. He will travel home along the river that bound him and that bound his father to the constant rain and the residue of his past, to the last days of his father’s life long suicide, what seemed to kill them both. James is a product of his past, of his parents’ push and pull.

In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, "the covers become a part of me".

They are icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analyzed in countless classrooms, homes, and pubs. Yet for most listeners, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown - until now. In this utterly captivating audiobook, Dr. Elliot Engel, a leading authority on the lives of great authors, illuminates the fascinating and flawed members of literature's elite. In lieu of stuffy biographical sketches, Engel provides fascinating anecdotes.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

This is the story of John McGahern's childhood - of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and of his own discovery of literature and his ambition to become a writer. At the heart of the book is an unembarrassed homage by a loving son to a woman who protected him and his sisters from his father's unpredictable moods. His joy in her presence is recovered with great lyrical tact.

Anyone who's read or listened to the classic I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings knows Maya Angelou was raised by her paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. In Mom and Me and Mom, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away and unearths the well of emotions Angelou experienced long afterward as a result. While Angelou's first six autobiographies reveal about her out in the world, influencing and learning from statesmen and cultural icons, her final autobiography and conclusion to the series, Mom and Me and Mom, shares the intimate, emotional story about her own family.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, originally published in 1893, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle had decided that these would be the last collection of Holmes's stories, and intended to kill him off in "The Final Problem". Reader demand stimulated him to write another Holmes adventure - The Hound of the Baskervilles. In "The Return of Sherlock Holmes", Holmes relates the aftermath of "The Final Problem", and how he survived. Content: I. The Adventure of Silver Blaze / II.

Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life examines the way Plath made herself into a writer. Close analysis of Plath's reading and apprenticeship writing both in fiction and poetry sheds considerable light on Plath's work in the late 1960s. In this updated edition, there will be discussion of the aftermath of Plath's death including the publication of her Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982. Biographies of Plath will be examined along with the publication of Hughes's Birthday Letters.

Harvard Square is at the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the business district around Harvard University. It’s a place of history, culture, and some of the most momentous events of the nation. But it’s also a gathering place for some of the city’s homeless. What is life like for the homeless in Harvard Square? Do they have anything to tell people about life? And God? That’s what Harvard student John Frame discovered and shares in Homeless at Harvard.

Julio Cortázar es considerado uno de los escritores más originales en lengua castellana. Cortázar no sólo participó en el llamado Boom latinoamericano sino que inauguró un campo dentro de la literatura fantástica, con discursos novedosos y formas poco exploradas en las letras iberoamericanas. En este ensayo se reconstruyen algunos de los momentos más significativos en la biografía de este gran escritor y se analizan sus principales obras.

Fue un novelista, dramaturgo y poeta francés nacido en 1910, cuya obra expresa una profunda rebelión contra la sociedad y sus costumbres, hablando sin pudor de la criminalidad, los prejuicios, el homosexualismo, etcétera, por lo que su lectura fue muy resistida en muchos países, pero alabado en otros.

В Дневнике писателя, не имеющим аналогов в русской и зарубежной публицистике, Достоевский напрямую общается с читателями и словно приглашает присоединиться к обсуждению глубоких тем, которым посвящено все его творчество: человек и Бог, добро и зло, свобода и судьба России. В заметках 1876 года особое внимание он уделяет анализу мировой политики того времени и духовных болезней русского общества, оказавшемся во многом пророческим. А результатом его размышлений можно считать впервые опубликованную в ноябрьской главе повесть "Кроткая", где писатель исследует отношения тирана и жертвы на примере обычной семьи.

A feminist landmark, The Golden Notebook tells the story of writer Anna Wulf and the crises she faces in her personal, political, and professional life. Confounded by writer's block, the ferociously independent Wulf explores her situation in four notebooks, one for each of the strands in her life. The Golden Notebook is the one in which, struggling to retain her sanity, she brings these strands together.

Dustin Lance Black wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk and helped overturn California's anti-gay marriage Proposition 8, but he grew up in a conservative Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas. His mother, Anne, was raised in rural Louisiana and contracted polio when she was two years old. She endured brutal surgeries as well as braces and crutches for life and was told that she would never have children or a family.

The war took him away. Is their love strong enough to bring him home? From family tragedy, the war, to undying love, this compelling story spans three generations.

In the three decades that Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has devoted himself to writing fiction, he has also produced scores of witty, moving, and provocative essays and articles. He engages the work of Nabokov, Kundera, Rushdie, and Vargas Llosa, among others, and he discusses his own books and writing process. We also learn how he lives, as he recounts his successful struggle to quit smoking, describes his relationship with his daughter, and reflects on the controversy he has attracted in recent years.

"Directing the Page" offers listeners an intimate exploration into the intertwined realms of filmmaking and literature as explored through the experiences of its author.