From the author's vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde's work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.--Off Our Backs

    This memoir reflects on key moments of the author's early life, from childhood to his entering seminary, that reveal how God speaks to us in a variety of ways every moment of every day.

    This autobiography traces Janet Frame's childhood in a poor but intellectually intense family, life as a student, years of incarceration in mental hospitals and eventual entry into the saving world of writers.

    By the time she was at Smith College, when this book begins, she had settled into a nearly daily routine with her journal, which was also a sourcebook for her writing. Plath once called her journal her “Sargasso,” her repository of imagination, “a litany of dreams, directives, and imperatives,” and in fact these pages contain the germs of most of her work. Plath’s ambitions as a writer were urgent and ultimately all-consuming, requiring of her a heat, a fantastic chaos, even a violence that burned straight through her. The intensity of this struggle is rendered in her journal with an unsparing clarity, revealing both the frequent desperation of her situation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. Written in electrifying prose, The Journals of Sylvia Plath provide unique insight, and are essential reading for all those who have been moved and fascinated by Plath’s life and work.

    in the Depresson years and World War II that has ever been written."—Harrison Salisbury.

    Her range of sensitivity—moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual— is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would “set color free in three dimensions.” She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters’ journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself—and her readers—through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art. Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.

    Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads.William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

    In this first volume of her autobiography, New Zealand novelist Janet Frame tells of her childhood as the daughter of an impoverished railway worker and a mother who aspired to publish poetry.Despite material privations and family conflicts, the world of the imagination was accorded a supreme place in the Frame household, and it was at this time that Janet Frame acquired her lifelong love for Romantic poetry and her tactile sense of the power of words.Amongst evocations of New Zealand landscape and the recall of childhood perceptions, we learn of the tragic death by drowning of her sister Myrtle, her brother's epilepsy - and begin to feel the dark undercurrents that were to suck Janet Frame under in the years before she found herself as a writer.

    Here she opens the doors of her Cape Cod home and invites her readers to share another part of her life."Still Cove," she writes, "is exactly my idea of heaven." Nestled on a cliff overlooking the sapphire waters of Mill Pond inlet, it is a low, one-story house with white cedar shingles weathered to a soft smoke gray.Looking beyond Still cove, Mrs. Taber reflects on the Cape itself. Here are friends and neighbors, living in enviable closeness to each other and to the natural setting in which they have made their lives. Here are the tides and the fogs, the cranberry bogs, the beaches where visitors swim and Cape Codders dig for clams. The book is divided into four sections, one for each season, and every page is alive with the author's presence and observations. "What is Cape Cod?" Gladys Taber writes. "It is an amethyst glow at the horizon over Mill Pond, announcing dawn." "It is the Full Flower Moon in May walking in gold on quiet water." "Honey locusts and honeysuckle weighing the air with sweetness and sea lavender signing the beaches with delicate purple." All of these, and much more, are Cape Cod, captured here as only Gladys Taber could express it.

    Published jointly by William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and Octopus Books.

    Bill shares in vivid detail his upbringing - the raging battles, his activity in his mother's atheistic empire, his dependence on drugs and his years as a fugitive.Nearly two decades after the Court's decision, Bill came to the end of his personal strength. In desperation he called out to God and God answered. From embezzlement to kidnapping to murder, Bill reviews the shocking evidence surrounding the disappearance of his mother, brother and daughter. Though actively involved in atheism, Bill discovered the gift Jesus Christ offers to all who seek Him. He invites you to experience God's grace in this journey from despair to everlasting love.

    

    The first of two memoirs by Dora Saint, known as Miss Read

    

    1 SOFTCOVER BOOK

    And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations." --Thom GunnThom Gunn is well-known as a poet, and increasingly as a literary critic. The Occasions of Poetry includes insightful critical pieces on writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder to Thomas Hardy and Robert Duncan. "The occasion in all cases," writes Gunn, "is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true." The first loyalty of a writer who is "true to his occasions," he writes, must be to the facts of experience. The book includes five autobiographical essays, which combine to form an engaging account of the author's development as a poet and to chronicle some of the most significant literary currents of recent decades, both in England and America.Thom Gunn, born in England in 1929, has lived in America since 1954. His books include Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview; The Man with Night Sweats; Collected Poems; and The Passages of Joy. The Occasions of Poetry was originally published by Faber and Faber.

    S. Merwin recalls in utterly unsentimental prose his youth, growing up in a repressed Presbyterian household in the small river towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The complex portrait that emerges of a family without language or history, transforms the story of their isolated lives into the development of a writer’s conscience and a warning about the fate of a middle class eager to obliterate origins."This book is superbly written, offering deep glimpses into the complexities and mysteries of family bonds, with just that distancing from people and events necessary for artistic control."—Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal

    First published in 1981, a founding book in the fields of health and disability studies, this text considers his trials and triumphs.

    Because of a dramatic accident when he was an infant, Daan was so critically injured as to become blind, deaf. dumb and spastic. That he lived at all was a miracle.

    Smile From Katie Hattan, A, & Other Natural Wonders, by Hale, Leon

    Earnest Hemingway taught her to ski and to clean fish and not to wear high heels while bowling. Dorothy Parker showed her how to tipple tequila and lime. Picasso provided art criticism. Cole Porter added the music and F. Scott Fitzgerald the magic. She was the only daughter of Sara and Gerald Murphy, the golden American who, between the wars, created the Emigre artists' paradise in the south of France. Their sunny charm, elegant good looks, and trend-setting brilliance, which made them Beautiful People before the term was coined, was chronicled in the bestselling Living Well is the Best Revenge. But there was another aspect to the Murphy's story, shadowing their gilded days with spirit-crushing loss. In this remarkable reminiscence, Honoria Murphy Donnelly includes her parents' sad as well as happy times, the intimate dramas as well as celebrity-studded anecdotes, in a deeply touching portrait of a family both very special and very human. From the lush lawns of East Hampton, New York, to the sun-struck Riviera beaches to the echoing corridors of exclusive Swiss sanitoriums, the legend of Sara and Gerald is funny, harrowing, memorable... but it is finally a story of love and courage, the triumph of a couple who won the hearts of a generation and, now, through their daughter, wins ours.

    The story of John and Ann Sweeney and their family of seventeen, including adopted Indian, black, and Vietnamese children.

    This marvelous collection of autobiographical essays by the celebrated, much-adored Fisher covers her life, family, food and adventures.

    Now, for the first time, a man who rose from humble origins to become one of the world's most popular sports figures describes his improbable and exuberant struggle upward.A fatherless Mexican-American boy, he was raised by his mother and grandfather in a Dallas shack - which also happened to be next to a golf course. By the age of eight, he was caddying, and teaching himself to play golf behind the caddies shed.They Call Me Super Mex is an uproarious account of his life as told by Lee, himself.

    The heart-wrenching story of one couple's courageous decision to have their severely brain-damaged son cared for in a residential facility.