The Pawnbroker s Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in the Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin s father was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned Los Alamos scientist who would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of light verse to a poet of witness; to her farm in rural New England, the subject and setting of much of her later work.Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets."

    In this funny, devastating, haunting memoir and with a raw and often painful honesty, she looks back at life with a painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip over into psychosis, and a hard-drinking, fist-swinging father who liked nothing better than to spin tales with his cronies at the Liars' Club.

    The Professor and Other Writings is a hilarious and heartbreaking exploration of gender, identity, and sexuality in the grand tradition of such feminist luminaries as Susan Sontag, Camille Paglia, and Joan Didion.

    In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ni Ghriofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.

    In a career spanning forty years, Barry has worked alongside the greatest producers and performers in show business: Tommy Cooper, Humphrey Lyttelton, Morecambe and Wise, Willie Rushton, Peter Cook, Kenny Everett, Rory Bremner to name but a few - this book is a veritable Who's Who of comedy.From humble beginnings at the Windmill Theatre and Expresso Bongo, to The Frost Report, Call My Bluff and I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue, Barry recalls the good, the bad, and the downright ugly in his own inimitable style.'Barry Cryer ...an anecdote jukebox whose whole life is basically one big chatshow.'Guardian

    So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull an electroshock- therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

    Coercive control drove her to the depths of despair. Stacey Jameson had a lack of self-esteem derived from her early childhood. Growing up and dealing with her parents’ divorce, she felt nothing more than an inconvenience to her depressive mother. With severe feelings of inadequacy, she was desperate to be loved and feel that she belonged. When she was a teenager, she met Leon, and fell in love. She had never felt so happy. They had one common denominator; they were both brought up in volatile homes. This was the foundation for a turbulent and destructive relationship. Stacey was welcomed with open arms into the bosom of Leon’s twisted family; naive and impressionable, she finally felt secure and loved. Stacey’s childhood had made her timid and compliant. Leon’s childhood had made him controlling and narcissistic. Gradually Stacey found herself in an unhappy relationship where her partner thrived on being abusive, yet she still loved him. She was coercively controlled into doing things that just were not part of her character. She was so manipulated; she believed she did not deserve any better. So often people look on with judgement at others who are in an abusive relationship and say, “Why don’t they just leave?”. Stacey’s story, just one of millions, describes her journey and why it’s just not so simple to do for people who find themselves caught up in a destructive relationship that they just cannot escape from.

    burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1970s with a series of hard-edged, provocative short stories. Hailed as a brilliant masculine writer with a deep sympathy for his female characters, he penned such classics as Houston, Houston, Do You Read? and The Women Men Don't See. For years he corresponded with Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin. No one knew his true identity. Then the cover was blown on his alter ego: A sixty-one-year old woman named Alice Sheldon. As a child, she explored Africa with her mother. Later, made into a debutante, she eloped with one of the guests at the party. She was an artist, a chicken farmer, a World War II intelligence officer, a CIA agent, an experimental psychologist. Devoted to her second husband, she struggled with her feelings for women. In 1987, her suicide shocked friends and fans. The James Tiptree, Jr. Award was created to honor science fiction or fantasy that explores our understanding of gender. This fascinating biography, ten years in the making, is based on extensive research, exclusive interviews, and full access to Alice Sheldon's papers.

    

    His work and ideas - about silence, indeterminacy, nonintention, art's role in bringing the everyday object to our attention, the singularity of performance - have had influence not only in the world of music but also in dance, painting, printmaking, video art, and poetry. As an exponent of Zen Buddhism since the early fifties, he has had an important role in introducing Zen spirituality to the American artworld and general culture. Among his friends and collaborators have been longtime associate Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Those who have acknowledged his influence in their work range from minimalist composer Philip Glass to rock musicians David Byrne and Brian Eno. The Roaring Silence is the first full-length biography of John Cage. Written with Cage's full cooperation, it documents his life in unrivaled detail, interweaving a close account of the evolution of his work with an exploration of his aesthetic and philosophical ideas. David Revill never assumes specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, but sets Cage's work in the context of his personal development and contemporary culture. He draws on numerous interviews with Cage and his associates. Paying due attention to Cage's inventions, such as the prepared piano, and his pioneering use of indeterminate notation and chance operations in composition (utilizing the I Ching), Revill also illuminates Cage the performer, printmaker, watercolorist, expert amateur mycologist, game show celebrity, and political anarchist, and discusses his pronouncements on social and environmental issues. The biography includes comprehensive chronologies of his musical and visual works. Arnold Schoenberg once called Cage, his former student, "not a composer but an inventor - of genius." David Revill shows how this multifacete

    She lived at the Barbizon Hotel, attended the ballet, went to a Yankee game, and danced at the West Side Tennis Club. She was supposed to be having the time of her life. But what would follow was, in Plath’s words, twenty-six days of pain, parties, and work, that ultimately changed the course of her life.Thoughtful and illuminating, featuring line drawings and black-and-white photographs, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 offers well-researched insights as it introduces us to Sylvia Plath—before she became one of the greatest and most influential poets of the twentieth century.

    Having run out of options, former YouTube star Dax Flame must get a job at an ice cream shop in order to make ends meet.

    It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them.  “They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother’s journals were blank.” What did Williams’s mother mean by that? In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals. When Women Were Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question “What does it mean to have a voice?”

    A month later, none of that was true. Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Like much of her generation, she was raised to resist traditional rules—about work, about love, and about womanhood. “I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.” In this profound and beautiful memoir, Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being “a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses.” Her own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed—and of what is eternal.

    The vehicle in question was an amphibious jeep developed by the U.S. Army, which Carlin christened Half-Safe, after a deodorant slogan. It was a mechanical mongrel that was supposed to move with equal ease across land and water but in practice wasn't much good for either one. Undaunted, Carlin and his wife Elinore set off across the Atlantic Ocean with dreams of fame and fortune, and of carving a small notch in history. What happened next is one of the most bizarre, remarkable, and forgotten adventure stories of the 20th century. In Half-Safe, author James Nestor endeavors to uncover Ben Carlin's fate and finds a gripping story of love, danger, and extraordinary perseverance that spans three oceans and five continents. Half-Safe takes us from the eye of an Atlantic Ocean hurricane to the sweltering Sahara to the impenetrable jungles of Southeast Asia—and into the mind of a man who could overcome everything but his own demons.