Book picks similar to
Storied City: A Children's Book Walking-Tour Guide to New York City by Leonard S. Marcus
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How Did You Get This Number: Essays
Sloane Crosley - 2010
From the author of the sensational bestseller I Was Told There'd Be Cake comes a new book of personal essays brimming with all the charm and wit that have earned Sloane Crosley widespread acclaim, award nominations, and an ever-growing cadre of loyal fans. In Cake readers were introduced to the foibles of Crosley's life in New York City-always teetering between the glamour of Manhattan parties, the indignity of entry-level work, and the special joy of suburban nostalgia-and to a literary voice that mixed Dorothy Parker with David Sedaris and became something all its own.Crosley still lives and works in New York City, but she's no longer the newcomer for whom a trip beyond the Upper West Side is a big adventure. She can pack up her sensibility and take us with her to Paris, to Portugal (having picked it by spinning a globe and putting down her finger, and finally falling in with a group of Portuguese clowns), and even to Alaska, where the "bear bells" on her fellow bridesmaids' ponytails seemed silly until a grizzly cub dramatically intrudes. Meanwhile, back in New York, where new apartments beckon and taxi rides go awry, her sense of the city has become more layered, her relationships with friends and family more complicated.As always, Crosley's voice is fueled by the perfect witticism, buoyant optimism, flair for drama, and easy charm in the face of minor suffering or potential drudgery. But in How Did You Get This Number it has also become increasingly sophisticated, quicker and sharper to the point, more complex and lasting in the emotions it explores. And yet, Crosley remains the unfailingly hilarious young Every woman, healthily equipped with intelligence and poise to fend off any potential mundanity in maturity.Show me the doll --Lost in space --Take a stab at it --It's always home you'll miss --Light pollution --If you sprinkle --An abbreviated catalog of tongues --Le Paris! --Off the back of a truck
The Korean Table: From Barbecue to Bibimbap 100 Easy-To-Prepare Recipes
Taekyung Chung - 2008
Poised to become America's next favorite Asian cuisine, Korean food is rapidly gaining in popularity throughout the country. Dishes such as bulgogi (Korean barbecue), kimchi (pickled spicy cabbage) and bibimbap (mixed rice) are only a few of the savory, authentic meals that are taking the food world by storm.The Korean Table is a wonderful new cookbook that shows American cooks how to create the tempting flavors of Korean cuisine at home. Chung and Samuels, a Korean and an American, team up to guide home cooks through the process of making Korean meals without fuss, multiple trips to specialty markets or expensive on-line shopping. Along with showing you how to create complete Korean meals from start to finish—from Scallion Pancakes to Korean Dumplings (mandu) and Simmered Beef Short Ribs—The Korean Table also includes information about how you can add the flavors of Korea to your meal in numerous quick and easy ways every day, using condiments, side dishes, salad dressings, sauces and more.
The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading
Phyllis Rose - 2014
Hoping to explore the “real ground of literature,” she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES.The shelf has everything Rose could wish for—a classic she has not read, a remarkable variety of authors, and a range of literary styles. The early nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside those about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels abut a picaresque novel from the seventeenth century. There are several novels by a wonderful, funny, contemporary novelist who has turned to raising dogs because of the tepid response to her work.In The Shelf, Rose investigates the books on her shelf with exuberance, candor, and wit while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf—those texts that accompany us through life. “Fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels,” she sustains a sense of excitement as she creates a refreshingly original and generous portrait of the literary enterprise.
Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me
Bill Hayes - 2017
But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance--"I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on--is captured in vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015).
Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters
Anne Boyd Rioux - 2018
In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux brings a fresh and engaging look at the circumstances leading Louisa May Alcott to write Little Women and why this beloved story of family and community ties set in the Civil War has resonated with audiences across time.
Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic
Irene Gammel - 2007
The author who created her was Lucy Maud Montgomery, a writer who revealed very little of herself and her method of crafting a story. On the centenary of its publication, Irene Gammel tells the braided story of both Anne and Maud and, in so doing, shows how a literary classic was born. Montgomery’s own life began in the rural Cavendish family farmhouse on Prince Edward Island, the place that became the inspiration for Green Gables. Mailmen brought the world to the farmhouse’s kitchen door in the form of American mass market periodicals sparking the young Maud’s imagination. From the vantage point of her small world, Montgomery pored over these magazines, gleaning bits of information about how to dress, how to behave and how a proper young lady should grow. She began to write, learning how to craft marketable stories from the magazines’ popular fiction; at the same time the fashion photos inspired her visual imagination. One photo that especially intrigued her was that of a young woman named Evelyn Nesbit, the model for painters and photographers and lover of Stanford White. That photo was the spark for what became Anne Shirley. Blending biography with cultural history, Looking for Anne of Green Gables is a gold mine for fans of the novels and answers a trunk load of questions: Where did Anne get the “e” at the end of her name? How did Montgomery decide to give her red hair? How did Montgomery’s courtship and marriage to Reverend Ewan Macdonald affect the story? Irene Gammel's dual biography of Anne Shirley and the woman who created her will delight the millions who have loved the red haired orphan ever since she took her first step inside the gate of Green Gables farm in Avonlea.
Booked: A Traveler's Guide to Literary Locations Around the World
Richard Kreitner - 2019
A must-have for every fan of literature, Booked inspires readers to follow in their favorite characters footsteps by visiting the real-life locations portrayed in beloved novels including the Monroeville, Alabama courthouse in To Kill a Mockingbird, Chatsworth House, the inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, and the Kyoto Bridge from Memoirs of a Geisha. The full-color photographs throughout reveal the settings readers have imagined again and again in their favorite books. Organized by regions all around the world, author Richard Kreitner explains the importance of each literary landmark including the connection to the author and novel, cultural significance, historical information, and little-known facts about the location. He also includes travel advice like addresses and must-see spots.Booked features special sections on cities that inspired countless literary works like a round of locations in Brooklyn from Betty Smith's iconic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and a look at the New Orleans of Tennessee Williams and Anne Rice. Locations include:Central Park, NYC (The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger)Forks, Washington (Twilight, Stephanie Meyer)Prince Edward Island, Canada (Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery)Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario (Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood)Holcomb, Kansas (In Cold Blood, Truman Capote)London, England (White Teeth, Zadie Smith)Paris, France (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo)Segovia, Spain, (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway)Umuofia, Nigeria (Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe)Kyoto, Japan (Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden)Cartagena, Colombia (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to Present
Maurice Sendak - 2003
His uniquely expressive illustrations, which bring to life a world of fantasy and imagination, have won him the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the Caldecott Medal, and most recently the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature in 2003.Picking up where Selma Lanes's earlier, landmark monograph, The Art of Maurice Sendak, left off, this new book traces Sendak's life and work from 1980 to the present, representing two decades filled with projects inside and outside the children's book arena. This strikingly designed volume is overflowing with hundreds of wonderful Sendak illustrations: sketches and final art for opera, ballet, and theater productions, as well as children's books, adult book jackets, posters, and CD covers.An extended essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, a friend of the artist, provides an intimate view of Sendak. With an insider's perspective, Kushner not only gives us a chronological overview of Sendak's work, but also allows us to see him as an accomplished author and artist redefining his legacy, and as a man coming to terms with himself. This survey will only add to our understanding and appreciation of this multitalented artist, whose creative endeavors are among the most inventive and treasured of our time.
Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers
Nancy Pearl - 2010
Book Lust To Go connects the best fiction and nonfiction to particular destinations, whether your bags are packed or your armchair is calling. With stops from Texas to Timbuktu, Nancy Pearl's reading recommendations will send you on your way.
The Wrong Shade of Yellow
Margaret Eleanor Leigh - 2014
I couldn’t jack it in and go home, because I didn’t have a home to go to anymore. The bicycle and the tent were now home. Wherever I found myself on any given night was now home. And that meant, for tonight, Genoa Piazza Principe Railway Station was home.I was cycling across Europe in search of Utopia, a place I believed was located somewhere in Greece. When I found it, I would start a new life there. It was my big, fat, Greek midlife crisis. But now I was having a crisis within a crisis. What the hell had I been thinking?
Guide to Colorado Backroads & 4-Wheel-Drive Trails
Charles A. Wells - 1998
The 1998 and 2005 versions of this book garnered rave reviews among readers and this new Guide to Colorado Backroads & 4 Wheel Trails is certain to receive plaudits for its updates and other improvements. Suggest with confidence.
The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder
Erin Blakemore - 2010
This collection of unforgettable characters—including Anne Shirley, Jo March, Scarlett O’Hara, and Jane Eyre—and outstanding authors—like Jane Austen, Harper Lee, and Laura Ingalls Wilder—is an impassioned look at literature’s most compelling heroines, both on the page and off. Readers who found inspiration in books by Toni Morrison, Maud Hart Lovelace, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Alice Walker, or who were moved by literary-themed memoirs like Shelf Discovery and Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, get ready to return to the well of women’s classic literature with The Heroine's Bookshelf.
Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise
Katherine Rundell - 2019
This delightful and persuasive essay is for adult readers.
This Ain't No Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980–1995
James Lough - 2013
This oral history of the famed hotel peers behind the iconic façade and delves into the mayhem, madness, and brilliance that stemmed from the hotel in the 1980s and 1990s. Providing a window into the late Bohemia of New York during that time, countless interviews and firsthand accounts adorn this social history of one of the most celebrated and culturally significant landmarks in New York City.
My Week at the Blue Angel: Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas
Matthew O'Brien - 2010
Thompson’s Las Vegas, with the Good Doctor as tour guide. A Lord of the Rings-like adventure in the city’s underground flood channels. A seven-day stay at a seedy motel on East Fremont Street.The stories in My Week at the Blue Angel aren’t about Steve Wynn, Cirque du Soleil, or how to play poker and they aren’t set in Caesars Palace, XS Nightclub, or a 2,000-seat showroom. They’re about prostitutes, ex-cons, and the homeless and they’re set under Caesars Palace and in trailer parks and weekly motels.In this creative-nonfiction collection, Matthew O’Brien—author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas—and veteran photographer Bill Hughes show a side of the city rarely seen. A side beyond the neon lights, themed facades, and motel-room doors. A side beyond the barbwire fences, “No Trespassing” signs, and midnight shadows.A side of Las Vegas many locals and visitors are curious about, but few ever explore.